Gender budgeting set for regions for 2012

Indraswari

I borrow the above title from The Jakarta Post’s article published on May 7, 2010, which reported that a gender-oriented program will be included in the Midterm National Development Plan for the 2010-2014 periods as a strategy to create gender responsive governance.

The report quotes Fithriyah of the National Development Planning Ministry (Bappenas), who said the gender-oriented budgeting program was introduced to the central government through several ministries and will be disseminated through to regional governments.
She added that seven ministries and government institutions have adopted two versions of the gender-oriented budgeting program, service delivery and capacity development and advocacy. The service delivery ministries are the National Education, Public Works, Health and Agriculture Ministries. The capacity development and advocating ministries and institutions are the Finance, Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection and the National Development Planning Ministries.
Then what is gender budgeting?
Rubin and Bartle in their article “Integrating Gender into Government Budgets: A New Perspective”, write that it is the actual integration of a gender perspective into budget decision at the national or sub-national level of government (Public Administration Review, Volume 65 Issue 3, May/June 2005, Washington). They add that the term also refers to an organized movement to influence government to incorporate a gender perspective into its budget decision.
Other terms for gender budgeting — according to Rubin and Bartle — are women’s budget, gender budgets, gender-sensitive budgets and gender-responsive budgets. It is important to note that gender budgeting is part of gender mainstreaming program as implied in a 2000 Presidential Instruction on gender mainstreaming in national development.
In line with the mainstreaming issue, Budlender, Sharp and Allen (1998) in their paper titled How to do a gender-sensitive budget analysis: Contemporary research and practice, state that “Women’s budget or a gender-sensitive budget is not a separate budget for women. Rather it is an analysis of the government’s budget to establish the budget’s differential impact on women and men and on different groups of women and men. A gender-sensitive budget is about taking government’s gender commitments and translating them into budgetary commitments”.
Furthermore they note that budgets themselves are a means to achieve (policy) objectives. In other words, budgets should follow policy and not the other way around.
Budgets and public policies are often assumed to affect everyone — men and women — equally, while in fact they are not. Therefore gender perspective in budgeting process and policy formulation are important to ensure that nobody is marginalized.
Implementing gender budgeting requires awareness and understanding among government officials on gender-based problems in development. Without this understanding we can only expect a little that a budget accommodates gender needs.
This lack of awareness and understanding is actually one of the challenges of implementing gender budgeting in Indonesia today. While there are national policies that address gender-based problems such as the 2004 Domestic Violence Law, the current decentralization era is marked by regional bylaws that are not only unfriendly, but discriminatory against women.
In recent years we have been familiar with media reports on local governments in some regions who are busy making laws on women’s dress codes and behaviors and justify such laws in the name of upholding public morality.
On the other hand, gender-based problems such as high maternal mortality rate is often poorly addressed. This indicates the lack of awareness and understanding previously mentioned. Therefore to implement gender budgeting successfully, it is important to continuously raise gender awareness and understanding among government officials and the public in general.
Development is for all. Both men and women should be able to enjoy the fruit of development fairly. This is only possible when their needs are accommodated fairly too in development program including in the budgeting process.


The writer is a lecturer at Parahyangan Catholic University’s School of Social and Political Sciences in Bandung.