8. Policy Actions and Recommendations for Gender-Just Governance A transformative agenda for gender-just governance requires an explicit redistribution of power across institutions, alongside the recognition of women in governance as solidarity actors. Women legislators, executives and local officials occupy positions within existing structures of power; their role is not only to represent but also to dismantle exclusionary practices and open governance to those historically dispossessed. This roadmap sets out aligned actions across the legislative and executive branches, ensuring that Upward Agenda Setting and Horizontal Accountability are institutionalized as complementary principles. → Encourage cross-alliance caucuses for women legislators and local officials to collaborate on gender justice initiatives. → Create women-in-governance alliances across LGUs and the legislature that connect women leaders to feminist CSOs, researchers and grassroots women’s movements. → Mandate that GAD budgets at the national and local levels include allocations for women leaders’ continuing education on gender, inclusion and care economies. 8.1. Women in Governance as Solidarity Actors Transformative gender-just governance cannot emerge from institutions alone. It requires the deliberate reallocation of voice and power, with women in governance positioned as both allies and catalysts of solidarity. However, as discussed earlier in the paper, current cultural attitudes and dynastic norms restrict women’s ability to initiate alternative modes of governance. The paper offers the following recommendations to seek solidarity from women in governance for an institutional shift toward gender-just governance: → Create more opportunities for women from the basic sectors(e.g., farmers, fisherfolk, Indigenous Peoples, urban poor, and others) to occupy leadership positions within the government bureaucracy, contributing to a transformative process to equalize power relations by diversifying the backgrounds and experiences of women who have access to such positions. → Institutionalize gender-transformative leadership programs for elected women officials, focusing on negotiation, coalition building and feminist policy analysis. → Support peer learning and mentoring networks(e.g., across local and national levels) so women in governance can share strategies for resisting patriarchal pressures → Create safe spaces for political dialogue where women can discuss structural challenges, harassment and ethical dilemmas without fear of retribution. 8.2. Legislative Recommendations Gendered Review of Existing Legislation Non-gender or gender-neutral legislation is assumed to impact women and men equally. A mandatory gendered review of all legislation must be institutionalized— including non-gender or gender-neutral legislation, especially among basic services identified under the LGC such as health, agriculture, social services, environmental protection and public works(Langran, 2011)—to assess the distributive impact across women and LGBTQIA+ people and further intersecting with Indigenous Peoples and persons with disabilities. This would shift legislative oversight from compliance-oriented audits toward equity­focused impact reviews, ensuring that laws do not reproduce patriarchal norms or exacerbate vulnerabilities. Gender-sensitive post-legislative scrutiny offers the possibility of assessing cross-cutting impacts to identify achievements or unwanted impacts from a gender equality perspective and ways to correct or change them (Mousmouti, 2020). Investigate GAD Budget Use and Update GAD Mandate The proper use of the GAD budget must be investigated to evaluate the misappropriated GAD funds already discovered by the COA(Commission on Audit, 2018). Identifying corrupt practices in GAD budget expenditure can expose the institutional blind spots that further normalize GAD’s secondary status. This is also an opportunity to reformulate the assumptions under the GAD framework. Congress should require that 24 Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung e.V.