As the group grew WBG started to identify potential allies among civil servants, journalists, and politicians and their advisors from different parties. These allies helped WBG communicate its findings to a wider audience and influence policy.
An early task for a group wanting to promote gender responsive budgeting is to map out different ‘stakeholders’, institutions, organisations, networks and individuals which might have an interest in your work. This could include those you want to involve in your group and those you want to influence.
It helps to think of where different stakeholders fit on a chart like this:
[Insert venn diagram image here]
It is also worth thinking about opposition to your work and where this might come from. The potential allies and opponents that you think about will vary depending on context but might include:
Grassroots women’s organisations
Larger national women’s organisations
Other equality and social justice voluntary organisations
Trade unions, particularly those representing large numbers of women
Research institutes and think tanks
Political parties and individual politicians
Parliamentary committees working on relevant areas
Individual academics
Academic networks with an interest in gender and/or the economy
International Non-Government Organisations
Civil servants
There may be potential allies and opponents in each group.
When building alliances think about what you can offer potential allies.
Politicians, civil servants and other policy-makers may value expert evidence that they can use in policy making and/or to persuade their colleagues to act.
Academics may value an opportunity to use their research to influence policy and links with front-line organisations that could help with future research.
Women’s organisations may value evidence and analysis that they can use in their campaigning and advocacy work and an opportunity to feed their front-line experience into research.
In the UK, academics have historically been relatively well paid, can research what they want and are used to working outside fixed working hours, which creates a pool of people who are willing to help. They have been able to contribute expertise for free. In some countries most people do not earn enough to do that; they expect to be paid on a consultancy basis by the UN or International NGOs meaning mobilising their expertise may be harder. On the other hand, organisations may be able to mobilise international funding that isn’t available to us.
