Políticas públicas, indicadores y presupuestos sensibles al género. Estado de la cuestión en Latinoamérica y las Islas Canarias

Abstract

From a conventional economic stand point, it is generally considered that individual behavior is guided by reason, self interest and market forces, and individuals as such are deemed to have no class, gender, age, ethnicity, etc., but rather are a historical and a cultural entities. A similar phenomenon can be seen in public administrations, where the view holds that public policy must be neutral, since the impact of public measures is supposedly universal by nature and can therefore only be collective. This is reflected, for example, in the implementation of public budgets, which suffer inherently from what has been called gender blindness, in their consideration of the realities and needs of individuals as if they were apparently neutral. In the Canary Islands, there has hardly been any experience at all in this area. The intention of this paper therefore is to examine the state of play in the area, while at the same time introducing the Canary Island Government’s project for drafting and implementing gender sensitive budget indicators.