A Polyphonic Debate on Social Equity Budgeting

This paper is polyphonic (i.e., a debate involving multiple perspectives) and highlights emerging interdisciplinary thoughts onpast, current, and future social equity budgeting (SEB). We present a vision for the field and emphasize the potential impact ofthis paper. We hope to enliven debates regarding context, underpinning philosophies, and methods, thus fostering a greater the-oretical and practical reconsideration of SEB. The impact of this paper is significant, as it leads to a fundamental rethinking ofSEB and related research, profoundly influencing the field. To do so, this paper has brought together 10 international scholars tofoster an interdisciplinary approach regarding views and strategies. The richness of looking at a plurality of perspectives enablesexploring developments that open the potential for a much greater theoretical and practical reconsideration of SEB and relatedresearch. The paper shows that while there is much convergence on the importance of ongoing research on gender, race, andclass, there can also be more research on areas such as SEB's philosophical, theoretical, and empirical underpinnings that needfurther development.1 | IntroductionWhile progress has been made in social equity research, the rolesplayed by budgetary processes in creating or exacerbating ineq-uities remain underexplored. This misstep is not just a gap in ourunderstanding but a pressing issue that needs to be addressed.More research in this area is crucial to understanding and ad-dressing these issues; this paper does just this.Among the tools to address inequities is social equity budget-ing (SEB), highlighted explicitly as necessary in future publicadministration and public sector accounting research (Bartleand Rubin 2024; Grossi et al. 2023; McDonald et al. 2022). SEBapplies fairness principles to public budgets and budgeting pro-cesses (McDonald and McCandless 2024). SEB research has foursignificant dimensions to ensure fairness concerning (a) access,(b) processes, (c) quality, and (d) outcomes, both together andseparately (McCandless et al. 2022).Within SEB, there has been research on race and ethnicity(Martínez Guzmán, Jordan, and Joyce 2023), gender (Polzer,Nolte, and Seiwald 2023; Rubin and Bartle 2023a), and its im-portance has been discussed concerning sexual orientationand gender identity (Naylor 2021), and ability status (Chordiyaet al. 2023). However, Kuenneke and Scutelnicu (2021),Kavanagh and Kowalski (2021), and McCandless et al. (2022);This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work isproperly cited.© 2024 The Author(s). Public Administration published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.