Practical Applications of Feminist Approach in Governance and Policy

Public administration was long treated as a neutral, technical activity, where rules applied equally to everyone and the gender of either the administrator or the citizen was irrelevant. The feminist approach rejects this assumption. It argues that budgets, bureaucracies, and policies are not gender-neutral at all, and that institutions built largely by and for men tend to reproduce existing inequalities unless they are deliberately redesigned. The real test of this approach lies not in theory but in practice, that is, in the concrete tools and policies governments actually use. This post examines how the feminist approach is applied in governance, from the way money is budgeted to the way bureaucracies are staffed and the way violence and economic exclusion are tackled.

From theory to practice: why application matters 🔗

The feminist approach to public administration began as a critique. Scholars like Camilla Stivers and Kathy Ferguson argued that the discipline was rooted in a male-oriented framework and that traditional bureaucratic structure itself could reinforce the unequal treatment of women. Feminist theory in public administration broadly takes two forms: a descriptive strand that studies how gender shapes women’s access to and status in public employment, and a conceptual strand that uses gender to rethink the very philosophy of administration, including bureaucratic structure, legitimacy, and leadership.

But a critique only becomes useful when it changes how governments operate. The application of the feminist approach is about translating these ideas into administrative machinery. The central insight driving this is gender mainstreaming, the practice of applying a gender lens to every stage of the policy process rather than treating “women’s issues” as a separate add-on. The aim is not merely to help individual women but to transform the institutional structures and practices that produce inequality in the first place.

Gender-responsive budgeting 🔗

The single most influential application of the feminist approach in governance is gender-responsive budgeting (GRB), sometimes called gender budgeting. The logic is straightforward: a national budget is not just an accounting document. It is a statement of priorities, and because resources are allocated in patterns that affect women and men differently, a supposedly “neutral” budget can quietly entrench inequality.

GRB is therefore not about creating a separate budget for women. It is a continuous process of integrating a gender perspective into policy formulation, implementation, and review. Over 100 countries have adopted some form of it.

How gender budgeting works in India 🔗

Gender budgeting was formally adopted in 2005-06, with the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy designing the analytical matrices and methodology to convert gender commitments into budgetary ones. Since then, the Ministry of Finance has published an annual Gender Budget Statement alongside the Union Budget. This statement disaggregates spending according to its differential impact on women and men, and it is typically organised into two parts: schemes that benefit women directly, and schemes where women are a significant component.

The scale has grown over time. For years the gender budget hovered at around 5 percent of the total Union budget, a figure critics found disappointing two decades in. More recently, the allocation has expanded considerably, reflecting a sharper policy focus on what the government calls “women-led development.” GRB has also influenced revenue policy, not just spending, through measures such as tax concessions on property owned by women.

GRB matters as an application because it embeds the feminist critique inside the most powerful administrative instrument a government has. Instead of asking departments to care about gender as an afterthought, it makes them account for gender every budget cycle.

Affirmative action and political representation 🔗

A second major application targets who holds power. The feminist approach draws on the idea of representative bureaucracy, the argument that when the people running institutions resemble the population they serve, decision-making improves and the interests of underrepresented groups are more likely to be actively pursued. If administration is shaped by those within it, then increasing women’s presence in elected and administrative bodies is itself a structural reform.

Reservation in local government 🔗

The clearest example is the reservation of seats for women in local bodies. The 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments of 1992-93 reserved at least one-third of seats for women in rural and urban local governing bodies. Article 243D mandates this floor for Panchayati Raj institutions, along with reservation in the offices of chairperson. Many states went further. Bihar raised women’s panchayat reservation to 50 percent in 2006, and over twenty states and union territories have since adopted the higher quota.

The results illustrate both the power and the limits of affirmative action. Women now make up a far higher share of elected representatives in local government than in Parliament, and in many states the figure exceeds 50 percent. At the same time, the “proxy representative” problem, where a male relative effectively exercises the authority of an elected woman, shows that quotas alone do not dismantle entrenched power relations. Representation must be paired with capacity-building and social change.

Reservation at the national level 🔗

For decades, no comparable reservation existed for Parliament or state legislatures, and women remained a small minority in both. The Constitution (106th Amendment) Act, 2023, known as the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, seeks to change this by reserving one-third of seats in the Lok Sabha and state legislative assemblies for women, including within the seats reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. The reservation is set to take effect after a delimitation exercise following the next census, so it has not yet been implemented. The contrast between the two levels of government, decades of reservation locally versus none nationally until recently, is a striking demonstration that representation rises where the structural mechanism exists and stagnates where it does not.

Women’s ministries and policy machinery 🔗

A feminist administrative agenda needs a home within the bureaucracy. This is the role of dedicated women’s ministries, departments, and “policy machinery”. In India, the Ministry of Women and Child Development serves as the nodal institution responsible for the welfare, development, and empowerment of women and children.

The creation of such a ministry is itself an application of the feminist approach. It institutionalises responsibility, gives gender issues a permanent administrative voice, and provides a base from which gender mainstreaming can be coordinated across other departments. The ministry’s flagship umbrella programme, Mission Shakti, illustrates how this works in practice. Mission Shakti aims to realise the goal of “women-led development” by addressing issues affecting women across their life cycle and making them equal partners in nation-building. It is built around convergence, deliberately coordinating across multiple ministries so that the gender lens reaches schemes in skilling, health, and digital access rather than staying confined to one department.

The two arms: safety and empowerment 🔗

Mission Shakti is divided into two sub-schemes, which neatly map onto two distinct applications of the feminist approach. The Sambal sub-scheme focuses on safety and security, while the Samarthya sub-scheme focuses on economic and social empowerment. This structure shows how a single piece of administrative machinery can pursue both the protective and the transformative goals of feminist governance at once.

Addressing gender-based violence 🔗

Tackling violence against women is one of the most visible applications, and it requires building services that the traditional bureaucracy never prioritised. Under the Sambal sub-scheme, several mechanisms work together. One Stop Centres provide integrated support to women affected by violence, offering medical aid, legal assistance, temporary shelter, police help, and psychological counselling under a single roof. The Women Helpline (181) offers a 24×7 toll-free emergency and non-emergency response, linking women to police, hospitals, and One Stop Centres.

A more recent and notably feminist innovation is the Nari Adalat, women’s collectives at the gram panchayat level that promote alternative dispute resolution and gender justice within society and families. This is significant because it does not simply route women through existing state structures. It creates new, women-led forums for resolving disputes, reflecting the feminist argument that justice mechanisms should be reshaped to reflect women’s experiences rather than expecting women to fit into institutions designed without them.

Economic empowerment 🔗

The feminist approach treats economic dependence as a root cause of inequality, so a large share of applied policy targets women’s livelihoods and financial autonomy. The Samarthya sub-scheme brings together several programmes for this purpose. The Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana provides cash incentives to pregnant and lactating mothers, partly compensating for wage loss so that women can rest before and after childbirth. The Palna creche scheme supports working mothers with safe childcare, directly addressing the unpaid care burden that often pushes women out of the workforce, while also creating employment for women as caregivers.

Beyond these, the promotion of women’s self-help groups has become a central strategy for economic empowerment, organising women into collectives that access credit and market linkages. The underlying feminist insight is that empowerment is not charity. It is about restructuring access to resources and opportunities so that women can act as economic agents in their own right.

Equal access to education and health 🔗

Finally, the feminist approach is applied to closing gaps in education and health, recognising that these are the foundations of every other form of equality. The Beti Bachao Beti Padhao scheme, launched in 2014, aimed to address the declining child sex ratio and to promote the survival, protection, and education of the girl child. Reported improvements in the sex ratio at birth in many districts suggest that sustained administrative attention, combined with community engagement, can shift even deeply rooted social patterns.

Health-focused interventions, particularly maternal health benefits and nutrition programmes, similarly reflect the principle that public services must respond to women’s specific needs rather than assume a single, undifferentiated citizen. Taken together, education and health initiatives complete the “life-cycle continuum” approach, the idea that gender-responsive governance should follow a woman from infancy through old age rather than intervening at isolated moments.

The limits and the larger goal 🔗

None of these applications is a complete solution. Gender budgeting can become a token labelling exercise if departments do not genuinely change their planning. Reservation can be undermined by proxy representation. Schemes can suffer from poor implementation and weak last-mile delivery. The feminist approach does not claim these tools are perfect; it claims they are necessary steps toward a deeper goal, namely transforming the institutional structures and practices that generate inequality. The shift from treating women as passive beneficiaries to recognising them as equal partners in “women-led development” captures this ambition. The measure of success is not how many schemes exist, but whether governance itself becomes more just, inclusive, and responsive.

What do you think? If reservation has produced far more women representatives in local government than in Parliament, what does that tell us about whether structural mechanisms or social attitudes are the bigger barrier to women’s political participation? And when a “neutral” budget can quietly reinforce inequality, can any area of public administration truly claim to be gender-neutral?

References

1. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780429501074-3/feminist-theory-public-administration-camilla-stivers
2. https://www.orfonline.org/research/gender-responsive-budgeting-in-india-a-stocktaking
3. https://www.sdg16.plus/policies/indias-constitutional-amendments-provides-mandate-for-womens-political-participation/
4. https://prsindia.org/billtrack/the-constitution-one-hundred-twenty-eighth-amendment-bill-2023
5. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=1841498&reg=3&lang=2
6. https://missionshakti.wcd.gov.in/about