This guidance sheet on Intergovernmental fiscal relations and gender-responsive budgeting is a UNIFEM publication written by Debbie Budlender in December 2006. This pamphlet is intended to assist GRB advocates in thinking about what budget experts term intergovernmental fiscal relations and what this means for GRB activities. Understanding this issue can strengthen advocacy around ensuring that adequate resources are available for allocation towards gender-responsive priorities for which local government is responsible. Intergovernmental fiscal relations concerns how money is transferred between different levels of government and thus how much money is available to sub-national governments for delivery of services. These transfers are necessary because many countries have decentralized functions by saying, for example, that delivery of services such as basic health, basic education, electricity and water should be delivered by the district or province/state level of government rather than national level. Generally governments have not decentralized the ability to raise revenue to the same extent as they have decentralized delivery functions. As a result, the relative abilities of different levels of government to raise revenue do not match the relative size and cost of the functions allocated to them.