The key element of LeTSGEPs is the development of GEPs with an integrated Gender Budgeting (GB) approach.

GB helps provide evidence of the economic and monetary perspective within the GEP process and achieving actual transformative change by enabling concrete actions and measures. Financial matters are the central pillar of the governance power of an RPO. Therefore, analysing them from a Gender Equality perspective can reveal new and unseen gender issues, related to the power of deciding the allocation of the budget for research.

GB can support GEPs in planning the necessary resources for implementing its planned actions. Moreover, in the auditing phase, GEPs with an integrated GB approach may give special attention both to the reclassification of expenditures from a gender perspective as well as to the analysis of the impacts of the actions on the programmes included in the GEP.

Implementing the budgeting side of GEPs allows for experimenting with innovative theoretical frameworks such as well-being GB. These approaches can raise awareness and provide different perspectives on GEPs’ impact and effectiveness. Well-being GB is based on Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s Capability Approach, which was adopted by the UN in 1990 in drawing up the Human Development Report.

The Capability Approach was first applied to GB methodology in 2002 and experimented at the municipal, district and regional level in Italy for several years (including the Municipality and Province of Modena and of Bologna, Province of Rome, Lazio, Piedmont and Emilia Romagna Region), in Turkey and in Senegal, and by the European Parliament in the two-step feasibility plans for the EU GB.

There are cross-cutting key enabling factors that are essential for the implementation of a GEP with an integrated GB approach aimed at achieving a transformative change in the medium-to-long term:

a) Political will
b) High-level commitment of public administrative institutions
c) Improved technical capacity of civil servants and administrative staff
d) Stakeholders’ involvement
e) Sex-disaggregated data
f) Training
g) Communication and networking

All these elements and references are described in detail in the Handbook, which is available in open access here in English and in the national languages of LeTSGEPs partners (Albanian, French, German, Italian, Serbian, Spanish). There is also a version in English for people with visual impairments, so that nobody is left behind.