Overview

This book examines the various strategies of engagement employed by women working to transform the bureaucratic structures of state organizations, multilateral institutions and NGOs to make them more gender-equitable. These strategies involve combining the task of pursuing transformative agendas from within bureaucracies - of being 'missionaries' - while adapting to the techniques and practices of the bureaucracy as a 'mandarin' would have to do. The contributors examine struggles not only at the discursive level, where women's needs are constructed and contested, but also at the institutional level of the rules and procedures of bureaucratic actors, and at the level of resource allocation. Studies from many different countries, including Vietnam, Australia, the United States and Morocco, illustrate both the variety of institutional strategies adopted by feminists in different political and cultural settings, and the highly diverse forms of political action by women which can be seen to constitute feminist politics. From their different perspectives the contributors acknowledge the gendered nature of bureaucracies but argue against the view that these institutions are monolithic and impermeable. This book has much to say to all those feminists working within bureaucracies - whether state or civil society institutions - with the aim of promoting women's concerns; it will also interest those who have chosen a strategy of 'disengagement'. In addition, the book makes a significant contribution to recent developments in the anthropological study of organizations.

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9781853394348

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Shahra Razavi is Research Co-ordinator at UNRISD. She specializes in the gender dimensions of social development, with a particular focus on livelihoods and social policies. She began her collaboration with UNRISD in February 1993, when she joined the Institute to work on a new research initiative to explore the gender dimensions of economic policy (Technical Co-operation and Women's Lives: Integrating Gender into Development Policy). She has led the Institute's subsequent research projects on gender, including Gender, Poverty and Well-Being; Agrarian Change, Gender and Land Rights; Globalization, Export-Oriented Employment for Women and Social Policy; and work on Gender Justice, Development and Rights which was carried out as part of the Institute's contribution to the Beijing Plus 5 Review Process. More recently, she coordinated the preparation of the UNRISD report (published in 2005), Gender Equality: Striving for Justice in an Unequal World. Her current research areas include work on Gender and Social Policy, and the rise of Islamic-based politics and gender equality. Prior to joining UNRISD, Shahra was working on her D.Phil. Thesis at St.Antony's College (Oxford University). Her thesis explored the gender dimensions of agricultural commercialization in southeastern Iran, where she carried out field research in 1988. She obtained her D.Phil. in December 1992. Shahra is currently serving on the editorial boards of Development in Practice and Global Social Policy.

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