Pathways
Feminist Bureaucrats: Contradiction, Co-optation or Political Strategy?
Events are scheduled to take place in the Washington DC and New York next week to launch the book 'Feminists in Development Organizations: Change from the Margins', edited by Rosalind Eyben and Laura Turquet.
The first in Washington on Monday 20th October is taking place at the Marvin Center, George Washington University from 2.00 to 3.30 pm.
The second is being held at UN Women in New York on Tuesday 21st October from 5.00 pm to 7.30 pm. This event, chaired by Shahra Razavi, Chief of Research and Data at UN Women, will be debating the question 'Feminist Bureaucrats: Contradiction, Co-optation or Political Strategy?'. A panel of speakers including Rosalind Eyben, Laura Turquet and Joanne Sandler will discuss the hidden lives and strategic dilemmas of feminists working in bureaucracies to effect transformational change.
RSVP for the events to Laura Turquet
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Featured Research Projects
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Feminist Activists in Global Policy Organisations
This project has identified and worked with feminist activists working within international development organisations that are shaping discourse and policy action – it explored their strategies and strengthened capacity to bring about change. …
Featured Archive Resources
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Strategies Of Feminist Bureaucrats: United Nations Experiences. IDS Working Paper 397
This paper explores the challenges and opportunities for feminists working as women’s rights and gender equality specialists in the United Nations as analysed from a practitioner perspective. Part 1 by Joanne Sandler analyses the experience of feminists struggling with the institutional sexism of the UN bureaucratic machine and shows how this played out in the difficult but ultimately successful negotiations around the creation of UN Women. In Part 2, Aruna Rao describes how cross-agency UN Gender Theme Groups worked together through a process of reflexive inquiry to strengthen the gender equality programming of three UN Country Teams, respectively in Morocco, Albania and Nepal. …
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Strategies Of Feminist Bureaucrats: Perspectives From International NGOs. IDS Working Paper 396
This paper explores the challenges and opportunities for feminists working as women’s rights and gender equality specialists in international non-governmental development organisations, as analysed from an insider practitioner perspective. Part 1 identifies the strategies used and the challenges encountered when Turquet lobbied DFID on its gender equality policy while struggling to avoid marginalisation within her own organisation, Action Aid. In Part 2, Smyth describes how she left Oxfam for a year to work in the Asian Development Bank and uses this experience to consider the strategic opportunities available to a gender specialist working in an NGO such as Oxfam as compared with working in an international finance institution. …
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Feminists in Development Organizations
Every day in international development organisations, feminists make use of strategy, tactics, wisdom and skill to act for their principles. Most of their strategies are invisible and their tactics subtle. They draw on networks of friendships and relationships that create ripples of effect in enabling their organisations to be pathways of women's empowerment. …
