A Social-reproduction and Well-being Approach to Gender Budgets: Experiments at Local Government Level in Italy

This Chapter illustrates a new approach to gender budgets based on Sen and Nussbaum’s capability approach as experimented in Italy at local government level. Following the method first discussed in Addabbo, Lanzi and Picchio (2004), this chapter places public budgets in an extended reproductive well-being approach to the economic system (Picchio, 2003; Bakker, 2007). We consider this approach the most adequate to deal with gender inequalities because it includes unpaid work as a major component of the total work of women and men; it places the process of social reproduction of the population among the structural processes of the economic system as a condition of its sustainability, and it assesses gender inequalities in a well-being multiple space as defined by a list of the individual capabilities and effective functionings of women and men. We think that Well-Being Gender Budgets (WBGB) can also be applied to other countries and at different levels of government. They could in fact become a key to a greater coordination of policies and a basis for social participation in public debate on the very notion and actual experience of women’s and men’s well-being in a given territory.In the first section, we present the macro framework and the conversion process of means and services into individual and collective well-being; the following sections describe the tools used to apply WBGB, showing cases of their application by some local governments in Italy. The second section introduces the list of capabilities and the criterion followed to define it, while in the third section we discuss how to build a context analysis by using WBGB presenting a system of indicators. In Section 4 we show how WBGB can be applied to analyse the distribution of public expenditure. Lastly, in Section 5 we draw our conclusions.Addabbo, T. Lanzi, D. and Picchio, A. (2004) “On Sustainable Human Development: Gender Auditing in a Capability Approach”, Materiali di Discussione del Dipartimento di Economia Politica, No. 467, Settembre 2004.Bakker, I., 2007, “Social Reproduction and the Constitution of a Gendered Political Economy”, in New Political Economy, XII 4: 541–556.Picchio, A., ed. (2003), Unpaid Work and the Economy, London, Routledge, 2nd ed. 2006.