Handbook of Feminist Governance 1800374801, 9781800374805

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HANDBOOK OF FEMINIST GOVERNANCE

INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOKS ON GENDER Founding Editor: the late Sylvia Chant FRSA, FAcSS, formerly Professor of Development Geography, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK International Handbooks on Gender is an exciting Handbook series under the general editorship and direction of Sylvia Chant. The series comprises high quality, original reference works offering comprehensive overviews of the latest research within key areas of contemporary gender studies. International and comparative in scope, the Handbooks are edited by leading scholars in their respective fields, and comprise specially commissioned contributions from a select cast of authors, bringing together established experts with up-and-coming scholars and researchers. Each volume offers a wide-ranging examination of current issues to produce prestigious and high quality works of lasting significance. Individual volumes will serve as invaluable sources of reference for students and faculty in gender studies and associated fields, as well as for other actors such as NGOs and policymakers keen to engage with academic discussion on gender. Whether used as an information resource on key topics, a companion text or as a platform for further study, Elgar International Handbooks on Gender will provide a source of definitive scholarly reference. Titles in the series include: Handbook on Gender and Health Edited by Jasmine Gideon Handbook on Gender in World Politics Edited by Jill Steans and Daniela Tepe-Belfrage Handbook on Gender and War Edited by Simona Sharoni, Julia Welland, Linda Steiner and Jennifer Pedersen Handbook on Gender and Social Policy Edited by Sheila Shaver Handbook on Gender and Violence Edited by Laura J. Shepherd Handbook on Gender, Diversity and Federalism Edited by Jill Vickers, Joan Grace and Cheryl N. Collier Handbook on Gender in Asia Edited by Shirlena Huang and Kanchana N. Ruwanpura Handbook of Feminist Governance Edited by Marian Sawer, Lee Ann Banaszak, Jacqui True and Johanna Kantola

Handbook of Feminist Governance Edited by

Marian Sawer Emeritus Professor, School of Politics and International Relations, The Australian National University, Australia

Lee Ann Banaszak Professor, Department of Political Science, The Pennsylvania State University, USA

Jacqui True Professor of International Relations, School of Social Sciences, Monash University, Australia

Johanna Kantola Professor of European Politics, University of Helsinki, Finland

INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOKS ON GENDER

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Marian Sawer, Lee Ann Banaszak, Jacqui True and Johanna Kantola 2023

Cover image: Geordanna Cordero on Unsplash All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948487 This book is available electronically in the Political Science and Public Policy subject collection http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781800374812

ISBN 978 1 80037 480 5 (cased) ISBN 978 1 80037 481 2 (eBook)

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Contents

List of contributorsviii 1

Introduction to the Handbook of Feminist Governance1 Marian Sawer, Lee Ann Banaszak, Jacqui True and Johanna Kantola Timeline of feminist governance Renee O’Shanassy

PART I

14

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

2

Feminist organisational principles Kaitlin Kelly-Thompson, Fernando Tormos-Aponte and S. Laurel Weldon

3

Understanding feminist governance through feminist institutionalism: an overview Lisa Guido, Lindsay Walsh and Lee Ann Banaszak

4

Feminist governance and the state Johanna Kantola

5

Do feminist insiders matter? Progress in conceptualization and comparative theory-building Amy G. Mazur and Dorothy E. McBride

6

Feminist perspectives on multilevel governance Meryl Kenny and Tània Verge

76

7

Seeking intersectionality in feminist governance Erica Townsend-Bell

88

8

Studying feminist governance: methods and approaches to the field Shan-Jan Sarah Liu

PART II

25

38 51

63

100

EVOLVING INSTITUTIONS

9

Weaving a feminist power tapestry: feminist governance in practice Caroline Lambert, Jessica Horn, Srilatha Batliwala, Michelle Deshong, Tanja Kovac and Naomi Woyengu

113

10

National women’s machineries: Trojan horses or hostages? Anne Marie Goetz

126

11

Gender-responsive budgeting Monica Costa and Rhonda Sharp

138 v

vi  Handbook of feminist governance 12

Specialised parliamentary bodies Marian Sawer

150

13

Promoting gender equality in elected office Mona Lena Krook and Pippa Norris

161

14

Gender-sensitive parliaments: feminising formal political institutions Sarah Childs and Sonia Palmieri

174

15

Tools of the trade: feminist governance in the field Sonia Palmieri and Julie Ballington

189

PART III INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND GLOBAL GOVERNANCE 16

The rise of feminist governance in foreign policy Karin Aggestam and Jacqui True

203

17

Feminist governance in global health Sara E. Davies and Clare Wenham

216

18

Feminist peacebuilding governance Maria Martin de Almagro

227

19

Feminist peace and security governance and the UN Security Council Victoria Scheyer and Marina Kumskova

238

20

Feminist interventions in trade governance Erin Hannah, Adrienne Roberts and Silke Trommer

250

21 Feminist governance and climate change Maria Tanyag

262

22

Transnational feminism and global governance Valentine M. Moghadam

274

23

UN Women: a case of feminist global governance? Andrea den Boer and Kirsten Haack

286

PART IV THE EUROPEAN UNION AND FEMINIST GOVERNANCE 24

The European Parliament as a gender equality actor: a contradictory forerunner299 Johanna Kantola and Emanuela Lombardo

25

EU gender equality policy and the progressive dismantling of feminist governance?311 Sophie Jacquot

26

Challenges to feminist knowledge? The economisation of EU gender equality policy Anna Elomäki

323

Contents  vii 27

Velvet triangles and more: alliances of supranational EU gender equality actors Petra Ahrens

28

Intersectional feminist activisms in Europe: invisibility, inclusivity and affirmation347 Serena D’Agostino

29

Feminist governance in the field of violence against women: the case of the Istanbul Convention Andrea Krizsán and Conny Roggeband

PART V

335

359

OTHER REGIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON FEMINIST GOVERNANCE

30

Building gender norms into regional governance and the limits of institutionalising feminism Toni Haastrup

31

Feminist institutions and implications for gender equality in East Asia Jiso Yoon

384

32

Feminist governance in Asia: areas of contestation and cooperation Rashila Ramli and Sharifah Syahirah

396

33

Latin American perspectives on feminist governance: between mainstreaming and sidestreaming challenges Gisela Zaremberg

408

34

Feminist governance in North America: manifestations, manipulations and mirages Alexandra Dobrowolsky and Tammy Findlay

421

35

Feminist regional governance in the Pacific Islands Kerryn Baker and Renee O’Shanassy

371

434

Index446

Contributors

Karin Aggestam is Professor of Political Science, Director of the Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University, Sweden, and Adjunct Professor at Monash University, Australia. She is also Scientific Coordinator of the Strategic Research Area and Programme: Middle East in the Contemporary World and a leading expert on peacebuilding, diplomacy and feminist foreign policy. Her publications include nine books and contributions to Handbooks on peace diplomacy, hydropolitics, gender, conflict analysis, foreign policy, negotiation/mediation, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and Middle East politics. Petra Ahrens is a Senior Researcher in Gender Studies at Tampere University, Finland. She examines European Union gender politics, transnational civil society organisations, and gender equality in Germany. She has recently obtained a five-year Academy of Finland Research Fellow project to study gender sensitive parliaments in Finland, Germany and Poland. Kerryn Baker is a Fellow in the Department of Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University. Her research on gender, politics and participation has been published in leading journals including the Australian Journal of Political Science, Pacific Affairs, Government and Opposition and Parliamentary Affairs. Her book Pacific Women in Politics: Gender Quota Campaigns in the Pacific Islands was published by University of Hawaii Press in 2019 and she is the co-editor (with Marian Sawer) of Gender Innovation in Political Science: New Norms, New Knowledge (Palgrave, 2019). Julie Ballington is a global policy advisor on women’s political participation at UN Women, where she leads a team providing policy and technical support to states. She has published widely on policy measures to promote women’s political participation, including through adoption of special measures, institutional reforms and prevention of violence against women in politics. She led UN Women’s work to measure women’s representation at the local level, reported for the first time in 2020. Lee Ann Banaszak is Professor of Political Science and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University and Head of the Department of Political Science. She has written widely on women’s movements, gender and public opinion, and gender and policy, including Why Movements Succeed or Fail (Princeton University Press, 1996) and the Women’s Movement Inside and Outside the State (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Her current research explores voting rights at the intersection of gender, race and class, and examines how institutional processes of maintaining voting rolls in the USA leads to inequality in voter access. Srilatha Batliwala is Senior Advisor, Knowledge Building with CREA (Creating Resources for Empowerment in Action), Senior Associate, Gender at Work and honorary Professor of Practice at SOAS, University of London. Over the past 45 years, her work has included building grassroots movements of the most marginalised urban and rural women in Mumbai and Karnataka state in India, developing theory from practice, cutting-edge research on gender issues and empowerment strategies, and capacity building of young activists in feminist moveviii

Contributors  ix ment building and leadership. She has written and published extensively, and is best known for her work on power and empowerment, women’s movements and movement building, feminist leadership and feminist approaches to monitoring and evaluation. Sarah Childs is Professor of Politics and Gender at the University of Edinburgh. Her book Feminist Democratic Representation (with Karen Celis) was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. Childs is also the author of The Good Parliament Report (2016), which followed a secondment to the House of Commons, and is completing her new book, Designing and Building Feminist Institutions. Monica Costa is an economist and gender and development researcher with a particular focus on the application of gender-responsive budgeting (GRB). Her book – Gender Responsive Budgeting in Fragile States: The Case of Timor-Leste (Routledge, 2018) – is the first to address the potential of GRB in fragile state contexts. She has published in leading journals and has worked on gender issues in Australia, Portugal, Timor-Leste, Solomon Islands and Indonesia. Serena D’Agostino is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Migration, Diversity and Justice (CMDJ) of the Brussels School of Governance (BSoG), Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). She is the coordinator of the VUB Strategic Research Programme ‘Evaluating Democratic Governance in Europe’ (EDGE). Her research interests lie at the crossroads of (political) intersectionality, activism/social movements and minority politics and rights – with a focus on Romani (gender) politics and Roma (women’s) rights in Europe. Her work has been published in Politics, Groups, and Identities, the European Journal of Politics and Gender and the Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies, among others. Sara E. Davies is a Professor in the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University, Australia. Her research is in global health governance, gender and human security. She most recently published Containing Contagion: Politics of Disease Outbreaks in Southeast Asia (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) and is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook on Women, Peace and Security (Oxford University Press, 2019). Andrea den Boer is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent (UK). Her research focuses on gender and international relations, with an emphasis on women’s rights, women’s security, and the causes and consequences of violence against women. She is a Co-Principal Investigator on the WomanStats Project, an international database and interdisciplinary research project on the linkage between the situation of women and the security of nation states. Michelle Deshong is a Kuku Yulanji woman and an Indigenous gender advocate, with particular interest in the participation of Aboriginal women in public and political life. She has published widely in these areas and has expertise on leadership and governance. She works closely with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women across the country for empowerment, representation and equality. Alexandra Dobrowolsky, Professor of Political Science, Saint Mary’s University, explores gender, representation and citizenship in an array of publications, including six books, among them the edited collections: Women and Public Policy in Canada: Neoliberalism and After (Oxford University Press, 2009); and with Fiona MacDonald, Turbulent Times and

x  Handbook of feminist governance Transformational Possibilities? Gender and Politics Today and Tomorrow (University of Toronto Press, 2020). Anna Elomäki is Academy of Finland Research Fellow in Gender Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere University, Finland. Her research focuses on the interconnections between the economy, politics and gender at EU and national levels, including the gender impacts and practices of economic policies and governance and the neoliberalisation of gender equality policies and discourses. Tammy Findlay, Professor and Chair in the Department of Political and Canadian Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University, focuses on feminist intersectionality and social policy, child care policy, and democratic governance. She is the author of the book Femocratic Administration: Gender, Governance and Democracy in Ontario (University of Toronto Press, 2015), and co-author of Women, Politics and Public Policy: The Political Struggles of Canadian Women, 3rd edn (Oxford University Press, 2020). Anne Marie Goetz is a Clinical Professor at the Center for Global Affairs, School of Professional Studies, New York University. Her research and policy work focuses on gender and democratic governance, and gender and conflict and her books include Governing Women (Routledge, 2009), and Reinventing Accountability (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). She is currently researching the rise of illiberal or authoritarian approaches to conflict resolution. Lisa Guido is a graduate student at the Pennsylvania State University receiving a dual PhD in the departments of Political Science and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research focuses on identity politics and inequality, and she is working on a project on gendered trends in local Pennsylvania school board elections. Kirsten Haack is Associate Professor in International Politics at Northumbria University. Her research interests include representation and leadership in international organisations especially by the UN Secretary-General, women executive heads and women diplomats. She is the author of Women’s Access, Representation and Leadership in the United Nations (Palgrave, 2022) and The United Nations Democracy Agenda (Manchester University Press, 2011). Toni Haastrup is a Professor in International Politics at the University of Stirling in Scotland. A feminist researcher and teacher, her research interests include explaining the gendered practices of regional security institutions in Africa and Europe – she has published extensively on these themes. In addition to her academic work, she collaborates frequently with international institutions like the UN and the EU and is an occasional media commentator. Erin Hannah is Associate Professor of Political Science at King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Her research and teaching interests include international political economy, gender and trade, development, global governance, global civil society, and the role of expert knowledge in global trade. She is co-editor of Expert Knowledge in Global Trade (Routledge, 2015) and author of NGOs and Global Trade: Non-State Voices in EU Trade Policymaking (Routledge, 2016). Jessica Horn is a feminist activist, strategist and consultant, and a founding member of the African Feminist Forum. She is the former Director of Programmes at the African Women’s Development Fund and has served on the governance boards of Mama Cash, Urgent Action Fund-Africa and The Fund for Global Human Rights. Her research and analysis has been

Contributors  xi published in academic, media and popular platforms including The Lancet, Feminist Africa, Gender and Development, Al Jazeera, The Guardian and openDemocracy. Sophie Jacquot is Professor of Political Science at the Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles (IEE, CReSPo). Her research interests focus on the transformation of EU gender and anti-discrimination policies, and on the place given to citizens in EU social and equality governance. She holds a Jean Monnet Chair (EUGENDERING, 2022–2025) on the challenges linked to the establishment of a Union of gender+ equality. Her books include Transformations in EU Gender Equality Policy: From Emergence to Dismantling (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Johanna Kantola is Professor of European Politics at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her books include Gender and Political Analysis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, with E. Lombardo); Gender and the European Union (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Feminists Theorize the State (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and co-edited Gender and the Economic Crisis in Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and The Oxford Handbook on Gender and Politics (Oxford University Press, 2013). She directs the European Research Council (ERC)-funded five-year research project EUGenDem (Gender, party politics and democracy in Europe). Kaitlin Kelly-Thompson is a lecturer at Tufts University. She completed her PhD at Purdue University in August 2020. Her award-winning dissertation ‘There is Power in a Plaza: Social Movements, Democracy, and Spatial Politics’ demonstrates how social movements create democratic spaces that advance inclusion and improve local democracy using the cases of the Gezi Park protests of 2012 and the 2017 Women’s Marches. Meryl Kenny is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Gender and Politics at the University of Edinburgh and Co-Director of the Feminism and Institutionalism International Network (FIIN). She has published widely on gender and political representation in Scotland/UK and comparatively, with current research focusing on feminist institutionalism, and gender and political recruitment. Tanja Kovac is the Director of Kovac & Co and immediate past CEO of Gender Equity Victoria, a peak organisation for gender equality organisations and professionals, and Senior Research Fellow for Gender Equity at the progressive think tank Per Capita. She was Chief of Staff to Australia’s first Family Violence Minister, overseeing family violence reform and creating Victoria’s first Gender Equality Strategy. She is also a former Director of EMILY’s List Australia, where she was instrumental in developing gender-based campaign strategies including the affirmative action target for women candidates – 50/50 by 2025. Andrea Krizsán is Professor at the Central European University, Budapest. She is the co-editor of the Routledge Handbook on Gender and EU Politics (Routledge, 2021) and co-author with Conny Roggeband of the books The Gender Politics of Domestic Violence (Routledge, 2018) and Politicizing Gender and Democracy in the Context of the Istanbul Convention (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Mona Lena Krook is Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University and chair of the Women and Politics PhD Program at Rutgers University. She has written widely on gender quotas and women’s political representation, including Quotas for Women in Politics (Oxford University Press, 2009). Her newest book, Violence against Women in Politics

xii  Handbook of feminist governance (Oxford University Press, 2020), explores resistance and backlash against women’s political participation. Marina Kumskova is Senior Policy and Advocacy Advisor at the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC) and Adjunct Professor at the Political Science Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She has been working in the field of human rights since 2013, as part of numerous projects exploring human rights issues around the world, particularly enforced disappearances in Chechnya. In 2016 she joined the Women, Peace and Security Programme at the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, where she worked to advance gender-sensitive conflict analysis and women’s participation in peace work, with a specific focus on the Middle East and North Africa. Caroline Lambert is a feminist activist and consultant who has held senior formal leadership roles in feminist and human rights organisations over a 25-year period – on the governance side and the operational side. She is currently exploring the exercise of informal power as she navigates feminist activism and movement building in the Australian gender equality movements – without an organisational affiliation. She lives and works on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation and is in awe of the ongoing custodianship that elders offer under conditions of colonisation. Shan-Jan Sarah Liu is Senior Lecturer in Gender and Politics in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She has published widely on women’s political representation, social movements, immigration in the media, and the gendered and racialised impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic with the goal to achieve justice and equality for the marginalised. Emanuela Lombardo is Associate Professor of Political Science and member of the Instituto de Investigaciones Feministas at Madrid Complutense University, Spain. Her latest monographs are Gender and Political Analysis (with Johanna Kantola, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and The Symbolic Representation of Gender (with Petra Meier, Ashgate, 2014). She directs the research group on Gender and Politics GEyPO (with Maria Bustelo) and is currently participating in the Horizon Europe CCINDLE project (2022–2026) on feminism and democracy. Maria Martin de Almagro is Assistant Professor in Conflict and Development Studies at the University of Ghent (Belgium). Previously, she held teaching and research positions at the Université de Montréal, University of Cambridge and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels. Her research on gender and peacebuilding in sub-Saharan Africa has been published in the European Journal of International Relations, International Studies Quarterly and Review of International Studies, among others. Amy G. Mazur is Johnson Professor of Political Science at Washington State University and an Associate Researcher at LIEPP, Sciences Po, Paris. Her research focuses on comparative feminist policy issues. She currently co-convenes, with Isabelle Engeli, the Gender Equality Policy in Practice Network (GEPP) with a co-edited book, Gender Equality and Policy Implementation in the Corporate World: Making Democracy Work in Business (Oxford University Press, 2022). Dorothy E. McBride is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Florida Atlantic University where she was a founder of the Women’s Studies program and the PhD program in

Contributors  xiii Comparative Studies and now advocates for women’s rights and gender equity in her adopted state of Washington. A specialist in comparative analysis and women and public policy in the USA and Europe, she is co-convener of the Research Network on Gender Politics and the State. Her books include Women’s Rights in the USA (Routledge, 1991); The Politics of State Feminism (Temple University Press, 2010); Comparative State Feminism (Sage, 1995); and Abortion in the United States: A Reference Handbook (ABC-Clio, 2018). Valentine M. Moghadam is Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Northeastern University, Boston. She has also been Coordinator of the Research Program on Women and Development at the United Nations University-International Institute of Global Health (UNU-IIGH) WIDER Institute (Helsinki, 1990–95) and a section chief on gender equality and development, UNESCO’s Social and Human Sciences Sector (Paris, 2004–06). Her books include Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) and most recently, After the Arab Uprisings: Progress and Stagnation in the Middle East and North Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2021) with Shamiran Mako. Pippa Norris is the Maguire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at Harvard University. The author of around 50 books, her work has been recognised by many major honours, including the Johan Skytte award, the Sir Isaiah Berlin Lifetime achievement award, the Karl Deutsch Award, the Australian Laureate Fellowship and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her latest book (with Ronald Inglehart) is Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Renee O’Shanassy lives on Ngunnawal country and works in public policy. She holds a Masters of Public Policy and Management from Monash University and Bachelor’s of Laws and International Relations from La Trobe University. She is currently undertaking a Master in Arts (Women’s Studies) with Flinders University. Renee has worked with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), various agencies of the Australian Public Service, development organisations and academia. Sonia Palmieri is a Gender Policy Fellow with the Department of Pacific Affairs, The Australian National University. As an academic practitioner, she has worked in both the university sector and development and parliamentary organisations to support women’s political leadership and participation. Sonia has driven the international research agenda on gender-sensitive parliaments, and has engaged with current and aspiring women in politics in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and – most prominently – the Pacific. Rashila Ramli is Professor of Political Science and Principal Visiting Fellow at the United Nations University-International Institute of Global Health (UNU-IIGH) and former Director of the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies (IKMAS), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM). Her areas of specialisation are Political Development, Human Security, and Gender and Politics. Her current research is on Global ASEAN and Social Inclusion through Localising SDGs. She is lead trainer on Leadership, Political Participation and Sustainable Development in Education. Adrienne Roberts is a Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Manchester. She specialises in feminist international political economy, with a particular focus on the politics of social reproduction and the gendered relations of finance, debt, development and trade. She is co-editor of the Handbook on the International Political Economy of Gender

xiv  Handbook of feminist governance (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018) and Feminist Global Political Economies of the Everyday (Routledge, 2018). Conny Roggeband is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam. She is the author and editor of multiple books in the domain of social movement studies and gender and politics, including her most recent book co-authored with Andrea Krizsán, Politicizing Gender and Democracy in the Context of the Istanbul Convention (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Marian Sawer is an Emeritus Professor and ANU Public Policy Fellow in the School of Politics and International Relations, The Australian National University. She has been analysing feminist engagement with the state since the 1980s, including the path-breaking Sisters in Suits (Allen & Unwin, 1990). She has worked in the Office of the Status of Women in the Australian government, has twice been attached to Status of Women Canada and has twice been rapporteur for UN Expert Group meetings on women’s policy machinery. Victoria Scheyer is a doctoral researcher at Monash University at the Gender, Peace and Security Centre. She holds a Master Degree in Peace Studies from the UN mandated University for Peace. At the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt she researches on resistances to gender equality in peacebuilding and feminist foreign policies. As co-president of the German section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, she advocates for intersectional gender equality and demilitarisation. Rhonda Sharp is an Emeritus Professor at the University of South Australia and a former president of the International Association for Feminist Economics, of which she was a founding member. Her work has focused on integrating a gender perspective into economic policies, particularly through gender-responsive budgeting, and she has engaged with governments, NGOs and international organisations for this purpose. In 2012 she was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for her services to the study of women and economics. Sharifah Syahirah is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at Kolej Universiti Poly-Tech MARA (KUPTM), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She has Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Human Science (Political Science) from International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), and a PhD in Political Science from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM). Her area of specialisation is gender and politics, policy and leadership. Her current research is on sexual harassment in sports, young women’s perception of politics, employees’ happiness, and the effectiveness of rural training programmes. Maria Tanyag is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of International Relations, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University. She received her PhD from Monash University in 2017. She was a Resident Women, Peace, and Security Fellow at Pacific Forum International, and programme co-chair for the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the International Studies Association (2021–23). Fernando Tormos-Aponte is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh and a Kendall Fellow at the Union of Concerned Scientists. He earned his PhD in Political Science from Purdue University and a BA from the Universidad de Puerto Rico – Río Piedras. Dr Tormos-Aponte specialises in environmental and racial justice, intersectional solidarity, identity politics, social policy and transnational politics.

Contributors  xv Erica Townsend-Bell is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for African Studies at Oklahoma State University. Her areas of expertise include the politics of intersectionality, comparative race and gender politics, and social movements, especially across the Americas. Her work is published in Political Research Quarterly, Signs, European Journal of Politics and Gender, JILAR and Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies (LACES), among other outlets. Silke Trommer is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Manchester, UK. Her work focuses on the politics of global trade, global governance, development, social movements and feminist international political economy. She is author of Transformations in Trade Politics: Participatory Trade Politics in West Africa (Routledge, 2014) and co-editor of Expert Knowledge in Global Trade (Routledge, 2016). Jacqui True is Professor of International Relations, Director of Monash University’s Centre for Gender, Peace and Security, Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence against Women and a Global Fellow, Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). Her research is focused on the Women, Peace and Security agenda, violence against women, and the gender dimensions of violent extremism and conflict. In 2021 Professor True was named one of the 100 most influential Persons in Gender Policy – for the gender-based violence area. Tània Verge is Professor of Politics and Gender at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where she led the Equality Unit between 2014 and 2021. She has written widely on women’s (descriptive and symbolic) political representation, gender power relations within political parties and parliaments, and resistance to the implementation of gender equality policy. Lindsay Walsh is a graduate student at the Pennsylvania State University receiving a dual PhD in the departments of Political Science and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research focuses on the cross-national study of women’s representation in the formal political sphere. She is currently studying the effect of gender quotas and increased women’s representation on policy outputs pertaining to women’s social and economic opportunity. S. Laurel Weldon is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada and co-editor of the American Political Science Review. She has written extensively on feminist movements, public policy and women’s human rights, especially violence against women and economic rights. Her most recent book with Mala Htun, The Logics of Gender Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2018) won the 2019 award for Best Book on Human Rights from the Human Rights Section of the International Studies Association. Clare Wenham is Assistant Professor of Global Health Policy in the Department of Health Policy at the London School of Economics & Politics and has over 10 years’ experience in research and teaching in global health security and outbreak response. Her research has focused on the politics and policies of health emergencies, including those of pandemic flu, Ebola and Zika. She most recently published Feminist Global Health Security (Oxford University Press, 2021). Naomi Woyengu is a young feminist activist and consultant who works with Pacific and global young feminist peers to build their individual and collective leadership and feminist

xvi  Handbook of feminist governance activism. She is also the founder of a young women-led group in Papua New Guinea called the HausKuK Initiative, which seeks to shift from the patriarchal HausMan (Men’s House) norms around leadership. Her feminist experience of over six years has mostly been in grass-root community movement building and young women’s leadership throughout Papua New Guinea and the Pacific through the YWCA. Jiso Yoon is Director of Center for International Development and Cooperation at the Korean Women’s Development Institute (KWDI). She has published research on women’s political representation, gender and political behaviour, and policy advocacy in Japan and South Korea. Her current research project involves a critical review of South Korea’s gender-focused Official Development Assistance (ODA), and suggests ways for the South Korean government to promote gender equality globally through ODA. Gisela Zaremberg is Professor and Academic Coordinator of the Public Policy and Gender Master at FLACSO Mexico. She has published on feminist governance, conservative backlash and democratic innovation in journals such as Politics & Gender, Journal of Politics in Latin America and International Feminist Journal of Politics. Her most recent book is Feminisms in Latin America: Pro-Choice Nested Networks in Mexico and Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

1. Introduction to the Handbook of Feminist Governance Marian Sawer, Lee Ann Banaszak, Jacqui True and Johanna Kantola

For the past 50 years women’s movements have been inventing new ways of organising, institution-building and disseminating gender equality norms. These innovations have brought more inclusive and flexible forms of governance – of the kind needed to respond to the complex challenges of today’s world. As used here, the term governance covers all the processes of government from the formal to the informal, from laws, institutional norms and policy framing to networks and relationships through which authority is both exercised and held to account. Our definition of feminist governance extends from the non-hierarchical style of women’s movements in the 1970s to the transnational oversight of ‘gender mainstreaming’ today. Feminist scholarship has played an integral role in the development of feminist governance, contributing or co-producing conceptual analysis of the governance innovations feminism has to offer and providing an evidence base for practitioners to draw on. This volume aims to summarise and reflect upon the findings of this research in a comprehensive way, making it accessible to both scholars and practitioners. The Handbook will present the debates over feminist governance, the role of insiders and outsiders, transnational networks, ‘autonomous women’s movements’ and international and regional norm transmission, as well as introducing state-of-the-art feminist governance expertise and toolkits. While explicating the role of feminist expertise in, for example, distributional analysis of budget impacts, we also explore the way feminist governance innovation has led to more inclusive forms of consultation so that the lived experience of diverse communities of women can inform policymaking. We hope that the comprehensive nature of the Handbook facilitates the work of practitioners, providing examples of what has been achieved by feminist governance and how it has been introduced in a wide variety of institutions across different regional contexts. For scholars of feminist governance we hope that the summary and analysis of past work provides a resource for current scholarship as well as marking potential avenues for future research. Defining this new field of feminist governance and indicating its scope has been an exciting part of this project. The ideas encapsulated in the concept of feminist governance had their origins in the organisational philosophy of the women’s movements of the 1970s. Feminist governance encompasses feminist institutions, norms and ideas as well as the work that feminists have done within broader political institutions and governance networks at national, subnational and transnational levels. In considering the transnational level, we draw attention to the significance of regional institutions as a site of feminist innovation supported by regional advocacy networks. But to return to origins, the ‘second wave’ of the women’s movement created institutions explicitly designed in accordance with non-hierarchical principles and consensus decision-making. Hierarchy was seen as a masculine principle that would only perpetuate 1

2  Handbook of feminist governance women’s subordination. In the 1970s feminists took these ways of organising into a range of social movements, including the environment movement, as well as into the new women’s services born of the women’s movement. As a joke had it at the time, Q: ‘How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb? A: Only one, but the chair has to rotate.’ In women’s services such as refuges and rape crisis centres, full collectivism tended to give way to hybrid forms of organising in response to pressures from government or donor funders and sometimes from workers themselves. The legacy of women’s movement origins was, however, a commitment to holistic and inclusive forms of management and service provision. At the same time, feminists were entering government, hoping to change not only the policy outcomes ‘but also the policy processes and the means of delivering these outcomes, as part of a more general redistribution of power in society’ (Sawer and Groves, 1994: 9). While insiders had to make compromises with hierarchy, other gains were made, in part thanks to the feminist policy networks and communities that engage with institutions of transnational governance. In this case, feminist governance may be seen both in the organisational styles of feminist advocacy networks and in the adoption and implementation by institutions of policies directed towards achieving gender equality. While the term ‘feminist’ is not explicitly used in the platforms of intergovernmental organisations such as the United Nations (UN), the term ‘gender’, drawn from feminist theory, becomes prominent from the 1980s (Charlesworth and Chinkin, 2013: 47). We say more below about the terms in which gender-equality policies are couched; here we concentrate on the evolution of feminist institution-building over time. Increasingly, government bureaucracies, parliaments and international organisations are adopting feminist principles such as promoting norms of gender equality, applying a gender lens to policies and consulting with diverse communities of women. Such norms are reinforced through transnational monitoring, reporting and ranking of gender equality policy implementation and through pressure exerted by women’s movements outside the state. Nonetheless, feminist institution-building remains precarious and there is wide variation in the degree to which feminist governance has been mainstreamed within governance institutions, in how it is incorporated into day-to-day operations, and even in what ‘mainstreaming’ means in practice across varying institutional locations. Our Handbook examines feminist governance and the institutionalising of feminist values, rather than gender or even the ‘gender of governance’ (Brush, 2003). Nonetheless, overlaps can be seen from the introduction to a sister handbook, Gender in World Politics: ‘Today gender is slowly, yet surely, being mainstreamed into the day-to-day operations of all major international institutions, in regional and national policymaking bodies and development organizations and in legislatures the world over’ (Steans and Tepe-Belfrage, 2016: 1). While Gender in World Politics provides an impressive overview of gender research in international relations, others have focused more closely on the feminist strategies deployed through international governance institutions. Gülay Caglar, Elisabeth Prügl and Susanne Zwingel suggest that these strategies can be roughly divided into two categories: on the one hand, legal and normative strategies to embed women’s rights and gender equality in international discourse; on the other, gender mainstreaming to operationalise these norms within organisations and policymaking. They see the legitimising of gender expertise as an important if contested strategy for challenging masculine state institutions by anchoring ‘a substantial understanding of gender within organizational practice’ (Caglar et al., 2013: 286). Because our own focus is on the innovations that feminism has contributed to governance more generally, we have cast our net widely, covering how feminists organise themselves as

Introduction  3 well as the changes introduced into political institutions. This Handbook is focused on the period from the 1970s, when feminist organising principles became more explicitly elaborated, but we do provide a timeline, showing the development of gender equality norms at international and regional levels from the late 19th century onwards. Our Handbook encompasses five categories of feminist governance: ● feminist institutions consciously designed in accordance with non-hierarchical feminist values, like women’s services in the 1970s onwards ● the operationalising of these values in feminist networks engaging with public policy, including both domestic and transnational advocacy networks ● feminist institution-building and other feminist work within broader political institutions such as bureaucracies and parliaments ● expression of feminist values through the adoption and implementation by broader political institutions of policies and forms of consultation directed towards achieving gender equality or gender+ equality1 ● soft regulation involved in transnational monitoring, reporting and ranking of gender equality policy implementation. These categories of feminist governance are discussed further below, where we introduce the themes of each part of the Handbook. Meanwhile, we shall touch lightly on how our work relates to previous work in the field. Because we focus on feminist contributions to governance, whether in the field of values and practices or more formal policy and institutional design, our scope is somewhat different to those who have focused on ‘governance feminism’. Janet Halley, in her important work on governance feminism, conceptualises it as a form of feminism that engages with the state and is acceptable to power holders. Indeed, she sees governance feminism as providing a passport to certain state or international jobs. Hence, she distinguishes it from feminist struggles to ‘prefigure emancipation in the life of feminist organizations’ (Halley, 2018: xiii), whereas we see the prefigurative design of feminist organisations as a major contribution to governance. Halley calls for a clear-sighted recognition of the compromises inherent in governance feminism and the mistakes that have been made, as well as the successes. While she highlights the moral complexities that come with policy influence, her primary target is the form taken by gender equality projects under the influence of neoliberalism. While we take on board the need to be clear-sighted about the issues involved in engagement with state or corporate power, our focus is more on feminist contributions to governance theory and practice, both inside and outside the state. Nonetheless, the influence of neoliberalism, referring to a shift away from the social liberal conception of the state as a vehicle of social justice towards more marketised models of the state, is a continuous theme of the Handbook. Concepts of feminist governance took hold when Keynesian social liberalism was a dominant paradigm and are more difficult to reconcile with the pursuit of market freedoms. While feminist governance involved a revolution of rising expectations, it was met by a neoliberal counter-revolution lowering expectations of what governments could do and indeed questioning the very concept of social justice. In this new context, the discursive strategies of femocrats had to change if they were to have any policy influence, emphasising the ‘business case’ for gender equality rather than social justice. For example, Australia led the way with studies of the economic costs of violence against women from the late 1980s, soon followed by Canada (Day et al., 2005). And, as we

4  Handbook of feminist governance shall see, it is not only neoliberal compromises that are affecting feminist governance but also the more explicit threats arising from radical right populism. To return to the governance research on which we draw, our project builds on the path-breaking 15-year project led by Amy Mazur and Dorothy McBride and the Research Network on Gender Politics and the State (RNGS). The RNGS project undertook a large-scale comparative examination of the role of women’s policy agencies in providing women’s movements with access to the policy process (McBride and Mazur, 2010). It assessed the extent to which women’s policy agencies served to transmit into government the policy frames and policy demands arising from women’s movements. Its focus was the factors that enabled such successful mediation, rather than the nature of the governance innovation involved both inside and outside formal political institutions. Its focus