Getting Institutions Right for Women in Development

This work argues that development organizations must be recognized as structurally deeply gendered, and that strategies for women must aim at institutional transformation, while building a conceptual framework and applying it to empirical case study material.

Gender and Development or Women in Development policies have been promoted in development organizations for almost three decades now. Although they have helped improve the immediate material condition of women, by and large such policies have involved organizations in reproducing the ideological and material conditions for women's subordination in the family and the economy. This book offers a gendered analysis of development organizations in a range of different institutional arenas. It builds a conceptual framework for exploring the politics and procedures internal to the institutions which design and implement policy, and then applies this to the analysis of empirical case study material. Other contributions reflect on strategies to help organizations internalise or institutionalise gender equity; to make accountability to women a routine part of development practice.