Gender budgeting in the EU budget: New momentum, agenda-setting and outcomes

Over the past decades, gender budgeting has developed into an institutional practice of public financial management implemented across the world, not least due to the involvement of international financial institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Lately, the EU institutions too have enhanced their involvement with gender budgeting: they have recommended member states to engage in gender budgeting and started to integrate gender perspectives and gender budgeting practices in the EU’s budgetary process. Drawing mainly on agenda-setting theory and feminist institutionalism, this paper aims to understand how gender budgeting emerged on the EU’s agenda with new intensity in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and under the gender-equality friendly von der Leyen Commission. The paper also critically evaluates the new gender budgeting tools adopted, such as tracking mechanisms for gender equality expenditure in EU funding programmes, and explores the institutional and political possibilities and constraints for institutionalizing gender budgeting in the EU budget. The paper contributes, firstly, to gender and EU literature, which despite the extensive attention paid to gender mainstreaming has not interrogated the EU’s budget process. The focus on the EU budget also expands gender budgeting literature, which has mainly focused on national and sub-national settings, and the EU case provides new insights on the agenda-setting stage of gender budgeting adoption.