Introduction
This International Gender Budgeting Conference, jointly organised by Bilbao Municipal Government and Biscay Regional Government, with the collaboration of the European Gender Budgeting Network, wants to disseminate and enhance the existing knowledge about what Gender Budgets mean. This analysis strategy seeks to apply such a perspective to all levels in the budgetary process and restructure expenditure and taxation with the aim of promoting equality of women and men.
Gender Budgeting implies a review of resource allocation with a strong focus on efficiency and effectiveness, as well as to reach the equality goals. The importance of looking at the budget with gender lens is linked not only to equity and justice goals, but to those of good governance, participation, transparency and accountability.
The programme of this Conference is structured around two main keynote addresses and four thematic panels. The first introductory speech deals with the connection between public policies and societal models that those policies contribute to model. By operating within the gender and power relations realm they determine the scope and array of choice that women and men can afford. This paper wants to reveal how the way public resources are raised and spent incentivize, or the opposite, certain collective and individual behaviours with enormous potential impact for gender equality.
Gender budgeting initiatives are defined and their content made more understandable in the second intervention where they are presented from what is called “the capability approach”. This approach makes an effort to specify the meaning of gender equality within different political areas.
The next four panels deal with some of the most significant aspects to the application of Gender Budgeting:
- Practical initiatives in Europe and worldwide.
- Taxation, distribution of economic resources between women and men.
- Modernizing public administration, innovation in public management and public budgeting, transparency and performance-based budget.
- Civil society participation in decision-making processes, democracy and empowerment of citizenry.
This event wants to serve as a reflection and discussion forum for both political and technical staff in public bodies. It also offers a chance to engage university, civil society and consultants in this debate about the priorities and values that are displayed undoubtedly through the budget analysis. Budgets then become the object of examination as well as an instrument for change and the arena where to explore other policy alternatives focused on making deeper gender-equality-oriented impact.
The final goal of this International Conference points to overcome the discriminatory and subordinating mechanisms of the patriarchal system, widening the gender equality political action scope to the budget, as the place where decisions come true.
