Gender-Responsive Budgeting in Climate Change Financing: A Panacea for Confronting Climate Change Vulnerability in South Africa?

This chapter attempts to explore the extent to which climate change vulnerabilities exacerbate gender disparities and how the application of gender-responsive budgeting tools can help mitigate such inequalities. The rationale for focusing more on these variables is based on the notion that gender analysis helps governments and organisations’ understanding of vulnerabilities and climate change implications, responses in various contexts, climate governance inequalities, and climate knowledge and social action. While studies are gradually shifting away from a linear and technocratic understanding of the nexus that exists between gender and climate change, a number of scholars in the African context are having difficulty operationalising this development.

Our goal is to make a contribution to the gender-climate change conceptual debate by examining how the idea of gender-responsive budgeting, applied in the South African context, can generate additional fiscal policy lessons and insights from the ground. While the concept has been used in different ways and contexts, its potential to shrink gender-related threats emanating from climate change in the South African context has not been fully explored. Since gender-responsive budgeting encourages the provision of methods in which government or organisations’ fiscal policies and expenditures are analysed from a gender perspective, we advance the notion that it can be used to mitigate the gender-differentiated effects of climate change. In order to tackle gender disparity challenges in the area of climate change, government-led adaptation initiatives must be gendered and accompanied by sufficient financial disbursements. Using desktop research, the findings point to the fact that gender-responsive budgeting tool has great potential to mitigate the effects of climate-related vulnerabilities by responding to the priorities of men and women.