China
Wenling Municipality
This experience with submitted to the 8th IOPD Distinction "Best Practice in Citizen Participation" (2014)
Executive Summary
for
Improvement of Participatory Gender Budget
The Case of Wenling in China
Xiajuan Guo
1. Initiatives of participatory gender budget (PGB ) in China have been developed into three types, the outsider model initiated by NGOs Hebeis shijiazhuang, the insider model operated by government finance bureau in Henans Jiaozuo, and the combined model run by the multi agents in Wenling of Zhejiang which successfully incorporated women into the governments budget making.
2. The Wenling experiment is unique due to its highly localized institutional innovation of the democratic consultative meeting (?????). It is characterized by the high proportion of womens participation which has improved womens empowerment in the governments budget decision making.
3. It has brought unprecedented openness to governmental budget, not only at the budget level but also with respect to equal participation for women. In this sense, gender budget is inherently political, rather than essentially a component of administrative instrument.
4. However, the Wenlings experiment also suffers from several limitations and challenges. One obvious weakness is that most of the programmes discussed by the PGB participants are women-specific, which accounted for only a small portion of the total budgets.
5. A complete process (or a cycle) of PGB should include the evaluation of the inputs, the activities, and the outputs and impacts[1] (Graph 11). The Wenling experiment of the PGB merely covered a part of the entire cycle, related to the first two of funding the women-specific programs and the activities, while leaving out the other two. It resulted in a lack of responsiveness to the implementations, therefore leaving it a broken chain of the whole cycle.
6. Thus, the PGB is still vulnerable and its sustainability remains a challenge. There are arguments about efficiency and equity through which a gender analysis of government budgets are justified, given the scarcity of resources and the competing demands. Therefore, the objectives of the new project are to improve the present practice and sustain the innovation.
7. It aims to design a new procedure of gender budget which will act together with the democratic consultation meetings. Under this new procedure, the budget items will be discussed, based on the gender disaggregated data, analyzed and used to expand gender budget programmes.
8. It intends to train participants of gender budget meetings, especially women, to improve their capability in reviewing government budget from a gender perspective. It will focus particularly on the knowledge of gender budget, the skills for gender analysis of budget, and the ability of conveying public opinions about government budget from a gender perspective.
9. It expects to expand the latitude of gender budget to complete the whole cycle, to assess the impacts of the selected budget programmes on females and males, to examine whether and to what extent the resources are allocated between the sexes, and to evaluate the effectiveness of the implementation of budget programmes.
8. The activities of the project will assist to facilitate the achievement of aims. Efforts include broadening the scope of the reviewed budget programmes and introducing a multi-dimension analysis of impacts on both sexes; to conduct capacity training to the participants of gender budget, especially to females; to complete the whole circle of gender budget in the forthcoming practice.
9. The effectiveness of the project will be assessed by three parameters: 1) Accelerating governments fulfillment of gender equality commitment; 2) Adjusting government budget and enhancing equal distribution; 3) Empowerment through equal participation in budgets.
10 The methodology for the project includes questionnaires, interviews and observations.
[1] Diane Elson (2002), Gender Responsive Budget Initiatives: Key Dimensions and Practical Examples, Gender Budget Initiatives: Strategies, concepts and experiences, New York: UNIFEM, p.18-19.