Resources

This article explores how, 20 years after Beijing, women's rights are being discussed within processes to develop a post-2015 sustainable development agenda and the parallel international disaster risk reduction framework. It is based on analysis of documents produced to date from the various processes, and also personal experience of seeking to influence both the post-2015 development and disaster agendas. It highlights how attempts to marry the environmental and development agendas reveal a continued problematic conceptualisation of sexual and reproductive rights. It suggests that in gender terms, while the post-2015 development agenda and the related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are over ambitious to the point of being mere rhetoric, gender rhetoric is yet to enter the international disaster risk reduction discourse. …

Studies and discussions at a workshop of four aid‐funded initiatives in different countries in South East Asia show that the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness offers a useful framework for assessing and strengthening government‐ed efforts towards greater gender equality and the achievement of the MDGs. The Paris principles provide the opportunity for governments, civil society and donors to work together in more genuine partnerships provided the search for efficiency gains is not at the expense of securing long term impact and that donors change their own organisational behaviour where this constrains gender equality efforts.    …

To what extent does gender equality contribute to economic growth? And to what extent does the reverse relationship hold true? There are a growing number of studies exploring these relationships, generally using cross-country regression analysis. They are characterized by varying degrees of methodological rigour to take account of the problems associated with econometric analysis at this highly aggregated level, including the problems of reverse causality. Bearing these problems in mind, a review of this literature suggests that the relationship between gender equality and economic growth is an asymmetrical one. The evidence that gender equality, particularly in education and employment, contributes to economic growth is far more consistent and robust than the relationship that economic growth contributes to gender equality in terms of health, wellbeing and rights. …

Migrants and migrant support groups work in a global environment which is increasingly anti-migration, linking migration with encroachment on the employment opportunities of local workers, with bringing in ‘alien’ values and ways of living and, in recent years, with terrorism and issues of national security. Migrant women live in a world where most women are still struggling to be able to exercise their rights, including the basic right to decent and productive work. Poorer migrant women workers work in a global environment which promotes temporary work and places more and more women in what is called the informal economy, a term which allows corporations and employers to evade their responsibilities to their workers but makes little sense to migrant workers who are subject to an intimidating array of rules and regulations, governing all aspects of what they can and cannot do. The only thing that is informal about the lives of poor migrant workers are the conditions under which they work and how they are paid. …

An enduring legacy of the Beijing Conference, gender mainstreaming has been widely implemented and widely critiqued since the 1990s. But the basis of these critiques has changed over time: this article charts a typology of critique approaches. It shows how the central problem is diagnosed variously as the loss of the political dimensions of gender in the course of mainstreaming; or technical shortcomings; or the gendered nature of organisations as the causes of technical failure. For others, the problem has been the failure to scrutinise the connection between gender mainstreaming and changes in gender relations in women’s real lives. …

This chapter addresses the debates about gender mainstreaming, organisational change, and the politics of influencing, to which the present book aims to contribute. That gender mainstreaming is political has long been accepted, but for this perception to be useful it needs to be transposed onto a much more strategically oriented understanding of feminist bureaucrats' activism. …

Article on the debate around abortion legislation in Brazil. Currently abortions are only legal in Brazil when the pregnancy results from rape or when it puts the mother’s life in risk. Unlike middle and upper class women, who can afford to pay for a clandestine abortion in modern, safe clinics, many young, poor, black women die from illegal abortion. …

This paper presents an overview of the processes, interventions, policies and personal experiences that lead to, or are associated with the somewhat ambiguous concept of women's ‘empowerment’ in Ghana. The task the authors set themselves was to find out from existing literature and key civil society organisations in Ghana today what kinds of actions have been implemented, and the policies and processes that seem to be associated with women's ‘empowerment’. …

This is a report of the first meeting of the Global Programme Advisory Group (GPAG) of the Global Programme of the Research Programme Consortium (RPC), Pathways of Women’s Empowerment, a five year programme led by the Institute of Development Studies and funded by the UK Department for International Development. The GPAG brings together a representative peer group that will help to ensure the Global Research Programme is academically robust and has an effective communications strategy. GPAG membership has been drawn from civil society, academic institutions and international development agencies. It is convened by One World Action. …

A summary of a longer scoping paper based on a consultation process and literature review that took place over six months from February to August 2006 with the aim to identify research issues in relation to the question “How can global policy and international practice better respond to the challenge of securing and sustaining tangible improvements in women’s lives? Another aim was to recruit a group of stakeholders to stay in contact with the research and contribute in one way or another in the programme over the next five years. …

This report covers the second meeting of the Global Programme Advisory Group (GPAG) of the Pathways to Women’s Empowerment Research Programme Consortium (RPC), which is a five year programme funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID). A group from civil society, academia and international development agencies, the GPAG’s purpose is to help ensure academic quality of research and effectiveness of the Global Hub communications strategy. This second GPAG meeting follows that held on 16-17 November 2006 where the advisory group reviewed initial research project proposals. Findings to date from these projects were presented to this second meeting. …

Institutions in the global development industry play a pivotal role in governing people's sexual and familial lives. Amy Lind addresses how forms of intimacy are governed through national and global development institutions, both through the visibilization and invisibilization of lesbians, gay men and other individuals who do not fulfill prescribed gender and sexual norms in their societies, with the overall aim of challenging heteronormativity and gender normativity in development thought and practice. …

Activists, academics and practitioners Kate Bedford, Stevi Jackson, Kamala Kempadoo, Jo Doezema, Jennifer Radloff and Jeanne Prinsloo, Chris Dolan, Amy Lind, and Alan Greig define ‘heteronormativity’ in a series of short interviews. …

Hania Sholkamy talks about the 'Talking Empowerment in Plain Arabic' project which aims to create the opportunity for Arabic speakers to set an agenda of priorities in a language that they can use to communicate and give a wider currency to their ideas. …

Heteronormativity is a term yet to be widely linked to HIV and AIDS work in Sub-Saharan Africa. Andy Seale argues that a greater appreciation of heteronormativity offers an opportunity to identify effective strategies to address harmful social norms that drive HIV infection and build synergies between work currently focused exclusively on women and girls, gender and men who have sex with men. A focus on heteronormativity in HIV work can act as a catalyst to the coalition-building needed for accelerated HIV prevention activism in Africa. …