Gender budgeting in Pakistan –issues and policy interventions

Since the Beijing Conference the gender mainstreaming has been gradually accepted as the tools for achieving gender equity all over the world. The gender equity aims at creating such conducive environment in which women are politically, socially, economically are empowered so that they exercise power to decide about their own roles in the society instead of letting the society generate or construct these roles socially. Pakistan is actively following the gender mainstreaming policies according to the actions approved in the Beijing Platform of action. Since the public sector is the main source of policy articulation on social, economic and political matters the responsibility of gender mainstreaming rested predominantly with the government. The civil society and donors are helping the government in implementation of its efforts at gender mainstreaming through technical and financial support. The governmental efforts at gender mainstreaming became more pronounced when it sharpened its focus on gender budgeting or gender responsive budgeting, which is one of the latest tools which the government has used to mainstream gender. Being a new concept gender budgeting raises more questions in Pakistan’s context then answering the questions faced by gender mainstreaming in itself. Gender budgeting entails the involvement of a spectrum of stakeholders in it which include: the government, donors, civil society, finance and economic ministries, women ministries and women themselves who are the supposed beneficiaries of this gender budget initiative. This paper aims to analyze the respective role of the stakeholders and relevant issues generated by the interaction between these actors. The issues relating to the technical capacity of the government – its departments, ministries – need to be discussed at length that whether the need for gender budgeting came as a need felt from within the society and translated into governmental effort to implement it or it came to the surface as an external advice from the donors. It is particularly important to analyze this issue since the long term sustainability and commitment of the government towards the initiative can only be ascertained if the need arose as a result of an internal need. The second important issue to be discussed in the paper is to fathom the political commitment behind the initiative. Since the budget making is a technical as well political process, the responses of legislators to this initiative are particularly important since they are the ones who approve the budgets. The third issue relates to the approach of the civil society and NGOs working on the issues of budgets and gender. There are quite a few such NGOs which are working on gender budgeting issues. However, those NGOs which are actively working on gender mainstreaming may be co-opted in the process of gender budgeting. It is particularly important to analyze the approach of such NGOs which are, in some way working on GB. Then the most important and critical issue is to see that the initiatives that are being implemented are actually meant to benefit women in the country, if so which strata of women these are specially focusing. Related issue is to explore whether the gender relation in Pakistan are considered as a normative for all strata of society or there are actually many strong sub currents of gender relations disguised by rural urban divide, tribal non trial layers etc. therefore it is important to see that which of the women these budgets initiatives are especially focusing at. There is another important issue to explore, which although seems beyond the scope of this paper, yet it remains important vis a vis the sustainability of the initiative, is whether the concept of gender budgeting consistent with the culture and indigenous belief systems about the gender or it is at variance like many other western theories of feminism; the feminist politics and theorizing as the world knows it is often labeled as a western construct divorced from the contexts of individual countries. By expanding on these this argument may be connected to the vulnerability and poverty among the poor of the country. Another issue is the changing international scenario of political philosophy. From Keynesian consensus to Washington consensus the development thinking of world has undergone a sea change in the wake of end of the cold war. The present development thinking of which the GB is a part, should also be seen in this context that is it a fad or it does offer fundamental solution for bringing gender equity. All these issues together raise different interesting questions, the answer to which will be explored in this paper.

Back to home page