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Charmaine Pereira looks at changing debates on gender and sexuality. She highlights feminist theorizing that in order to understand the complexity of heteronormative social relations, it is important to examine the relations among gender and sexuality in general, and heterosexuality in particular. …

Understanding what works to promote, support and sustain ‘women’s empowerment’ calls for a greater appreciation of what the term means to different policy actors in different contexts. In Ghana, there is a strong commitment to women’s empowerment from government administrative officials, particularly female staff. However, there appears to be limited knowledge about the dimensions, pathways and strategies for women’s empowerment within government and the bureaucracy. Officials often base their interventions on a desire to address women’s individual situations rather than on analysis of the deeper-rooted structural constraints that women face, and remedies that might address them. …

This article examines how girls’ education since 1995 has emerged as a prominent symbol within the ‘rights’ discourse coming out of the Beijing Platform for Action. By highlighting the neo-liberal and neo-colonial processes during this time, particular shifts are traced which show how girls’ education has been a symbolic part of the geo-political canvas in Pakistan and Afghanistan alongside the ‘war on terror’ and universalisation of education. The article refers to alternative voices which have attempted to disrupt the global narrative of the post-Beijing ‘rights’ agenda and points to the problems of this in the context of occupations, militarisation, and markets being used simultaneously as strategies for global governance and order. …

This edition of the People and Power programme from Al Jazeera TV looks at the state of women's equality, rights and the feminist agenda in the light of International Women's Day. …

Members of the Pathways South Asia Team talk about what empowerment means to them and describe their Pathways research projects in more detail in relation to this. …

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. …

The Social Research Center (SRC) hosted a workshop entitled “Introducing Empowering Conditional Cash Transfers to Egypt,” aimed at garnering the insights and experiences of colleagues, both local and international, pertaining to the design and future implementation of a conditional cash transfer (CCT) pilot in Egypt. Experts were asked to facilitate discussion about current CCT programmes and how they can best be adapted to the Egyptian social, political, and economic landscape. …

The South Asia Hub of the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment research consortium held an inception workshop based on scoping papers on the themes of ‘voice’, ‘work’, and ‘body’. The purpose of the research is to seek to identify discourses and interventions that have led to the greater empowerment of women, based on these three themes. The papers in this book are culled from that inception workshop and give an idea of the mosaic that forms the lives of women in the heartland of South Asia. Three main arenas of activism and interventions emerge from the papers. …

The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (BPfA) is 20 years old. This introduction looks at the promises of the Beijing conference and reflects on how these have materialised amidst broader changes in the political economy of development. Most significant is the shift in the role of the state, with the entry of new development actors into the development policy and practice arena and growing private sector engagement. One consequence of this is that in the enthusiasm of corporate campaigns promoting women and girls as self-actualising individuals who can lift their communities out of poverty, effective implementation of progressive policies is getting lost. …

This book attempts to synthesize the experiences of organizing hard-to-teach working women in the informal economy and draw out their lessons. The chapters deal with examples of organisations that are working with this category of women workers in order to draw out both common patterns and unique responses to particular circumstances, and thus deepen our understanding of some of the collective pathways to change that might be relevant for different groups of working women in different sectors of the economy. In this introduction, the authors draw out some key themes from the chapters in order to address some key questions. What gave these precarious workers the impetus and courage to organize? What were the main obstacles faced by their organisations in efforts to address what Nancy Fraser calls the injustices of redistribution, recognition and representation? These relate to the unfairness of the economic system and the exploitative relations of work that it generates; the denial of respect and dignity to certain groups of workers on the basis of their identity and the work they do; and the absence of an organized voice that can articulate their needs and rights as women, as workers and as citizens. …

This introduction presents the various lived scenarios addressed by authors in this collection, in which women across diverse geopolitical sites confront questions of sexuality, gender and power. Each scenario involves different narratives of women’s sexuality being constructed by and about women. The chapter presents the central questions that each of the authors addresses in her analysis of these narratives of sexuality. …

This book is about taking an upside down approach to women’s political empowerment. Its starting point is that the academic and policy focus on getting the electoral system right in order to narrow the gender gap in representation needs to be complemented with a bottom up approach that examines women’s pathways of political engagement. …

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. …

This introduction outlines the central themes that are covered in the chapters and sheds light on the linkages between these issues as well as drawing out the conclusions that tie the arguments of the individual chapters. Three central themes connect the chapters in this volume. The first is concerned with problematising binaries and uniform categories. That is, many of the chapters address the question: What is concealed when both reform efforts (and the public debates about them) fail to escape conceptualisations and categorisations that are based on binaries and uniform understandings of terms such as ‘religious’  ‘secular’ or ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity?’ …

This introductory article draws out some of the dimensions and dilemmas around women's empowerment that are highlighted in the articles in this IDS Bulletin: the choices, the negotiations, the narratives and above all, the context of women's lived experience. In doing so, we show that empowerment is a complex process that requires more than the quick and easy solutions often offered by development agencies. Much of the significant change happening in women's lives takes place outside of the range of these conventional interventions. In conclusion, we suggest that for development agencies to really support women's empowerment requires greater engagement with changing structures rather than accommodating women within the inequitable existing order, and a much deeper understanding of what makes change happen in their lives. …