Gender Budgeting initiatives have played a crucial role in promoting gender equality by resource allocation for over two decades. While already the first pilot projects have shown that considering how raising and spending public money may affect the men and women differently had a positive effect on gender equality (Rubin and Bartle 2005), only few national governments so far have embraced gender budgeting as a key approach in their resource allocation decisions. While sex-disaggregated data is a crucial prerequisite for successful gender budgeting initiatives, in practice, there is often a lack of the respective information. Countries that can be considered best practice cases in this regard however do not only incorporate information about e.g. the distribution of men and women benefiting from certain programs or the distribution of tax burden on the sexes, but implement also particular gender equality goals that shall be achieved with the allocated resources (Stotsky 2016). Thus, gender budgeting is based on similar processes and considerations that drive budgeting decisions in outcome-oriented or performance-based budgeting.
A participatory approach to Gender Budgeting (Beveridge et al. 2000; Miller 2009) suggests that the initiatives strengthen the democratization of policy (Walby 2005) by considering actors beyond those 'normally involved in policy-making’. Two European countries, Austria and Belgium, have been at the center of recent research on gender budgeting, each representing a different approach but both being described as best practices (Quinn 2017; Stotsky 2016). In Austria, Gender Budgeting has been implemented during an extensive budgeting and accounting reform, where setting outcome targets to enhance gender equality has become mandatory for each policy field (i.e. line ministry) in the budgeting system implemented in 2013 (see Steger 2012). However, as budgeting is performance-informed rather than performance-based, the link between the outcomes and the budget is a loose one. In Belgium, the Gender Budgeting system slightly differs from the Austrian approach. Belgian line ministries also must define gender equality goals and link them to the budget proposal, but they are a mandatory part of the budget debate in the parliament (Stotsky 2016) and thus part of a wider and more public discussion.
The present paper provides a comparative analysis of the Austrian and Belgian approaches to and practices of Gender Budgeting at the central government level using different frameworks to classify gender budgeting initiatives (e.g. Budlender 2002; Elson 2002; Holvoet 2008). The study comprises an analysis of first, the budget structure, budgeting and accounting systems, and the process of outcome-oriented budgeting as well as the involved actors/co-producers; and second, the political debate (i.e. parliamentary budget debates) during the budget approval phase, as well as changes in gender equality goals over time. Thus, we combine an accounting and a public management and governance perspective in investigating how Gender Budgeting initiatives shape policy-making (and vice versa) in one of the most crucial contexts of political decision-making – resource allocation.
