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Patti O’Neill talks with Rosalind Eyben about being a feminist bureaucrat at the OECD. …

Report in Bangla on the research which interrogated the significance and relative impact of donor funding on women organising at global, national and local levels. The researchers did not assume that successful organising by women required external funding, but rather sought to clarify the conditions under which external financial support to women's organisations and groups had a positive impact on women's empowerment as well as the conditions in which successful mobilising is achievable without such support. This was a comparative research with Ghana, where one of the components examined the role of international development agencies in supporting women's organisations. …

The women’s funding movement has contributed to and been a product of women’s rights movements around the world for over 30 years. This article looks at the history of Mama Cash, the first international women’s fund, to chart how the effort to mobilise resources for women’s rights activism has been going – before and since the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. The many advances by feminist movements include how we have resourced our movements and ourselves to do this work. Reviewing Mama Cash’s efforts to continue to support and sustain feminism/ists reveals lessons about the role that resources and processes of resourcing play in organising by women, girls and trans* people, as well as what types of resourcing support women, girls and trans* people to build movements that are responsive, effective and resilient – and ultimately successful at securing the various changes we seek in the world. …

Women’s empowerment’, as used by international development organisations, is a fuzzy concept. Historical textual analysis and interviews with officials in development agencies reveal its adaptability and capacity to carry multiple meanings that variously wax and wane in their discursive influence. Today a privileging of instrumentalist meanings of empowerment associated with efficiency and growth are crowding out more socially transformative meanings associated with rights and collective action. In their efforts to make headway in what has become an unfavourable policy environment, officials in development agencies with a commitment to a broader social change agenda juggle these different meanings, strategically exploiting the concept’s polysemic nature to keep that agenda alive. …

‘Women’s empowerment’, as used by international development organisations, is a fuzzy concept. Historical textual analysis and interviews with officials in development agencies reveal its adaptability and capacity to carry multiple meanings that variously wax and wane in their discursive influence. Today a privileging of instrumentalist meanings of empowerment associated with efficiency and growth are crowding out more socially transformative meanings associated with rights and collective action. In their efforts to make headway in what has become an unfavourable policy environment, officials in development agencies with a commitment to a broader social change agenda juggle these different meanings, strategically exploiting the concept’s polysemic nature to keep that agenda alive. …

This paper proposes a framework for how empowerment can be conceptually understood and operationally explored. It makes recommendations for forthcoming areas of work within the POVNET Work Programme on empowering poor women and men to participate in, contribute to, and benefit from growth. …

Most international development organisations include women’s empowerment and gender equality as a key objective. But what empowerment means and how best to support it remains a matter of debate. …

This paper focuses on feminisms and the women's movements in Brazil. …

Successive post-independence governments have embraced women’s empowerment in one form or another, either because of their own ideological positioning, or because of demands by their ‘donor friends/partners’ and/or organized domestic groups and NGOs. What has emerged is a varied landscape on women’s rights and empowerment work comprising the state bureaucracy, multilateral and bilateral agencies, NGOs, and women’s rights organisations, with their accompanying discourses. In the Ghanaian context, Nana Akua Anyidoho and Takyiwaa Manuh look at what the discourses of empowerment highlight, ignore or occlude, the convergences and divergences among them, and how they speak to or accord with the lived realities of the majority of Ghanaian women. Given that the policy landscape in Ghana is highly influenced by donors, they ask which discourses dominate, and how are they used for improving women’s lives in ways that are meaningful to them. …

Blagojevic reflects on empowerment. She looks at the history of ‘empowerment’ in Serbia, from the debate over its translation to the co-opting of the concept by donors to enforce democratic, neo-liberal policies, with the result that empowerment simply instrumentalized women. She provides a definition of empowerment that links it with rights and introduces the concept of ‘de-development’ to indicate when development does not equal progress, linking this concept to MGDs. In relation to the Balkans, Blagojevic suggests that gender equality instead of empowerment may be a better term to use. …

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. …

This workshop held from 26-28 October 2008 brought together participants in a reflective practice project, a small and self-selected group of feminist policy practitioners working on women’s rights and gender equality issues in the head offices of international development organisations, who aim to be more effective in their work by studying and reflecting on their own experiences. The workshop provided an opportunity for collective reflection and analysis. Some brought with them a long experience of working in global policy spaces while others are relative newcomers. Our specific responsibilities and working environments have varied considerably. …

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.    …

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. …

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. …