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Following the round of UN Conferences on Women from the 1970s to the 1990s, many states in the developing world established national machineries to first 'integrate women into development', and later to spearhead the task of gender mainstreaming adopted in the Beijing Platform for Action.  …

In this conclusion, we discuss both the advantages and disadvantages of the marginal position that feminists working in international development bureaucracies find themselves in. Using their creativity and agency as 'tempered radicals' they seek to turn the disadvantages of marginality - such as a sense of powerlessness and reduced visibility - into advantages, as they try to take forward the women's rights agenda. …

In this conclusion, we discuss both the advantages and disadvantages of the marginal position that feminists working in international development bureaucracies find themselves in. Using their creativity and agency as 'tempered radicals' they seek to turn the disadvantages of marginality - such as a sense of powerlessness and reduced visibility - into advantages, as they try to take forward the women's rights agenda. …

Within the constraints of bureaucratic straitjackets and institutional turf battles, this chapter examines the workings of cross-agency gender theme groups (GTGs) to strengthen the gender equality programming of three UN country teams (UNCTs) through an action-learning approach facilitated by Gender at Work. …

The first of three chapters within this book which analyse the research findings from the Pathways Feminist Activists in Global Policy Organisations project, using the device of five fictionalised characters to preserve the anonymity of participants. …

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. …

Meeting at a weekend-long retreat, the five women discuss what 'success' is for a feminist bureaucrat, and the challenges of gender mainstreaming. They agree on the importance of analysing and understanding the organisations they work for, and of finding opportunities to influence by 'working with the grain'. …

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 the third in the series of chapters about the group of feminist bureaucrats learning and sharing their political craft. The scene moves to an international meeting that exposes how power shapes legitimate knowledge and how strategies may fail. …

Drawing on direct experience, this book is about feminists working politically to promote their organisations' gender equality goals. The aim is that by sharing this experience, the book's contributors can help others in similar positions to debate and reflect on the challenges of their jobs, and that readers from within the wider international women's movement will gain insights to help them engage more strategically with their allies inside development organisations. …

Drawing on direct experience, this book is about feminists working politically to promote their organisations' gender equality goals. The aim is that by sharing this experience, the book's contributors can help others in similar positions to debate and reflect on the challenges of their jobs, and that readers from within the wider international women's movement will gain insights to help them engage more strategically with their allies inside development organisations. …

Reflecting her career as a feminist activist and bureaucrat, Patti O'Neill discusses with Rosalind Eyben her strategies at the OECD as the official responsible for supporting the work of the Gender Network of the Development Assistance Committee. …

This chapter illustrates - with two examples - the procedures applied for the formulation of politically negotiated texts that guided international policies in the field of women, gender, and development. The challenges in the preparation and negotiation process that ultimately led to a formal position of the European Union are described from the perspective of a gender adviser to a member state's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. …

This chapter portrays the experiences of feminists confronting institutionalised discrimination within the UN bureaucratic machine. It documents how over four years of difficult negotiations, feminist advocates inside and outside the bureaucracy contributed to the successful merger of four UN organisations into a new UN entity: UN Women. …

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. …