Why do countries adopt (or abandon) gender-responsive budget policies?: the case of Australia, 2014-2022
Abstract
The term gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) encompasses a range of analytic approaches and other policy tools intended to steer public budget processes and allocations toward greater equality for men and women. By the second decade of this century, at least 80 – roughly a third – of the world's countries had adopted some version of GRB. GRB-adopting countries span the range of the world's regions and income levels, with no obvious pattern connecting region, culture, or economic conditions to the adoption or non-adoption of GRB initiatives. Why do some countries adopt GRB while others do not? As a first step toward answering that question, we used the advocacy coalition framework to structure a process-tracing examination of three recent GRB policy changes in Australia. Australia in 1983 became the first county in the world to adopt GRB and began producing an annual Women's Budget Statement (WBS) in 1984. That practice was abandoned in 2014 following a change of government but later re-adopted in 2021 by the same government in the wake of a political scandal. A new government took office in 2022 and substituted its own WBS for the previous government's several months into the 2022-2023 fiscal year. The processes leading to those policy changes were consistent with the ACF's general hypotheses about the causes of policy change but can also be explained as the results of electoral politics and partisan electoral maneuvering.
Description
Keywords
Advocacy coalition framework, Australia, Gender budget, Gender-responsive budgeting, Women's Budget Statement