UN Women: a case of feminist global governance?

Abstract

Since its creation in 2010, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and Empowerment of Women (UN Women) has been at the forefront of the UN’s work on gender equality. UN Women’s unique relationship with civil society actors brought a promise of a UN with greater accountability, accessibility, and support for a feminist agenda. In this chapter we analyse UN Women as an example of feminist governance, focussing on its achievements in formulating and implementing policies to achieve gender equality, including the creation of norms and promotion of gender equality both within states and the UN system, engagement with feminist civil society actors, success in monitoring gender equality data, policies and processes, and its ability to frame issues from a gender perspective. Our assessment suggests that while some of the problems of the earlier, sprawling gender architecture have been addressed, others have continued and new issues have emerged.