Norway's PEFA Gender-Responsive Public Financial Management Pilot

Norway is consistently ranked among the world's top performers on general gender-equality indices, yet until 2020 the machinery of its own state budget process had never been directly assessed for gender responsiveness.
The PEFA Secretariat's Supplementary Framework for Assessing Gender-Responsive Public Financial Management (GRPFM) — piloted across seven lower- and middle-income countries in 2019 — was applied to Norway in early 2020 at Norad's request, its first use in a high-income country. The framework scores a country's budget system against nine standardised indicators.
Norway scored reasonably on two of the nine indicators: including gender information in the annual budget proposal, and reporting gender data in annual reports. It scored poorly on the remaining seven: gender is not systematically mainstreamed into budget preparation, there is no dedicated tracking of gender-related expenditure, sex-disaggregated performance information for service-delivery programmes is limited, and there is no formal parliamentary scrutiny of gendered budget impacts.
Norway's Ministry of Finance responded that its budget system is designed to balance many cross-cutting policy objectives rather than track each one individually, and that gender equality is pursued mainly through measures outside the budget document itself. PEFA's own assessors separately noted that the GRPFM framework's centralised, quantitative assumptions may not fit Norway's decentralised, trust-based governance model. The case is included here as an instructive counter-example: a strong national gender-equality record does not guarantee that the public-finance machinery producing it is itself gender-responsive by design.

Read the full analysis: https://www.norad.no/publications/2020/gender-responsiveness-in-public--financial-management-in-norway/