The review follows the PRISMA 2020 reporting guideline, the international standard for systematic reviews, and searched Scopus and Google Scholar for English-language studies published between 1980 and 2025. The structured search returned 932 records, of which only 11 met the inclusion and appraisal criteria after screening. Methodological quality was assessed with the Joanna Briggs Institute Critical Appraisal Checklist, a validated tool for judging the rigor of individual studies, and the evidence was synthesised thematically in two stages. The included cases span Europe, South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and the post-socialist states, giving the review an unusually broad comparative reach for a field where most analyses remain single-country studies.

The central question the authors pose is deceptively simple: does gender budgeting actually change fiscal allocation, or does it merely append reporting requirements to otherwise unchanged budget processes? This distinction matters because public financial management reforms are typically judged by whether they alter the core machinery of the budget cycle, including formulation, approval, execution, and audit. A reform that adds a gender statement to budget documents but leaves expenditure decisions untouched satisfies the letter of adoption while failing the substance. The review finds that gender budgeting has indeed strengthened budget transparency and gender-disaggregated reporting in the studied contexts, but its redistributive impact remains uneven, and in several cases it has calcified into compliance-oriented reporting with little bearing on how money is actually allocated.

To explain this variation, the authors read their findings through two theoretical lenses drawn from organisational sociology and institutional politics. The first is decoupling, a concept rooted in the work of Meyer and Rowan on institutionalised organisations, which describes how organisations formally adopt policies as myth and ceremony while day-to-day practice continues unchanged. Bromley and Powell later refined decoupling into a spectrum ranging from smoke and mirrors to walking the talk. The second lens is feminist institutionalism, which examines the hidden gendered life of institutions, including informal norms, path dependencies, and power relations that formal rules alone cannot overcome. Together these frameworks allow the review to treat reform not as a binary of compliance versus transformation but as a continuum of coupling between formal adoption and substantive practice.

From this analysis the review identifies four institutional dimensions that condition where a given case falls between symbolic adoption and substantive reform. The first is legal embedding, meaning whether gender budgeting is anchored in statute, constitutional provisions, or binding regulations rather than discretionary circulars. The second is the allocation-outcome linkage, meaning whether gender analysis is actually connected to budget decisions and measurable expenditure outcomes rather than existing only in parallel reports. The third is administrative capacity, including the technical skills, data systems, and staffing that finance ministries need to conduct gender analysis of revenue and expenditure. The fourth is political commitment, the sustained executive and legislative support that keeps the reform alive when budgets tighten or governments change.

The comparative cases illustrate how these dimensions interact. In OECD countries such as Austria, Canada, and South Korea, gender budgeting has been integrated into performance budgeting frameworks and budget documentation, though outcomes vary with the strength of the allocation-outcome linkage. In India, one of the earliest adopters in the Global South, gender budgeting operates through a dedicated statement of gender-related expenditure in the Union budget and has been extended to subnational governments such as Karnataka, yet recent scholarship questions whether fiscal outlays map onto gendered outcomes. In post-socialist states such as Ukraine and Slovenia, and in participatory experiments in Russia, the reform has often depended on donor support or civil society pressure, raising questions about durability once external impetus fades. In sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, capacity constraints and data gaps frequently limit the depth of analysis that budget offices can perform.

The review is candid about the limits of the evidence base itself. Only 11 studies survived rigorous appraisal out of nearly a thousand records, a striking attrition rate that reflects how thin the literature is on measured fiscal outcomes. Most existing scholarship documents the design and process of gender budgeting initiatives rather than their effects on expenditure patterns, service delivery, or gendered wellbeing. The authors also flag the near-absence of intersectional fiscal analysis, meaning studies that examine how budget allocations affect people differently across race, caste, class, disability, and geography in combination with gender. These gaps, they argue, should be the priority for future public financial management scholarship, because without measured outcomes the field cannot adjudicate between the compliance and transformation hypotheses.

The theoretical contribution of the review lies in positioning gender budgeting along a coupling continuum and specifying the conditions that move a case along it. Rather than asking whether gender budgeting works as a yes-or-no question, the framework asks which configurations of legal embedding, allocation-outcome linkage, administrative capacity, and political commitment push a reform from procedural compliance toward substantive change. This matters for practitioners because it suggests that reforms fail not simply from lack of will but from missing institutional complements. A statute without administrative capacity produces unenforced mandates; capacity without political commitment produces technocratic exercises; commitment without legal embedding produces reforms that evaporate with the next election.

For the broader field of public financial management, the findings resonate with a wider literature on the limits of institutional reform in development. Scholars such as Matt Andrews have argued that reforms imported as best practice often become isomorphic mimicry, where governments adopt the form of reform without its function. Gender budgeting, born from the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and championed by organisations including UNIFEM, the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Council of Europe, and the OECD, now faces the classic test of any mainstreamed reform: whether institutionalisation preserves transformative intent or dilutes it into ritual. The review suggests that the answer depends less on the design of gender budgeting tools than on the institutional environment in which they are deployed.

The review ultimately offers a sober but constructive message. Gender budgeting has achieved real gains in transparency and accountability, giving parliaments, auditors, and civil society new instruments to interrogate public money through a gender lens. But transparency is a means, not an end, and the redistributive promise of the reform remains largely unfulfilled in the absence of measured outcomes and intersectional analysis. As governments worldwide confront fiscal consolidation pressures and competing priorities, the four institutional dimensions identified by Athira and Pulikkamath provide a diagnostic checklist for distinguishing genuine reform from elaborate paperwork, and a research agenda for determining when budgets truly budget for equality.

Subject of Research: Gender budgeting as a public financial management reform: a systematic review of institutional and governance outcomes

Article Title: Gender budgeting as a public financial management reform: a systematic review of institutional and governance outcomes

Article References: Athira, R., & Pulikkamath, A. (2026). Gender budgeting as a public financial management reform: a systematic review of institutional and governance outcomes. SN Social Sciences, 6(11), Article 553. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01856-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01856-0

Keywords: Gender, budgeting, public, financial, management, reform, systematic, review, institutional, governance, outcomes, scientific research