Gender responsive budgeting and rights-based monitoring

This paper calls for a closer dialogue and interchange between gender budgeting implementation and rights-based monitoring perspective. States at the global level have agreed on the principle of transformative gender equality in order to achieve the «leaving no one behind» commitment agreed by the Sustainable Development Goals. However, these global commitments and responsibilities have not been recognized and acknowledged as duly binding by development practitioners and policy-makers. The adoption of rights-based development indicators by policy practitioners in the implementation of gender budgeting could serve multiple purposes. Based on the experience of gender responsive budgeting trainings organized in Turkey, Albania and North Macedonia, we argue that gender responsive budgeting (GRB) provides for a transformative approach to policy making while supporting policy-makers and practitioners in designing a policy and budget process taking gender equality and human rights’ commitments into consideration. A rights-based GRB framework could be an effective tool to reinvigorate the efforts in closing the gender gaps from a rights-based perspective. The proposed framework here adds to the endeavors to bridge between gender budgeting perspective in practice and the approach to rights-based monitoring.