On Sustainable Human Development: Gender Auditing in a Capability Approach

An important social dimension of sustainable human development is gender equity.Gender Equity does require not only targeted government spending for equal opportunities between sexes, but also gender-sensitive policy making. Feminist studies have developed several tools to assessthe gender impact of public policy and, in particular, of public budgets. They commonly audit the gender impact of public policies by analyzing public spending through elementary indicators. Theirstarting idea is that without systematic gender auditing, public policies may generate new (or perpetuate old) inequalities between men and women. According to the Capability Approach, amultidimensional auditing methodology is needed to assess the impact of public policy on women's wellbeing.In this paper, we introduce an innovative approach to Gender Auditing (GA) of public budgets inspired by the capability approach. This approach has been experimented in a recent attempt todevelop gender budgets in Emilia Romagna (Italy) with reference to three levels: the Region and Modena Municipality and Provincial District. Different experimental tools have been designed and usedIn particular, at the regional level, individual well-being is defined in terms of an extension of capabilitysets and inequalities are seen as multiple dis-functionings in a social space where women aredisadvantaged in terms of access to resources, education, health, control over their bodies. Hence, byidentifying some dimensions of women’s empowerment and some public policy domains, we build a GAmatrix together with some simple indicators for GA.At the provincial level, the list of capabilities used to define a multidimensional well-being isderived from the capabilities implicit and embodied in the administrative structure and taken aspolitical responsibilities of the local government with regard to the well-being of residents. Themethodology used for the Provincial District is an extended reproductive well-being approach that notonly focuses on women’s inequality but also introduces a new concept of social sustainability.Women’s experience of the vulnerability of family members, included adult males, allows to disclosesome general features of the economic system. Finally, at municipality level, the focus is on thenetwork of institutions that cooperate to guarantee local well-being and particular attention is given tothe capability of caring.