Gender Responsive Budgeting & Gendered Public Finance Bibliography with Abstracts

This bibliography was created as part of the Consortium’s Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace and Planet (FRSPP) project. The bibliography surveys the existing research; the Consortium aims to build upon this literature as we explore the ways that a gendered approach to public finance can strengthen politically, socially and environmentally sustainable peacebuilding. 

Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB) is a gender mainstreaming tool used to make gendersensitive budget analyses and to formulate gender-sensitive budgets and policies. Sometimes also known as “Gender Budgeting,” Gender Responsive Budgeting is a “strategy premised on the idea that budgets are not gender neutral and that the choices governments make about how to raise and distribute resources can reinforce, maintain or reduce gender inequality” (Elson 2012).

GRB should be understood as only one part of a larger topic, which is Gender and Public Finance. Public finance refers to the ways in which government generate, allocate and spend funds. It is crucial that aspects of public finance beyond budgeting be subjected to the same kinds of feminist analytic curiosity that has productively illuminated budgeting. The implications of linking public finance and gender are wide and deep, from opening more acute ways of thinking about post-conflict reconstruction or financing for development, to deconstructing unpaid labor. We hope that this bibliography, which includes the few sources we could find that treat both GRB and Gender and Public Finance as a whole, will be taken as a starting point for researching these intricate questions.

Section I of this bibliography provides a guide to the academic literature on GRB and on Gender and Public Finance. However, much of the literature on GRB comes from the policy realm, created or commissioned by institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, so we include some key pieces of the policy literature in Section II. The reader will note that a substantial number of the authors who work in this field are represented in both sections.

Rather than an exhaustive list of sources pertaining to the field, this bibliography is a curated resource meant to introduce readers to both the key concepts of and critical approaches to GRB and Gender and Public Finance. Throughout, resources that are especially useful as introductions to the topic are indicated with two asterisks (**).

This bibliography was created by the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, as part of the Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace and Planet (FRSPP) project. The FRSPP starts with the perception that postwar transitions and the sustainability of peace itself are often undermined by transnational political economic actors and processes. Its goal is to provide: forward-looking expert knowledge of those processes; analyses of their impacts on gender relations and other structural inequalities underlying armed conflicts; and recommendations for how to engage and modify those processes to be more supportive of the societal transformations critical to building gender-equitable, sustainable peace. Topics addressed in the FRSPP include, inter alia: the economic recovery policy prescriptions of international financial institutions; extractives; land rights, large scale land acquisition and land grabbing; infrastructure reconstruction; and climate disruption.