Much of the human rights budget work discussed at other points on this web site involves monitoring and analysis of existing or past allocations and expenditures in government budgets.  There are, however, some initiatives underway that are designed to help determine how much governments should direct to specific areas or sectors in order to produce a “rights-compliant” budget.  These initiatives have been described in different ways, one of which is “frontloading” human rights into budgets (rather than retrospectively analyzing budgets).  Producing a “right to health” budget or a “right to food” budget, for example, would involve identifying everything a government should do if it is to realize the specific right, developing related programs and projects, and calculating how much those programs and projects would cost to implement. 

Such initiatives have encountered a number of challenges.  One challenge arises from the fact that many things need to be done to realize a right, and yet those same things need to be done to realize other rights.  If food is to get to market, for example, roads need to be built, and yet, how much of the cost of building and maintaining a given road should be attributed to the right to food and how much to the right to health, the right to education, and so on?   Because of challenges such as this, comprehensive “frontloading” is proving almost impossible to achieve.  However, the process of thinking through government policies and plans as they relate to specific rights, and costing how much those policies and plans would cost to implement, is an invaluable and necessary step in the direction of realizing rights through the government’s budget.    

One organization that is coordinating such a “frontloading” initiative is Equalinrights. In 2011, Equal in Rights published  two papers written by Victor Steenbergen:  “Frontloading Human Rights: A Conceptual Framework for Building Budget and Realising rights”. This paper defines all the key concepts and provide an understanding of their relevance for Frontloading Human Rights. And, "A guide to Costing Human Rights”. This paper provides an overview of all the central concepts and definitions relevant for costing human rights policy. In addition, this paper also attempts to improve the ability of civil society organizations to perform costing exercises by outlining the steps that every human rights costing analysis should take to identify the financial implementation costs of a human policy or intervention. It then offers some recommendations for improving future practice by looking at some examples in the form of case studies.

Information on three initiatives that have sought to develop something approaching a “right to food” budget  is included in Budget work to advance the right to food: "Many a slip...", pp. 81-99.