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Voicing demands is a collection of analytical narratives of what has happened to feminist voice, a key pathway to women's empowerment. These narratives depart fromthe existing debate on women's political engagement in formal institutions to examine feminist activism for building and sustaining constituencies through raising, negotiating and legitimising women's voice under different contexts. …

The paper examines the challenge of feminist engagement in the South today. The analysis proceeds from the position that feminist engagement has registered multiple successes with a major break through in the ways in which it has made considerable dents into dominant development discourses. However, I argue, that this very success has created inherent vulnerabilities, with success appearing as a double edged sword whose disintegrative effects are much fiercer and much more anchored, in terms of power regimes. By trying to have a command into the development arena feminism had to reshape itself – even at the basic level of being understood. …

This chapter explores the strategies and choices of feminists in organising voice and mobilising support in a post-authoritarian Bangladesh. It provides an analytical narrative of how three national level feminist organisations strengthen their voice by: a) packaging their demands strategically to appeal to different actors; b) building coalitions and networks with other civil society actors, c) using personal networks to access politicians and state actors, d) creating transnational links to exert pressure on the state. …

Since February 2007, a small group of feminist activists working from inside the head offices of international development organisations (bilateral, multilateral and INGO) have been participants in a project to explore how they can encourage their organisations to be pathways of women’s empowerment. The project’s objective is to encourage greater strategic awareness among the policy activists themselves concerning their room for manoeuvre, and secondly to stimulate discussion among others as to how they could optimally support those working from inside bureaucracies. In this paper, presented to 'Pathways: What are we Learning?' Analysis Conference, Cairo, 20-24 January 2009, I explore the challenges facing these feminist activists in building relations for institutional and policy change for women’s rights. Research participants believe that the principal factor in successfully changing institutional arrangements, albeit subversively, is networking and alliances within and between organisations as well as with the wider women’s movement. …

Zelal Ayman, Ulrika Holmstrom, Monica Williams, Marcos Nascimento, Kuhu Das, Dean Peacock, Carolyn Hannan, and Anita Gurumurthy reflect briefly on the question, “What do men have to do with women’s empowerment?” …

This paper examines the model of ethnographic framing of the self/other relationship, and how this framing contributes to de-essentialising the theorising of women's agency and subjectivity. The paper reflects on my own PhD field research experience conducted during 2007–2008 in the Gaza Strip. In a situation where the researcher and the research subject share the spatial history, as well as the multiple positionalities in their life cycle, the researcher's self inevitably becomes a subject of the ethnography. The analysis in this paper transcends the simplicity of the interactive relations between ‘researchers’ and ‘researched’. …

In this chapter, Laura Turquet draws on her experience working as a gender adviser at the international non-governmental organisation (INGO) ActionAid UK. By describing a series of events, she explores the successes and challenges of lobbying the UK government's Department for International Development (DFID), while struggling to avoid marginalisation within her own organisation. …

This article argues that the slip between policy intension and outcome in policies addressing women and money lies in three neo-liberal assumptions: that individuals have clear title to their earnings, that markets are not socially constructed and that viewing individuals and families as isolated units of subsistence is a valid analytical method. It argues that critiques of development policy that are rooted in individualised conceptualisations and measurement of female autonomy and empowerment do not adequately challenge these assumptions, instead they tend to rely on them themselves. It also suggests that feminist critiques are based on the double standard that women should have clear title to their earnings and assets, while men should be supporting the family. Using research undertaken in South India, this article demonstrates that the social construction of credit, labour, housing and marriage markets determine the extent to which women can benefit from improved livelihoods. …

This paper presented at a conference on ‘Reclaiming Feminism: Gender and Neo-liberalism organised by IDS and Birkbeck College from 9-10 July 2007, examines the reform programme of the Obasanjo government (1999-2007), as laid out in the National Economic Empowerment Development Strategy (NEEDS). Initiated halfway through the first term of Obasanjo’s tenure, this was the first explicitly articulated ‘economic and development agenda’ during his administration, as opposed to the characteristic one-off programmes previously developed on an ad hoc basis. Initial expectations of the government’s goals and intentions were high, given the long-awaited end of military rule and Obasanjo’s status as the first elected civilian head of state for decades since the Second Republic of Shehu Shagari. In this paper, the author reflects on processes that are involved in instrumentalist and opportunistic uses of ‘gender’ and ‘empowerment’ by the state, specifically the Olesugun Obasanjo two-term administration of Nigeria (1999 to 2007) and its NEEDS programme. …

In June 2007 - five years after it was first promised during the 2002 electoral campaign - political reform finally made it onto the Brazilian National Congress agenda. After years of waiting, women were anticipating deep changes in the patriarchal rules and elitist power structures that had characterized the Brazilian state for decades. But the majority of women's demands did not even come close to the negotiation tables. Costa describes this as “. …

In south Asia as elsewhere in the world, religion has come to play an increasing role in shaping and reshaping women’s lives. This process is a particular challenge to people like Firdous Azim, a feminist who “grew up” intellectually and politically via involvement in the women’s movement of the 1980s in Bangladesh. The activism of that period was explicitly secular; its main priorities were the issues of rights, inequalities and violence prevalent in a young state which had achieved independence only in 1971. Firdous Azim is professor in the department of English and the humanities at BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. …

Andrea Cornwall and Nana Akua Anyidoho critically examine empowerment in an introduction to how to go beyond mainstream interpretations of empowerment to discover what is happening in women’s lives that is bringing about positive change. …

Cecilia M. B. Sardenberg reflects upon the experience of NEIM – the Nucleus of Interdisciplinary Women’s Studies of the Federal University of Bahia – in engaging with ‘empowerment’. NEIM has been involved in 27 years of activism in order to bring about changes, both structural as well as in women’s individual lives, towards insuring greater autonomy for women and our increasing participation in decision-making. …

The author presents a case study of the digital storytelling (DST) project at the Pathways for Women’s Empowerment Research Consortium. Pathways undertook DST as a new research tool to articulate how women strategize and experience positive change in their daily lives in Bangladesh. She analyses the relation between DST and feminist research, and evaluates its capacity to represent women’s diverse experiences given the genre’s formalities and narrative preoccupations. This study aims to counteract the tendency within the DST movement to propagate digital stories as complete, “authentic” voices. …

This panel session from the AWID Forum in Cape Town, November 2008 on engaging men in feminist struggles and movements sought to address how to engage men in feminist movements, why men question or give up their masculine images, and what is needed to mobilize men in feminist and social movements. …