Gender-Oriented Budgeting as a Democratic Practice during a Self-Government Reform: Ukrainian Experience

Given the European vector of Ukraine's development, the issues of decentralization and related problems of reorganization of the management system throughout the power vertical are relevant. The transformation of a self-government system in the conditions of decentralization induces the development of innovative theoretical paradigms and the implementation of the best practices, including the gender-oriented ones. Although only a few years have passed since the beginning of the administrative reform, Ukraine has both positive and negative practical experience that needs to be analyzed and generalized. It is important that, along with a of self-government reform, sectoral reforms are also taking place. At the community level, the parallel implementation of reforms provides an opportunity to review both human resources (including based on gender attribute) and the use of financial resources. A significant obstacle to reforms is the inconsistency of the regulatory framework and the pace of changes, as well as the division of powers between the different levels of the vertical (a region − a district − a community) and the horizontal (cooperation between communities to achieve strategic goals). The analysis of the community's financial capacity has shown that the departure from the initial long-term plan is not always justified and increases the risk of not being able to provide at least a minimum list of services for the population without the help of the state. A key element of a gender-oriented budgeting, which is being actively introduced by the state today, is to measure the degree of influence that occurs as a result of the application of budget funds, to fulfill the tasks, to meet the needs of different groups of the population. For a long time, new approaches to budgeting have been implemented inactivity and, often, only formally. One of the approaches, a special-purpose programme, the use of which should be mandatory for budgets of all levels since 2019, aims at optimally utilizing the mostly limited resources of the community budget to achieve maximum efficiency and highest quality of services for specific groups of women and men. An important issue is the transparency of the formation, justification of the efficiency of spending budget funds, monitoring and providing reports with specific results. The combination of the gender-oriented budgeting and the programme-targeted method, provided that a community-based self-government reform takes place, has all the means to promote the effective use of financial resources and to take into account the interests of women and men of all ages.