Between tradition and post‐coloniality: the location of gender in Australian development policy

Abstract

This paper contributes to the debate on whether development assistance should adhere to universal measures of quality of life for all men and women, or defer, instead, to the many different norms that traditional cultures have established. It traces the development in the 1980s and 1990s of a gender policy for Australian overseas aid in the face of post‐develop‐mentalist, post‐colonial and post‐structuralist feminist critiques of ‘Western’ constructions of Third World women, which contend that Women in Development (WID) and Gender and Development (GAD) policies reinforce and maintain the discourse of modernity so essential to ‘northern’ hegemony and development practices. This paper suggests that a space between opposing universalist and relativist claims can be found for an Australian gender and development policy which is adaptable to geographically and historically specific gender relations, and which allows a self‐reflexive questioning of the hierarchical relationship between development ‘helpers’ and ‘beneficiaries’.