Long Summary:
Gender Budget Initiatives can be an important tool for claiming resources, however are they restricted to research and policy papers? This paper takes a look at gender budget work from an advocacy perspective – stating that budgets are nine parts politics and one part information. It argues that participation and informed citizenship should be a central element in the design and implementation of any budget work to ensure fairer and more democratic budget decisions. Encouraging groups to build broad-based alliances and to demand resources as well as rights, is a step towards more effective implementation of policies such as those on inheritance and domestic violence. Work supported by the Asia Foundation in Uganda, the Philippines, and Indonesia has enabled the piloting of different participatory research and action methods to make budget analysis more politically strategic and more empowering. If research is to be useful to advocates it has to address concrete problems and must be synthesised, simplified and made relevant to advocates so they can shape clear policy demands.

Research gaps and difficulties from an advocacy perspective are as follows:

- It is hard to define a common agenda for research and action as researchers and activists approach budget work from different and sometimes conflicting perspectives. The entry point for activists tends to be concrete problems, whereas the entry point for researchers may be theory, policy, or existing research and analysis.

- If research and analysis are too long and too complex, their value to advocates is limited. A lack of examples of how budgets work in practice can alienate activists.

- Gender budget work often fails to make concrete policy proposals and demands. Advocates need concrete examples of recommendations and a clear idea of the trade-offs between alternatives.

- The lack of basic gender-disaggregated data about specific problems makes it hard for groups to link analysis of a problem to a policy solution with budget implications.

- The widespread misunderstanding that gender budget work is about a special resource allocation for women acts as a major barrier to analysing total public expenditure and to building broader alliances to tackle discrimination in the budget.

- A “follow-the-money” approach to gathering information on budget spending is a manageable entry point for grassroots and rights groups trying to challenge promised but undelivered public services.

- The lack of work on the revenue side of budgets has left advocates vulnerable to arguments and the realities that resources are scarce and governments can only do so much.

- There are dangers to gender budget advocates investing too much energy in detailed discussions on budget line items and losing the broader picture which includes faulty macroeconomic thinking and planning, and the need for a broader reform agenda.

Recommendations to address these gaps between research and the needs of activists are as follows:

- Researchers and activists should be involved as equal partners, affirming the importance and distinct nature of their skills. The budget analysis should be defined as issue- or problem-focused and participatory action research methods used to directly involve citizens and activists in information gathering and analysis.

- Make research and analysis accessible by using executive summaries, bullet points, simple charts and comparisons that link findings to concrete problems and policy alternatives.

- Real examples should be used to better show the gendered budget choices and trade-offs.

- Researchers and advocates should work together to pressure governments to collect and make available sex- disaggregated data.

- Once partners understand the value of gender analysis to budget work, they can see how useful it is to all social inclusion work, not just budgets. Ways to promote gender budget work without it being misunderstood as a special interest welfare strategy need to be developed.

- Groups need simple advice and tools for tracking and monitoring budget spending in order to trace their concrete problem to a policy and in turn to a budget to work out what went wrong.

- Researchers would greatly assist advocacy efforts if they incorporated an analysis of how decisions and choices are not influenced solely by the facts but also by vested interests and conflicts in the policy process.

- In order to extend the arguments of advocates to the revenue side there is a need to develop more revenue tools, analysis, and examples.

- Gender budget analysis has to be linked to macroeconomic thinking and to promote a broader reform agenda aiming to strengthen citizen participation, promote more democratic decision-making, and change the very assumptions that budget calculations are based on.

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