Introduction

In 2011–2012, the journal Gender & Development ¹ instigated a discussion between women’s rights activists and gender and development policymakers and practitioners on the progress of gender mainstreaming. Gender mainstreaming is an approach to women’s rights and gender issues, widely adopted by governments and development institutions of all sizes, shapes and hues after it acquired currency at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, China, in 1995.

Today, nearly 20 years on from Beijing, ‘gender’ is spoken of all the time. It is supposed to be ‘mainstreamed’ into humanitarian responses, and in long-term development programmes; at different stages of the project cycle; and in all types of interventions – from advocacy initiatives to community-level development. But what has this meant for women and men, girls and boys, in the communities and nations that have signed up to work on challenging and changing gender inequality? In the Gender & Development Beyond Gender Mainstreaming Learning Project, a total of around 100 participants was involved to discuss these and other concerns. ² Participants came from markedly different personal, professional and institutional locations. We pooled our thinking and expertise; challenged each other’s perspectives on the contribution gender mainstreaming has made to the pursuit of gender equality and women’s rights worldwide; and considered the future of gender mainstreaming as an approach to the feminist goals of gender equality and women’s rights.

Some of the insights gained are offered here. Gender mainstreaming has not had uniform effects, nor should we expect it to have had; yet we can make some general points to help our diagnosis of success and failure, and this chapter attempts to raise some of the most important among these. The first section gives a brief account of the coining of the concept of gender mainstreaming, recalling that this was an outcome of a process lasting 20 years, punctuated by formal UN-convened encounters between the global women’s rights movements ³ and the international development community. The chapter then goes on to discuss some of the ways in which gender mainstreaming has played out in practice. In such a discussion, it is crucial to consider how tensions around the underlying vision of development inform gender mainstreaming in international institutions, donor governments, governments in the Global South and NGOs of different types.

The origins of gender mainstreaming

To the international women’s movements in 1995, gender mainstreaming represented the most encouraging and largest step forward yet, in a struggle that had been marked by the series of UN Conferences on Women, which had run from the first one in Mexico City, in 1975, to Beijing in 1995, and had taken in the UN Decade for Women 1976–1985. Women’s rights activists from all over the world had engaged with states and international development organisations over this time. They had debated differences in dialogue with each other, honing a shared vision and priorities, and built a powerful coalition that aimed to transform the course of global development itself.

Gender mainstreaming was a response to the failure of women in development (WID) programming of the 1970s and 1980s. Evidence had proliferated of ‘project misbehaviour’ (Buvinic 1986), as women responded to ill-conceived development initiatives foisted on them by pursuing strategies to mitigate their negative effects and capture any benefits to be had. Despite varying political and economic rationales for undertaking work with women (Moser 1989), the vast majority of WID programs began with promoting women’s income-generating activities as an entry point. Feminist and women’s rights organisations from the Global South argued that WID projects designed to harness women’s productive potential to unsustainable national growth strategies needed to be jettisoned. Informed by a broadly socialist analysis of poverty as rooted in inequality, they argued for a strategy of empowerment and transformation. In this, the role of Northern-based development organisations was to support Southern women’s rights organisations to use as they saw fit in pursuit of home-grown solutions to political, economic and social marginalisation of women. Ultimately, this would change the course of development.

Perhaps the most famous articulation of an alternative vision of development informed fully by the perspectives of women in the global South is that of the DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New era) network:

For many women, problems of nationality, class, and race are inextricably linked to their specific oppression as women. Defining feminism to include the struggle against all forms of oppression is both legitimate and necessary. In many instances gender equality must be accompanied by changes on these other fronts, at the same time, the struggle against gender subordination cannot be compromised during the struggle against other forms of oppression, or be relegated to a future when they may be wiped out . . . we strongly affirm that feminism strives for the broadest and deepest development of society and human beings, free of all systems of domination.

(Sen and Grown 1987: 19)

Feminist activism at the UN Beijing Conference 1995

It is clear from the last section that feminist activists saw (and still see) dramatic change in the ways development addressed the concerns of gender equality and women’s rights as necessary not only to women, but to the whole of humanity. Development organisations needed to change their sense of what their purpose was, and who they were intended to serve, in addition to their ways of working, in order to be capable of delivering the transformative vision of development set out by international women’s movements over the two decades leading up to the UN Fourth World Conference on Women at Beijing in 1995.

At Beijing, an enormous NGO forum (a gathering of civil society organisations) took place parallel to the conference proper. The vibrancy – and the diversity – of the international women’s movements were evident. Differences in identity, location and hence in priorities did not hinder powerful lobbying and advocacy to achieve a positive outcome at the conference, resulting in the UN commitment to gender mainstreaming in the Beijing Platform for Action. Yet – as is so often the case when passionate activism and radical political thinking attempts to change the course of history – the commitment given by governments at Beijing was a compromise between widely varying views from radicals and conservatives, often relying for the establishment of consensus on the use of words that can be widely interpreted according to the motive and context of the policymaker.

This was the context for the UN’s eventual definition of gender mainstreaming, with its rather mechanistic understanding of gender analysis as a means to transform development. Interpretation and implementation has been left to individual development organizations to figure out for themselves:

Mainstreaming a gender perspective is the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes, in all areas and at all levels. It is a strategy for making women’s as well as men’s concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal is to achieve gender equality.

(United Nations 1997: 1)

We are now almost two decades on from the Beijing Conference and the start of widespread commitments to gender mainstreaming, and ‘almost all international development organizations and governments have adopted gender mainstreaming in some form’ (Derbyshire 2012: 406).

In the next section, I draw on discussions from the Beyond Gender Mainstreaming Learning Project to examine perhaps the key concern in assessing the ‘fit’ between the radical vision of change of feminists at Beijing, and the progress made thus far.

Gender mainstreaming, policy and organisational approaches to development

It is a challenge for development and humanitarian organisations to assess the impact of their activities on the lives of women and girls, men and boys ‘on the ground’, whose lives are altered profoundly and continuously by all sorts of factors. In a review of gender mainstreaming undertaken in the early 2000s, Caroline Moser and Annalise Moser (2005) pointed out that many analyses of the impact of gender mainstreaming have tended to focus on the impact of gender mainstreaming on development organisations themselves, rather than looking at the impact on supposed ‘beneficiaries’ (and others). This focus on ‘who we are’ rather than ‘what we do’ has of course a great deal to do with the focus of feminist enquiry in the 1990s into the key role of social institutions, including the market, state and NGOs, in perpetuating or challenging gender inequality. Institutions reflect the norms and values of surrounding society – an aspect of which is ‘male bias’ (Elson 1991). Getting development institutions ‘right for women’ (Goetz 1995) has thus been a priority in the era of gender mainstreaming. Ramya Subrahmanian (2007: 113) has observed that ‘a key criticism about gender mainstreaming has been the “narrowness” of the strategy despite the complexity of gender relations and the contextual variations in the processes and outcomes related to gender inequalities’.

In her research into the initial impact of gender mainstreaming, Rounaq Jahan (1995) distinguished between integrationist and agenda-setting mainstreaming. Integrationist mainstreaming is a process whereby aspects of the Beijing agenda are taken up without organisations essentially altering their vision of development, policies or ways of working. It is seen as a technical concern – as Jahan states, work that integrates gender analysis of women’s and men’s concerns throughout policies and projects. In contrast, agenda-setting mainstreaming changes the course of the organisation’s work – in the way gender mainstreaming was intended by the women’s movement – and, as such, requires understanding of the deeply rooted normative beliefs that inform an organisation’s culture and therefore underpin all its activities, keeping existing power relations in place and unchallenged.

For many working in governments and international organisations disbursing development funding to states and NGOs in developing countries, ‘gender mainstreaming’ took a decidedly integrationist form. At worst, it has been reduced into a magic bullet solution to development, in which the North-to-South transfer of resources to women entrepreneurs is often in the form of repayable loans. The hope is that this will result in wealth creation for women, their families and society. These small injections of capital are often linked in the minds of the donors to socially desirable outcomes associated with the empowerment of women. These range from fertility reduction to investment in daughters’ education. Giving resources to women is seen as ‘smart economics’ – policymakers and practitioners in the international financial institutions in particular argue for funding for programs with gender equality aims on the basis of broader economic and social impact (Chant and Sweetman 2012).

Yet, while it focuses on women and channels resources to them, programing undertaken from a ‘smart economics’ perspective fails to challenge the complex structural inequalities shaping the realities of individual women living in poverty in the Global South. While it may benefit some women in a limited way, smart economics depoliticises the notion of gender mainstreaming by using the language of radical change, empowerment and women’s rights, while abdicating responsibility that politicians and economists should take to remove gender, race and class-based inequalities in social institutions, which shape the realities of women and constrain their ability to realise real, sustained and systemic change.

In contrast to this focus on economic prosperity as the key to development and gender inequality, ‘alternative’ development organisations – that is, those whose vision of development is founded on left-wing political ideals of equality, rights and justice – are more likely to see the need for political voice to be built for women as a constituency, through work addressing political and social dimensions of powerlessness head-on. However, experience of gender mainstreaming shows progress has been patchy. Participants in the Beyond Gender Mainstreaming project confirmed that there is still a tendency not to look beyond the economic aspects of development to focus on inequality holistically. Programmes may end up defaulting to look very much like smart economics approaches, focusing on ‘economic empowerment’ of women and leaving the dirty, dangerous work of dismantling political and social barriers to women’s rights to women themselves – just as the WID projects discussed above did in the past.

In addition, some participants highlighted the fact that – even after all this time, and the incredibly high-profile activism of feminists from the Global South – gender mainstreaming in development is still dogged by assertions that women’s human rights agendas and feminist change are cultural impositions on developing countries. There is, of course, a vast range of evidence of the thriving multiplicity of women’s rights movements in the Global South, which may or may not use the term ‘feminist’, and may or may not be wholly ‘home-grown’ (we live in an age of globalised ideas and political movements, after all), but all of which represent constituencies of women in developing countries fighting for their rights.

Research focusing on the impact of gender mainstreaming on women and girls ‘on the ground’ tends to suggest that development policymakers and practitioners need to base our mainstreaming in a more conscious analysis of how change happens, and gain a clearer – and more realistic? – awareness of the role to be played by development organisations. Gender mainstreaming strategies that prioritise the top-down North-to-South transfer of resources and see gender inequality as remedied by women earning income fail to root their analysis of change in the empowerment of women living in poverty in the Global South; yet this was the central vision of mainstreaming as originally articulated by the global women’s movements.

Institutionalising gender mainstreaming

What strategies have feminists inside and outside development organisations employed to change development organisations internally, so they are more able to deliver real change for women in the Global South? The institutional aspects of gender mainstreaming are critical to dismantle bias informed by gender, race and class-based inequalities, development institutions (from states to international financial institutions to NGOs of all types and sizes) need to be ‘right for women’ (Goetz 1995). Gender mainstreaming has thus involved attention to policies, personnel, organisational ‘architecture’ and structures, human resource recruitment and management procedures, as well as the analytical tools employed in programme planning and implementation, to ensure these support gender equality and women’s rights. Gender policies have been drafted, redrafted and ratified. Debates have been had about adopting the terminology of ‘gender’: gender analysis, gender tools and frameworks, gender equality – or equity, or justice. Decisions have been taken on how to develop organisational infrastructure to support gender mainstreaming. Methods for programme planning, implementation and evaluation have been developed, rolled out, discarded, forgotten and reinvented. Senior management comes and goes, and gender issues are sometimes championed, and occasionally seemingly almost forgotten. Consultants are asked to evaluate progress on gender issues periodically, and their findings acted on, or placed on a (literal or virtual) shelf to gather dust.

The trajectories followed by different organisations have been usefully typologised by Helen Derbyshire (2012), building on her participation in the Beyond Gender Mainstreaming Project; some of the key elements are discussed here.

What, then, has been the impact of mainstreaming?

This chapter set out to examine a few of the most important issues that the experience of gender mainstreaming has thrown up. Twenty years after Beijing, women are still waiting for the transformation to global and national governance that they require in order to participate and demand accountability, and that would logically result in a changed world order reflecting the values and priorities of women living in poverty in the Global South.

We face complex crises globally, presenting enormous challenges to the whole of humanity. Conflicts, social turmoil owing to changes in economic and political power between regions and countries, the impact of climate change, food crises, and the continuing impact of the 2007–2008 economic crisis that began in Europe and North America, are among the factors threatening many in the Global South. Other factors challenging women’s rights include continuing struggles for citizenship in the context of globalization (see chapter by Townsend et al. in this volume); struggles for democracy in regions including the Middle East in the Arab Spring; ongoing conflicts; and failed states. Women are also facing the threat of growing social and political conservatisms in many societies, including fundamentalisms and religious extremism, in both the North and South, which particularly threatens women’s human rights, including their sexual and reproductive rights. The wider picture is terrifying, but in many countries feminists – in particular, young feminists – are organising and taking action, often using new technologies to create new forms of activism.

Gender mainstreaming in most international development organisations, including the IFIs and the UN system, has fallen very far short of visions of transformative gender mainstreaming. Inequality is becoming the development issue of our times, but understandings of it tend to focus on inter-household inequality and not on the intra-household issues that are gendered and intrinsically linked to class and race inequalities throughout societies. The leadership of key development organisations that shape our world is still overwhelmingly male, white and elite. Women’s priorities and perspectives are missing from key decision-making bodies. Gender mainstreaming is a discredited concept for many feminist activists. The radical visions of Beijing have not resulted in a transformed global order; and there is widespread ‘sobering recognition of the enormous gap between feminists’ aspirations for social transformation and the limited, though important, gains that have been made’ (Cornwall et al. 2007: 1).

Nearly 20 years after Beijing and the inception of gender mainstreaming, what is its future? Perhaps the time has come to move ‘Beyond Gender Mainstreaming’ entirely. Do we need perhaps to move away from gender mainstreaming? Have we been there, done that and got the T-shirt? Is it now an outmoded and tired concept that has lost its currency? We may acknowledge the progress made in development organisations in taking on a concern for gender equality, but we also need to respond to the current backlash against these advances. Some argue that what is needed now is a shift away from gender mainstreaming, towards strategies that aim to end gender discrimination, focusing on social justice, transformation and change (Sandler and Rao 2012). Yet for others, adoption of gender mainstreaming language by states, development and humanitarian organisations is seen as a critical ‘foot in the door’. ‘Gender’ is now on the agenda of all organisations involved in development and humanitarian work. Can integrationist approaches be used as entry points for transformation and a genuine redistribution of power in development?

In the past year, there have been discussions in different quarters about the possibility of a UN Fifth Conference on Women, the need to lobby for the voices of women and girls to inform the successor to the Millennium Development Goals, and an assessment and refocusing of the UN Commission for the Status of Women, among other high-level changes to the gender equality and women’s rights agenda. Rather than adding women to recipes for poisonous, unsustainable development based on exploitation – in particular, of women in poverty in the Global South, or portraying these women as virtuous victims while failing to support their activism and demands for justice – development organisations need to take on a commitment to transformative gender mainstreaming. Development requires the perspectives and solutions of women, and women require equality, human rights and justice.