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Gender mainstreaming
Razavi, Shahra Miller, Carol
Razavi, Shahra
Miller, Carol
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opb4.pdf
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Abstract
"Public institutions continue to be of significant interest to feminists given that they reproduce and contribute to women s subordination through their assumptions, working procedures and activities. There are divergent views, however, on whether public institutions can be made more accountable to women; the two main positions taken by feminist critics of public administration are: (i) the disengagement strategy, which is sceptical of the ability of development institutions to promote women s concerns; and (ii) the incremental approach, which sees development institutions as too important a force to be ignored, and thus promotes change within them, even if it is piecemeal. The second approach is reflected in the types of changes that have been introduced in the three agencies analysed in this paper the UNDP, the World Bank and the ILO and in the United Nations system more generally. The international women s movement, punctuated by the United Nations World Conferences on Women, has since the 1970s called upon international development agencies and governments to integrate women into the development process. An early institutional response was the setting up of women in development (WID) bureaux which funded and/or executed a variety of women s projects. By the mid-1980s, due to the slow pace of progress in improvements to women s status and well-being, and the continued marginalization of women-specific projects, the need for new strategies became apparent. In this context, mainstreaming gained currency amongst international agencies and governments as a new strategy aimed at bringing women s concerns into the centre stage of development. A distinction has been made between an agenda-setting and an integrationist approach to mainstreaming; the former attempts to transform the thrust of development policy as it brings women s concerns into the mainstream, while the latter attempts to integrate those concerns within the existing development activities without necessarily altering the agenda. The changes that have been introduced in the three multilateral institutions, documented in this paper, fall within the confines of the incremental approach. In this context, mainstreaming involves two main components: (i) integrating gender issues into the entire spectrum of activities that are funded and/or executed by an organization (i.e. projects, programmes, policies); (ii) diffusing responsibility for gender integration beyond the WID/gender units through mechanisms such as gender training and gender guidelines making it a routine concern of all bureaucratic units and all staff members"(pg ii)
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1995-08
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With permission of the license/copyright holder