Well-Being Gender Budgets: italian local governments cases

This paper implements the methodological tools developed at regional and local governments level on gender budgets, using Sen and Nussbaum capability approach to design Well-Being Gender Budgets (WBGB). Following the methods first discussed in Addabbo, Lanzi and Picchio “On Sustainable Human Development: Gender Auditing in a Capability Approach” (2004), the framework used in this paper is an extended reproductive well-being macro approach that includes unpaid work, focuses on gender inequalities in well-being, and uses an analytical perspective which places the process of social reproduction of the population among the structural processes of the economic system and as a fundamental condition of its sustainability.The paper is divided into four sections. After the Introduction, in the first section the perspective and method of WBGB are presented. In the second, the recent experiences of WBGB adopted in Italy at provincial district and regional level are introduced and the Italian local governments institutional context is presented. In the third, a list of capabilities, based on the administrative structure of the local governments adopting the gender budget, is proposed. In fact, the structure of the different Departments (Health, Education, Transports, etc.) is seen as the result of an historical assumption of public responsibility towards specific dimensions of residents’ well-being, such as: being healthy, educated, mobile in the territory, carer of others, etc.. The context analysis is then designed to provide empirical information on a set of effective functionings that areused to assess gender inequalities in a specific well-being domain.In the fourth section, new tools (capabilities matrices) are introduced, drawn to help public policy actors to become aware of the implications of their choices on the multidimensional well-being of the women and men living in their territory. Moreover, some examples of budgeting monetary resources, taking into account well-being policy objectives are illustrated, with particular reference to the Piedmont Region and the Rome Provincial District.The results of different Italian local-government experiments in WBGB are proposed to share a different way of approaching the assessment of the gender impact of public policies and to open a discussion on their pros and cons. We think that their tools could become a key to policy integration and a basis for social participation in a public reasoning process on well-being, but they need to be discussed in a wider forum, and the possibility of their application to other countries and at different government levels also needs to be discussed.