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Wendy Harcourt highlights the most interesting and contentious issues to emerge during a conversation held among 25 people from key women’s networks, UN agencies, research institutions and think tanks at the 54th Commission of the Status of Women (CSW) in New York March 2010. Using charterhouse rules, the dialogue was an attempt to hold a new kind of conversation in the CSW space. The participants candidly held up to scrutiny the key concepts of gender and empowerment in the context of the new development institutions. …

In this article, Harcourt argues that conventional development approaches to gender and empowerment are constraining and unimaginative, and do not foster lively, authentic debate. Instead, in development, people tend to limit their definitions of gender and empowerment to acceptable terms to avoid conflict or funding cuts. She looks at pop culture that celebrates and sells images of empowered women (Lady Gaga in particular) and compares this to the depoliticized notion of ‘empowerment’ in development, and suggests that development practitioners need to reach out further than the constraining environment of development and in the process change development itself. Harcourt points to new media and communications technologies that can be harnessed to create spaces and engage a variety of people with development debates and to make development more adventurous and creative, arguing that doing so would do much to help us get out of discourses of professionalism that create institutions afraid to open up because they fear argument and difference. …

This article provides an introduction to the Development special issue on Sexuality and Development. The articles in the issue are based on discussions held at a workshop on Sexuality and the Development Industry at the Institute of Development Studies in April 2008. The aim of the journal is to examine international development's connections with sexuality and look for more creative and constructive means of engagement. It sets out why sexuality is an important issue to address and explores why the development industry has failed to constructively take on the issue in the past as well as to propose how to do it better. …

Human rights, including women’s rights are dropping off the donor agenda. Recent years have seen a marked shift in official development discourse, with less emphasis on a rights-based approach and more on an efficiency approach to gender equality, exemplified by Nike Foundation’s ‘Girl Effect’ theme of stopping poverty by investing in girls – an initiative that ignores the social, historical and structural factors which contribute to inequality while simultaneously ignoring the voices of the people it seeks to help. Removing the realization of rights, including women’s rights, from the donor agenda is part of a wider tendency to define development in terms of measurable outcomes or instruments – immunizations, bednets, numbers of children going to school, quotas for women in parliament. As a result of the shift to the political right in many OECD governments, these demands for reporting against quantifiable achievements as a measure of impact is having an effect on all the organisations that they are funding. …