Participatory Governance? Gender and Participation in Peru’s Local Institutions

This 20-page paper discusses Peru’s participatory budget (PB) process, and analyses whether the benefits of these processes are available to all political actors, particularly women. It explores whether women and men participate equally in Peru’s participatory budgeting. Prepared for delivery at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in August 2012, the paper concludes that women are not participating in PB processes in Peru at the same rates as men, thus its democratising potential is compromised.

The paper explains that as countries around the world push for increased transparency and improved local governance, many cities and states are organising participatory budgeting processes to engage new actors in politics. This particular way of developing budgets offers citizens an opportunity to learn about government operations and to deliberate, debate, and influence the allocation of public resources. In Peru, the Participatory Budget Law finalised in 2003 dictates that the capital investment costs of each regional budget must be developed with civil society input. Development plans and project are debated at public meetings, and once approved, the regional president sends a list of projects to the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF), which evaluates their technical viability. According the paper, two indicators of women’s participation are available: 1) the number of women participating in meetings and 2) the number of women's organisations represented in meetings.

The research suggested that when measured in terms of individual participation, women never exceed one third of actual participants in these processes. This means that women are not getting the same chance to gain skills in public policy decision-making, improve their understanding of budgets and democratic processes, or gain leadership skills in local level settings. Economic barriers, combined with the fact that women are expected to take on most domestic duties, make it very hard for women to actually attend meetings. Additionally, the weakness of women’s organisations prevents many from attending these formal processes; only 2 to 3% of participating Agents (Pas) that came to meetings officially represented women’s organisations in the meetings. These barriers combine to prevent women from having an equal voice in the participatory decision-making processes.

The paper outlines several steps to make it easier for women and women’s organisations to participate:

• Timing matters: The actual time of the PB meetings can deter potential participants. Early evening and short meetings are more conducive to women's participation. One local government official noted in an interview that women often have to leave earlier than male participants, presumably to take care of household tasks, and they then miss the final vote on the specific projects to fund.
• Provide childcare: Evening hours are still difficult for families, especially the primary caregiver. For that reason, many advocates have called for onsite childcare at these meetings.
• Adequately inform and train participants before meetings: Because more women than men are illiterate in Peru, information about the process has to be provided by radio, not only newspapers and the internet. Furthermore, participants must receive adequate training with training materials that can be understood by less educated participants (i.e using pictures instead of words).
• Local governments should make registration possible for weak organisations: Flexible registration criteria will allow more diverse kinds of organisations to participate. Local ordinances could require less strict standards than "formalization," such as a list of members or a notebook that records the organisation’s meeting schedule.
• Incorporate quotas: Peru has had electoral quotas in place since 1997. Thus, it would not be surprising to most to mandate that the technical and oversight committees, for example, have 30% female members. This worked in Villa El Salvador, where each participating organisation must send two representatives and at least one must be a woman or youth.
• Streamline gender in the technical process: The Colectivo Interinstitucional, a group of Peruvian NGOs that monitors the PB process, has recommended that the MEF set up a national database of indicators to capture project impact. They recommend that these should include "indicators with a focus on gender and infancy." MEF also provides a one-page sample format for investment project proposals - one line could be added asking about the gender of the project's beneficiaries. Adding language about gender in the instructions themselves would also represent a step forward.