Gender and feminist transformative development

Abstract

'Gender equality' and 'women's empowerment' are firm mainstream development goals. This is an achievement of feminist scholarship and advocacy and the transnational activism of women's groups. More particularly, it is an outcome of the 'social turn' in donor thinking about development and governance, exemplified by the World Bank's declaration that addressing gender equality is 'smart economics'. This chapter explains how a political project of transformative development was sidelined in the process and, increasingly, 'gender equality' and 'women's empowerment' became synonymous with liberal technocratic development agendas to grow competitive markets through policy and governance reforms. While this has narrowed the policy and programming choices available in the development mainstream, GAD feminist scholarship and practice has continued to offer development alternatives. This chapter has outlined some of these alternatives in the form of so-called 'gender transformative approaches' and concluded by pointing to synergies with 'thinking and working politically' development agenda, particularly in the areas of 'bottom-up' political change.