This paper considers how to conduct policy evaluation from a socio-gender perspective, using a conceptual framework of comparative gender analysis of social policies. It discusses what is social policy, proposes to include industrial and economic policies as well as those conventional policy areas centered on social security, health, and welfare services, housing, education, and so on in social policy studies.
It then introduces a gendered model of policy processes, after noticing some points to be checked in analyzing policies comparatively on institutional structure of policy-making and -implementing bodies such as constitution, representation, internal democracy and grievance procedure. The policy process model is a substantially revised and gendered one of the “model of welfare production”, which was thoroughly utilized by Deborah Mitchell in her pioneering comparative analysis of income transfers based on LIS database.
A subsequent section applies the model to analyze and characterize several income generation projects more or less targeted to women in rural Nepal and Thailand. The projects were surveyed in 1997 in field researches organized by Japanese National Women's Education Center and supported by the Ministry of Education's Grant-In-Aid for International Scientific Research, in which the author participated as a leader of Thai team.
The conclusion gives a list of check points in evaluating social policies from a gender perspective, while classifying policies to gender-blind, practical-gender-issue-responsive, and strategic-gender-issueresponsive. The check points are relative urgency and importance of the policy in question (efficiency in the widest sense), appropriateness (including the extent of gender-blindness) of policy issues recognized, appropriateness of policy goals and objectives in the light of policy issues, appropriateness of policy measures in the light of policy goals, adequacy of policy inputs, extent of leaking of policy inputs out of policy targets (efficiency in a narrower sense), reducing of policy outputs by unpredicted side-outputs (efficiency in a wider sense), reducing of policy outcome by adverse intra-household redistribution, extent of the policy goals achieved in final outcomes (effectiveness), and sustainability of outcomes (effectiveness in mid-to long term).
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