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A short article based on research undertaken with Rebecca Napier-Moore into how women's empowerment is conceptualized by international development organisations. …

Women's rights organisations are highly significant for securing tangible results for women's empowerment. The nature of the state, state-society relations, the structure of gender relations and the particular history of the feminist movement and activism in any country all shape the character of women's mobilisation for their rights. Although Bangladesh and Ghana differ in all these respects, they also share some common characteristics which may not be present in all other aid recipient countries. Both have gone through a democratic transition after a long period of military/one party rule. …

The author draws on her own experience as a feminist bureaucrat involved in the 1995 Women’s Conference to make the case for multiple feminist narratives of Beijing that woven together can create a myth that points to the importance of collective organising that cuts across state-civil society boundaries. …

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 report concerns the historical trajectory of women’s rights organisations (WROs) in Bangladesh and Ghana within the changing national contexts as well as the shifting international aid landscape in the last two decades and identifies the influence of external financing on what the organisations do and how they go about it. The report offers a model for how to study the question in other contexts and it can be used by WROs in other countries to reflect upon the relevance of the findings in their own context and to respond accordingly. The influence of international aid, particularly in the 1990s and the early part of the last decade was in many ways beneficial for organisational effectiveness. Recently the funding landscape has become more hostile with funders’ interest in rights and social transformation declining. …

Is it possible to secure the desired policy action 'infusing' gender into existing ways of doing and organising things - and by so doing to incrementally secure real gains for women? Or will transformative policies for women's empowerment only be achieved through discursive and organisational transformation? …

Is it possible to secure the desired policy action ‘infusing’ gender into existing ways of doing and organising things – and by so doing to incrementally secure real gains for women? Or will transformative policies for women's empowerment only be achieved through discursive and organisational transformation? But can the two be separated so neatly? Are there possibly unpredictable effects when feminist policy actors are on the one hand committed to changing discourse and power relations while on the other hand acting pragmatically to secure small instrumental changes? Taking international development organisations as the field of analysis, this article examines assumptions about policy change as a pathway of women's empowerment and goes on to explore a shift from a focus on institutional capability to one on actors and agency, and on strategies, tactics and manoeuvres. …

Most international development organisations include women’s empowerment and gender equality as a key objective. But what empowerment means and how best to support it remains a matter of debate. This brief by Rosalind Eyben informs that debate with empirical evidence from the five-year international research programme, Pathways. Pathways researchers from West Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and the UK used quantitative surveys, ethnographic fieldwork, participatory action research, life-histories, storytelling and film-making to discover how empowerment happens. …

A meeting was held in October 2006 at Queen Elisabeth House hosted by  Barbara Harris White and organised by Tina Wallace (International Gender  Studies at QEH) under the auspices of the Womenʹs Study Group of the DSA.   The intention was to stand back and look at where gender is in the  development agenda with a group of people committed to and concerned about  what has happened to gender in the past few years.   …

Ines Smyth works for Oxfam and spent a year as the leading gender specialist at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) - an institution with a very different ethos and priorities. She explores how the characters of the two organisations shape their commitments and approaches to promoting gender equality in their programmes. …

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. …

Rosalind Eyben describes her participation in a high-level international meeting on women’s economic empowerment. She examines how the concept of empowerment is being constructed, contested and shaped in international aid policy. …

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. …

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. …

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. …