Some of society’s most pressing challenges don’t fit neatly into a box. Take persistent gender inequality. For over three decades, governments, international institutions, civil society organizations and affected women, themselves, have worked to address the structural, policy and cultural factors that perpetuate gender-based discrimination, exclusion, oppression and violence.

The drivers and manifestations of gender inequality are multiple and intersecting with other socio-economic factors and broader challenges of equity, inclusivity and sustainability. Any remedies invariably must cut across government ministries and sectors. Effective government responses require planning, policy making and public finance systems that (1) assess the problem in all its complexity, (2) design and adequately finance responses, (3) execute the relevant programs and activities and (4) assess outcomes and impacts. To support solutions that effectively “mainstream” gender equality considerations across the public sector, governments and civil society organizations have been using gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) approaches for over 25 years. These approaches support awareness raising; management and public accountability purposes, including identifying and tracking gender-related spending; impact evaluation, and ultimately improvements to planning and implementation.

Learning from GRB to ensure climate-responsive public budgets

Like gender inequality, climate change poses extremely complex and intersecting challenges and addressing them requires significant government intervention and coordination. In addition to the cross-cutting nature of an effective response, efforts to address climate breakdown are often components of a larger program or project, raising huge definitional and operational challenges.

Within the last decade, as governments in climate-vulnerable countries have sought to improve their public finance systems and practices to respond to climate change, several have turned to GRB for its possible lessons on developing and implementing climate change-responsive budget reforms. Climate-responsive budgeting has taken various forms, including climate tagging of budget lines, the use of environmental cost-benefit analysis for decision making and carbon pricing. To date at least 30 countries have conducted Climate Public Expenditure and Institutional Reviews (CPEIRs), which review legislation and public expenditure contributions to national climate goals and seek to identify specific public expenditure policy and management challenges. In addition, at least 19 countries have established some form of climate budget tagging according to estimates in a new report from the World Bank.

Gender equity in the face of climate breakdown

Climate breakdown exacerbates existing inequalities, including those of gender. Women and girls, particularly those who are living in poverty, are often more severely impacted by climate-related extreme weather events. Their ability to respond to climate hazards can be limited by barriers to asset accumulation; unequal access to property, natural resources or financial services like credit; and inadequate support to lessen their traditional care burdens from public services like education, health care, and disaster recovery support.

Moreover, women, especially those at the frontlines of climate change impacts, have few or no opportunities to participate in decision-making processes. Yet, given their relevant experience, knowledge and skills, this exclusion undermines effective responses to the climate crisis.

Clearly, gender-responsiveness, including the agency and leadership of women, must be at the center of the response to the climate crisis, if we are to have sustainable, equitable, low-emission and climate-resilient societies and economies. And public finance management sits at the center of any integrated government response to gender inequality and climate change that recognizes and responds to the dynamic relationship between them. Arguably, there needs to be “double mainstreaming” of both climate and gender.  Governments need to take the next step of making their climate-responsive budgets also gender-responsive and vice versa.

New study looks at the state of gender-responsive climate change budgeting

To help accelerate progress toward more effective integration of gender and climate in public financial management, we studied existing practices, approaches, and opportunities—in search of guiding principles for gender-responsive climate change budgeting (GR-CCB). Beyond a broad scoping of interesting nascent efforts around the world, we dug more deeply into the experience of two countries—Mexico and Bangladesh—that face significant risks of negative impacts from climate change but represent different climate change policy and public financial management (PFM) contexts; each has engaged in gender- and/or climate change-responsive budgeting at the national and subnational level.

In the country assessments, we identify the policy models used and analyze key components of the different approaches, implementation considerations and impacts on decision making and outcomes. We also tried to analyze the budgets of two key sector ministries in each country to determine what portion of the respective ministry budget allocated in support of climate change actions was also gender responsive. One key assumption was that, as both Mexico and Bangladesh have established components of both GRB and climate change budgeting, we would be able to use publicly available budget data to calculate the “overlap” between the two—or the GR-CCB.

Our assumption about access to basic allocation data was too optimistic. While we were able to come up with some broad, indicative estimates of the GR-CCB of the ministries, not enough detailed data were available to support more accurate estimates. Through the attempt, though, we were able to identify gaps and offer recommendations on what is needed to move forward:

• National leadership that clarifies mandates, roles, and responsibilities for various actors and supports transparency and consistency,
• Training of key staff across sectors to ensure they understand, internalize, and incorporate the principles of gender equality and climate change,
• Strong budget reporting methodologies that include data disaggregated by cross-cutting priorities, such as climate and gender, and by programs of work,
• Deep multistakeholder engagement in planning, policy-making and oversight processes and
• Adequate financial resources for these and other recommended activities.

While not arriving to the clear answers we hoped for, nonetheless this exploratory exercise can inform current discussions on the need to move beyond a partial and segmented integration of either gender or climate considerations to an integrated response on existing financial needs assessments, allocation and budgeting and expenditures practices. Only through this kind of integrated approach can the twin challenges of gender and climate be properly addressed.

*Dr. Sandra Guzmán, Grupo de Financiamiento Climático para América Latina y el Caribe; Tanjir Hossain, ActionAid Bangladesh; Delaine McCullough, International Budget Partnership; Sejal Patel, International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED); Liane Schalatek, Heinrich Böll Stiftung, Washington, DC; and Paul Steele, IIED.