Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development - gender budgeting pilots: evaluation report

Introduction

The Scottish Government has published an Equality and Fairer Scotland Budget Statement (EFSBS) alongside the Budget since 2009. Each year, the Government has made improvements to its approach to equality budgeting.

To explore opportunities to further strengthen its approach to equality budgeting in the longer term, and to inform the potential development of gender budgeting in particular, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) was commissioned to:

(1) conduct a review of the Scottish Government’s current approach to Gender Budgeting, and

(2) pilot and test the feasibility of implementing a new approach with two areas in the Scottish Government: Economy (located in the Deputy First Minister, Economy and Gaelic portfolio), and Justice (located in the Justice and Home Affairs portfolios).

The pilot approach was directly informed by the findings of the OECD review of the Scottish Government’s approach to gender budgeting (see Annex A).

The review identified a number of strengths in Scotland to support gender budgeting, including political commitment, the role of the Equality and Human Rights Budget Advisory Group (EHRBAG), the use of Equality Impact Assessments (EQIAs) and the Equality Evidence Finder. However, it also noted that a lack of overarching strategic goals for gender equality was inhibiting the Scottish Government’s ability to focus policy development and budget decisions towards closing persistent gender gaps.

In response to these findings, the Scottish Exchequer commissioned two pilots with the Economy and Justice portfolios. The purpose of these pilots was to explore the feasibility of the Scottish Government to adopt a new approach to gender budgeting which uses the budget process to focus and track policy activity that helps achieve overarching strategic gender goals. The pilots were therefore focused on understanding the role and opportunities for adapting the budget process to help in advancing equality goals, rather than on the pilot portfolios’ policy activity.

The evalution findings presented in this report should therefore be considered with this focus in mind. It was beyond the scope of this pilot to consider in detail policy activity to address the identified gender goals, and so the information presented focuses on pilot participants’ assessment of testing the implementation of the OECD’s recommended budget process approach. Whilst support was provided by the OECD, Scottish Government officials had not been trained in implementing the approach.

Pilot Approach

The OECD’s recommended approach focused on restructuring policy and budget activity towards overarching strategic gender goals. In the absence of Scottish gender goals, the pilot exercises used the Canadian Gender Framework goals (see Annex B), given their broad applicability within a Scottish context.

On the basis of this, both pilot areas were asked to identify one of the Canadian cross-cutting goals relevant to their area and articulate a portfolio level objective that would support the Scottish Government in achieving the overarching goal. The Economy pilot focused its activity on the goal of ‘equal and full participation in the economy’. The Justice pilot focused activity on goals related to ‘gender based violence and access’.

Once pilot areas had identified a portfolio level objective, they were asked to consider:

• what is known about current barriers to achieving this objective;
• what their portfolio is already doing in this area;
• and where and how they might redesign or propose new policies and programmes to better focus activity and spend on the objective.

In addition, pilots were asked, where possible, to identify the relevant Level 3 and Level 4 budget lines for proposed activities to test how a goal setting approach might feed into budget allocation decisions.

Pilot Activities

The pilots were conducted over five weeks between April and May 2024 and included a number of activities to test the recomended approach. These were:

• Introductory pilot commencement session which set out the plan for pilot activities and included presentations from the OECD lead for gender budgeting on their review of Scottish Government’s approach, and experts from the Government of Iceland, on Iceland’s experience of implementing gender budgeting.
• In-person direction setting workshops with support from the OECD lead for gender budgeting, and an OECD contracted consultant formerly employed by the Prime Minister’s Office at the Australian Government.
• Troubleshooting sessions.
• The issuing of a pilot reporting template and guidance which were completed and returned by both pilot areas and shared with the OECD for comment.
• Final feedback session with both pilot areas, Scottish Exchequer, and the OECD. This session sought feedback from pilot areas on the trialled approach, and shared feedback from the OECD on the completed pilot templates. Feedback received during this session helped to inform the pilot evaluation.

Pilot Aims

The aims for the pilots fell into three categories. These were as follows:

• To test the feasibility of implementing the OECD’s recommended gender budgeting approach, by seeking to:
  • Understand if the existing budget process can support gender budgeting;
  • Understand potential resource implications of implementing and carrying out gender budgeting each year;
  • Identify which professions would need to be involved to make any implementation of gender budgeting successful;
  • Establish the feasibility of categorising identified activity within budget lines.
• To understand the value of conducting budgeting activity against strategic goals, by testing the use of:
  • A focus on gender equality in its approach to budgeting.
  • More widely, an equality goals focused approach to budgeting.
• To explore analytical approaches that would support a goal focused approach to gender budgeting, including by identifying and testing:
  • New ways of communicating equality impact analysis to better support budget decisions.
  • Budget monitoring methodologies and how these might be applied to the Scottish budget.

Evaluation Approach

To evaluate the feasibility of implementing the OECD’s recommended approach to gender budgeting, the pilot area assessments gathered from each portfolio were reviewed by the Scottish Exchequer and OECD colleagues.

In conjunction with focus group feedback from pilot area colleagues, this combined evidence was used to assess the extent to which each area had been able to follow the OECD approach with available information and Scottish Government policy and budgeting processes.