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Lydia Alpı´zar Dura´n was invited to address the annual session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). She shares her reflections as someone who joined the women’s movement in the midst of the Beijing preparations as a youth activist. She discusses the importance of the development community focusing on the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action and going beyond the Millennium Development Goals. She presents key insights from the work on advancing women’s rights and gender equality over the last 15 years along with a review of some relevant current trends and concludes with a set of action-oriented recommendations. …

The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (BPfA), celebrated by feminist activists as a triumph for women's rights, is 20 years old. The world that it once described has changed profoundly in some respects, and yet in others remains surprisingly similar. This IDS Bulletin reflects on those changes and continuities, tracing the trajectories of the Beijing conference in different policy arenas, national settings and domains of practice. …

This pack contains relevant background and current information on the post-2015 discussions about gender. You may wish to read the documents in preparation for our discussions at the conference. You will find a list of the readings contained in the pack along with short summaries to assist you with navigating through the information.  Hyperlinks to the documents have been provided where possible in the summary text. …

In preparing for the twenty-year review of the Beijing Platform for Action on women’s economic empowerment, both formal policy documents and media coverage in developed countries such as the Netherlands resonate with the rhetoric of choice between work and care. In this article, my central argument is that framing the combination of work and care as a matter of personal choice stands in the way of economically empowering women. For policy makers to take responsibility in these matters, both policy documents and media coverage should promote win-win instead of zero sum solutions in combining work and care, for both men and women. …

This article offers some reflections on how the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA) theme of women and decision making power came to be translated into a set of policy directions, and what their implementation suggests in terms of their potential to challenge power hierarchies. The article draws on work from the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment programme on voice and constituency building. The article argues that the policy focus of the BPfA, after the introduction of MDG 3 in particular, became one of redressing gender disparities in representation in legislatures. Twenty years later, we are at a critical juncture in which we need to ask ourselves whether we need to go beyond numbers in parliament as a proxy for political empowerment, and probe into: what kind of politics, through which pathways, in relation to whom, to achieve what? …

Within the last decades, feminist movements in Brazil have advanced significantly beyond borders, gaining increasing recognition in global spaces, UN ones in particular, for positively influencing Brazil’s official position. Unsurprisingly, Brazil has served four terms in the CSW and, in the eyes of more progressive delegations, is a much needed presence to ensure no lost ground on what has been achieved in previous conferences. However, the actual presence of Brazilian feminist activists in the delegations and the NGO Forums has dwindled considerably. What have been the strategies and mechanisms at play in maintaining a radical vein in our official position? Can it be sustained without the more active involvement of feminist activists – say, throughout Brazil’s new role as president of the 60th CSW session? These are some of the issues I address in this article, sharing the views of activists present at those events. …

Brazilian feminists have made steady progress at both national and regional levels with establishing sexual and reproductive rights, and they have an important stake in the discussions at 2010's UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). Cecilia Sardenberg calls on them to be alert against retrogressive steps. …

The Beijing Women’s Conference in 1995 marked a coming together of feminists from all over the world, with an end agreement on a transformative and relatively clear text – the Beijing Platform for Action. Over a decade later, words and agendas around women’s empowerment have changed as the wider international development agenda has moved away from the notion of people centred development of the 1990s. Eyben and Napier-Moore trace those changes and tease out the waxing and waning of different associational meanings attached to women’s empowerment as used in international development agencies. Their historical analysis suggests a current privileging of meanings of efficiency and growth, broadly crowding out meanings of empowerment associated with solidarity and collective action. …

In Latin America, the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing has been a milestone in the history of the feminist and women’s movements. Twenty years have passed and despite important achievements in gender equality, for issues of economic equality the results are still meagre and there remains a long road ahead in the fields of employment, access to resources, and social protection for women. Unsurprisingly, it is in economic matters that the feminist and women’s movements have renewed their themes and strategies. This article identifies a gender economic agenda that is broad in its transformative scope and in its determination to challenge core aspects of the current economic and social organisation. …

Great strides have been made towards the realization of gender equity over the past fifteen years in Egypt. Since the last ICPD in 1994, a National Council for Women has been established, a number of prejudicial laws have been changed and over four million women have entered the labour force. This chapter not only documents the achievements but also gauges the distance left towards the realization of gender equity and justice. The case of Egypt illustrates the importance and limitations of formal and structural change. …

The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (BPfA) is 20 years old. This introduction looks at the promises of the Beijing conference and reflects on how these have materialised amidst broader changes in the political economy of development. Most significant is the shift in the role of the state, with the entry of new development actors into the development policy and practice arena and growing private sector engagement. One consequence of this is that in the enthusiasm of corporate campaigns promoting women and girls as self-actualising individuals who can lift their communities out of poverty, effective implementation of progressive policies is getting lost. …

The author draws on her own experience as a feminist bureaucrat involved in the 1995 Women’s Conference to make the case for multiple feminist narratives of Beijing that woven together can create a myth that points to the importance of collective organising that cuts across state-civil society boundaries. …

This paper presented to 'Pathways: What are we Learning?' Conference held in Cairo from 20-24 January 2009, explores how three national level women’s organisations mobilize various constituencies including their own members and negotiate with political parties, the state bureaucracy and allies within civil society, for attaining specific gender justice related goals. The focus is on two different processes: a) how these organisations ‘create meaning’ around an issue (i. e. , justify and represent) for constituents, members and allies; b) how they create support for their cause among potential supporters and allies. …

In 1995, sexual rights were articulated in the Beijing Platform for Action. Now, however, principles agreed many years ago are being deemed too radical to be cited in new texts. In the face of these roll-backs, and at a time when activists are being silenced by funding restrictions, what possibility is there of progress? Drawing on examples from the Commission on Human Rights, the 49th Commission on the Status of Women (Beijing Plus Ten) and the Commission on Population and Development, this article examines the obstacles to progress, the challenges to and of maintaining the status quo and the opportunities we must seize if we are to realize the potential of sexual rights. We must not lose the hard-won gains from the International Conference on Population and Development, the Fourth World Conference on Women and other for a. …

Is it possible to secure the desired policy action ‘infusing’ gender into existing ways of doing and organising things – and by so doing to incrementally secure real gains for women? Or will transformative policies for women's empowerment only be achieved through discursive and organisational transformation? But can the two be separated so neatly? Are there possibly unpredictable effects when feminist policy actors are on the one hand committed to changing discourse and power relations while on the other hand acting pragmatically to secure small instrumental changes? Taking international development organisations as the field of analysis, this article examines assumptions about policy change as a pathway of women's empowerment and goes on to explore a shift from a focus on institutional capability to one on actors and agency, and on strategies, tactics and manoeuvres. …