Workshop on Green Budgeting for The U.T. Of Puducherry

December 9, 2023

Annual budget processes are crucial from the point of view of planning and coordination and can be seen as an important entry point for mainstreaming climate action and environment-related SDG targets in planning processes. Budgets are a crucial tool for ensuring policy coherence through mainstreaming sustainable development outcomes in economic policy and are an important means of implementation. Institutionalizing green budgeting can lead to active mindsets of departments and lead to better planning and coordination within the existing fiscal space. Green budgets can be a useful tool to mainstream sustainable development horizontally across departments.

Green budgeting can draw from other issue-based budgeting processes such as gender budgeting and child budgeting. The broader approach for green budgeting is based on bottom-up accounting and planning for environmental sustainability to encourage horizontal mainstreaming of sustainable development.

The Energy and Resources Institute in collaboration with the Government of Puducherry organized a workshop with the objective to provide an orientation to state officials on green budgeting.

The workshop had four main segments. The first segment was the inaugural segment which set a high-level context and policy vision for the workshop. The second segment involved a technical presentation from experts from TERI and ADRI. The third segment involved a group exercise involving department officials on the concept and process of green budgeting where each group was given the task to produce 2-3 examples of entries on green budgeting. The final segment included ways forward and vote of thanks.