Editorial
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The Impacts of Forest Concession on Women’s Lives
The data from Global Forest Watch (GFW) records a massive loss of tree covers in peat lands in Pelalawan Regency and Siak Regency, Riau, which could lead to prolonged forest fires. Currently, the proportion of degraded forests is much larger than the proportion of natural ones, potentially causing an extended impact on women who are highly dependent on forest conditions. The increasingly fast rate of deforestation each year is triggered by the large number of concessions granted to plantation and forest-based companies, thus limiting the people’s access to forests and natural resources.
Rhonda Sharp is a Professor in economics from Australia. Rhonda Sharp and Debbie Budlender are pioneers in research on the importance of gender issues in drawing up a budget. Her paper How to do a Gender-Sensitive Budget Analysis: Contemporary Research and Practice was written together with Debbie Budlender and Kerri Allen, and published by Australian Agency for International Development; Commonwealth Secretariat, Canberra, 1998.
Since 2001, Indonesia has been struggling to implement gender-sensitive budgeting at the national as well as local level. NGOs such as CIBA, PATTIRO, BIGS and WRI have been influencing and working together with the government to carry out the gender-budgeting agenda. The result, however, has not been entirely successful. The gender-sensitive budgeting, for example, has not succeeded in promoting poverty reduction programs for women as a priority. In fact, the government still often skews the process by interpreting ’gender-sensitive budgeting’ as ’budgets for women’, and it leads to the allocation of budget for state-founded middle class women organizations such as PKK and Dharma Wanita. Furthermore, gender-sensitive budgeting advocacy in Indonesia has not been able to produce a policy that guarantees the implementation of gender-sensitive budgets both at the national and local level.
Debbie Budlender and Rhonda Sharp are among the pioneers in research on the importance of gender issues in drawing up a budget. She has developed a number of papers that carry the issues, including a paper entitled How to do a Gender-Sensitive Budget Analysis: Contemporary Research and Practice she wrote together with Rhonda Sharp and Kerri Allen. The paper was published by Australian Agency for International Development; Commonwealth Secretariat, Canberra in 1998. Her own writings are including Budgeting to Fulfil International Gender and Human Rights Commitments, that was published by the United Nations Development Fund for Women in 2004 and Gender Responsive Budgeting: Manual for Trainers, that was published by United Nations Development Programme in 2004.
Objectives
Gender Budgeting Training and Study Visit in order to identify, digest, understand, and learn the Philippines initiatives, experiences, and plans in Gender Budgeting application, implementation, processes, and achievements.