ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the process of participatory preparation and budgeting with its predefined sequence and the establishment of various committees to update local decisions and bottom-up strategies. The Union Parishad (UP) – the lowest administrative tier of Bangladesh’s rural local government – was chosen as a study unit. The participatory planning and budgeting processes are linked together to provide important information to the ordinary people, for instance, which schemes were placed at the planning phase by the people and which schemes got approval at the budgeting phase. Moreover, an open budget phase is a platform where people get information about the local council’s income and expenditure statement and the state of implementation of schemes initiated in the previous year. The mechanisms and medium have also been analyzed through which people are engaged in the planning and budgeting processes. There has been an elaborate discussion on internal issues, including the influence of political leaders or elites; overlapping duties of the officials of all levels of local- government-elected politicians and bureaucrats; the non-functioning role of participatory space for a selection of the project beneficiaries; local politics and lack of resources, etc. that are causing obstacles in the process of formulation of participatory gender responsive budgeting at the local government units. It is also explained how the concept “preference for women” got lost in the existing practice of local politics and administrative complexity.
