ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the origins and spread of gender budgeting, techniques of gender budget analysis, the impact of gender budgeting, and the challenges of transformational gender budgeting. It shows how what began as a feminist initiative has in many cases been watered down by governments and international financial institutions so that the transformational potential has been lost, and suggest that we now need to talk about a feminist fiscal policy that focuses on the macroeconomic dimensions of the budget. There are difficulties in coming to a general conclusion because of the wide variety of forms of gender budgeting that have been tried out, many of which have lacked a strong link to policy. Much of the literature focuses on the ways that budget procedures have been changed, including use of sex-disaggregated data, but does not focus on outcomes. Feminist economists need to be ready to seize opportunities to work with progressive political forces to secure a truly feminist fiscal policy.
