ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates a new approach to gender budgets based on Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum's capability approach, as experimented with in Italy since 2002 at local government level. It places the public budgets in an extended reproductive well-being approach to the economic system. A government budget is a comprehensive account of the public expenditures and the revenues. Well-being gender budgets (WBGBs) constitute an original proposal that shifts the assessment of the policies from the usual analysis of means to an analysis of the quality of life of women and men, taking into proper account their sex, different gender life experiences and social conditions. The concept of the multi-dimensional well-being is in fact recognisable in everyone's experience of the complexity of living as the sexed individuals embedded in a social context and positioned in a network of the human relationships, socially necessary for their human sustainability.
