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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. …

This report covers the second meeting of the Global Programme Advisory Group (GPAG) of the Pathways to Women’s Empowerment Research Programme Consortium (RPC), which is a five year programme funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID). A group from civil society, academia and international development agencies, the GPAG’s purpose is to help ensure academic quality of research and effectiveness of the Global Hub communications strategy. This second GPAG meeting follows that held on 16-17 November 2006 where the advisory group reviewed initial research project proposals. Findings to date from these projects were presented to this second meeting. …

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. …

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. …

Neoliberalism – that ‘grab-bag of ideas based on the fundamentalist notion that markets are self-correcting, allocate resources efficiently and serve the public interest well’, as Stiglitz (2008) puts it – has been a focal point for contestation in development. Feminists have highlighted its deleterious effects on women’s lives and on gender relations. They have drawn attention to the extent to which the institutions promoting neoliberal economic and social policies have undermined a more progressive agenda, as they have come to appropriate words such as ‘empowerment’ and ‘agency’ and eviscerate them of any association with a project of progressive social change. This collection of articles brings together reflections from a diversity of locations on prospects for reclaiming these ideas and using them to reframe and revitalise feminist concepts like ‘agency’ and ‘empowerment’, we argue, we need to return to and reaffirm their ‘liberating’ dimensions, reaffirming their association with forms of collective action that involve resisting and transgressing repressive social norms. …

In December 1995, when Hamas announced the establishment of the Islamic National Salvation Party, a political organization separate from its military wing, it opened the way for involvement of the Islamic movement in the political processes brought about in the West Bank and Gaza with the signing of the Oslo Accords and the arrival of the Palestinian National Authority. In speaking of the rights of different groups, including women, in its founding statement, and in setting up in Gaza a Women's Action Department, the new party opened its doors to the ‘new Islamic woman’ and to a significant evolution in Islamist gender ideology in Gaza, if not in the West Bank – where, due to Hamas' policy there of targeting only males, there exists no parallel to the Salvation Party or organisational support for women like that represented by the Women's Action Department in Gaza. Hamas' gender ideology, like that of the secularist parties, remains contradictory, and doors to women's equality only partly open; nevertheless, Islamist women have managed to build impressive, well‐organised women's constituencies among highly educated and professional women coming from poor and refugee backgrounds; and the Salvation Party shows an increasing tendency to foster gender equality and more egalitarian social ideals, while holding fast to the agenda of national liberation. These advances have been achieved both through alternative interpretations of Islamic legal and religious texts, and through positive engagement with the discourses of other groups, whether secular feminists or nationalists. …

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 article is based on the experiences and reflections of a group of researchers in Bangladesh (of which we were members) studying women's empowerment. We investigate the kinds of epistemological and ethical dilemmas that arose from how they selectively presented their identities to gain access and tried to create ‘positional spaces’ in conducting fieldwork. We also explore how these researchers engaged in co-production of knowledge with research participants and tried to balance our multiple accountabilities in this process. By exploring these issues, we analyse assumptions about ‘feminist’ research practices and our struggles to live up to these. …

Wendy Harcourt, records the conversation between Peggy Antrobus and Gita Sen, founders of Development Alternatives for Women in a New Era (DAWN), on how they understand gender and empowerment. …

Even the most devoted believers in the neoliberal paradigm will have had their convictions shaken recently, as the world’s markets have played havoc with their faith. For those who have long questioned the purported benefits of neoliberal economic policies and highlighted their injurious consequences, it comes as little surprise that this 'grab-bag of ideas' is in freefall. The focus of this IDS Bulletin is particularly apposite at a time when much-cherished axioms are being re-inspected and where new possibilities and directions are so badly needed. Contributors add to a growing, vibrant debate about Gender and Development. …

This conference, held at the Institute of Development Studies from 9-10 July 2007, was co-hosted by the Pathways of Women's Empowerment Research Programme and Birkbeck College, London. The Pathways programme linked with openDemocracy to provide communications outputs from this conference. Building on recent work which highlights the need to critically reassess approaches to gender within mainstream development theory and practice, this workshop focused specifically on whether, and if so how, dominant neo-liberal discourses of development have systematically appropriated and transformed feminist concepts - and on the prospects for reclaiming and reframing feminist engagement with development. …

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. …

Critical evaluation of the current status of ‘gender’ in development points to the conclusion that its political and analytical bite has been blunted by its domestication by development agencies. Transplanted from domains of feminist discourse and practice onto other, altogether different and in many ways inherently hostile institutional terrains, the term has retained little of the radical promise that was once vested in its promotion. ‘Gender equality’ is used as an umbrella term for as diverse a set of activities as gathering sex-disaggregated statistics, doing ‘gender sensitization’, championing women’s rights and making women more competitive in the labour market. That which once lay at the heart of the ‘gender agenda’ – transforming unequal and unjust power relations – seems to have fallen by the wayside. …