Gender Budgeting in Belgium: A Feminist Institutionalist Analysis of Policy Failure and Pathways for Advancement

How can the (mis)implementation of gender budgeting in Belgium be explained? In 2007, Belgium became one of the first countries to legislate gender budgeting, a policy tool designed to promote more equitable resource allocation through gender-sensitive analysis of public revenues and expenditures, and one that holds significant transformative potential for advancing gender equality. However, despite a robust political and legal framework, the implementation of gender budgeting in Belgium has remained modest in scope and limited in impact. In practice, it has largely been reduced to a narrow technocratic instrument—ex ante gender impact assessments—applied to only a small portion of the federal budget. This paper examines the (mis)implementation of gender budgeting in Belgium through the lens of feminist institutionalist theory, which uncovers the hidden life of political and administrative institutions and emphasizes their gender-biased foundations. We argue that the institutionalization of gender budgeting has been shaped—and constrained—by gendered power relations, bureaucratic norms, and entrenched governance practices that dilute its transformative ambitions. Although gender budgeting initially emerged from feminist activism, it has been progressively reframed to align with bureaucratic rationalities and neoliberal governance logics that privilege procedural compliance over substantive structural change. Empirically, the paper draws on an analysis of budgetary documents combined with a thematic analysis of 49 semi-structured interviews conducted with public officials from federal administrations and ministerial cabinets. This mixed qualitative approach enables a detailed examination of how gender budgeting is interpreted, operationalized, and constrained within everyday institutional practices. The analysis highlights how macro-level structures—such as dominant economic paradigms, political institutions, and broader cultural norms—interact with meso-level bureaucratic routines and micro-level decision-making processes to shape the trajectory and outcomes of gender budgeting in Belgium. By situating Belgium’s experience within broader feminist critiques of state institutions and economic governance, the paper demonstrates, first, how structural and political constraints limit the capacity of public institutions to meaningfully integrate gender considerations into budgeting processes. It then identifies potential pathways for advancing gender budgeting as a genuinely transformative policy instrument by explicitly engaging with—and challenging—the institutional contexts in which it is embedded.