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

Conclusions

This pilot has highlighted some of the potential benefits of conducting an approach to gender budgeting that focuses on the delivery of strategic goals for aligning cross-cutting government activity, providing an avenue for creative and collaborative proposals to close persistent gender gaps, and harnessing the budget process to track and support activity across the government.

However, there would likely be significant challenges with further implementation of the piloted approach within the existing Scottish Government budgeting process. A focus on goals would require cross government development of Scottish specific goals. It would also benefit from the development of additional methods to identify and track key policies against the goals. Testing such approaches was beyond the scope of this pilot and could be explored further as part of any future development work.

Based on OECD experience, the introduction of gender goals might also benefit from the implementation of some form of portfolio performance reporting. In the longer term, consideration of OECD best practice recommendations for performance budgeting may also help to further support existing internal budget improvement work, including on transparency and accountability.

The adoption of the OECD’s recommended approach to gender budgeting might be difficult to implement in the short term, and whilst this pilot has surfaced some of the practical challenges, it could bring a number of opportunities. Other countries have used the adoption of equality goals or objectives to improve the focus of government activity towards key inequalities, this includes but is not limited to gender, as the approach can be applied to a range of equality priorities. While evidence suggests that it is difficult to directly track the impact of gender budgeting on equality outcomes in the short term, adopting a strategic approach may help to focus activity.

It is important to note however, that few OECD countries implement the OECD’s recommended approach in full, as adaptations are necessary in order to ensure the suitability of any new approach to the country specific context. Further work to explore how gender budgeting would be implemented is needed, and any changes to gender or equality budgeting should be supported by training and guidance for colleagues to ensure the required capacity and skills are available. However, any changes to the budget process are a second step to the development of overarching gender goals. Without gender or equality goals in place to focus government activity, changes to the budget process may have limited impact on addressing persistent inequalities.