Introducing Gender Responsive Budgeting to Aotearoa New Zealand: The influence of institutional resistance, amnesia, and epistemic assets

In 1985, the Labour government in New Zealand established the country’s Ministry for Women; a standalone agency, with a dedicated Minister inside Cabinet, an autonomous Māori (Indigenous) women’s policy unit, and a commitment to connecting women’s organisations with the policy process. Almost 40 years later, the Ministry remains in place. Its name has changed, its mandate has evolved (in part a result of a number of public sector management changes), and the gender analysis tools necessary for Gender Responsive Budgeting have been designed and redesigned several times over. In this paper we trace these ebbs and flows of New Zealand’s attempts to institutionalise gender expertise across agencies and whether this explains the slow progress taken in embracing gender responsive budgeting. We draw on Lombardo and Mergaert (2016) to identify whether the inability to embed tools over time is tied to institutional resistance; or something else. We also explore whether the concept of institutional amnesia (Pollitt, 2009; Stark, 2019;) helps us to understand this lack of permanence. We then ask whether these two features (resistance and amnesia) can be undermined by international actors and norms (Krook and True, 2010), and the capacity of academic gender experts to act as epistemic assets, to support memory retention and the recognition of gender expertise as a valued policy competence (Thompson and Prügl, 2017).