Economic Governance and Gender Budgeting

This chapter sheds light on how recent trends in public financial management and economic governance intertwine with and impact gender equality policy. The chapter examines gender budgeting as an international public governance trend with the potential to reconfigure gender equality–economy relations. It also assesses how broader efforts to reform economic policy-making and budget processes, such as fiscal rules and other tools to control public spending, shape gender budgeting and gender equality policy. The chapter argues that Finnish gender budgeting practices have not been immune to the depoliticisation and economisation characteristic of transforming public governance. It also argues that other public financial management reform agendas shape gender budgeting and gender equality policy, often in constraining ways, and that more feminist engagement with the big picture of public financial management is therefore needed. Although in Finland, gender budgeting has provided limited room for a transformative critique of the economy and economic policies, it has still broken some strategic silences, politicised economic policies and budgets and provided some gender equality actors a foothold in new areas of public governance.