Several interrelated research methods will be utilized to develop, apply and evaluate the project:

• A survey of international best practice in gender and youth sensitive public expenditure management strategies through literature reviews and document searches. The aim of this exercise will be to identify the most appropriate model of youth/gender sensitive budgets, utilizing criteria developed by the Commonwealth Secretariat (Budlender/Sharp);
  
  
• An audit of the capacity of the pilot countries to mainstream youth/gender concerns into their budgets, policies and planning processes;
  
  
• The application of two models of people -centred budgets focusing on youth and gender. The application will involve several tasks including the development and application of youth/gender disaggregated data, the training of government officials in the tools of gender and youth disaggregated policy and budget analysis, the establishment of an administrative framework of accountability, the modelling of processes of budget prioritization , the development of budgetary youth/gender performance indicators and other monitoring devices. This applied research will gather field data and utilize this data in a reflexive way to continually feed the results of the different activities/tasks back into the further development of the two models.
  
  
• Interviews with stakeholders, process analysis, and data analysis will be utilized to evaluate the youth and gender sensitive budget Pacific country pilots.
  
  

The project is theoretically informed by scholarship in feminist economics, public policy and governance.

The project's terms of reference include an agreement for the project leader and her team to disseminate the findings of the pilots, including forums such as international conferences and scholarly journal articles.