Who: Juan Pablo Martinez Guzman (Assistant Research Professor, School of Public Policy, UMD)
Title: Public Administration Challenges for Equity-Oriented Reforms: Gender-Responsive Budgeting in Ecuador
Abstract: In the past few years, the world has seen an increase in awareness and a reduction in tolerance towards gender, racial, and other biases. Many governments are responding to these dynamics by changing their rhetoric and adopting new equity-oriented reforms. However, these new reforms might still face multiple obstacles if they are to produce the societal changes that are expected from them. Those obstacles are not limited to political gridlock and opposition but also include hurdles in public administration systems that might be particularly challenging for equity-oriented reforms. In this paper, we evaluate gender-responsive budgeting which constitutes an equity-oriented reform that predates the #MeToo movement but that has continued to expand around the world. Building from public administration literature, we hypothesize that gender-responsive budgeting, and other equity-oriented reforms, might have a difficult road towards producing societal change because they face more stringent public administration obstacles than other reforms. We evaluate the case of the government of Ecuador through an in-depth qualitative analysis that includes a thorough documentation analysis and over 20 interviews. We focus on the case of Ecuador because it presents an interesting dichotomy: it has been often lauded as successful but does not seem to have translated into significant societal changes. Our findings confirm that there are multiple public administration weaknesses that prevent gender-responsive budgeting reforms from translating into societal change. These weaknesses include general components that are relevant for any type of reform, but also issues related to the prevalence of biases and a higher need for resources that appear to be specific for equity-related reforms.
Zoom link here | Meeting ID: 913 5206 1634 | Passcode: 710849