7. Policy Pathways for Gender-Just Governance To be truly gender transformative, gender-just governance must legitimize practices and processes that transform power relations in politics and governance spaces by redistributing authority to vulnerable sectors through the combined principles of Upward Agenda Setting and Horizontal Accountability. Together, these pathways shift decision making from elite-centered institutions to community-driven processes while ensuring that accountability flows laterally across government, civil society and citizens. Crucially, this requires institutions to move beyond surface-level representation toward examining their own outcomes and assumptions. By interrogating how policies and practices institutionalize gender inequality—and by surfacing the often-ignored foundations of the care economy—governance can reorient itself toward a genuine gender mainstreaming framework that seeks equity across the entire policy cycle(Sawer et al., 2023). 7.1. Gender-Responsive Analysis across the Governance Cycle At the heart of gender-just governance is the recognition that all governance processes—whether legislative or executive, fiscal or programmatic—are gendered in their impacts. Gender analysis must therefore be present across the full life cycle of governance: policy conception, agenda setting, budget deliberation, implementation, monitoring, evaluation and reporting. This approach involves proactive interrogation of how rules, incentives and institutional practices differently affect women, men, LGBTQIA+ people, Indigenous Peoples and persons with disabilities as a core feature of policy, rather than as an afterthought (Mousmouti, 2020). Utilizing gender analysis across the governance cycle transforms it into an accountability tool, ensuring that equity is a core design principle in all legislation and in every stage of governance, not only in problems labeled as“women’s issues”. 7.2. Redistribution of Care Work as a Governance Priority Unpaid and underpaid care work—childcare, eldercare, domestic labor, community caregiving—forms the invisible infrastructure sustaining economic and political life. Yet it remains largely excluded from governance priorities, treated as a private burden instead of a collective responsibility. The absence of care work recognition creates systemic inequities: Women are overrepresented in informal labor, face barriers to political participation and carry disproportionate burdens during crises(climate disasters, pandemics, conflict). Care work sustains the political and economic system and yet remains invisible in public policy. Gender-just governance requires prioritizing care redistribution across the whole policy cycle. Agenda setting must foreground testimonies of caregivers; budgets must include disaggregated line items for childcare, eldercare and community health; and implementation must provide flexible, decent work opportunities for caregivers through localized hiring. Monitoring and evaluation should track reductions in unpaid care burdens as success indicators, while reporting should include care economy audits to ensure visibility. Active care redistribution transforms governance from passively benefiting from unpaid labor to actively guaranteeing equitable responsibility, enabling women and other caregivers to engage fully in civic and political life. 7.3. Institutionalizing Community-Based Agenda-Setting Mechanisms Establishing community-based agenda-setting mechanisms that go beyond token consultations is a key reform toward gender-just governance. At present,“invited spaces” limit citizen participation to formal invitations controlled by local elites, reproducing exclusion(Medina-Guce et al., 2025). Instead, governance should involve mini-publics that formally recognize CSOs, people’s organizations and sectoral groups, including non-organized citizens, as co­creators of policy priorities. These mechanisms must be mobile and accessible—reaching women, persons with disabilities, senior citizens and caregivers directly in their homes and communities—so that barriers of distance, resources and time do not silence those most vulnerable. 7.4. Open and Participatory Budgeting across Government Participatory budgeting must prioritize CSOs and community initiatives not as peripheral stakeholders but as Claiming Power and Reshaping Governance: A Feminist Framework for the Philippines 21