When someone last counted, in 2002 it seems, more than 60 countries were doing Gender-Responsive Budgeting (GRB), and since then the numbers have increased. Sixty countries is a significant number given that GRB is a tool that emerged only in the 1980s. It is now in the gaze of the global community, not as much for what it has done but more so for the potential it offers. What actually does GRB offer, and what value does it add to planning and budgeting?

The dominant economic market paradigm has utterly failed to achieve development goals like the provision for basic needs and food security, social equality and gender justice, as well as environmental sustainability. The interlinked global food, financial, economic, social and climate crises of 2008/9 are only the latest proof that the neoliberal model which now increasingly centers around the financial market, can not cope with its own inner contradictions. It constantly exceeds the limits of growth and systemically produces one economic, social and environmental crash after the other.

 

Accordingly, social movements and civil society organisations elaborated and differentiated their criticism of this unsustainable and crisis-prone economic model and the respective development strategies and neoliberal policies. WIDE contributes a feminist perspective to this criticism and locates its critical analysis in a framework of feminist economics.

 

Yamini Mishra contribution to the publication "In search of economic alternatives for gender and social justice: Voices from India" , edited by Christa Wichterich, can be found on page 32 - 38.