Guide for the evaluation of public policies with a gender perspective

Fundación Plurales, together with the gender, women and diversity committee of ENI Argentina (Argentine National Engagement Strategy), produced a Guide for the evaluation of public policies. The specific objective of this guide is to have certain parameters to identify and evaluate whether a public policy is sensitive or not to gender and intersectionality.

Exploring and highlighting the relationships between women and men in society, and the inequalities in these relationships is essential. Who does what? Who has what? Who decides? How? Who wins? Who loses? When we ask ourselves these questions, we also ask ourselves: Which men? Which women? Gender analysis breaks down the division between the private sphere (which involves personal relationships) and the public sphere (which deals with relationships in society in general).

A policy with a gender and intersectional perspective has to recognize inequality, that the nature of women’s participation is determined by gender relations, which make their participation different and often unequal; understanding that women may have different needs, interests and priorities, which can sometimes conflict with those of men; describing it; conceptualizing it and having concrete actions that seek to reverse them.

This guide allows us to determine what we understand by gender-sensitive public policy, define evaluability criteria and questions. Thus, we specify what the contributions of policies should be. The equitable use, administration and control of natural resources; empowerment of women in the face of disaster risks; equitable participation in decision-making processes; equitable distribution of benefits and public resources for development; equitable access to training and capacity building processes; access to information systems (early warning systems, systems to detect critical places with respect to climate change and risk management, for example); recognition of the needs and interests of men and women from different ethnic groups and of different ages; recognition of the differential impacts and the various vulnerabilities that men and women may suffer according to their age and ethnicity and promotion of affirmative actions or temporary measures in favor of women, in processes that promote sustainable development.

Agustina Calcagno, a member of the Plurales Foundation and the team that produced the Guide, explains that within the framework of the work with the committee, the need arose to have a tool and analysis methodology to carry out the follow-up of the recommendations that CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women) and the ESCR (Economic, Social and Cultural Rights) Committee of the United Nations made to the Argentine State.

“We needed a practical and simple tool that would allow us to understand the advances and setbacks in terms of gender and inequalities that was specific to the analysis of the rights of rural, indigenous and peasant women. For example: analyzing access to water, access to land, the distribution of power in rural and indigenous communities. In other words, a tool that would allow us to evaluate government actions, public policies and initiatives, laws, decrees, among others.”

Regarding the process of putting together the Guide, Agustina says that “we wanted it to be a tool created in a participatory and collective way with the committee members. At the same time, we wanted it to be simple and easy to implement with the women, so that it would be a tool that would adapt to the knowledge and needs of the committee.” She lists the steps they took to achieve this.

  1. They carried out a survey of tools, matrices and methodologies that had already been developed by other organizations that work on gender issues as well as on indigenous and rural community issues. They based their work on documents prepared by the Gender Equality Observatory of Latin America and the Caribbean of the ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean), Land Coalition, UN Women, OXFAM, among others.
  2. Based on the analysis and research of the tool, they built a first matrix in which they established what criteria and questions they wanted to ask themselves when evaluating public policies and actions.
  3. Based on the first document they had prepared, they first shared it with their fellow committee members and then worked on it together with an expert in public policy evaluation, with whom they fine-tuned their initial matrix until they obtained the final version.
  4. Once they had the version, they began testing it with the committee members, working on the participatory analysis of public policies on gender and agriculture in Argentina. As they progressed with the questions, they adjusted the criteria and questions in the matrix. A guide was created to facilitate its application.

“Both the construction of the matrix and its implementation gave rise to a great process of reflection, analysis and learning for the committee members. During the time of building the matrix, it was necessary to work on building common notions around gender, equality, intersectionality, and the definition of rights. The implementation process involved putting into practice everything discussed and learned during the design phase, and also realizing that we had a tool that from now on, through its questions, allowed us to analyze all kinds of actions,” Agustina explains.

So far, they have carried out the analysis of the Law on Family and Peasant Agriculture, the line of credit for women from Banco Nación, and the Agroecology Bill.

The analysis of both the Law on Family Agriculture and the line of credit, “helped them generate concrete evidence for the realization of public advocacy actions. From these, we prepared letters in which we expressed the situation of rural, peasant and indigenous women in terms of economic autonomy, access to credit and family farming and we sent them to different public representatives of ministries, secretariats and national directorates.”

In closing, Agustina highlights that “both the process and its implementation were of great importance for the training of the committee members as well as for strengthening their leadership capacities, public influence, reduction of inequalities and gender and intersectional analysis.”

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