P30 Social Equity in the Budgeting Process
Panel chairs
Corresponding and review group chair
Bruce D. McDonald III, NC State University, bmcdona@ncsu.edu
Co-Chairs
John R. Bartle, University of Nebraska Omaha, USA
Laurence Ferry, Durham University, UK
Sean A. McCandless, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
Meagan M. Jordan, Old Dominion University, USA
Ileana Steccolini, Universita di Bologna, Italy
Call for Papers
As part of everyday practice, incorporating social equity principles into the public budgeting and governmental finance process is important to address inequitable outcomes, and public budgeting is a tool for institutionalizing social equity in public administration. The incorporation of social equity as a public administration pillar has had a long lineage (Frederickson, 1971). However, over the past 15 years, poly-crises have led to further disparities in health, wealth, and opportunity to the extent that democracy is weakened and needs renewed budget responses (Ahrens & Ferry, 2015).
Among the many tools to address inequities is social equity budgeting, which has been highlighted as important in future public administration and public sector accounting research (McDonald et al., 2022, 2024; Grossi et al., 2023). This approach to budgeting arises from applying social equity principles to public budgets and the budgeting process, which is critical to the debate in that the budget determines who gets what – essentially mirroring political priorities (McDonald & McCandless, 2024). Research into social equity has progressively answered five broad questions, namely how social equity is linked to constitutional provisions of fairness, how definitions of we have expanded, the extent of inequities, why inequities persist, and how accountability for social equity is achieved (Gooden, 2015). Social equity budgeting research has been widely undertaken around four major dimensions to ensure fairness concerning access, processes, quality, and outcomes both together and separately (Johnson & Svara, 2015a, 2015b).
Research is growing regarding how budgetary actions impact racial and gender equity, but much more remains to be explored (Guzman, 2023; Guzman et al., 2023; Rubin & Bartle, 2023). Further, it has been noted by Kuenneke and Scutelnicu (2021), Kavanagh and Kowalski (2021), and McDonald and McCandless (2022, 2024) that the budget process used to support these decisions and the financial instruments used to pay for them may exacerbate the inequities. Excitedly, the growing literature on the varying approaches to incorporating social equity is international with contributions such as Ferry et al.’s (2019) consideration of public value, Galizzi et al.’s (2021) discussion of gender-responsive budgeting, and Bracci et al.’s (2021) highlighting reporting as typically a function of institutionalized values. However, whilst there has been noteworthy public administration research on social equity budgeting and its associated variations and given the ubiquitous and critical role of budgeting and financial management, the philosophical, theoretical, and empirical underpinnings of social equity budgeting need further development.
The papers that will comprise this panel will draw upon social equity, public budgeting and finance, and public accounting frameworks, among areas. Of particular note is that the theoretical underpinnings of research that will appear in this panel will intentionally pull from all dimensions of the discipline in ways that have not been previously done given the limited focus on the interchange of social equity and public finance.
We intend for the panel to be methodologically diverse, encouraging paper submissions that are either quantitative or qualitative in nature. While quantitative papers help to inform our broad understanding about social equity in budgeting, qualitative papers can help provide depth to that understanding. We are particularly interested in encouraging qualitative or mixed methods papers so that the panel can help make significant advancements to our understanding of social equity budgeting and its implications.
This panel advances the understanding of social equity in the budgeting process by providing a forum for research and collective discussion. The results of this discussion have important implications for public management scholars as we begin to understand the interchange between social equity and public budgeting and financial management and how the financial policies established by governments can, and do, create inequities within our communities. The contributions from the papers that comprise this panel will help to provide a globally coherent and theoretical grounding for the study of social equity budgeting but also provide some of the first findings on the origins, impact, and implications of incorporating social equity principles into public finance.