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 was also comparative, rather than seeking to map the evolution of feminist governance in its multiple manifestations. The evolution of feminist governance over time is highlighted in the chronology of developments at international and regional levels that accompanies this Introduction. This timeline shows the increasing significance of transnational forms of governance and the space they have provided for feminist agendas. It runs from the first international congress of women in 1878 to the 2020 OECD meeting on gender governance and coronavirus, and illustrates the spread of feminist engagement into the new transnational governance sectors that feature in the Handbook. So, our project on feminist governance includes but extends beyond the subjects of feminist engagement with the state or ‘state feminism’. As noted, it includes the feminist organisational principles inspiring the processes and design of women’s services and advocacy organisations, whether involving full collectivity or hybrid forms. It looks at the evolution of feminist organisational philosophy within changing governance contexts. One change is the increased complexity of policymaking in the ‘multilevel global policy arena’, introducing a new demand for specialised feminist policy expertise rather than ‘feminist ideals of horizontal, non-hierarchical and loose organizing’ (van der Vleuten et al., 2014: 58). Another aspect of the changing context already mentioned is the emergence of right-wing populism adding to religious mobilisations against ‘gender ideology’. In the mid-1990s, coordinated opposition to feminist policy influence emerged in different parts of the world and transnationally. The concept of gender became a particular target – the idea of gender as a social construct was seen as undermining traditional family values and the natural complementarity of men and women. Feminists were perceived to have achieved undue influence in governance, particularly within international and regional governance bodies that were imposing alien values on nation states. Populist movements appealed to a constituency of men who perceived themselves as having lost status and power thanks to the influence of cosmopolitan elites and feminists (Verloo, 2018). One aspect of the work of these cosmopolitan elites was the ‘soft regulation’ that is an increasingly significant aspect of international governance. Soft regulation reinforces norms but does not involve legal sanctions for non-compliance. It encompasses the standards, codes of conduct, rankings, handbooks and toolkits produced by transnational standard-setting bodies. Such exchanges of good practice and benchmarking have become intrinsic to the dissemination of feminist governance innovation, from electoral gender quotas to gender-responsive budgeting. Apart from the European Union (EU), the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) are good examples of transnational standard-setting institutions that disseminate such innovations. Feminist insiders

Introduction  5 in these bodies have helped develop these standards, which can then become a routinised part of international or regional governance (True, 2008). One of the more visible aspects of soft regulation is the role of dialogues around the mandated reporting on implementation of international treaties such as the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Such dialogues with the treaty monitoring body involve both government and civil society actors, and, in the case of CEDAW, can also involve parliamentary actors. The CEDAW Committee is the only UN treaty body to have adopted a policy of cooperation with parliaments. However, the dissemination of gender equality norms and soft regulation does not only take place through international governance institutions and advocacy networks. Regional institutions have a particular significance in norm diffusion and peer review, making them a focus for feminist engagement (Roggeband et al., 2020). The regional institution best known for its role in promoting gender equality norms both within and beyond its borders is the EU. However, this may be a matter of degree rather than of kind and other regional institutions have also been important sites of feminist innovation, including the Organization of American States, Mercosur, the African Union, the Southern African Development Community, the Pacific Islands Forum and, to a lesser extent, the Association of South-East Asian States (see van der Vleuten et al., 2014). Drawing attention to the differing forms of feminist engagement with institutions of regional governance is part of the mission of this Handbook. The extensive feminist norm work in institutions of international and regional governance is now contested in a coordinated way, for example by the countries that belong to the Group of Friends of the Family. These successful ‘norm-spoiling’ efforts led to the decision by feminist insiders in the UN that to hold a fifth World Conference on Women would be too risky and result in the erosion of women’s rights (Goetz, 2020: 169).

HANDBOOK ORGANISATION The Handbook is organised into five major parts, followed by the timeline. The parts are as follows. Part I: Theoretical Perspectives The Handbook begins with a section exploring theoretical concepts related to feminist governance more generally, setting the stage for the later sections of the book. Each chapter in Part I introduces a major existing concept, providing theoretical discussions about how it relates to our concept of feminist governance. Chapter 2 explores how gender influences power relationships and how feminist theorising and organising led to a set of organising principles that embody feminist governance. Chapter 3 discusses how the methodology of feminist institutionalism provides insights into feminist governance and examines a number of feminist political institutions that contribute to feminist governance. It focuses specifically on the factors that influence how feminist governance develops and how it changes. The question of the appropriate connection between feminists and the state has been debated for many years. Chapter 4 utilises five different feminist theoretical perspectives on the state

6  Handbook of feminist governance in analysing how the state is gendered, the ways that feminists can and should approach the state, and the implications of these questions for feminist governance. In so doing, the chapter provides an overview of the ways that the state is gendered and how these affect the opportunities for feminist governance. Similarly, Chapter 5 offers an overview of the concept of feminist insider activism, examining existing work on the concept of insiders, and providing a summary definition while discussing the implications for feminist governance. The relationship between feminist governance and multilevel governance, particularly the ways in which institutional arrangements connecting international, national, regional and local governments affect and are affected by feminist movements and their representation, is examined in Chapter 6. Through careful analysis, the authors reveal ways feminists can take advantage of multilevel governance to effect change; they also demonstrate the importance of paying attention to the mediating actors like political parties as well as anti-feminist and conservative movements. A central concept running through the Handbook is the importance of intersectionality and multicultural approaches in understanding feminist governance. Chapter 7 discusses the importance of intersectionality and the degree to which intersectional analyses and policies are often lacking in existing forms of feminist governance. It provides concrete suggestions for increasing intersectional perspectives within feminist governance including the necessity of incorporating intersectional praxis as the foundation of feminist activism and policy analysis. The final chapter in Part I explores the methods utilised by feminist governance scholars, examining the advantages and disadvantages of different methods. In addition to echoing the need for greater use of intersectionality, the author also demonstrates the importance of paying attention to researchers’ positionality and methods in feminist scholarship and praxis. Part II: Evolving Institutions Part II of the Handbook covers the differing ways that concepts of feminist governance have been institutionalised. The authors of Chapter 9, who have all been involved in the work of ‘movement building’, trace the evolution of institutions of feminist governance in the context of both advocacy and service delivery. They start with the ‘pursuit of collectivity’ by women’s services in the 1970s and continue with collective reflections on both the structures and norms underpinning feminist organising. These range from practices of shared leadership to the reframing of time to accommodate feminist process and intergenerational goals. This story is followed in Chapter 10 by tracking the parallel development of women’s policy machinery within government and the promotion of such machinery through the UN. This chapter looks at how ‘national machineries’ were adopted both in OECD countries and in emerging economies, the possibilities and pitfalls revealed over time, and how feminist governance is affected by the new political polarisation over gender equality. From the 1980s, transnational bodies also helped disseminate a new development within feminist governance – gender-responsive budgeting. Chapter 11 is devoted to the diverse practices of gender-responsive budgeting that have emerged inside and outside government, showing how feminist values can be blunted in the process. Parliament also became an increased focus in the 1990s and attention turned to quotas and other means of increasing women’s legislative recruitment. These are the subject of Chapter 12, which surveys and assesses the diverse strategies devised to pursue this goal, ranging from electoral gender quotas to conditional public funding and training programmes.

Introduction  7 Increased numbers of women legislators in turn led to initiatives to increase the responsiveness of parliaments to women. Chapter 13 deals with the range of specialised parliamentary bodies created to apply a gender lens to policy and oversee gender mainstreaming. It covers the effectiveness of such bodies and the extent to which they can provide an alternative reference point to traditional parliamentary norms. It makes clear they are not the only conduits of feminist policy influence, which can also manifest itself around the Cabinet table and in ministers’ offices. By the 21st century, there were also new initiatives at both transnational and national levels to address issues arising for women in parliament as a workplace, whether as elected politicians or as staff. The authors of Chapter 14 bring first-hand experience to bear on the development and dissemination of the concept of ‘gender-sensitive’ parliaments. They also reflect on the nature of the iterative dialogue between academics and practitioners involved in feminist governance. The final chapter of Part II deals with the norm work involved in provision of tool kits and handbooks for the implementation of international and regional gender equality agreements. While normative frameworks have received much attention, less has been paid to the guidelines and toolkits through which they are operationalised. The authors of Chapter 15, who have both been involved in such norm work within intergovernmental and standard-setting bodies, argue that it is integral to the diffusion of feminist governance. Part III: International Relations and Global Governance Part III of the Handbook focuses on feminist governance in international relations and global and regional governance. Importantly, it introduces feminist foreign policy as an emerging movement attempting to transform foreign policy and global governance. Chapter 16 argues that feminist foreign policy emerged as an innovation from inside governments and has since spread across governments and spurned a transnational epistemic network and movement promoting feminist principles and practices in foreign policy. How FFP, as it has been called, is promoted and legitimised both by states and projected outwards through multilateral institutions and international governance is addressed in this chapter. Questions of which actors are most important and the role of leadership in feminist governance in international relations and global governance are a strong theme of all chapters in Part III. Two chapters, in particular, explore in depth the leadership provided by transnational feminist networks and the policy entrepreneurship of UN Women since its creation in 2010. Chapter 22 on the transnational feminist networks (TFN) built by civil society and women’s movements shows how they have engaged with governments and global governance institutions for decades now through research, lobbying, advocacy and action to influence policymaking from economic to security policy: and from policies on violence against women to policies on care work. TFNs have benefited from the UN-led global women’s rights agenda while also contributing to its expansion and depth; the significant political constraints they face are highlighted by the current Covid-19 pandemic crisis. Chapter 19 complements this story of feminist governance at the global level by documenting UN Women’s role in promoting greater accountability and accessibility, and support for a feminist agenda across the UN system. Notably, UN Women has succeeded in framing global issues from a gender equality perspective and monitoring gender equality data, policies and processes, in part enabled by engagement with feminist civil society actors.

8  Handbook of feminist governance Chapters in this part of the Handbook examine feminist innovations across different domains of global governance: foreign policy, security, climate change, health, peacebuilding, aid and trade policy. They analyse and explain the emergence of feminist norms and trace their implementation and practice in each of these domains. These domains also reflect major challenges for global governance – such as how is it possible to govern in the context of a pandemic that threatens the lives of every individual or in the context of climate change that promises devastating consequences for our planet in a world of divided, sovereign states? How is it possible to mobilise an equitable response to these challenges within and across vastly different governments? And what is the contribution of feminist principles, practices and networks in addressing these fundamental challenges affecting all levels of governance? Several chapters focus on feminist governance in particular international institutions within each domain, such as the World Health Organization, the UN Security Council, UN Peacebuilding Fund, UN Women, the World Trade Organization, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the World Bank. These chapters ask how far, and in what ways, feminist norms have been adapted, contested and implemented in light of geopolitical, bureaucratic and masculine power dynamics – the latter being important since such global institutions have until recently been elite-male dominated. For example, Chapter 17 asks what feminist governance looks like in the World Health Organization (WHO). WHO is the leading global health institution and technical agency providing guidance on health emergency response, and deference to state approval is the guiding principle. State power is a major barrier to feminist governance in this domain, but the Covid-19 pandemic has made this stance with regard to gender inequality increasingly untenable. Chapter 21 on climate change illustrates further challenges with instituting feminist governance at the global level. This chapter analyses the disconnect between ‘technical expertise’ reproduced in global governance where climate change is framed both as a security and scientific issue, and women’s everyday knowledge. The very narrow and still male-centric model of knowledge production and validation leads to piecemeal policy improvements that fail to reach the most vulnerable and climate-risk-exposed populations. Taken together, the chapters in Part III cover a range of relatively new actors and new tools of feminist governance. They include: the growth of new transnational feminist networks; the emergence and consolidation of feminist local and global peacebuilding expertise explored in Chapter 18; new feminist methodologies and technical tools for analysing trade agreements and their gender impacts critically reviewed in Chapter 20; the spaces opened up for broader civil society engagement and representation through feminist engagement with the typically closed-door UN Security Council explored in Chapter 19; and the evolution of UN Women as the powerhouse for feminist policymaking at the UN (Chapter 23). Part IV: The European Union and Feminist Governance Part IV of the Handbook maps the ways in which the EU can be seen as a progressive actor for gender equality and feminist governance, including the presence of specialised bodies within its institutions, the centrality of gender mainstreaming and the role of civil society actors. At the same time, the chapters illustrate shortcomings and backlash against feminist governance and gender equality within the EU. Chapter 24 analyses the European Parliament, the most democratic and gender equal of EU institutions, by focusing on its feminist governance structures. The chapter covers the key

Introduction  9 parliamentary structures for feminist governance including gender mainstreaming and the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM Committee). However, it also discusses the ways in which the anti-gender backlash has challenged the progressive language and politics of gender equality within the parliament. Chapter 25 provides a detailed account of the ways in which gender equality policy of the EU has been transformed over the past decades. The author suggests that whilst the policy used to be highly professionalised and institutionalised, with fairly strong feminist governance structures in different institutions of the EU, over the last decade it has been dismantled. The author argues that feminist governance is under threat in the EU. Chapter 26 provides one explanation for the weakening position of gender equality. The chapter analyses the role of economisation of gender equality in the EU and provides an account of the important ways in which economic values have been strengthened and neoliberal economic policies have taken over progressive gender policy. The author maps the actors, processes and knowledge that have contributed to the neoliberal economisation of the EU’s gender equality policy. Two chapters in Part IV focus on the role of civil society as an important facet of feminist governance. Chapter 27 is built around the concept of the feminist velvet triangle, a term coined originally by Alison Woodward (2004) to capture the ways in which feminist movements, bureaucrats within the EU and academic experts cooperated on progressive gender policy. The chapter analyses the history and formal rules of civil society participation in policymaking in the EU and examines the current situation and challenges to these feminist alliances. Chapter 28 analyses intersectional feminist activisms in the EU. Whilst the political phenomenon is not new, intersectional feminist activism has remained largely invisible in gender and EU scholarship. The author analyses how Black feminists, Afrofeminists and Romani feminists create new forms of political resistance in contemporary Europe. The chapter poses a number of important questions to feminist governance debates: who are the feminists participating in feminist governance; which mechanisms of invisibilisation are in place; which concepts – including intersectionality – need to be used in theory and practice to overcome these exclusions? The final chapter of Part IV reaches beyond the European Union to discuss a key issue in feminist governance, namely that of gender violence and violence against women. It analyses a major feminist success in the field of violence policy, the so-called Istanbul Convention adopted by the Council of Europe (2011). Chapter 29 shows how this feminist governance achievement has become the focal point of opposition against gender and gender equality in Europe. Part V: Other Regional Perspectives on Feminist Governance Part V explores regional innovations in feminist governance and how regional institutions have become a key site for such innovation. Differing contexts, differing political opportunity structures and differing feminist perspectives affect the regional variation in forms taken by feminist governance. For example, Chapter 30 explores how regional integration practices culminating in the creation of the African Union have provided new entry points for feminist activism. It highlights both endogenous and exogenous factors involved, including African women’s organising, new indigenous legal instruments and global normative frameworks like the Women, Peace and Security agenda.

10  Handbook of feminist governance Regional perspectives from Asia include a chapter on feminist institution-building in two major East Asian countries: Japan and South Korea. Chapter 31 argues that the combined work of feminist insiders and outsiders has shaped gradual policy changes but there are key challenges to the furthering of feminist governance. A second regional perspective from Asia is provided by Chapter 32, comparing the feminist governance component of a regional intergovernmental organisation (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations or ASEAN) with a regional civil society organisation (the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development). This chapter chronicles the growth of feminist advocacy, networks and governance within these regional institutions providing perspectives on feminist governance within the Asia-Pacific region. Chapter 33 presents theoretical and methodological approaches to the relationship between feminist movements and the state in Latin America. The distinctive forms taken by feminist governance in this region have included legislated candidate quotas and intersectional parity clauses in local politics. The chapter also explores the possibilities for feminist governance within states mired in conflict and violence. Chapter 34 reflects on the effects of feminist governance and its gains and losses in Canada, the USA and Mexico. It uses Canada as a case study to evaluate the implementation of gender-based analysis (GBA) as a form of feminist governance, and the challenges posed by multilevel governance, free-trade agreements and neoliberal regimes. Turning to the Pacific Islands, Chapter 35 examines how regionalism has contributed to collective identity, and the role of regional civil society networks in the development of gender equality initiatives such as the Regional Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security adopted by the Pacific Islands Forum in 2012. It shows that while gender equality has been formally adopted on to the regional political agenda, activists identify and contest a failure to challenge underlying development paradigms. This uneasy relationship between feminist governance and economic paradigms that devalue and discount social reproduction and the care economy is a general theme of this volume. It is particularly evident in the transnational institutions that have been vectors of both gender equality and marketisation agendas, often serving to narrow the ambit of gender equality to equal workforce participation. Nonetheless, as the Handbook shows, there has been a wealth of feminist contributions to governance innovation, inspiring a research literature that highlights the links between theory and practice while being reflexive about the relationship between researchers and practitioners. The chapters of the Handbook illustrate the wide range of issues at stake when researching and doing feminist governance. The authors provide rich material across different continents on practices and institutions of feminist governance; transformation and successes, but also failures and backlashes and something in between, where feminist governance is strongly shaped not only by feminist struggles but also by political contexts, fortunes and crises. Like all crises, the recent Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the strengths and the weaknesses, the challenges and the gaps in feminist governance at all levels – local, national, regional and global. Harnessing years of feminist governance work including knowledge-building efforts, capacity-building of advocacy coalitions and honing of policy entrepreneurship skills, many feminist governance actors took advantage of the Covid pandemic as a window of opportunity to promote greater policy awareness of the problem of violence against women. The

Introduction  11 heightened nature of the problem during the pandemic was used to spur, secure and diffuse feminist policy change. UN Women, in particular, took on a role as policy entrepreneur, calling violence against women the ‘shadow pandemic’ and launching a global campaign for policy changes to prevent and end violence against women, especially in homes during Covid restrictions (UN Women, 2020). This Handbook draws on research showing how feminist governance networks in international governmental organisations, as well as advocacy organisations, have supported global policy innovation diffusion in recent decades (Htun and Weldon, 2012; Simmons and Elkins, 2004; True and Mintrom, 2001). Covid provided a ‘policy window’ to further advance this innovation (Mintrom and True, 2022). Feminist research and advocacy in 2020–21 influenced policymaking by assembling evidence and documenting the impacts of Covid-19 on violence against women, by promoting readily implementable short-term solutions as well as gender-sensitive policy responses for medium- and longer-term post-Covid recovery (Elomäki and Kantola, 2022). Innovations included the use of new remote technologies and new agencies such as pharmacies and supermarkets to access victims and survivors and programmes targeted at perpetrators and bystanders. These policy innovations and good practices were promoted, shared and implemented by already established feminist governance networks across the world. However, while the Covid-19 crisis opened some policy windows, it closed off others. Women’s economic insecurity has proved difficult to address, despite women’s disproportionate loss of incomes and jobs and the return in some countries of gender-responsive budgeting (McKinsey Global Institute, 2020). Gender inequalities have widened globally due to the intensification of women’s unpaid labour in elder care, home schooling and household provision during the pandemic and economic stimulus packages have neglected female-dominated sectors of the labour market. Thus far there have been few successful feminist policy responses (Turquet et al., 2021). While the pandemic raised awareness of the centrality of the care economy, the undervaluing of the paid work of front-line workers continued. Gender budgeting could show how women were disadvantaged by fiscal policy but was less successful in shifting neoliberal commitments to lower taxes rather than increasing social expenditure. There is far more work to be done in re-thinking governance and policy guided by feminist principles – using feminist tools and expertise and drawing on feminist movements to address systemic inequalities. Rather than concluding the debate on feminist governance we very much hope that the Handbook prompts more research into these crucial questions across different contexts and using different theoretical and methodological approaches. We trust that these reflections will be useful to feminist practice and that the owl of Minerva can spread its wings well before the coming of the dusk.

NOTE 1. In the early 21st century the term gender+ equality was introduced to signal that gender equality policies need to encompass intersecting attributes and forms of disadvantage. In Canada the term gender-based analysis (GBA) was similarly renamed GBA+ in 2011 to indicate that when a gender lens was applied to policy the intersection of other identities would be taken into account.

12  Handbook of feminist governance

REFERENCES Brush, Lisa D. (2003) Gender and Governance, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Caglar, Gülay, Elisabeth Prügl and Susanne Zwingel (2013) Feminist Strategies in International Governance, London: Routledge. Charlesworth, Hilary and Christine Chinkin (2013) ‘The New United Nations “Gender Architecture”: A Room with a View?’, Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law 17: 1–60. Day, Tanis, Katherine McKenna and Audra Bowlus (2005) The Economic Costs of Violence against Women: An Evaluation of the Literature, Division for the Advancement of Women, United Nations. https://​www​.un​.org/​womenwatch/​daw/​vaw/​expert​%20brief​%20costs​.pdf. Elomäki, Anna and Johanna Kantola (2022) ‘Feminist Governance in the European Parliament: The Political Struggle over the Inclusion of Gender in the EU’s Covid-19 Response’, Politics & Gender: 1–22. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1017/​S1743923X21000544. Goetz, Anne Marie (2020) ‘The New Competition in Multilateral Norm-Setting: Transnational Feminists and the Illiberal Backlash’, Daedalus 149(1): 160–79. Halley, Janet (2018) ‘Preface: Introducing Governance Feminism’. In Janet Hally, Prabha Kotiswaran, Rachel Rebouché and Hila Shamir, Governance Feminism: An Introduction, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ix–xxi. Htun, Mala and S. Laurel Weldon (2012) ‘The Civic Origins of Progressive Policy Change: Combating Violence against Women in Global Perspective, 1975–2005’, American Political Science Review 106(3): 548–69. McBride, Dorothy E. and Amy G. Mazur (2010) The Politics of State Feminism: Innovation in Comparative Research [with the participation of Joni Lovenduski, Joyce Outshoorn, Birgit Sauer and Marila Guadagnini], Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. McKinsey Global Institute (2020) ‘COVID-19 and Gender Equality: Countering the Regressive Effects’. https://​www​.mckinsey​.com/​featured​-insights/​future​-of​-work/​covid​-19​-and​-gender​-equality​ -countering​-the​-regressive​-effects​#. Mintrom, Michael and Jacqui True (2022) ‘COVID-19 as a Policy Window: Policy Entrepreneurs Responding to Violence Against Women’, Policy and Society 41(1): 143–54. Roggeband, Conny, Anna van der Vleuten and Anouka van Eerdewijk (2020) ‘Feminist Engagement with Gender Equality in Regional Governance’. In Lars Engberg Pedersen, Adam Fejerskov and Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde (eds), Rethinking Gender Equality in Global Governance: The Delusion of Norm Diffusion, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 71–95. Sawer, Marian and Abigail Groves (1994) Working from Inside: Twenty Years of the Office of the Status of Women, Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. Simmons, Beth A. and Zakhary Elkins (2004) ‘The Globalization of Liberalization: Policy Diffusion in the International Political Economy’, American Political Science Review 98(1): 171–89. Steans, Jill and Daniela Tepe-Belfrage (2016) ‘Introduction’. In Jill Steans and Daniela Tepe-Belfrage (eds), Handbook on Gender in World Politics, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1–4. True, Jacqui (2008) ‘Gender Specialists and Global Governance: New Forms of Women’s Movement Mobilisation?’. In Sandra Grey and Marian Sawer (eds), Women’s Movements: Flourishing or in Abeyance? London: Routledge, 91–104. True, Jacqui and Michael Mintrom (2001) ‘Transnational Networks and Policy Diffusion: The Case of Gender Mainstreaming’, International Studies Quarterly 45(1): 27–57. Turquet, Laura, Silke Staab and Constanza Tabbush (2021) ‘Where COVID 19 Leaves Gender Equality: Evaluating Responses to the Pandemic Through the Gender Lens’, Apolitical, 11 June. https://​ apolitical​.co/​solution​-articles/​en/​where​-covid​-19​-leaves​-gender​-equality​-2. UN Women (2020) ‘Covid-19 and Violence Against Women: Addressing the Shadow Pandemic. https://​ www​.unwomen​.org/​-/​media/​headquarters/​attachments/​sections/​library/​publications/​2020/​policy​ -brief​-covid​-19​-and​-violence​-against​-women​-and​-girls​-en​.pdf​?la​=​en​&​vs​=​640. van der Vleuten, Anna, Anouka van Eerdewijk and Conny Roggeband (2014) Gender Equality Norms in Regional Governance: Transnational Dynamics in Europe, South America and Southern Africa, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Introduction  13 Verloo, Mieke (ed.) (2018) Varieties of Opposition to Gender Equality in Europe, New York and London: Routledge. Woodward, Alison E. (2004) ‘Building Velvet Triangles: Gender and Informal Governance’. In Thomas Christiansen and Simona Piattoni (eds), Informal Governance and the European Union, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 76–93.

Timeline of feminist governance Renee O’Shanassy

This timeline seeks to provide an overview of developments in feminist governance with an emphasis on the development of normative and policy regimes at international and regional levels, particularly the accelerating progress made during and following the United Nations (UN) Decade for Women (1976–85). For this purpose, feminist governance is defined as the adoption and implementation of policies directed towards achieving gender equality, including: ● the creation of international law, institutions, and norms, including policies and platforms ● the development and dissemination of mechanisms such as gender mainstreaming and gender responsive budgeting Although the agenda-setting role of civil society organisations is acknowledged, primacy is given here to the role of the United Nations (UN), along with other transnational and regional sources of governance norms. Thanks to feminist advocacy, from the beginning in 1945, the UN Charter recognised the equal rights of men and women, including as UN employees (Article 8).

BOX 1.1 UN CONVENTIONS AND DECLARATIONS ON WOMEN’S HUMAN RIGHTS 1948: Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms that the rights and freedoms it contains apply to everyone without distinction, including sex 1952: Convention on the Political Rights of Women 1957: Convention on the Nationality of Married Women 1962: Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriage 1966: International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights form the International Bill of Human Rights 1967: Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women 1979: Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women The principal and original UN organ responsible for advancing the status of women is the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) established by the Economic and Social Council in 1946 and an independent functional commission from 1947. It has been integral in drafting 14

Timeline of feminist governance  15 the conventions on women that preceded the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), providing a forum for advocacy, action and coordination. It was also responsible for the coordination of four UN world conferences on women.

BOX 1.2 UN WORLD CONFERENCES ON WOMEN • • • •

Mexico City (1975) Copenhagen (1980) Nairobi (1985) Beijing (1995)

At the fourth UN women’s conference, the Beijing Platform for Action was adopted by 189 countries. It covers 12 critical areas, including gender mainstreaming and special measures to increase women’s participation in public decision-making. The Beijing Platform established a series of five-yearly reviews. Considerable effort has been put into protecting its normative gains, including in highly contested areas such as reproductive rights.

BOX 1.3 UN SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTIONS ON WOMEN, PEACE AND SECURITY The UN Security Council passes a series of resolutions on gender-based violence, the role of women and the gender dimensions of peace processes, conflict resolution, peacekeeping and peacebuilding. • • • • • • • • • •

Resolution 1325 (2000) Resolution 1820 (2009) Resolution 1888 (2009) Resolution 1889 (2010) Resolution 1960 (2011) Resolution 2106 (2013) Resolution 2122 (2013) Resolution 2242 (2015) Resolution 2467 (2019) Resolution 2493 (2019)

Following debates on UN reform, all arms of UN women’s machinery were brought together into a single organisation. In 2010, the General Assembly established UN Women – Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment, drawing together the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), the Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW), the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues, and the UN International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (UN-INSTRAW).

16  Handbook of feminist governance Internationally, the Millennium Development Goals in 2000 and the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 have sought to pursue gender goals and indicators. These sets of goals have influenced aid donors and recipients, but also mobilised implementing bodies of the UN and other international organisations and alliances, to adopt gender equality principles, gender mainstreaming and capacity building in their programming. This includes the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the European Union (EU), the Commonwealth, the Organization of American States (OAS), the African Union (AU), International IDEA and bilateral donors such as USAID, SIDA, NORAD, CIDA and DFAT. Development programming by these institutions and donors has played an important role in establishing standards and reporting frameworks for the integration of gender equality into the governance of member states and their development assistance programmes. Regional governance bodies such as the OAS, the European Union and the African Union have become increasingly important sites for the development, transmission and localisation of gender equality norms. The Commonwealth and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have also played a role in providing technical assistance and guidance in the development of both gender equality policy, and in development programming in service of gender equality goals.

Timeline of feminist governance  17 Table 1.1

Timeline of feminist governance

Pre-1900 1878

International Congress of Women first meets. Subsequent international meetings focus on suffrage and broader issues of women’s rights.

1910s 1911

International Women’s Day first celebrated.

1915

International Congress of Women (from which develops the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom) meets at the Hague and adopts 20 resolutions for ending the Great War, many similar to the later 14-point peace plan adopted by Woodrow Wilson.

1919

International Labour Organization (ILO) established. Two hundred women labour reformers from 19 countries and three continents attend the International Congress of Working Women to coincide with inaugural International Labour Conference. The ILO passes including the Night Work Convention and the Childbirth Convention. At the Paris Peace Conference: Women’s groups advocate for women’s presence and are granted limited participation in ‘women’s issues’. Women’s groups present ‘The Women’s Charter’ seeking to make woman’s nationality independent of her husband, demanding a ban on the trafficking of women and girls and that women be afforded the same labour rights as men.

1920s 1920

League of Nations established. Article VII of the Covenant ensures women have the right to work for the League on all levels, including in the Secretariat. However, progress on establishing a ‘women’s bureau’, facilitating equal pay, providing access to entrance exams or eliminating discrimination against married women is very limited.

1921 1928

ILO passes Lead Paint Convention. (Americas) The Sixth International Conference of American States establishes the Inter-American Commission of Women, the first inter-governmental agency with a mandate to ensure recognition of women’s human rights, with delegates from each member state.

1930s 1933

(Americas) Montevideo Pan-American Conference, the Equal Nationality Treaty, and the Equal Rights Treaty.

1937

The League of Nations establishes a Committee of Experts on the Legal Status of Women.

1940s 1944

An annex to the ILO Constitution affirms that all human beings, irrespective of race, creed or sex, have the right to pursue both their material well-being and their spiritual development in conditions of freedom and dignity, economic security and equal opportunity.

1945

United Nations Charter establishes the United Nations (UN). Among its purposes is to promote and encourage ‘fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion’. Women delegates successfully lobby for a reference to the equal rights of men and women in the Charter.

1946

The Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) is established as a subsidiary body of the Commission on Human Rights (CHR). The Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW) was first established as the Section on the Status of Women, Human Rights Division, Department of Social Affairs.

1947

CSW becomes an independent functional commission of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).

1948

UN General Assembly adopts the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, recognising universal inalienable rights and fundamental freedoms. (Americas) The Organization of American States (OAS) is established by Charter following International

1949

Conferences of American States. UN Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others. Establishment of the modern Commonwealth of Nations (‘the Commonwealth’).

1950s

18  Handbook of feminist governance 1952

UN Convention on the Political Rights of Women codifies a basic international standard for women’s political rights, including the right to vote, election to all publicly elected bodies and the holding of public office and exercise of public functions.

1957

UN Convention on the Nationality of Married Women. (Europe) European Economic Community established by treaty, which includes the principle that men and women should receive equal pay for equal work which becomes the basis of gender equality policies for the EU.

1960s 1960

(Americas) The OAS agrees on the establishment of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and notes the cooperative relationship with the Inter-American Commission of Women, amongst others.

1962

UN Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriages elaborates on Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which calls for full and free consent of both parties to a marriage and for states to specify a minimum age for marriage and to register marriages.

1963

Establishment of the Organisation of African Unity (precursor to the African Union). No mention of women,

1965

Establishment of UN Development Programme (UNDP) and Commonwealth Secretariat.

gender equality or the establishment of women’s machinery. 1966

Adoption of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

1967

General Assembly adopts a Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women amongst pressure from Soviet and Third World states and declares discrimination an offence against human dignity.

1970s 1972

Proposal for an International Women’s Year at CSW.

1974

General Assembly’s Declaration on the Protection of Women and Children in Emergency and Armed Conflict.

1975

World Conference of the International Women’s Year held in Mexico City. UNGA30 adopts Resolution 3520 proclaiming 1976–85 to be the United Nations Decade for Women. (Asia) First meeting of the ASEAN Standing Committee establishes the ASEAN Sub-Committee on Women (ASW), which has been responsible for the implementation of global plans of action.

1976

UNGA31 approves the programme for action for the Decade for Women and invites action from member states and UN bodies. UNIFEM established as a voluntary fund for the UN Decade for Women.

1979

The UN General Assembly adopts the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which defines the meaning of discrimination against women and establishes legal obligations for states parties to end discrimination. Establishment of the UN International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW).

1980s 1980

Second World Conference on Women held in Copenhagen.

1983

OECD DAC Guiding Principles to Aid Agencies for Supporting the Role of Women in Development.

1984

Creation of UNIFEM as an independent arm of the UNDP with an explicit mandate to promote the mainstreaming of gender issues across the full range of UN activities. Its mandate was expanded in 1986 when it became the UN development fund for women. World Bank includes its first explicit but not mandatory Women in Development guidelines in its Operations Manual.

1985

Third World Conference on Women held in Nairobi, which adopts a five-year action plan ‘Forward Looking Strategies for the advancement of women’ with movement being made on violence against women and the introduction of principles of gender mainstreaming. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) introduces a Women in Development Policy, which emphasised financing programmes and women as a special target group, including social infrastructure, agriculture, rural development and small-scale industries. First Commonwealth Women’s Affairs Ministers meeting, in which ministers considered ways to empower women’s machineries to ensure that government policies and programmes addressed the needs of women.

Timeline of feminist governance  19 1989

OECD DAC Policy Statement on Development Co-operation in the 1990s Guiding Principles for Women in Development.

1990s 1991

The Commonwealth agrees on the Harare Commonwealth Declaration which sets priorities for the 1990s and beyond with a strengthened emphasis on Commonwealth contribution to democracy, human rights and equality.

1992

The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development ‘the Rio Summit’ outcome document ‘Agenda 21’ recognises women as a major group of interest and integrates gender equality and women’s rights to environmental outcomes. The 1992 Dakar/Ngor Declaration on Population, Family and Sustainable Development stated, inter alia, that population policies and programmes should be part of sustainable development strategies. The IPU holds that democracy requires policy and legislation to be decided upon jointly by men and women with equal regard for each half of the population. Adopts a Plan of Action to ‘correct present imbalances’. (Europe) The EU signs the Maastricht Treaty. (Africa) Heads of state of countries throughout Southern Africa signed the Declaration and Treaty of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). OECD DAC The Development Assistance Manual which includes a section on Women in Development.

1993

The World Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna recognises violence against women as a human rights violation and calls for measures towards eliminating such forms of violence. The UN General Assembly adopts the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, which is the first international instrument to address and define forms of violence and laying out a framework for action globally. Radhika Coomaraswamy (Sri Lanka) is appointed as the first Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women.

1994

International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) outcome document ‘20-year ICPD Program of Action (Cairo Consensus)’ positions women’s empowerment at the centre of development and places the right of women and couples to control their own fertility at the centre of population policies and programmes. The concept and commitment to sexual rights and reproductive health (SHRH) is forged at this conference. (Americas) Inter-American Convention on The Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence Against Women.

1995

The United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women is held in September in Beijing. The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action is unanimously adopted by 189 countries, which outlines objectives and actions under 12 areas of concern to advance women’s rights. Every five years since, global reviews have taken place to evaluate progress and implementation gaps. (Europe) The Council of Europe establishes a Group of specialists on gender mainstreaming under the auspices of the Steering Committee for Equality between Women and Men. International IDEA is established and becomes an important civil society partner in the gender quota space. OECD DAC High Level Meeting adopts policy statement ‘Gender Equality: Moving Towards Sustainable, People-Centred Development’ which will serve as a strategic objective for development cooperation.

1996

(Europe) The EU commits to Gender Mainstreaming.

1997

UN Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women (OSAGI) established. ECOSOC adopts a resolution on gender mainstreaming. (Europe) Member states sign the Treaty of Amsterdam which reinforces the promotion of a high level of employment and equality between men and women as key objectives and includes an article committing the community to ‘aim to eliminate inequalities and to promote equality, between men and women’ in all its activities. (Africa) SADC Heads of State and Government sign the SADC Declaration on Gender and Development in September 1997, followed by its Addendum on the Prevention and Eradication of Violence against Women and Children in September 1998.

20  Handbook of feminist governance 1998

States agree to the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (OP-CEDAW), an international treaty which establishes complaint and inquiry mechanisms for CEDAW. The International Criminal Court is established. The court has substantive jurisdiction over sexual and gender-based violence and gender-based persecution, has gender-sensitive rules of procedure and evidence and emphasis on gender balance. (Europe) The Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers adopt a Recommendation on gender mainstreaming. (ASEAN) Declaration on the Advancement of Women in the ASEAN Region. OECD DAC Guidelines for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in Development Co-operation.

1999

(Africa) African Plan of Action to Accelerate the Implementation of the Dakar and Beijing Platforms for Action for the Advancement of Women. The Framework for the Integration of Women in APEC adopted and Ad Hoc Task Force for the Integration of Women in APEC appointed and endorsed by APEC Trade Ministers.

2000s 2000

UN Millennium Declaration adopted from which eight goals to be achieved by 2015 (the ‘Millennium Development Goals’ or MDGs) are derived: Goals 3 (Gender Equality) and 5 (Maternal Health) were specifically gender focused. The UN Security Council passes Resolution 1325 recognising that war impacts women differently and calls women to be a key part of the prevention, management and resolution of conflicts. Resolution 1325 has been subsequently supported by 1820, 1888, 1960, 2106 and 2122. Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (also referred to as the Trafficking Protocol or UN TIP Protocol) as a protocol to the Convention against Transnational Organised Crime is agreed. (Europe) The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights signed in 2000 reinforces the prohibition of discrimination and the obligation to ensure equality between women and men in all areas and releases Community Framework on Gender Equality (2001–05). (Africa) The Constitutive Act of the African Union is agreed. Article 4 (L) of the Constitutive Act of the African Union stipulates that the Union will function in accordance with the principle of gender equality. The African Union establishes a Women and Gender Development Directorate. (Americas) The Organization of American States adopt into their principal mandate Inter-American Program on Women’s Human Rights and Gender Equity and Equality (IAP). OECD DAC submits a report on implementing the DAC Gender Equality Goals to the United Nations Special Session ‘Women 2000: Gender Equality, Development and Peace for the 21st Century’.

2001

(Europe) EU signs the Treaty of Nice.

2003

African Union adopts The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, better known as the Maputo Protocol, which recognises the critical role of women in promoting inclusive development and calls for the AU ‘to ensure the effective participation of women in decision-making, particularly in the political, economic and socio-cultural areas’. ADB releases its Policy on Gender and Development, to replace its former Women in Development work (1985–96). International IDEA, Stockholm University and the IPU establish the Global Data Base of Quotas.

2004

(EU) the Congress agrees to Resolution 176 (2004) and Recommendation 148 (2004) on gender mainstreaming at local and regional level: a strategy to promote equality between women and men in cities and regions. (Africa) The African Union releases the ‘Solemn Declaration on Gender Equality in Africa’. (ASEAN) Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women in the ASEAN Region.

2005

(Africa) African Union agrees on a Charter on Women. ASEAN Work Plan for Women’s Advancement and Gender Equality (2005–10).

Timeline of feminist governance  21 2006

UN Chief Executives Board (UNCEB) establishes UN system-wide policy on gender equality and empowerment of women. The UN Secretary-General’s In-Depth Study on All Forms of Violence against Women is released, the first comprehensive report on the issue. High Level Panel releases ‘Delivering as One’ report identifies gender as a cross-cutting issue, proposing reform to accord women a stronger voice and recommended the establishment of a single body to deal with issues of gender. Secretary-General presented the report A/64/588, entitled Comprehensive Proposal for the Composite Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. ASEAN Work Plan to Operationalise the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (2006–10). The Commonwealth revises its conditions of membership and including a commitment to ‘equality of opportunity’.

2007

(Europe) EU signs the Treaty of Lisbon. (Africa) SADC Council of Ministers adopt the SADC Gender Policy.

2008

UN Security Council Resolution 1820 recognises that sexual violence can be categorised as a war crime, calls for protection from violence in refugee and displaced person camps and affirms the need for women’s full participation in peace building processes. (Africa) SADC Heads of State and Government signed and adopted the SADC Protocol on Gender and Development in August 2008, except for Botswana and Mauritius. (Americas) Statute of the Inter-American Commission of Women agreed which sets out the current objectives and functions of the Commission which includes the protection and promotion of women’s rights.

2009

(Africa) African Union gender policy released.

2010s 2010

General Assembly creates the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) to accelerate progress on meeting the needs of women and girls. This merges the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), the Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW), the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues, and the UN International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (UN-INSTRAW). The 15-year review of the Beijing Platform for Action. OECD launches its Gender Initiative that focuses beyond development. EU The European Commission adopts a Women’s Charter. African Union launches African Women’s Decade. ASEAN establishes the ASEAN Commission on the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Women (ACWC) and makes the Ha Noi Declaration on the Enhancement of the Welfare and Development of ASEAN Women and Children.

2011

UN Human Rights Council adopts the first UN resolution on sexual orientation and gender identity. The Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence became the second legally binding regional instrument on violence against women and girls but, unlike other regional agreements, it can be signed and ratified by any State. ASEAN ASW Work Plan (2011–15). The Commonwealth celebrates Commonwealth Day, with the theme of women as agents of change.

2012

UN General Assembly passes a resolution to ban female genital mutilation. UN-SWAP established, which serves as an accountability framework for gender equality and women’s empowerment across the UN system. OECD All on Board for Inclusive Growth initiative launched. IPU adopts Plan of Action for Gender-Sensitive Parliaments. G20 Leaders make the Los Cabos Declaration, which committed to tackling the barriers to women’s full economic and social participation and to expanding opportunities for women in their countries. Pacific Islands Forum Leaders’ Gender Equality Declaration is attached to the Forum Leaders Communique, including a commitment to the articles of CEDAW.

22  Handbook of feminist governance 2013

ASEAN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women and Elimination of Violence Against Children. ADB releases a Tool Kit on Gender Equality Results and Indicators and Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Operational Plan. The Commonwealth agrees on the Commonwealth Charter, which includes as a core value, a commitment to gender equality.

2014

G20 summit leaders pledge to reduce the gap in participation rates between men and women by 25 per cent by 2025. IFES releases Gender Equality and Election Management Bodies: a best Practices Guide.

2015

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are agreed, including standalone Goal Five on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment. OECD releases its Recommendation of the Council on Gender Equality in Public Life and a Toolkit for Gender Equality in Governance. The Secretary General of the OECD releases 21 FOR 21, which enumerates the ways in which improving gender equality and closing the gender gap will be a focus for the OECD in 2016–21. The African Union introduces Agenda 2063, which includes at Aspiration 6, a commitment to development that recognises women. UN Women releases the UN ‘Global Study’ of the 15-Year Implementation of Resolution 1325. Women 20 (W20) is established as an official G20 engagement group.

2016

The EU signs the Charter of Fundamental Rights which guarantees ‘Equality between women and men must be ensured in all areas, including employment, work and pay’. The EU adopts its Gender Action Plan (GAP) II 2016–20. ASEAN releases its Regional Plan of Action on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, ASEAN Regional Plan of Action on the Elimination of Violence Against Children and the ASEAN Committee on Women Work Plan 2016–20. The Commonwealth makes the Commonwealth Kigali Declaration to prevent and eliminate child, early and forced marriage in the Commonwealth. At the 11th Commonwealth Women Affairs Ministers’ meeting the communique sets out four priorities on gender equality: women’s economic empowerment, women in leadership, ending violence against women and girls and gender and climate change. On Commonwealth Day, it celebrates ‘an Inclusive Commonwealth’.

2017

The UN Secretary-General António Guterres launches a new System-wide Strategy on Gender Parity. EU agrees the 2017 European Consensus on Development which commits the EU and its member states to a strong gender focus in its development work. OECD releases The Pursuit of Gender Equality – An Uphill Battle, which discusses progress in gender equality in education, employment, entrepreneurship and public life. It notes overall slow progress. ASEAN Heads of Government Adopt Joint Statement on Promotion of Women, Peace and Security, and ASEAN releases the Declaration on the Gender-Responsive Implementation of the ASEAN Community Vision 2025 and Sustainable Development Goals. The Commonwealth releases the Commonwealth Secretariat Strategic Plan, notes three cross-cutting outcomes, of which Gender Mainstreaming is one.

2018

African Union releases its Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Strategy (2018–28). The Pacific Partnership to End Violence Against Women and Girls brings together governments, civil society organisations, communities and other partners to promote gender equality, prevent violence against women and girls (VAWG), and increase access to quality response services for survivors. G7 Advisory Group on Gender Equality established. The EU launches the Strategic Approach to the Women, Peace and Security agenda.

Timeline of feminist governance  23 2019

In preparation for CSW64 in 2020 and Beijing 25+ Platform for Action (Beijing+25) review, a series of national-level reviews of progress, regional 25-year review processes at regional intergovernmental meetings and parallel NGO forums are held. The 12th Commonwealth Women Affairs Ministers’ meeting focused on tracking progress on the four Commonwealth gender priorities by member states present, priorities for significant review years and released a technical paper on progress. The Commonwealth Secretariat released a Gender Equality Policy.

2020

The EU adopts the Gender Equality Strategy 2020–25 and the Gender Action Plan (GAP) III 2021–25. CSW64 is delivered at a small scale with a political declaration being made to commemorate Beijing 25+ due to the Covid-19 pandemic. OECD High-Level Conference on Ending Violence Against Women. UN Secretary-General releases policy brief: the impact of Covid-19 on women.

PART I THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

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

INTRODUCTION In this chapter, we trace the development of feminist organisational concepts and practices, drawing out ten distinct principles of governance. We begin by sketching feminist concepts of power and empowerment, before turning to a discussion of how feminist theory and practice have worked together to offer models of intersectional, postcolonial organising. These models aim to offset the distorting effect of power on deliberation and to counter the silencing and marginalisation of subaltern groups.

POLITICS, POWER AND EMPOWERMENT Traditional approaches to politics in political science emphasise distributive considerations, as in ‘who gets what, when, how’ (Lasswell, 1936) or the authoritative allocation of value (Easton, 1953). Feminist approaches to politics encompass not only these issues of distributive justice, but also questions of power and empowerment, with distinctive approaches to both concepts. Feminist understanding of power is rooted in the idea of gender, a constellation of institutions that defines categories of sex and identity. Gender systems assign bodies to these categories, creating social groups. A particular gender regime empowers and elevates some groups and characteristics and excludes and undercuts others. The gender systems in place in most of the world elevate categories, groups and characteristics associated with men and the masculine and devalue women, the feminine and other categories, identities and characteristics that fall outside the binary schema which so dominate contemporary gender politics. The first principle of feminist organising is that it foregrounds gender as an axis of power and works to counter oppressive gendered power structures. Other principles of feminist organising flow from this feminist approach to gender and power. Power and gender are not features of bodies or individuals but, rather, are an aspect of social organisation. Power names a relationship between groups, defined by institutional structures that constrain and enable agents to do particular types of things. Power relations are maintained and sustained by daily interactions at the micro level as individuals reinforce norms, rules and laws through their compliance. Power is positional, not fungible, not a substance or amount that can be easily transferred (Lloyd, 2013; Young, [1990] 2011). Power works through bodies, though it is not a ‘thing’ a person can give away or hold: a person cannot renounce their gender, race or class privilege or transfer it to others. Feminists expand the notion of the political to encompass the working of social, political and economic institutions that create gendered, raced and classed hierarchies. The feminist slogan ‘the personal is the political’ reflects the feminist analysis of power as operating in 25

26  Handbook of feminist governance seemingly ‘private’ or informal contexts as well as in public and formal proceedings (Enloe, 1983). It operates through norms and social identities, through bodies, and not just through explicit efforts to influence power (Cochrane, 1999; Khagram et al., 2002; Locher and Prügl, 2001). Power works through – and can be resisted – not just at the ballot box, but also inside patriarchal institutions such as the Church, military and family (Katzenstein, 1990, 1998; Okin, 1989).1 These institutional structures combine to create a ‘matrix of domination’ (Collins, 1990). Oppression names the condition in which a social group, like women, is confined by a cage-like constellation of norms, laws and social practices (Frye, 1983; Young, [1990] 2011). Feminists identified gender as a form of oppression early on, but oppression may take many forms, characterising, for example, distinct aspects of racial or class injustice. Oppression is multifaceted, multidimensional and intersectional (Crenshaw, 1989; Young, [1990] 2011). Conversely, feminist struggles against injustice are inspired by the ‘anti-oppression’ principle, which commits activists to opposing oppression in all its forms (hooks, 2000). This does not mean that these structures and relationships of power cannot be changed. They can: through collective action. Just as individual actions cumulate into broad societal patterns that constitute institutions and norms, people organise together to challenge or subvert these broader institutions and norms by refusing to comply, by proposing alternative, rival norms and rules to follow (Enloe, 1996; Weldon, 2019). When people en masse refuse to follow the rules, the laws and norms lose – or at least begin to lose – their purchase. For example, when women telephone operators in Boston held a strike in 1913 against their bifurcated workday they were able to effectively disrupt communications throughout the region, leading to an increased valuation of their labour (Deutsch, 2000). Such organised action reflects empowerment, namely ‘the development of a sense of collective influence over the social conditions of one’s life. … includes both personal empowerment and collective empowerment and suggests that the latter is a condition of the former’ (Young, 1997: 89). Such collective action is complicated by the ways that axes of social domination intersect each other, making the concept of intersectionality very important for understanding not only the operation of power but also the strategies of resistance and struggles for change (Ackerly and True, 2008; Crenshaw, 1989). For example, women’s movements in the United States have had to confront relations of racial domination among women (hooks, 2000; Roth, 2004), and the civil rights movement in the United States, a movement for racial justice, was riven by class and gender as well as race (Simien, 2011). Feminists of colour writing in political science have insisted on the centrality of power to ideas of intersectionality, and vice versa (Alexander-Floyd, 2012; Bilge, 2013). Although solidarity among oppressed groups is critical to change, to their power and empowerment, it remains difficult to achieve (Einwohner et al., 2021; Rai, 2017). Feminist organisations and practices of governance grow out of these struggles for justice (see Lambert et al., Chapter 9 in this Handbook), and feminist organisational principles reflect this origin.

EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH TO POLITICS AND GOVERNANCE This feminist notion of power not only expands the spheres of the political, it also grounds political analysis (and knowledge) in the experiences and bodies of women (de Beauvoir,

Feminist organisational principles  27 1972; Young, 2005). Women’s bodies and experiences are shaped, enabled and constrained by racialised, class-based norms of what is appropriately feminine, from dress to the movement of women’s bodies (McMillam Cottom, 2019; Young, 2005). These messages encourage women and girls to be their bodies’ own disciplinarians, to control their bodies through diet, exercise, dress and the like in order to ensure that their bodies are not unruly, uncontrolled symbols of desire (Bordo, 2003; Gay, 2017, 2018). This policing of bodies shapes the political sphere. Powerful bodies are expected to conform to particular standards of masculinity, and national, racial and/or ethnic identity (Rai, 2014). For example, Indian parliamentarians are expected to perform a particular form of Indian national identity through clothing and speech while within the walls of parliament (Rai, 2014). Likewise, French Housing Minister Cécile Duflot was cat-called when she dared to give a speech to the National Assembly in a feminine floral dress. Women’s bodies are disciplined in order to gain access to political power. These boundaries are often maintained through violence as the burgeoning research on violence against women in politics shows (Krook, 2017). Feminist activists have found ways to use these gendered expectations about bodies to build power and create change. Most obviously, activists have used nakedness as a political tactic to attract attention (as when FEMEN protesters used toplessness to protest violence against women in France, or in the protest-tactic in the oil-rich parts of Nigeria to protest kidnapping, occupation by troops or other problematic government actions or policies), or writing on their bodies to protest abortion regulations (as in the Netherlands). More subtly, feminist activists from the suffragettes to the Women’s March have used embodied protest as an avenue to disrupt taken-for-granted assumptions about who is and can be a political actor by actively claiming public space. By physically and collectively occupying public space – a space from which women’s bodies ought to be excluded – women use collective action to challenge gender norms and assert legitimacy as political actors (Kelly-Thompson, 2020; Parkins, 2000). Unruly bodies have radical potential when they break from gendered expectations (Butler, 1993; Parkins, 2000). Women’s embodied experiences form the basis for both feminist epistemology and political organising. For example, the influential (but now less frequently invoked) model of consciousness-raising is a technique for developing political analysis based on personal experiences, most prominently used by feminists in the 1970s (Morgan, [1984] 2016). The method involves personal testimony that describes one’s feelings and experiences in a shared and supportive context. These shared experiences are discussed in terms of their connection to broader patterns of both power and privilege as a method for building collective feminist knowledge (Morgan, [1984] 2016; Sarachild, 1975). As the Combahee River Collective ([1977] 1995: 232) expresses it: The most general statement of our politics … would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of colour face.

While the roots of consciousness-raising are often located in the so-called second wave and seen as a model used mainly in the past, contemporary movements such as Ni Una Menos and #MeToo encourage a contemporary form of consciousness-raising using both online and

28  Handbook of feminist governance in-person organising to create shared knowledge around women’s experiences with femicide and violence (Friedman and Rodriguez Gusta, 2020; Friedman and Tabbush, 2016). This form of knowledge production centres women’s lived experiences as a basis for a better understanding of power dynamics. Using deliberation and collective action that links personal experience to political action is central to the idea of empowerment that informs feminist approaches to governance. For feminists, empowerment is linked to collective action whereby individual actions cumulate to constitute a challenge to power, a disruption to business as usual. Effective challenges to structures of power will be collective, working at a macro level, rather than individual, even if these macro strategies work through the transformation of a multitude of individual actions (Enloe, 1996; Young, 1997). These challenges to power are a collective phenomenon, requiring collective action on a wide array of dimensions to counter oppression and domination. Empowerment encompasses both the individual-level dimensions of increased agency and political awareness and the broader efforts to secure the societal conditions that make individual agency possible and meaningful (Lloyd, 2013; Mansbridge, 2001; Weldon, 2019; Young, 1997). The smooth operation of bureaucratic, social, political and economic systems depends on women’s compliance (Enloe, 1996). If they organise, women can use their collective power in these realms to make a difference. The connective tissue of such collective efforts can inhere in social networks that may not appear to be oriented towards the state but towards social, economic, cultural and community activities (Weldon, 2004), again pointing to the importance of a broad understanding of what constitutes ‘political’ activity. Organisational principles may challenge norms of governance that are implicit or taken for granted or thought of as private and personal and beyond the organisational purview, issues of time, relations or responsibilities for care work, or even how one wears one’s hair or other aspects of appearance (Brown and Lemi, 2021; see also Chapter 9 in this Handbook). This embodied understanding of knowledge and power also grounds a politics of presence, the idea that women must be present to represent themselves, a principled commitment to descriptive representation. This politics of presence, however, stands in some tension with the feminist commitment to acknowledging women’s diversity, especially when that diversity is the basis for relations of oppression or domination among women. How can the presence of a white, middle-class woman, for example, speaking from her own experience, help to represent or understand relations of racial or class domination? How can women from the Global North speak, on the basis of their own experience, for all women globally? Below we describe the ways that feminist organising has taken up these challenges and tensions.

UNIVERSALISM, GLOBAL FEMINISM AND TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISM: POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES At the same time that feminists were developing accounts of knowledge and power that linked them so closely to women’s bodies and experiences – grounding them in local contexts and personal experiences – cross-national, global connections between feminists grew in intensity and frequency and the influence of these networks grew in the late 1980s and 1990s (Friedman, 2017; Paxton et al., 2006). Global feminism emphasised the universality of women’s position on the bottom of the sex hierarchy (MacKinnon, 1989; Morgan, [1984] 2016). It emphasised

Feminist organisational principles  29 the ubiquity of violence against women, exclusion from political office and a lack of reproductive freedom as universally shared elements of women’s global oppression (Morgan, [1984] 2016; Bunch, 1990). The particularism and localism that is grounded in feminist phenomenology might seem to stand in tension with feminist impulses towards universalism, with movement identities that emphasise women as women, and global feminism. Indeed, just as these universalist ideas about women’s human rights were finding expression in powerful human rights instruments such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), feminist activists and scholars began identifying sources of gender trouble, showing the ways that the experiences of women of colour, LGBTQ+ people, Indigenous women and differently abled women (among others) did not conform to a single shared experience (Butler, 1993; Crenshaw, 1989; Wendell, 1996). These observations went beyond the idea that the gender binary failed to capture the experiences of the vast majority of women and men – the issue was not just difference. It was also about power relations among women: women had divergent and even conflicting interests as women. Some challenges to the universalising impulses of feminist theory came from feminists writing from the standpoint of the Global South, who pointed out the persistence of the global domination of former imperial powers, and the ways that contemporary feminist theory unwittingly reproduced a colonial stance with respect to Third World women (Mohanty, 2003; Narayan, 2013). Scholars of feminism in the Global South documented the long history of women’s organising for national independence and women’s rights (Jayawardena, [1987] 2016). Southern women did not need northern feminists to ‘save brown women from brown men’ (Spivak, 1988). Contemporary feminist theorists link gender justice to a broader process of decolonisation, including the decolonisation of feminist theory and practice (Deer, 2015; Mohanty, 2003). Global feminism continues to influence feminist politics – for example, in its influence on the women’s rights machinery of the United Nations (Walby, 2011) – but most feminist theorists and activists have moved away from the idea of global feminism towards an idea of transnational feminism (Adams and Thomas, 2010; Moghadam, 2005). Many feminists in the Global South have organised regional or cross-regional meetings, such as the encuentros in Latin America, Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML) in the MENA region, and Development Alternatives for a New Era (DAWN) (Adams, 2006; Moghadam, 2005). This model of feminist practice aims to forge a more limited, practical solidarity. At the Third World Conference on Women at Nairobi in 1985, feminist activists began to develop a model for transnational feminist collaboration that emphasised inclusivity and political pragmatism as the bases for feminist organising: feminists aimed to put intersectionally marginalised women at the centre of the leadership and agenda, working in coalitions on a case-by-case basis to find areas of shared commitment rather than assuming these flowed naturally from a shared identity (Weldon, 2006). The commitment to specifically transnational rather than national feminisms signals a move beyond interests rooted in the nation state system, with all its colonial baggage (Lu, 2017; Moghadam, 2005). Indeed, the very idea of activism as ‘border crossing’, as challenging national divisions, animates much contemporary feminist practice. For example, a caravan of feminist activists from several East African countries came together in a united trip to Kilimanjaro to highlight land rights issues in the region. The border crossing was a deliberate effort to draw attention to issues that transcended the specific location in which they occurred.

30  Handbook of feminist governance Similarly, in El Paso, feminist activists braided hair together across the United States (US)– Mexico border to symbolise cross-border solidarity (Kelly-Thompson et al., 2020). These ideas have developed into a model of transversal, intersectional solidarity, one that informs feminist organising (Hancock, 2016; Yuval-Davis, 2006). We turn to these models below.

INTERSECTIONAL SOLIDARITY Feminist organising has come to see intersectional solidarity as a way of building politically powerful coalitions whilst simultaneously addressing the ways that difference overlaps with domination, so that axes of global, racial and sexual difference define groups of women with distinct and even conflicting interests as women. But what does intersectional solidarity mean in terms of political practice? Intersectionality is the idea that societal axes of oppression cross-cut and intertwine in complex ways defining distinct lived experiences and perspectives, focusing initially on how race, ethnicity and gender combined to oppress Black women. Intersectionality emerged as a political project in both academic and activist spaces, seeking to challenge the suppression and erasure of Black and Mestiza theorising and praxis in intellectual and social movement spaces (Combahee River Collective, [1977] 1995). Early proponents of intersectionality developed the concept to locate policy silences and neglect of groups at the intersection of interlocking systems of oppression (Crenshaw, 1989), especially Black women in the US. (For more on intersectionality, see Townsend-Bell (Chapter 7) and D’Agostino (Chapter 28) in this Handbook.) Activists and policymakers all over the world have taken up the concept of intersectionality, and many activists have used the concept to inform their approach to organising social movements (Chan-Tiberghien, 2004; Falcón, 2016; Symington, 2004; Yuval-Davis, 2006). Although scholars are increasingly interested in examining the ways in which movements enact intersectional solidarity (Montoya and Galvez Seminario, 2022; Tormos-Aponte, 2019), they have been slower to take up the concept (Irvine et al., 2019; Liu, 2017). The emerging literature on intersectionality still decentres Black and Mestiza feminism and lived experiences (Beaman and Brown, 2019) and overlooks the intellectual labour of Black intellectuals (Alexander-Floyd, 2018). Activists who seek to take an intersectional approach to organising have looked at various forms of coalition building and solidarity more generally as an organisational expression of a commitment to gender justice (Cho et al., 2013; Collins and Chepp, 2013). Intersectional solidarity is an ‘ongoing process of creating ties and coalitions across social group differences by negotiating power asymmetries’ (Tormos, 2017: 712). It resists exclusionary solidarity (Ferree and Roth, 1998) and avoids essentialist, biological, static and additive notions of identity (Hancock, 2007). Movements can develop an intersectional consciousness to inform their praxis. Intersectional consciousness refers to an awareness of the dynamic interactions between social structures and their government of social group power relations (Tormos-Aponte and Ferrer-Núñez, 2020). This consciousness can emerge at the individual and collective level (Cole, 2008; Curtin et al., 2015; Greenwood, 2008; Irvine et al., 2019; Tormos-Aponte, 2019). This consciousness can inform intersectional praxis, which refers to ‘organizing approaches that movements adopt to negotiate inter-group power asymmetries and steps that movements and organizers take to

Feminist organisational principles  31 transform intersectional forms of oppression’ (Tormos-Aponte, 2019; Tormos-Aponte and Ferrer-Núñez, 2020). Working to counter power in organising means advancing critical diversity, diversity defined as emphasising social difference when doing so works to reveal the domination of some groups in discussion, politics and so on – a kind of analytic affirmative action, or affirmative representation as a principle of organising (Einwohner et al., 2021; Strolovitch, 2007). Specific practices include ensuring representation of marginalised groups in leadership, foregrounding symbols and discourse of marginalised groups in movement materials, and giving extra weight to issues raised by marginalised groups in discussions. These principles of organisation reflect an understanding of political intersectionality as undergirding solidarity along gender lines, an understanding of gender groups as context-specific coalitions, not essential identities (Crenshaw, 1989; Young, 2005). Social movements can adopt a series of measures to enact an intersectional approach to building solidarity. First, they can ensure that they recognise the importance and presence of intersectionally marginalised groups in their symbols and discourse. Second, they can ensure that intersectionally marginalised social groups are present – descriptively represented – in movement leadership and other movement-defining deliberations (Tormos-Aponte, 2019; Weldon, 2006). Third, they can prioritise the issues of intersectionally marginalised groups in movement agendas, a technique of affirmative representation (Strolovitch, 2007). Movements vary in the specific identity categories they use or emphasise as they organise to enact intersectionality (Luna, 2016; Townsend-Bell, 2011; Tormos Aponte and Ferrer-Núñez, 2020). For instance, Townsend-Bell (2011) describes how the relative salience of different identity categories varies across geographies and organising contexts. Further, movement deliberations may shape the relevance of certain identity categories over others. These contextual social group dynamics and activist deliberations about identity inform movement agendas, structures, discourses and strategies.

AUTONOMY AS A PRINCIPLE OF FEMINIST ORGANISING These models of feminist organising implicitly rely on the ability of different groups of women to organise and articulate their distinctive viewpoints. In practice, progressive organisations of all types use caucuses and other forms of autonomous organising for marginalised groups to facilitate the articulation of particular viewpoints. This practice flows not only from the consciousness-raising model of feminist mobilisation, but also from the recognition that power can subvert movement discussions in the absence of spaces dedicated to the expression of subaltern voices. For this reason, feminist organising has long emphasised the importance of autonomy (Hassim, 2009; Molyneux, 1998; Ray and Korteweg, 1999; Tripp, 2001; Weldon, 2002, 2011). Autonomous women’s communities, counter-publics, have always played an important role for feminism, and shaped the relationship to state (and governance). The concept, however, has sometimes been confused with the Marxist debates about autonomy from the state. Autonomy of feminist movements has been taken to be more than this, to reflect autonomy from male dominated organisations, not just the state (Molyneux, 1998; Weldon, 2002, 2011). Organisational autonomy is necessary to allow the articulation of a distinctive feminist agenda. Initially, this insistence was related to an analysis of gender as having primacy or

32  Handbook of feminist governance being the primary axis of oppression, but this has given way to an acknowledgement that gender is a multidimensional phenomenon, and that gender oppression cannot be disentangled from race, class and sexual identity (Townsend-Bell, 2012; Weldon, 2006). Organisational autonomy, for example, proved important for the development of lesbian and queer feminisms in Latin America as they sought to articulate their perspectives in the context of the feminist Encuentros, the regional meetings of feminist activists that have been organised since the 1980s (Alvarez et al., 2002). The insistence on organisational autonomy as a mechanism for countering the influence of power on deliberation, however, has continued to guide feminist organising practice and models of governance.

CONCLUSION: EMPOWERING GOVERNANCE, RESISTING GOVERNMENTALITY If governance is defined as the way that collectives manage their common affairs, as ‘a continuing process through which conflicting or diverse interests may be accommodated and cooperative action may be taken’ (Our Global Neighborhood, cited in Keping, 2018: 3), then feminist theory and practice emphasise some model practices for inclusive governance aimed at strengthening solidarity, even if actual feminists typically fall short of these ideals in practice. Governance includes both formal and informal rules and arrangements (for more on feminist models of governance, see Chapter 9 in this Handbook). Feminist principles of political governance include such organisational rules as: 1. Inclusion of gender as a (not the) primary axis of political organising and analysis; an organisation that pays no attention to gender justice cannot be said to be feminist. 2. Inclusion of axes of oppression and domination beyond gender, including race, ethnicity, sexuality and imperialism. 3. A broad understanding of the political, meaning, appropriate topics and practices around which to mobilise politically and to contest, including seemingly personal issues such as appearance, sexuality, sexual identity and other seemingly intimate issues. 4. An organisational structure (e.g. caucuses) that facilitates and enables separate organising and expression of distinctive points of view of marginalised gender groups (e.g. women of colour, LGBTQ+ people, poor women) and even subgroups within those groups (poor women of colour; LGBTQ+ people of colour). 5. An organisational structure that privileges the issues and perspectives generated by caucuses or other organisational mechanisms dedicated to developing subaltern perspectives. 6. An organisational structure that formalises processes of articulating dissent. 7. Descriptive representation for marginalised groups (including women, people of colour, diverse sexual identities and orientations, people of various nationalities or no nationality, etc.), especially in leadership, ideally in highly visible and powerful positions. 8. Attention to the power of symbols and representation in official discourse, ensuring that these represent marginalised groups. 9. Efforts to form coalitions with like-minded groups to further social, political and economic transformations. 10. Political organising that confounds and disrupts oppressive institutional practices, from borders to market imperatives.

Feminist organisational principles  33 These principles reflect a feminist understanding of empowerment, one that stands in opposition to ideas of neoliberal governmentality, that is, an idea of empowerment of ‘investing in oneself’ that ultimately emphasises self-regulation in conformity with the values of market hegemony. By emphasising collective action and working against oppression and domination in all its forms, feminist activists offer a model of governance that resists such governmentality.

NOTE 1.

This section draws on Weldon (2019).

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Feminist organisational principles  35 Hancock, Ange-Marie (2016) Intersectionality: An Intellectual History, New York: Oxford University Press. Hassim, Shireen (2009) Rethinking Gender Politics in a Liberal Age: Institutions, Constituencies and Equality in Comparative Perspective, Geneva: UNRISD. hooks, bell (2000) Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Boston, MA: South End Press. Irvine, Jill, Sabine Lang and Celeste Montoya (2019) ‘Introduction: Gendered Mobilizations and Intersectional Challenges’. In Jill Irvine, Sabine Lang and Celeste Montoya (eds), Gendered Mobilizations and Intersectional Challenges: Contemporary Social Movements in Europe and North America, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield/ECPR Press, 1–22. Jayawardena, Kumari ([1987] 2016) Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, New York: Verso Books. Katzenstein, Mary F. (1990) ‘Feminism within American Institutions: Unobtrusive Mobilization in the 1980s’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16(1): 27–54. Katzenstein, Mary F. (1998) Faithful and Fearless: Moving Feminist Protest Inside the Church and Military, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kelly-Thompson, Kaitlin (2020) ‘There Is Power In a Plaza: Social Movements, Democracy, and Spatial Politics’, Purdue Graduate School, PhD thesis. http://​doi​.org/​10​.25394/​PGS​.12743735​.v1. Kelly-Thompson, Kaitlin, Amber Lusvardi, S. Laurel Weldon and Summer Forester (2020) ‘Dimensions of Transnational Feminism: Autonomous Organizing and Agenda-Setting in Global Civil Society’. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, held virtually. Keping, Yu (2018) ‘Governance and Good Governance: A New Framework for Political Analysis’, Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 11(1): 1–8. Khagram, Sanjeev, James V. Riker and Kathryn Sikkink (2002) Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks, and Norms, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Krook, Mona Lena (2017) ‘Violence Against Women in Politics’, Journal of Democracy 28(1): 74–88. Lasswell, Harold Dwight (1936) Politics: Who Gets What, When, How, New York: Whittlesey House. Liu, Callie Watkins (2017) ‘The Anti-Oppressive Value of Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality in Social Movement Study’, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 4(3): 306–21. Lloyd, Moya (2013) ‘Power, Politics, Domination, and Oppression’. In Karen Celis, Johanna Kantola, Georgina Waylen and S. Laurel Weldon (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, Chapter 4. Locher, Birgit and Elisabeth Prügl (2001), ‘Feminism and Constructivism: Worlds Apart or Sharing the Middle Ground?’, International Studies Quarterly 45(1): 111–29. http://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​0020​-8833​ .00184. Lu, Catherine (2017) Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luna, Z. (2016) ‘“Truly a Women of Color Organization”: Negotiating Sameness and Difference in Pursuit of Intersectionality’, Gender & Society 30(5): 769–90. MacKinnon, Catherine A. (1989) Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mansbridge, Jane (2001) ‘The Making of Oppositional Consciousness’. In Jane Mansbridge and Aldon Morris (eds), Oppositional Consciousness: The Subjective Roots of Social Protest, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1–19. McMillam Cottom, Tressie (2019) Thick: And Other Essays, New York: The New Press. Moghadam, Valentine M. (2005) Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (2003) Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Molyneux, Maxine (1998) ‘Analysing Women’s Movements’, Development and Change 29(2): 219–45. Montoya, Celeste and Mariana Galvez Seminario (2022) ‘Guerreras y Puentes: the Theory and Praxis of Latina(x) Activism’, Politics, Groups, and Identities 10(2), 171–88. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​21565503​ .2020​.1821233. Morgan, Robin ([1984] 2016) Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology, New York: Open Road Media.

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

INTRODUCTION Feminist institutional approaches have provided methodological tools to analyse development and change in the gendered nature of political institutions. This chapter discusses the ways that feminist institutional approaches give us purchase on understanding feminist governance, at local, national and international levels. Feminist governance – those formal and informal processes of government developing from or inspired by women’s movements – can challenge existing hierarchical institutional processes that vest power in a limited group, and can alter the nature of gendered institutions, providing new avenues for feminist policy change, and creating more diverse and inclusive political institutions. Our chapter begins with a discussion of the concept of feminist institutionalism, exploring its contributions to our understanding of feminist governance and feminist governance development. Taking a feminist institutional approach, we discuss some of the pathways to feminist governance and some of the ways that feminist governance has changed over time. We also examine how intersectional feminist theorising relates to feminist institutionalism. To explore these topics in further detail, we provide brief overviews of three institutional sources of feminist governance – sex/gender quotas, gender policy machineries and gender mainstreaming. We focus on how feminist institutionalism provides us with better understanding of these institutions and their impacts. We conclude the chapter by discussing the implications of this analysis for the future of feminist institutional research and feminist governance.

FEMINIST INSTITUTIONALIST APPROACHES AND FEMINIST GOVERNANCE While analyses of existing institutions from a feminist perspective are as old as feminism itself, in the last two decades feminist institutionalism has been developed as a specific disciplinary method for understanding the gendered nature of institutions (Kenny, 2007; Krook and Mackay, 2011; Lowndes, 2020; Mackay et al., 2010). This approach draws on feminist analyses of the gendered nature of existing hierarchies, power relations, norms and rules, as well as on non-gendered institutional approaches that examine institutional change and stability through path dependencies (Pierson, 1996), critical junctures (Capoccia and Kelemen, 2007), institutional layering (Mahoney and Thelen, 2010) and norm change (Helmke and Levitsky, 2004). Feminist institutional approaches thereby provide better understandings of institutions by revealing and explaining their gendered nature. In so doing, they also provide the means for understanding how feminist governance develops over time and can survive and thrive within 38

Understanding feminist governance through feminist institutionalism  39 otherwise patriarchal structures. Feminist institutionalism also gives us purchase on how and whether feminist movements may influence those institutions. Feminist institutionalism is defined as an analytical approach that prioritises gender as a significant factor in understanding the creation, evolution and change of institutions, and prioritises institutional analyses where institutions are defined as the gendered formal and informal rules of the game (Hawkesworth, 2003; Mackay, 2011). Many of the authors in this volume utilise feminist institutionalism to explore the rise of and the influences on feminist governance. To answer the question of how feminist governance develops over time, the feminist institutional approach turns to a number of important change agents. First and foremost, feminist movements and women’s movements more generally have played important roles in creating the conditions for gendered changes in political institutions. As agents for change, feminist movements, feminist organisations and even individual feminist activists raise awareness and encourage change in political and social institutions, even in geographic areas far beyond where they are organised (Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Towns, 2010). Feminists also work from inside institutions to create change (Banaszak, 2010; Chappell, 2003; Sawer, 1990). Such changes range from small changes such as incorporating gender into different locations within the state to large demands for the creation of gender policy agencies. Feminist governance is often spread through international organisations – such as the Inter-Parliamentary Union (Sawer, Chapter 12 this volume), the International Criminal Court (Chappell, 2016) and the UN Conferences on women (Goetz, Chapter 10 this volume; McBride and Mazur, 2013; Rai, 2003), leading to the international spread of institutional change. Second, feminist institutionalism focuses on illuminating the ways gender assumptions, roles and norms serve to influence the development of feminist governance. Feminist scholars have demonstrated how gendered norms and beliefs constrain feminist governance, reducing the ability to achieve changes in policy (Ferree, 2003) or governance structures (Kantola and Lombardo, Chapter 24 this volume). While gendered norms and values are important in influencing the development of feminist governance, other norms about the means by which state institutions can and should be organised may influence the development of gendered institutions as well. For example, Banaszak et al. (2003) argue that the rise of neoliberalism influences how feminist governance develops. For example, neoliberalism may manifest itself in the requirement for specific organisational forms and the degree to which free market processes are prioritised over feminist organisational processes. Third, feminist institutionalism is also sensitive to the degree to which such changes are constrained by the political context (Kenny and Verge, Chapter 6 this volume; Mazur, 1996). This sensitivity to political context allows feminist scholars to illuminate the partial and contingent nature of feminist governance, focusing on the degree to which feminist institutions are only partially implemented within larger state institutions. Feminist institutionalism also clarifies the backsliding and counter-feminist institution building seen in many areas around the world (Bashevkin, 1998). For example, Zaremberg (Chapter 33 this volume) notes that although gender mainstreaming and feminist-friendly policies are often a characteristic of left-wing governments, the specific ideological constellations of some left-wing and conservative governments alter this assumption in Ecuador, Argentina, Mexico and Brazil. Finally, incorporating intersectional feminist scholarship into feminist institutionalism has the potential to expand our understanding of a more inclusive feminist governance. Feminist critiques of existing feminist institutionalism and feminist governance include the idea that

40  Handbook of feminist governance these often prioritise the experiences of privileged women (Townsend-Bell, Chapter 7 this volume) and ignore women of colour, LGBTQIA+ populations and poor women. Explicitly intersectional feminist institutionalist analyses may provide different perspectives on the degree to which feminist governance thrives within states and also may alter our understanding of the pathways to feminist governance. While some feminist institutional scholarship has begun to address this (see e.g. Hearn et al., 2016; Krook et al., 2009; Skjeie and Langsvasbråten, 2009; Squires, 2005; Verloo, 2013), as we discuss throughout this chapter, there is considerable work to be done to fully incorporate intersectional analyses into feminist institutional approaches to feminist governance.

UNDERSTANDING FEMINIST GOVERNANCE DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE Institutional reproduction, creation and change are difficult to differentiate, but it is particularly the informal institutions and their interactions with formal institutions that provide the tools to understand continuity and change (Banaszak and Weldon, 2011; Mackay, 2011: 185). Informal institutions like gender norms communicate important information about who should have power in formal institutions and mediate the effects of formal institutions. This relationship creates opportunities for change, particularly when formal and informal institutions are in contradiction or conflict with one another (Banaszak and Weldon, 2011; Waylen, 2014). Change also occurs because feminist institutions are bounded within existing institutional, cultural and discursive environments that may limit the form feminist institutions take, contradict central feminist principles or alter feminist discourses in incongruous ways. The pervasiveness of some cultural norms and practices also work against gender equality, particularly within government institutions. Women have historically been associated with femininity and the private sphere while men have been associated with public, masculine pursuits. Norms and practices regarding the policing of femininity and masculinity have created a culture that is resistant to change (Chappell, 2016). Rules restricting women from working in certain positions or at all reflected the culture and attitude shared by those in power. With the help of political and judicial structures, these formal restrictions were slowly lifted and women were granted more rights and freedom. These changes generally happened slowly, with backsliding occurring at important points, and did not eliminate informal rules and expectations about women. As such, they are therefore labelled ‘drift’ institutional change. While drift is not likely to produce more gender equitable institutions, because it is slow-moving, it allows movement towards feminist governance when it is difficult to create new institutions or rules, particularly when societal norms and practices oppose such changes (Waylen, 2014). Alternatively, sometimes normative change occurs that brings existing formal rules into question. For example, increasing acceptance of gays and lesbians in the late 20th century resulted in a questioning of the gendered rules about marriage. Formal and informal institutions interact and affect political outcomes in ways that are gendered because they are embedded in a structure of gender norms (Mackay, 2011). Gender norms and other informal institutions are heavily ingrained in the fabric of society and as such are not always noticed or recognised as gendered (Waylen, 2014). Political institutions produce, maintain and reproduce raced and gendered experiences in their norms and practices (Hawkesworth, 2003). Feminist governance challenges existing gender norms but acceptance

Understanding feminist governance through feminist institutionalism  41 of larger institutional values and rules may limit or shape the paths of feminist governance. For example, Lambert et al. (Chapter 9 this volume) describe the way that established formal processes within government altered the feminist Australian health care movement. Townsend-Bell (Chapter 7 this volume) and Banaszak et al. (2003) similarly note that contradictions between neoliberal state operations can limit opportunities for feminist change. For this reason, opportunities to incorporate feminist governance and gender equality often come at a time of broad restructuring within existing institutions or during critical junctions such as the creation of new political institutions (Mackay, 2014). Political devolution in the United Kingdom, for example, allows for the creation of new legislatures in Scotland which could serve as new sites for feminist interventions. However, every institution is created within the influence of existing institutions resulting in long-lasting legacies being built into institutional design (Mahoney and Thelen, 2010). In the example of UK devolution, for example, the Westminster parliamentary system rests on a masculinised public domain, separate from the private feminised domain of personal affairs (Mackay, 2014). Even after the implementation of new processes or the creation of new institutions, old and existing norms prevail. The legacy of informal rules can both hinder and help the implementation of formal rule changes (Waylen, 2014). Mackay (2014) uses the phrase ‘nested newness’ to describe how new institutions are influenced by the legacies of old institutions. This is understood to be a gendered concept because older institutions that were once thought to be gender neutral are actually masculine. Gender reforms are particularly difficult to implement because of the ‘stickiness’ of old rules, both formal and informal (Mackay, 2014). Sources of Feminist Change As we have suggested above, a primary source of change in feminist governance is women’s movements. Women’s movements initiate institutional change in that they influence the way that state bureaucratic structures function (Htun and Weldon, 2012; Mazur, 1996). Women’s movements also are major drivers for changing informal norms and values (Banaszak and Ondercin, 2016), creating a pathway for the institution drift described above. Insider feminist activists also provide opportunities to change policy and transform state institutions from the inside (Banaszak, 2010; Bereni and Revillard, 2018; Chappell, 2003; Sawer, 1990). This allows them to further the movement in different parts of the state. Movements that push feminist ideals often fluctuate among different ideological and strategic stances, sometimes leaning toward a more moderate and accommodating relationship with state institutions and other times toward autonomy or radicalism (Banaszak et al., 2003: 2). The approach that the women’s movement takes generally depends on political traditions and the political opportunity structure, including the degree to which the state incorporates formal channels for civil society advocacy. International non-governmental organisations (INGOs) and intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) also may initiate the institutional changes associated with feminist governance because they measure and identify gender disparities and spread awareness of these disparities throughout the international community. These global perspectives promote understanding of the full dimensions of inequalities such as women’s unpaid labour contributions (Staudt, 2018). INGOs and IGOs often provide information about gender inequalities that act as benchmarks and set standards that are then used to pressure states and initiate institutional change (Keck and Sikkink, 1998). International organisations also have the power and authority to

42  Handbook of feminist governance label discrimination against women a human rights violation. The UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) labels gender discrimination as a human rights violation because it is ‘incompatible with the dignity of women as human beings’. It also frames gender discrimination as hindering development efforts and increasing poverty (Hawkesworth, 2012: 254). The UN’s 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women outlined critical areas of concern and pressured state institutions to strengthen national machineries for gender equality. It also provided legitimacy for gender quota claims put forward by women’s organisations (Dahlerup, 2008: 323). Finally, as we noted above, the political context both fosters and hinders changes in feminist governance. The constellation of the party system and the characteristics of individual political parties are one significant aspect of this political context. Existing political parties can foster institutional development through both formal and informal processes, working both for and against gender equality or feminist governance. Formal processes refer to official party rules such as nomination procedures. Informal processes refer to the ‘hidden’ norms and assumptions that help parties function, like norms of candidate recruitment (Bjarnegård and Kenny, 2016: 372). Access to information about the internal party selection processes and norms is often ‘hidden’ from view (Norris and Lovenduski, 1995), but we know these informal criteria affect possibilities for institutional change. Informal processes can change formal party rules. For example, members of the Scottish Labour Party supported gender quotas in internal party debates because they wanted to minimise the role that the old boy network, which reduced the representation of women, played in the candidate selection process (Bjarnegård and Kenny, 2016).

THREE EXAMPLES OF FEMINIST INSTITUTIONALISM AT WORK To explore how feminist institutional approaches elucidate development and change in feminist governance, we briefly analyse three types of feminist governance through a feminist institutional lens: gender/sex quotas, gender policy machineries and gender mainstreaming. As Squires (2007: 2) notes, these examples represent feminist governance strategies focused on ‘presence, voice, and process’. We concentrate here on how feminist institutionalism provides better understanding of their development and future trajectory, and note that each is developed more deeply elsewhere in the volume.1 Sex/Gender Quotas Gender quotas have grown increasingly popular over the last few decades because they are effective at rapidly increasing the proportion of women representatives. International pressure and women’s movements have solidified gender quotas as a requisite for democracy and modernisation (Dahlerup, 2007), leading to more than 130 countries adopting some form of quota by 2022 (Kandawasvika-Nhundu, 2022). The first gender quotas were reserved seats or national mandates requiring a minimum number of women legislators, which originated between the 1930s and 1970s in Africa, Asia and the Middle East (Hawkesworth, 2012: 198). Unfortunately, segregated candidate election processes and appointed status of women legislators under reserved seats marginalised and

Understanding feminist governance through feminist institutionalism  43 discredited women legislators. From the 1970s onward, new kinds of gender quotas evolved, although separate election processes persisted as a legacy of the policy’s development. Party quotas originated in Sweden in 1972 through activism carried out by the Social Democratic Women’s Federation (Hawkesworth, 2012: 197, 201) and became common in centre left parties, including Green parties. Legislated party quotas, which mandate that parties must nominate a certain number of women candidates, grew popular throughout the Global South in the 1990s. Today, many countries transition from one form of gender quota to another, or implement multiple gender quotas simultaneously. Iraq, for example, implemented separate gender quotas at both the national and subnational level. There is an ongoing debate on whether gender quotas facilitate feminist governance. Proponents of gender quotas argue that they are a highly effective means of increasing the number of women elected to political office (Dahlerup and Freidenvall, 2005; Krook, 2009; Paxton and Hughes, 2015; Paxton et al., 2010). For many scholars, changing the number of women results in more explicitly feminist governance. Sacchet, for example, argues that ‘if more women are involved in policy making, the policy content will change to reflect more fully “women’s interests”’ (2008: 375). Many scholars find that gender quotas increase women’s substantive representation because of women’s increased presence in decision-making bodies (Chattopadhyay and Duflo, 2004; Franceschet and Piscopo, 2008). Some proponents of gender quotas also argue that they directly affect feminist governance because they increase the salience of gender-related issues in national legislatures (Weeks, 2016). On the other hand, critics warn that gender quotas tokenise, essentialise and generalise women while disregarding their many-sided and cross-cutting interests (Mansbridge, 1999: 652). They question the degree to which statutory gender quotas and reserved seat systems may accurately represent the diversity of women’s interests (Grey, 2006; Spelman, 1988). Studies also show that a rise in the number of women legislators may provoke backlash among male legislators, who may impede women’s policy initiatives (Crowley, 2004; Franceschet et al., 2012; Hawkesworth, 2003). Reserved seats and statutory gender quotas in particular may discredit women representatives because they create an environment in which women are not perceived to win seats based on merit but instead constitute a separate ‘affirmative action’ group in national legislatures (Wang and Yoon, 2018). Critics also claim that women representatives elected through gender quotas are perceived as less capable and less experienced (Bauer, 2008: 359). This discrediting of women representatives undermines the inclusion of their perspectives in policymaking (Lovenduski, 2005). Gender quota implementation is characterised by layering, where new rules are introduced atop or alongside old rules, and conversion, where actors work within a system to change institutions (Waylen, 2014). National legislatures face pressure internally from women’s movements and externally from the international community to implement gender quotas because they are perceived as a necessary step for equal representation and a strong democracy (Bush and Jamal, 2015; Dahlerup, 2008). Political parties have also instituted internal gender quotas in response to women’s mobilisation. However, gender assumptions and norms as well as the institutional rules of parliamentary systems have proved an obstacle in their development of feminist governance. When new institutions such as gender quotas are implemented in these masculine domains, they absorb the ‘masculinised practices’ of the institutional surroundings (Mackay, 2014). We see these masculinised practices even in policies requiring the selection of women candidates to political office. They can create an environment in which women MPs are not assumed to

44  Handbook of feminist governance have the competence necessary for office because they did not earn their seat based on ‘merit’. In particular, in reserved seat situations, appointment by gender quota may differentiate MPs selected by this process from legislators elected through open elections. For example, a survey of 80 Rwandan legislators revealed that the majority of MPs claimed to know exactly which women MPs were elected by quota and also judged them to be less experienced than women elected in an open seat (Bauer, 2008: 359). Nonetheless, gender quotas do change parliamentary institutions, completely restructuring the process through which women enter the formal political sphere. Gender Policy Machineries Gender policy machineries have been extensively studied by gender scholars.2 The relationship between gender policy machineries and feminist governance is complex and heavily influenced by existing gendered institutions. Gender policy machineries are defined as formal state structures that ‘promote the rights, status, and condition of women or strike down gender hierarchies’ (McBride and Mazur, 2013: 655); they are located at subnational, national, regional and international levels within formal state structures, and even appear in state-related institutions such as political parties (McBride and Mazur, 2013). For example, the United States has multiple gender policy machineries spread throughout departments of the national government, and these policy machineries are found in many subnational (i.e. state and local) governments as well (Banaszak, 2010; McBride and Mazur, 2013). The labels and placement applied to gender policy machineries can also be a strong indicator of the degree to which feminist governance is possible. For example, in Germany the cabinet position that advocates for women has always been tied to children, and often also to family policy, reflecting the intertwining of women’s interests with the family. When women’s interests were initially provided cabinet representation in 1986, for example, the Federal Ministry for Youth, Family and Health was renamed the Federal Ministry for Youth, Family, Women, and Health. On the other hand, as the title suggests, France’s Ministry for Women’s Rights represented a gender policy machinery that enumerated gender equality as a central mission (Mazur, 1996). Whether gender policy machineries are headed by a cabinet position also provides some indication of importance within government. For example, in Australia, the central hub of the wheel model of gender policy machinery has changed location over time, with location affecting cabinet access and capacity for cross-government coordination. Moreover, the position is often led by a cabinet member who carries a second portfolio. For example, in March 2022, the Minister for Women is also the Minister for Foreign Affairs. Thus, the degree to which gender policy machineries reflect feminist governance is often constrained by the historical and institutional context, as well as by their ‘nested newness’ which is reflected in their shifting location and portfolios (Mackay, 2014). Given the wide variety of institutional forms and practices across countries and over time, how can gender policy machineries result in feminist governance? In practice, the degree to which these formal institutions constitute feminist governance hinges on many of the factors we have described above. First and foremost, gender policy machineries that focus on feminist governance are a result of mobilisation by women’s movements at the national level and transnational feminism – both of which have provided the pressure to move intransigent or indifferent governments towards women’s equality. Moreover, just as these gender policy machineries can bring

Understanding feminist governance through feminist institutionalism  45 feminist governance inside the state or provide important resources for women’s movement organisations, feminists outside the state can also provide informational resources and support for policies pursued within these state organisations (Banaszak, 2010). Moreover, much depends on the leadership of these formal policy machineries, particularly the degree to which they incorporate femocrats or feminist insiders (Mazur and McBride, Chapter 5 this volume). Where feminist insiders are well integrated into the bureaucracy, some form of feminist governance can survive even under hostile regimes. Politics also plays a role in whether gender policy machineries result in feminist governance. Conservative parties generally constrain the ability of gender policy machineries more than Green parties or socialist parties. This has been particularly true with the rise of populism and the move to the right of many conservative governments (Bashevkin, 1998). However, not all left-leaning parties support feminist policies, which may be seen as running counter to the interests of working-class supporters. For example, Lang (2007: 130–33) chronicles the problems Social Democrat Christine Bergmann faced within her own party when trying to pass an Affirmative Action Law that had initially been highlighted as a goal of the red–green coalition. Despite the widespread nature of gender policy machineries, such institutions have made fewer advances for women at the intersections of race, class or sexuality, and they often fail to live up to important principles of feminist governance. For example, Hoskyns (2001: 40) notes that although the European Union had gender equality as a long-standing goal, immigrants and women of colour were not recognised until the late 1990s. Similarly, although the Women’s Educational Equity Act of 1974 in the United States was considered path-breaking in its explicit focus on women of colour, many evaluations of the legislation suggested that even under sympathetic administrations it had minimal impact and provided less funding to women of colour than white women (Conrad et al., 2014). Gender Mainstreaming Feminist institutionalism tells us that all policies and government institutions are gendered. Gender mainstreaming emerged as a strategy for explicitly institutionalising women’s interests in all areas of policy and governance with the goal of achieving gender equality. It is defined as ‘the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes, in all areas and at all levels’ (Rai, 2003: 16). Because of its focus on equality and equity for individuals of all genders, when implemented, it furthers feminist governance, though it is constrained by the presence of traditional gender norms within political institutions. The impetus for gender mainstreaming largely came from international institutions like the United Nations, the European Union and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which provide oversight and toolkits for its implementation (Moghadam, Chapter 22 this volume). In developing countries, organisations like Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era and the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) have been central to developing the gender mainstreaming agenda. Gender mainstreaming has emerged in institutions across the globe: strategies have been taken up at the local level in Tanzania (Mujwahuzi et al., 2018), and at the national level in the Philippines, providing new initiatives in gender training and changing public discourse (Honculada and Ofreneo, 2003: 131). Gender-responsive budgeting has also grown substantially from its roots in Australia (Costa and Sharp, Chapter 11 this volume) to be adopted in

46  Handbook of feminist governance more than 90 countries. Institutionalising a gender lens in all areas of policy and governance, as gender mainstreaming does, challenges the hegemonic masculinity of most government institutions and promotes equality for all genders, but progress depends on the degree to which gender mainstreaming is actually effective. Two emphases have developed within discussions of gender mainstreaming: one that focuses on integrating gender into existing institutions and one that focuses on transforming existing institutions (Staudt, 2003: 54). Awareness of the consequences of inequality is key to understanding the adverse effects of maintaining existing gendered institutions. By focusing on institutional outcomes, asking questions about how policies and practices institutionalise gender inequality, and considering unexplored assumptions about the ‘care economy’, institutions can move towards a gender mainstreaming framework (Staudt, 2003: 58). When implemented effectively, such a framework demonstrates the connection between gender equality and good governance. The implementation and success of gender mainstreaming varies across national contexts, leading to disparity in feminist policy or governance in many programmes. Patterns that have emerged in the implementation of gender mainstreaming include decentralisation of responsibility and treating mainstreaming as a set of features from which to choose (Daly, 2005). One implementation strategy is the creation of a mainstreaming-skilled department or task force that acts as a resource for the rest of the institution. While this remains a best practice, some institutions hire diversity officers who are more symbolic than substantively helpful. Having a separate unit handle institution-wide change without leadership from the top is not productive and does little to challenge gendered legacies within the institution. Because institutions have ‘sticky’ norms and rules, new rules need legitimacy to survive (Mackay, 2014). One critique of current implementation of gender mainstreaming is that some strategies ignore other intersectional identities. Complex equality can be mainstreamed, but each component entails a different understanding of implementation through bureaucratic policy tools, consultation with women’s organisations and inclusive deliberation (Squires, 2005). Feminist researchers warn that, by essentialising the experiences of women, gender mainstreaming could perpetuate a narrow view of gender and identity politics. What has been largely accepted as the universal experience of women is actually the average experience of middle-class, able-bodied, white, cis-gendered, heterosexual women. For example, the pay gap is wider for women of colour than the commonly advertised gender wage gap. Inclusive deliberation by maintaining an intersectional lens when developing new institutions of governance could prevent the reproduction of structural inequalities as well as institutionalised racism and accessibility. Both gender mainstreaming and deliberative democracy focus on the rule-formation process and call for equality through inclusivity, but deliberative democrats offer resources to counter the integrationism found in gender mainstreaming (Squires, 2005). If equality for all is truly the goal, then incorporating other marginalised groups is necessary in the gender mainstreaming process, but not all feminist institutionalists believe such incorporation is possible. Hunting and Hankivsky (2020) argue that gender mainstreaming is distinct from intersectionality and limits possible responses to inequity by primarily focusing on gender. Intersectionality is difficult to integrate into existing gender mainstreaming frameworks but could strengthen approaches to inequalities on its own (see Townsend-Bell, Chapter 7 this volume). While gender mainstreaming has institutionalised progress towards gender equality in some governments, the implementation of such policies is not always intersectional or effective in promoting equality for all.

Understanding feminist governance through feminist institutionalism  47

CONCLUSION We have argued here that feminist institutional research provides important insights into our understanding of feminist governance. Feminist movement mobilisation at multiple levels including activism inside the state, informal norms, the political context, the gendered nature of institutions, and historical and political legacies all influence the degree to which newer institutions like gender quotas, gender policy machineries and gender mainstreaming result in feminist governance. Two important questions will continue to motivate the study of feminist institutions moving forward. First there is still much work to be done within feminist institutional research in exploring the complex conditions that result in feminist governance. In particular, we need to widen the number of case studies of the development of feminist governance, especially in authoritarian countries, those undergoing extensive regime transitions and in the Global South. Second, while there are certainly more calls for intersectionality, the foundational research on feminist governance and on feminist institutionalism could do much more to explore the simultaneity of oppressions (Frazier et al., 2017). Our current strategies could be expanded to examine in-depth equality outcomes for all women. Careful incorporations of intersectional feminist governance concepts and the critiques of non-intersectional approaches into the research on feminist institutionalism could advance our understanding of both the development and the future of feminist governance.

NOTES 1. See, among others, Krook and Norris (Chapter 13), Goetz (Chapter 10), Costa and Sharp (Chapter 11) and Jacquot (Chapter 25) in this Handbook. 2. See e.g. Baldez, 2001; Haussman and Sauer, 2007; Mazur, 2013; McBride Stetson, 2001; McBride and Mazur, 2010, 2013; McBride Stetson and Mazur, 1995; Outshoorn and Kantola, 2007; and Teghtsoonian and Chappell, 2008.

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4. Feminist governance and the state Johanna Kantola

INTRODUCTION The state is at the heart of feminist governance debates. The institutions and processes of the state are the target of attempts to develop and institutionalise feminist governance practices. States come in many forms, but none are gender neutral – treating different people as if they had no gender, race, ethnicity or class background – nor gender equal – having adequate policies, institutions and processes in place to ensure equal opportunities and outcomes for all. Feminists both engage with and critique states as potential sites for feminist governance. Feminist theories of the state are often discussed by using labels such as liberal, radical, Marxist/socialist, Nordic or poststructural feminist perspectives (see e.g. Chappell, 2013; Kantola, 2006, 2016). Such labels may be problematic as concepts, such as liberalism, mean different things in different contexts (Sawer, 2003). This chapter will discuss feminist governance and the state through five distinct analytical perspectives on the state, which are determined by their underlying conceptualisation of gender. The five feminist perspectives are: (i) women and the state; (ii) gender and state institutions; (iii) deconstruction of gender and state discourses; (iv) intersectionality and the state; and (v) postdeconstruction and the state (see Kantola and Lombardo, 2017a). The chapter is structured around these five perspectives. In terms of feminist governance, each analytical feminist perspective allows for a discussion of issues at the heart of debates about feminist governance and the state. The first two approaches, women and the state and gender and state institutions, bring forth the paradoxes and dichotomies, which have for long been at the centre stage of feminist debates on the state, such as public/private, in and out of the state, and relationships of the state to feminist politics and struggles (Banaszak, 2010; Banaszak et al., 2003). The women and the state approach prioritises engaging with the state to ensure inclusion and advancing feminist governance from within. The gender and state institutions approach analyses the state in terms of its gendered structures and its patriarchal and capitalist processes, which might compromise such engagements. Both approaches have contributed to the development of important feminist governance tools such as gender mainstreaming, women’s policy agencies, parliamentary bodies and equality reviews (see Childs and Palmieri, Chapter 14; Mazur and McBride, Chapter 5; Sawer, Chapter 12, all in this Handbook). Discussion of the five analytical approaches shows how feminist debates have moved away from essentialist notions about women and men, and the state. The third approach, deconstruction of gender and state discourses, suggests that instead of the state being a real essentialised object, feminist scholarship needs to explore the ways in which states are constantly reproduced through discourses and practices. Feminist scholars explore the power relations behind these constructions, the femininities and masculinities that they rely upon and reproduce, and their differentiated gender impacts. State processes, policies, institutions, discourses, practices and norms are shown to be gendered and gendering and constitutive of gender orders. 51

52  Handbook of feminist governance The intersectionality and the state approach draws on Black feminist theorising about gender, race, ethnicity and class, as well as sexism and racism, and has become more mainstream with the popularity of the notion of intersectionality which highlights how gender intersects with race and ethnicity, sexuality, disability, class and other inequality categories (Crenshaw, 1991; see also Townsend-Bell, Chapter 7 in this Handbook). States are not only gendered and racialised but also sexualised in that they use norms around heterosexuality to reproduce the state and nation. Feminist scholars have coined the terms homonationalism and homoprotectionism to illustrate how the states and nations draw new boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ or ‘the Others’ (Puar, 2007). The final approach, postdeconstruction and the state, reflects the ‘affective turn’ in feminist theory and points to the role of emotions in holding nations and states together (Ahmed, 2004) and how they might be gendered. The changing political and social context is reflected in feminist debates about the state. Feminist scholarship now theorises states as highly context specific rather than universal. Context-specific states are termed abusive, women-friendly, developmental, fragile, coercive, postmodern, central, strategic, neoliberal, illiberal or postcolonial in feminist debates to reflect both the differences between and within states and state institutions (Bumiller, 2008; Kantola and Dahl, 2005; Parashar et al., 2018; Prügl, 2010). What was first discussed as ‘globalisation’ has now been specified as neoliberalisation that takes different forms in different parts of the world. Neoliberal governmentality reflects the infiltration of market-driven truths and calculations into the domain of politics (Brown, 2018; Ong, 2007: 4). A cross-cutting theme in current feminist governance and the state debates is the manifold impact of neoliberalism and its manifestations in states and feminist engagement with them, to the extent that we can talk about a move towards ‘market feminism’ (Kantola and Squires, 2012) and ‘governance feminism’ (Griffin, 2015; Halley, 2018; Prügl, 2011).

WOMEN AND THE STATE The women and the state approach centres women’s presence, roles, action, interests, needs, rights and voices in political analysis. The approach treats women and men as unitary categories whose interests, needs and beliefs can be identified objectively in research. In terms of political analysis, the women approach challenges the exclusion of women from analytical concepts such as power, agency and institutions, and from what is analysed – polity, politics and policy (Kantola and Lombardo, 2017a). In feminist governance debates, this signifies the inclusion of women in male-dominated governance structures within states. Because of the still relatively precarious position of gender and politics within the discipline of politics, the category of ‘women’ retains considerable importance even if it has been challenged in, for example, gender studies and feminist theory. In these approaches, the state represents a neutral institution that can be targeted and lobbied to achieve progressive gender equality legislation and policies. The state is an institution that is a source of potentially women-friendly legislation and policies. For example, in Betty Friedan’s liberal feminist classic The Feminine Mystique (1962), equality of opportunity for women is to be achieved through changing legislation on equal pay and working hours, and outlawing discrimination in workplaces. Women’s access to the state in terms of political institutions (parliaments, governments, bureaucracy) becomes an important political question and goal (see Kantola, 2006, 2016). The notion of the state put forward by liberal feminists is

Feminist governance and the state  53 symptomatic of liberal feminist appropriation of key concepts in general: they take existing ideas and apply them to the case of women. More women in the state would entail more women’s policy, a presumption that has since been challenged in the debate about women’s substantive representation where it has been shown that increases in women’s descriptive representation do not automatically translate to feminist policy (Celis et al., 2008). Nordic theorising of women-friendly welfare states construes them as a prime – yet of course not the only – example of feminist governance from within potentially benign states. Helga Maria Hernes (1987) defined Nordic states as potentially women-friendly societies, which signified that women’s political and social empowerment happened through the state and with the support of state social policy (for a discussion, see Kantola, 2006). Studies of the Nordic women-friendly welfare states drew attention to women’s contributions and roles in both maintaining and changing gender relations (Siim, 1988). Early debates on women-friendly welfare states highlighted the contradictions, whereby the private dependency of women on individual men was transformed into public dependency on the state (Dahlerup, 1987). The expansion of the public sector, even if it benefited women, was planned and executed by a male-dominated establishment, yet women’s lives were more dependent and determined by state policies than men’s. The concept of the women-friendly welfare state has since come under intense criticism from feminist scholars in the Nordic countries. First, the women-friendly welfare state has been shown to benefit only some women and men (e.g. white and middle class) and to be constructed on inequalities based on race and ethnicity, sexuality and class. As a powerful discourse, ‘women-friendly welfare state’ may even mask these inequalities by creating an impression that equality has been achieved for all (Kantola, 2006). Second, Nordic welfare states have been strongly influenced by the processes of neoliberalisation and economisation, which intensified during and in the aftermath of the 2008 financial and economic crisis. These states have become more neoliberalised in terms of policymaking norms and processes and the effects have been gendered and racialised (Elomäki and Koskinen Sandberg, 2020). Third, the Nordic welfare states are highly corporatist, meaning that a number of gender equality issues, especially those related to the labour market, continue to be decided in complex negotiations between labour market organisations – out of the reach of democratic politics or feminist governance within democratic institutions (Elomäki et al., 2021; Saari et al., 2021). Whilst Nordic countries continue to perform comparatively well in terms of achievements on gender equality, corporatism has been understudied as a policy framework that is in many cases detrimental to gender equality (Elomäki et al., 2022). For example, employers’ organisations have been opposed to increasing pay transparency or parental leave if they consider these reforms to be costly to private sector companies.

GENDER AND STATE INSTITUTIONS Despite their great variety, gender approaches include the need to understand gender always in relation to wider social structures in order to comprehend domination and inequalities that are by definition structural. Analytically, the focus shifts here from women to gender, and gender is studied as a complex socially constructed relation between masculinities and femininities, and deep gender structures are understood to be socially constructed (Kantola and Lombardo, 2017a). For feminist governance, this means that mere inclusion of women in the state, its laws

54  Handbook of feminist governance and institutions is insufficient. Instead, feminist governance needs to include a transformative aspect: transforming these gendered norms and structures. On a practical policymaking level, gender mainstreaming has been developed as a feminist governance tool to be used for breaking gendered structures. Feminist governance debates take place against a long history of feminist theorising of the state, highly critical of the state as an embodiment of deeply unequal gendered structures and as an essentially patriarchal and capitalist institution. Radical feminists stressed the patriarchal nature of the state, analysing the role of the state in perpetuating gender inequalities. The state was not an isolated, neutral and narrow institution – as in the women and the state approach – but rather embedded in broader gendered social structures that in turn shape women’s engagement with the state and the policies that emanate from it (Eisenstein, 1986: 181). The concept of patriarchy captured the insight that the oppression of women is not haphazard or piecemeal but, rather, that the diverse forms of oppression were interconnected and mutually sustained (see Kantola, 2006, 2016). The radical nature of this feminist analysis stemmed from the claim that the state was not only contingently patriarchal, but essentially so, and patriarchy was global and universal. MacKinnon (1989) directed her critique at the liberal state in particular and criticises its laws and policies, for instance, for never fully enforcing laws relating to violence against women or women’s bodily rights. At the same time, states enforced the equation of women with sexuality, which added to their oppression. For Carole Pateman (1988), the origins of patriarchy lay in the social-sexual contract that gave men political rights over women and access to their bodies. An exclusive focus on integrating women into state institutions produced a situation that perpetuated dominant patriarchal discourses and norms rather than challenged them (for a discussion, see Kantola, 2006, 2010). Employing a gender analysis means focusing on the gendered structures in the wider society. It also signifies that a more complex notion of state power and institutions is needed. Feminist studies of democracies have discussed the concept of ‘gender democracy’ to analyse how democratic decision-making is influenced by gendered assumptions and patterns in the wider society (Galligan, 2015: 2). As the gendered nature of political processes and practices varies according to the specific institutional contexts and levels of decision-making, a comparative perspective to the study of democratic polities is needed (Galligan, 2015: 2; Kantola and Lombardo, 2017a). Galligan (2015) proposes three criteria to assess the quality of ‘gender democracy’ in specific empirical contexts: inclusion, accountability and recognition. While inclusion is more often analysed through women approaches, accountability and recognition are particularly addressed from gender – and intersectionality – approaches (Kantola and Lombardo, 2017a). Democratic accountability requires the transparency of democratic decision-making processes to make political or public representatives accountable to the people for the decisions they make. When analysed through gender lenses, this means, for example, asking questions such as: ‘How far do political parties articulate their proposals on gender justice and gender equality?’ or ‘How extensive is the range of mechanisms aimed at rendering decision-makers accountable for upholding gender equality commitments?’ (Galligan, 2015: 9). Recognition calls attention to the diversity of voices, groups and identities, and sensitivity to the participation of different minoritised groups and subjects within both democratic and feminist governance structures. The gender perspective has resulted in a significant number of empirical and comparative studies of how different state formations, such as democracies, provide the conditions for feminist governance. Comparative state feminist literature has studied the ways in which

Feminist governance and the state  55 women’s movements engage with one branch of the state – women’s policy agencies – and evaluated the factors that impact on the successes and failures of these engagements for overall gender policy in the state (see McBride and Mazur, 2010; McBride Stetson and Mazur, 1995). Lee Ann Banaszak (2010) conceptualises the state in terms of its organisation and bureaucracy and explores favourable locations for gender activists and the impact of changes in these for feminist struggles. Feminist institutionalists, in turn, study the state as a variety of separate institutions that include both formal and informal institutions such as norms and rules (Chappell, 2002, 2013: 607). This body of work draws attention to the importance of institutional legacies, path dependencies and possibilities for change (Chappell, 2013: 608). The state is a differentiated set of gendered formal and informal institutions, practices, agencies and discourses, and politics and the state are conceptualised in broad terms.

DECONSTRUCTION OF GENDER AND THE STATE DISCOURSES The third approach, deconstruction of gender and state discourses, analyses the ways in which gender as a discourse and a practice is continuously contested and constructed in political debates (Kantola and Lombardo, 2017a). In deconstruction, gender is deemed to have no fixed meaning, but rather to assume different normative meanings in the conceptual disputes that policy actors engage in (Bacchi, 1999; Verloo, 2007). This approach has shown that a problem such as gender inequality, which feminist governance seeks to tackle, can be represented in many different ways, with many different solutions, and that a particular diagnosis of the problem of gender inequality is at the same time silencing alternative representations of the problem (Bacchi, 1999). Deconstruction, therefore, makes it possible to understand how some solutions are favoured over others and how gender can be silenced in political disputes, stretched to include other equality dimensions apart from gender, or bent to other goals that have nothing to do with gender equality (Ferree, 2009; Lombardo et al., 2009). Drawing on this approach, poststructural feminists have made important contributions to feminist debates on the state by deconstructing the internal unity of the state and theorising the differentiated state as a diverse set of institutions (Pringle and Watson, 1990, 1992). Elisabeth Prügl defined the postmodern state as ‘a decentered state in which authority is shared by multiple levels of government’ (2010: 448). The state is depicted as a discursive process meaning, for example, that state unity and identity are reproduced discursively (see e.g. Kantola, 2007; Kantola et al., 2011). The patriarchal state can be seen then, not as the manifestation of patriarchal essence, but as the centre of a reverberating set of power relations and political processes within which patriarchy is both constructed and contested (Connell, 1987). These particular discourses and histories construct state boundaries, identities and agency (Kantola, 2006, 2007) and masculinity remains central for understanding ‘the multiple modes of power circulating through the domain called the state’ (Brown, 1995: 177). The analyses allow the complex, multidimensional and differentiated relations between the state and gender to be taken into account. They recognise that the state can be a positive as well as a negative resource for feminists, thus deconstructing the dichotomy between ‘in’ and ‘out’ of the state. Within a framework of diverse discourses and power relations, gender diversity and differences in gendered experiences come to the fore (Kantola and Dahl, 2005). Scholars working with deconstruction approaches have developed the notion of governance feminism. The concept of governance feminism captures the ways in which feminist actors

56  Handbook of feminist governance and knowledge can be transformed – and become compromised – in interactions with national or international institutions’ priorities, which may be, for example, neoliberal, conservative or populist (Griffin, 2015; Prügl, 2011). For example, in EU institutions, gender equality policies have been instrumentalised to achieve economic goals and focus on a narrow range of issues supportive of economic integration (see Elomäki, Chapter 26; Jacquot, Chapter 25; and Kantola and Lombardo, Chapter 24, all in this Handbook). As Elomäki shows in her chapter here, ‘economisation’ of EU policies brings the need to define gender equality through an economic rationale – costs and benefits to the economy and economic growth. Neoliberalism especially has become an important theme for feminist analysis as it has so fundamentally shaped the opportunities for gender and equality policies and feminist engagement with the state. Neoliberalisation signifies the marketisation of public services, transferring costs and risk from the state to individuals and families. It includes employment and social policies that responsibilise individuals and governance reforms that extend private sector management practices to the public sector (Elomäki and Kantola, 2018). The effects have been gendered. While neoliberal discourses and policies portray both women and men as rational economic actors and push women into the labour market, policies that dismantle the welfare state and re-privatise and informalise care rely on and intensify women’s unpaid or poorly compensated work, increasing class-based and racialised inequalities among women (Bakker, 2003; Brown, 2018). Feminists are faced with new challenges when the state becomes a ‘competition state’ or a ‘strategic state’ as a result of impact of neoliberal ideologies and modes of governance. At a practical level, lower levels of funding to state-based bodies have resulted in the dismantling of state gender equality architecture and defunding of women’s organisations (Kantola and Lombardo, 2017b). Neoliberalism has also been conceptualised as a new relationship between government and knowledge through which governing activities are recast as non-political and non-ideological problems that need technical solutions (Ong, 2007: 3). De-democratising shifts in economic governance have narrowed down democratic debate and civil society participation. These changes in the state are also transforming state-based feminist strategies and practices from previous ‘state feminism’ to ‘market feminism’ (Kantola and Squires, 2012) or governance feminism (Prügl, 2011), where feminist knowledge is appropriated and transformed to the service of neoliberal states.

INTERSECTIONALITY AND THE STATE Intersectional analyses study the inequalities, marginalisation and domination that the interactions of gender, race, class and other systems of inequality produce. While the concept of ‘intersectionality’ may be a novelty, its key ideas were articulated decades ago in Black, lesbian and postcolonial feminist theorising that exposed the limitations of women-only and gender-only analyses. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s coining of the term ‘intersectionality’ gave this approach new analytical purchase. Elaborating the concepts of structural and political intersectionality, Crenshaw (1991) studied how the intersection of inequalities of gender, race and class have consequences for people’s opportunities in life, in areas such as employment and gender violence, and how political and social movement strategies focusing on one inequality are not neutral in relation to other inequalities.

Feminist governance and the state  57 Feminist theorising of the state, such as the conceptualisations discussed above, often comes from specific (Western) contexts that are not always made explicit. There is a strong body of feminist work on the state that stresses the importance of different contexts where states are theorised as well as the linkages between theory and practice. Development scholars, too, point to the fundamentally different meaning of the state (Afshar, 1996; Alvarez, 1990; Dore and Molyneux, 2000; Rai and Lievesley, 1996). In terms of key issues, postcolonialism, nationalism, economic modernisation and state capacity emerge as important, whereas Western feminists often take these issues for granted, focusing instead on how best to engage with the state (Chappell, 2000: 246; Wieringa, 2002: 47). When exploring women’s activism, for example in Africa, the ways in which patriarchy is combined with (neo)patrimonialism in the state becomes central (Tripp, 2001). In neopatrimonial states, ‘claims to authority are based on personal relations of loyalty and dependence that stand above the law’ (Tripp, 2001: 106). When combined with patriarchy, this can have a negative effect on women’s position and participation in the state. Hence, questions of women’s autonomy acquire a different significance. For example, the Ugandan women’s movement has been able to claim a greater degree of autonomy from the state, which has been critical to its success (Tripp, 2001: 105). Again, these practices vary greatly between states and need to be studied contextually. In postcolonial states, the colonial past and anti-colonial struggles are present in different ways and shape the ideologies, governance and institutional structures of such states (Parashar, 2018: 162). For many, the nation state presented an idealised form of self-rule, a structure where anti-colonial nationalism could be manifested (Parashar et al., 2018: 8). For critics such as Ashis Nandy (2003), ‘the state’ shares ‘the white man’s burden’ as it controls and civilises societies, promoting modernisation through, for instance, development policies. For postcolonial states, in particular, it is an acute paradox that while anti-colonial struggles saw the idea of the sovereign state as a solution to colonial abuse, ‘many of these postcolonial states became perpetrators of gross human rights violations, particularly against women and minorities, violences that have been largely unseen or silenced, neither reported, recorded nor recognized’ (Parashar et al., 2018: 1). Political and armed conflicts in Africa, Asia and the Middle East fuel and are fuelled by weak, non-existent state structures, making the achievement of human rights, women’s rights and equality through sovereign states seem like a distant goal (Parashar et al., 2018). Intersectionality approaches have been used to explore how LGBTQ+ activists have changed state relations and how the state has structured opportunities for lesbian and gay communities all over the world (Ayoub and Paternotte, 2014). An important shift in Europe has been the expansion of one-dimensional state equality laws, policies and institutions based on gender or race to cover, for example, sexual orientation, age, disability and religion too. The opportunities and challenges this creates for advancing equalities and intersectionality in gender policymaking has been the subject of feminist debates on ‘institutionalizing intersectionality’ (Kantola, 2010; Krizsan et al., 2012). Radical right populism is changing feminist politics in relation to states too. Radical right populists directly oppose gender and gender equality as a harmful ‘gender ideology’. They construct advancement of gender equality as a harmful elitist ideology imposed on member states by the European Union (Kantola and Lombardo, 2019; Kuhar and Paternotte, 2017). Opposing ‘gender ideology’ is based on seeing the social construction of femininities and masculinities implied by the concept of ‘gender’ as harmful and wrong. Rather, radical right

58  Handbook of feminist governance populists talk about natural roles of women and men, boys and girls, and stress heterosexuality and nuclear families as the basis of society and state policy. Radical right populists have made important electoral gains in a number of European states, most visibly affecting gender equality in Hungary and Poland. Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary has transformed the democratic principles of the state, curtailing the independence of media, civil society and courts. Feminist activists, like others, are faced with engaging the new illiberal politics of the state (Krizsán and Roggeband, 2018). In Poland, abortion rights have been restricted through undemocratic processes referring the final decision to government-influenced courts. Even in countries where radical right populists are in opposition, the ways in which they oppose gender equality and LGBTQI+ rights is having an impact on debates on gender equality, making such rights less legitimate (Kantola and Lombardo, 2019, 2020; Kuhar and Paternotte, 2017; Verloo, 2018).

POSTDECONSTRUCTION AND THE STATE Postdeconstruction is a term that can be used to refer to debates on feminist new materialism and affect, studies that come analytically ‘after’ reflections on the deconstruction of gender (Kantola and Lombardo, 2017a). Postdeconstruction has been widely debated in feminist theory, gender studies and cultural studies but is yet to emerge as an analytical strategy in gender and political analysis. As an approach, postdeconstruction is interested in understanding the role of affect, emotions and bodily material in gender and politics. From the new materialist point of view, significant social change cannot be achieved solely by deconstructing subjectivities, discourses and identities. Rather, there is a need to understand and alter very real socioeconomic conditions and the interests that these serve (Coole and Frost, 2010: 25; see also Kantola and Lombardo, 2017a). This places emphasis on economic and political processes and their materiality and impact on bodies. In terms of feminist governance and the state, using postdeconstruction suggests that the state and its effects cannot be understood merely in terms of discourses. Instead, these approaches stress that the states are embedded in material phenomena and processes, which is irreducible to culture and discourse (Ahmed, 2008; Coole and Frost, 2010: 2–3). From the point of the view of theorising the state, what becomes important is the biopolitical interests of the modern state: the state’s role in managing the life, health and death of its populations. Management of ‘fertility rates, marriage and funeral rites, epidemics, food hygiene, and the nation’s health’, including seemingly technical questions about biological life processes, enter the political order because the state must make decisions about the worthiness of different lives (Coole and Frost, 2010: 23). In this way, states exert powers in shaping, constraining and constituting life chances and opportunities. The ways in which the state exercises power is both discursive and material; the two cannot be separated but neither reduced to one another. Whilst economic factors and capitalism become central, the capitalist system is not understood in a narrowly economistic way but rather ‘as a detotalized totality that includes a multitude of interconnected phenomena and processes’ (Coole and Frost, 2010: 29). This view encourages us to take seriously Foucauldian analysis of governmentality, biopolitics and the role of discourse in maintaining social order, and incorporating the state’s role in maintaining the conditions of capital accumulation into the analyses (Coole and Frost, 2010: 30).

Feminist governance and the state  59

CONCLUSION Feminist political analyses of the state powerfully demonstrate the multiple ways in which states continue to be gendered and the challenges this creates for feminist governance. The state continues to play an important role in upholding and reproducing gendered, racialised and sexualised hierarchies in contemporary societies. Feminist governance within states has been able to challenge such hierarchies but has also become complicit within them, for example by providing legitimacy to neoliberal policies. These dilemmas are well captured by the notion of governance feminism. This chapter has demonstrated, however, how the state can be analysed through a variety of feminist approaches: women and the state, gender and state institutions, deconstruction of gender and state discourses, intersectionality and the state, and postdeconstruction and the state. The multiplicity of the feminist approaches ensures that state–gender relations can be illuminated from different perspectives and the possibilities and challenges for feminist governance richly mapped.

REFERENCES Afshar, Haleh (ed.) (1996) Women and Politics in the Third World, London: Routledge. Ahmed, Sara (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, London: Routledge. Ahmed, Sara (2008) ‘Open Forum. Imaginary Prohibitions. Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gesture of the “New Materialism”’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 15(1): 23–39. Alvarez, Sonia E. (1990) Engendering Democracy in Brazil: Women’s Movements in Transition Politics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ayoub, Phillip M. and David Paternotte (eds) (2014) LGBT Activism and the Making of Europe: A Rainbow Europe? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bacchi, Carol Lee (1999) Women, Policy and Politics: The Construction of Policy Problems, London: SAGE. Bakker, Isabella (2003) ‘Neo-Liberal Governance and the Privatization of Social Reproduction: Social Provisioning and Shifting Gender Orders’. In Isabella Bakker and Stephen Gill (eds), Power, Production and Social Reproduction, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 66–82. Banaszak, Lee Ann (2010) The Women’s Movement: Inside and Outside the State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Banaszak, Lee Ann, Karen Beckwith and Dieter Rucht (2003) ‘When Power Relocates: Interactive Changes in Women’s Movements and States’. In Lee Ann Banaszak, Karen Beckwith and Dieter Rucht (eds), Women’s Movements Facing the Reconfigured State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–29. Brown, Wendy (1995) States of Injury: Power and Freedom in the Late Modernity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brown, Wendy (2018) ‘Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein: Authoritarian Freedom in Twenty-First Century “Democracies”’, Critical Times 1(1): 60–79. Bumiller, Kristin (2008) In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement Against Sexual Violence, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Celis, Karen, Sarah Childs, Johanna Kantola and Mona Lena Krook (2008) ‘Rethinking Women’s Substantive Representation’, Representation: The Journal of Representative Democracy 44(2): 99–110. Chappell, Louise (2000) ‘Interacting with the State’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 2(2): 244–75. Chappell, Louise (2002) Gendering Government: Feminist Engagement with the State in Australia and Canada, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

60  Handbook of feminist governance Chappell, Louise (2013) ‘State and Governance’. In Georgina Waylen, Karen Celis, Johanna Kantola and Laurel Weldon (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics, New York: Oxford University Press, 603–26. Connell, R. W. (1987) Gender and Power, Cambridge: Polity Press. Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost (2010) ‘Introducing New Materialisms’. In Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (eds), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1–43. Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1991) ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’. In K. Bartlett and R. Kennedy (eds), Feminist Legal Theory: Readings in Law and Gender, San Francisco, CA: Westview Press, 57–80. Dahlerup, Drude (1987) ‘Confusing Concepts – Confusing Reality: A Theoretical Discussion of the Patriarchal State’. In Anne Showstack Sassoon (ed.), Women and the State, London: Routledge, 93–127. Dore, Elizabeth and Maxine Molyneux (eds) (2000) Hidden Stories of Gender and the State in Latin America, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Eisenstein, Zillah (1986) The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism, Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Elomäki, Anna and Johanna Kantola (2018) ‘Theorizing Feminist Struggles in the Triangle of Neoliberalism, Conservatism, and Nationalism’, Social Politics 25(3): 337–60. Elomäki, Anna, Johanna Kantola and Paula Koskinen Sandberg (eds) (2022) Social Partners, Power and (In)Equalities in Europe: Gendered Corporatism in Times of Neoliberalism and Transnationalization, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Elomäki, Anna and Paula Koskinen Sandberg (2020) ‘Feminist Perspectives on the Economy within Transforming Nordic Welfare States’. NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 28(2): 81–5. Elomäki, Anna, Armi Mustosmäki and Paula Koskinen Sandberg (2021) ‘The Sidelining of Gender Equality in a Corporatist and Knowledge-Oriented Regime: The Case of Failed Family Leave Reform in Finland’, Critical Social Policy 41(2): 294–314. Ferree, Myra Marx (2009) ‘Inequality, Intersectionality and the Politics of Discourse: Framing Feminist Alliances’. In Emanuela Lombardo, Petra Meier and Mieke Verloo (eds), The Discursive Politics of Gender Equality: Stretching, Bending and Policymaking, London: Routledge, 86–104. Friedan, Betty (1962) The Feminine Mystique, New York: Dell Publishing. Galligan, Yvonne (2015) ‘States of Democracy: An Overview’. In Yvonne Galligan (ed.), States of Democracy: Gender and Politics in the European Union, New York: Routledge, 1–14. Griffin, Penny (2015) ‘Crisis, Austerity and Gendered Governance: A Feminist Perspective’, Feminist Review 109(1): 49–72. Halley, Janet (2018) ‘Preface: Introducing Governance Feminism’. In Janet Halley, Prabha Kotiswaran, Rachel Rebouché and Hila Shamir, Governance Feminism: An Introduction, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, ix–xxi. Hernes, Helga Maria (1987) Welfare State and Woman Power, Oslo: Norwegian University Press. Kantola, Johanna (2006) Feminists Theorize the State, New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kantola, Johanna (2007) ‘The Gendered Reproduction of the State in International Relations’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 9(4): 270–83. Kantola, Johanna (2010) Gender and the European Union, New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kantola, Johanna (2016) ‘State/Nation’. In Mary Hawkesworth and Lisa Disch (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 915–33. Kantola, Johanna and Hanne Marlene Dahl (2005) ‘Gender and the State: From Differences Between to Differences Within’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 7(1), 49–70. Kantola, Johanna and Emanuela Lombardo (2017a) Gender and Political Analysis, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kantola, Johanna and Emanuela Lombardo (eds) (2017b) Gender and the Economic Crisis in Europe: Politics, Institutions and Intersectionality, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kantola, Johanna and Emanuela Lombardo (2019) ‘Populism and Feminist Politics: The Cases of Finland and Spain’, European Journal of Political Research (EJPR) 58(4): 1108–28.

Feminist governance and the state  61 Kantola, Johanna and Emanuela Lombardo (2020) ‘Strategies of Right Populists in Opposing Gender Equality in a Polarized European Parliament’, International Political Science Review. https://​doi​.org/​ 10​.1177/​0192512120963953. Kantola, Johanna, Cristian Norocel and Jemima Repo (2011) ‘Gendering School Shootings in Finland’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 18(2): 183–98. Kantola, Johanna and Judith Squires (2012) ‘From State Feminism to Market Feminism’, International Political Science Review 13(3): 382–400. Krizsán, Andrea and Conny Roggeband (2018) ‘Reversing Gender Policy Progress: Patterns of Backsliding in Central and Eastern European New Democracies’, European Journal of Politics and Gender 1(3): 367–85. Krizsan, Andrea, Hege Skjeie and Judith Squires (eds) (2012) Institutionalizing Intersectionality? Comparative Analyses, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kuhar, Roman and David Paternotte (eds) (2017) Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against Equality, London: Rowman & Littlefield. Lombardo, Emanuela, Petra Meier and Mieke Verloo (eds) (2009) The Discursive Politics of Gender Equality: Stretching, Bending and Policymaking, London: Routledge. Mackinnon, Catharine (1989) Towards a Feminist Theory of the State, London: Harvard University Press. McBride, Dorothy and Amy Mazur (2010) The Politics of State Feminism: Innovation in Comparative Research [with the participation of Joni Lovenduski, Joyce Outshoorn, Birgit Sauer and Marila Guadagnini], Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. McBride Stetson, Dorothy and Amy Mazur (1995) Comparative State Feminism, London: Sage. Nandy, Ashis (2003) The Romance of the State: And the Fate of Dissent in the Tropics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ong, Aihwa (2007) Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Parashar, Swati (2018) ‘The Postcolonial/Emotional State: Mother India’s Response to Her Deviant Maoist Children’. In Swati Parashar, J. Ann Tickner and Jacqui True (eds), Revisiting Gendered States: Feminist Imaginings of the State in International Relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 157–73. Parashar, Swati, J. Ann Tickner and Jacqui True (2018) ‘Introduction: Feminist Imaginings of Twenty-First-Century Gendered States’. In Swati Parashar, J. Ann Tickner and Jacqui True (eds), Revisiting Gendered States: Feminist Imaginings of the State in International Relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–15. Pateman, Carole (1988) ‘The Patriarchal Welfare State’. In Amy Gutman (ed.), Democracy and the Welfare State, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 231–60. Pringle, Rosemary and Sophie Watson (1990) ‘Fathers, Brothers, Mates: The Fraternal State in Australia. In Sophie Watson (ed.), Playing the State, London: Verso, 229–43. Pringle, Rosemary and Sophie Watson (1992) ‘“Women’s Interests” and the Post-Structuralist State’. In Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips (eds), Destabilizing Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press, 53–73. Prügl, Elisabeth (2010) ‘Feminism and the Postmodern State: Gender Mainstreaming in European Rural Development’, Signs 35(2): 447–75. Prügl, Elisabeth (2011) ‘Diversity Management and Gender Mainstreaming as Technologies of Government’, Politics and Gender 7(1): 71–89. Puar, Jasbir (2007) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Rai, Shirin and Geraldine Lievesley (eds) (1996) Women and the State: International Perspectives, London: Taylor and Francis. Saari, Milja, Johanna Kantola and Paula Koskinen Sandberg (2021) ‘Implementing Equal Pay Policy: Clash Between Gender Equality and Corporatism’, Social Politics 28(2): 265–89. Sawer, Maria (2003) The Ethical State? Social Liberalism in Australia, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Siim, Birte (1988) ‘Towards a Feminist Rethinking of the Welfare State’. In Kathleen Jones and Anna Jónasdóttir (eds), The Political Interests of Gender, Oxford: Sage Publications, 160–86.

62  Handbook of feminist governance Tripp, Aili Mari (2001) ‘The Politics of Autonomy and Cooptation in Africa: The Case of the Ugandan Women’s Movement’, The Journal of Modern African Studies 39(1): 101–28. Verloo, Mieke (ed.) (2007) Multiple Meanings of Gender Equality: A Critical Frame Analysis of Gender Policies in Europe, Budapest: Central European University Press. Verloo, Mieke (ed.) (2018) Varieties of Opposition to Gender Equality in Europe, New York: Routledge. Wieringa, Saskia (2002) Sexual Politics in Indonesia, London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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

INTRODUCTION At the heart of the study of feminist governance is understanding what happens when women’s movement actors and ideas become institutionalised inside the state through women’s policy agencies and individual actors – called femocrats – who advocate explicitly feminist agendas. Since path-breaking work done in Australia on femocracy – ‘sisters in suits’ (Sawer, 1990) ‘working from inside’ (Sawer and Groves, 1994) and ‘inside agitators’ (Eisenstein, 1996) – researchers have used the concept ‘feminist insider’ primarily in the context of Western post-industrial democracies to describe the phenomenon. They have explored various research questions such as: Who are these feminist insiders and how are they connected to the women’s movement outside state arenas? To what extent are feminist insiders able to achieve change that reflects feminist ideas in the organisational logics of the state and the adoption and implementation of policies and tools? Put simply, do feminist insiders matter? Certainly, actors and structures within the state, like femocrats and women’s policy agencies, have the potential to be conduits for movement actors and ideas in ways that enhance gender equality and, in doing so, to improve the overall quality and performance of democracy. At the same time, critics have warned that the potential for cooptation and rejection posed by the gender-biased/ patriarchal state jeopardises such democratic promise. As Guido et al. say in this Handbook (Chapter 3), pervasive cultural norms work against gender equality, including within government institutions. While research on gender and the state has developed the analytical notion of feminist insiders and their activism, the concept has not been operationalised and used in systematic cross-national analysis with an eye towards building comparative theory. Thus, the goal of this chapter is to propose a precise operational definition of feminist insider activism (FIA) that can be used in such comparative research. The intent is to help researchers identify insiders and map their trajectories, systematic empirical research that can contribute to larger theories about the impact of these inside agitators in a wider range of national contexts. The first part of the chapter traces the evolution of the use of the term insider from its origins outside gender and politics research to the ways various studies have used it to examine the connections between women’s movements and state action. This review then leads into a working definition of feminist insider activism and an elaboration of how to apply it in comparative research. The conclusion turns to a discussion of the next steps in the emerging research agenda on feminist insiders and implications for broader questions of feminist governance and the performance of democratic systems.

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FEMINIST INSIDER ACTIVISM: AN INTERNATIONAL CROSS-DISCIPLINARY DIALOGUE Whereas researchers who work on comparative issues of gender policy and the state have tended to focus on state feminism, feminist policy formation, or feminist movements and policy separately, the emerging research agenda on feminist insiders and their activism integrates findings from these three ‘separate streams’.1 At the core of the concept of feminist insider activism is the ‘intersection’ (Banaszak, 2005, 2010), between movements outside government and actors and structures within the state; what makes the insiders feminist is their advocacy of feminist ideas that they bring from movements outside the state, for example, the cases of South Africa and Australia in this Handbook. As research on the state–movement connection shows, understanding insider activism is less about whether feminist insiders are formally part of the women’s movement (see e.g. Bereni and Revillard, 2018), or whether women’s movement actors are autonomous from the state (e.g. Banaszak, 2010), but rather what they do as actors within state arenas. The specific links between feminist insiders and outsiders, therefore, is a question for research. What do researchers mean when they use the term insider? Politics and gender researchers by no means have a monopoly on the notion and in fact they have been inspired by studies, especially on social movements, apart from those on feminist governance. As Banaszak points out, ‘the decision to take to the streets or work in the airconditioned halls of government’ (2005: 169) was highlighted as early as 1976 by Jo Freeman’s study of the US women’s movements and then by a range of social movement and politics and gender scholars in the 1980s and 1990s. Building on the work of Merton (1972), Patricia Hill Collins developed the concept of the ‘outsider within’ to show how Black feminist thinkers may use their positions of marginality in producing ideas that reflect their ‘special standpoint’ (1986). This ‘outsider within’ phenomenon can be found in discussions of feminist approaches to fieldwork, for example by Cuomo and Massaro (2014) and Naples (1996). Social movement researchers have used the term feminist insider to identify feminist women’s movement actors who move into non-feminist movements and/or groups. For example, Uthman’s (2009) study of insiders in Nigeria focuses on the Muslim women who work inside the larger Islamic movement. Multilevel insider–outsider feminist strategies at the transnational level have been identified by Hsiung et al. (2006) and Einhorn (2006), while, Keck and Sikkink (1998) have observed a ‘boomerang effect’ in many countries across the globe. Here, feminist activists go ‘outside’ the national level to mobilise in transnational movements and intergovernmental organisations and then use international norms and policies to put pressure on national governments to pursue gender equality policy. Thus, the insider–outsider construct has been quite fruitful for a range of feminist analyses. At the same time, in the study of gender politics and the state, the use of the feminist insider concept with respect to feminist governance emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s (Chappell, 2013). The proliferation and diffusion of women’s policy machineries across the globe, which began in the 1970s, culminated at the 1995 Beijing Conference (McBride and Mazur, 2013). That, along with the shift in women’s movement mobilisation in Western countries from anti-system protest movements to more institutionalised networks aimed at policy reforms, provided fertile ground for analysis. A closer look at the emergence of the concept reveals how it has been used in comparative theory-building on gender politics and the state, not only to develop and test assertions about determinants and dynamics of feminist governance, but also

Do feminist insiders matter?  65 to provide good practice and recommendations for policy actors, practitioners and activists who pursue gender equality both inside and outside the state. State of the field articles on state feminism (McBride and Mazur, 2013), insider activism/ tactics in the United States (US) (Banaszak and Whitesell, 2017) and other Western countries (Banaszak, 2005), and gender and governance (Chappell, 2013) in the 1980s and 1990s documented the shifts in women’s movement mobilisation and activities of women’s policy agencies in Western post-industrial democracies. These studies convinced researchers to change the view of the state as a monolithic patriarchy to seeing it as a complex set of institutions and arenas. Australian feminist scholars led the way in studying the growth of agencies and femocrats. Sawer’s (1990) work on ‘sisters in suits’ was followed by Eisenstein (1996) who, in her study of bureaucrats pursuing explicitly feminist agendas, helped transfer the label ‘femocrat’, originally both a critique and a form of identity, into a legitimate area of study (Sawer, 2016). Chappell (2013) made an important contribution by re-thinking critical feminist theories of the state, asserting that the state should be thought of in more differentiated terms. These studies showed that women’s movement activists on the outside could find openings as insiders to move into the state to promote gender justice and gender equality (Franzway et al., 1989; Pringle and Watson, 1992). Pringle and Watson argued that once inside, the approaches of femocrats were shaped by the particular discursive contexts where they were situated in the state. While a rich international literature has continued to examine the role of femocrats, the definitions of just who is a femocrat vary. Some writers define them as any women in the state bureaucracy, others as bureaucrats with feminist agendas and still others as any actor working for a women’s policy agency. Outshoorn (1994), for example, focuses on femocrats in women’s policy agencies in the Netherlands. Thus, there is no agreement that all femocrats are feminist insiders, although, to be sure, femocrats are a major conduit for insider activism.2 In her comparative study of Canada and Australia, Chappell developed the notions of ‘feminist engagement with the state’ and ‘gendering government’ where ‘feminist activists cannot avoid the state’ and ‘actor–agency relations’ are ‘co-constitutive’ (2002: 25). German theorists also advanced the idea of ‘feminist materialism’ to describe the obstacles and opportunities for feminist action offered by the contemporary variegated state (e.g. Sauer and Wöhl, 2010). In the late 2000s, feminist institutional theory emerged and identified gender power imbalances that act as barriers to advancing women’s rights and gender equality in a meaningful way (e.g. Krook and Mackay, 2011). Chappell (2006) honed in on processes within the state that had gender-biased path dependencies – dominant gender norms and practices that made it difficult for feminist insiders and outsiders to make progress (here she revised March and Olsen’s (1984) quite gender-blind notion of institutional path dependencies and ‘logics of appropriateness’).3 Meanwhile, feminist scholars in the Nordic countries identified the policies and laws that came from interactions between feminist insiders and outsiders as state feminism, focusing on agitation from below and integration from above (Hernes, 1987; Siim, 1991). Feminist politics and gender scholars in the US also engaged with insider–outsider concepts. Banaszak conducted path-breaking research on insider activism in the US bureaucracy (2005 and 2010) and more recently with Whitesell (2017) in the legislative arena, providing key insights and observations that are foundational for any understanding of insider activism. Their perspective was influenced by the American anti-state political culture and a broad-based grassroots

66  Handbook of feminist governance women’s movement that was both anti-system through direct protest and pro-reform through lobbies and large feminist groups and networks. At the same time as these single-country studies were conducted, a group of feminist scholars based in the US, Europe and Australia came together in 1994 to study women’s policy agencies (WPA) from a comparative perspective. Based on the history, organisation and activities of a single WPA in each of 14 Western post-industrial democracies, it was clear that a core research question still needed to be addressed: whether and to what extent do WPAs ‘develop opportunities for society based actors – feminist and women’s advocacy organizations – to have access to the policy process?’ (McBride Stetson and Mazur, 1995: 14). To study this question, members of this group and other scholars formed the Research Network on Gender Politics and the State (RNGS). Eventually growing to 40 members, RNGS set to work to refine the concept of state feminism and develop a comparative mixed-methods research design to guide a comparative long-term study of the influence of women’s policy agencies across five sectors of public policy and in 13 Western democracies. The nominal definition of state feminism, developed by RNGS, went beyond equating state feminism with the presence of WPAs in government. It spelled out that state feminism occurs when women’s policy agencies act as allies of women’s movement actors to achieve policy goals and procedural access to policymaking arenas.4 Based on theories of social movements and representation, the RNGS project began with the assertion that WPAs could be potential sites for the representation of women’s movement interests both in terms of descriptive representation – women’s movement activists themselves entering the policy process – and substantive representation – the ideas of women’s movements entering and influencing the formation of public policies. Such representational potential of insiders became part of the RNGS research agenda. This approach was in line with Weldon (2002), who argued that organisations inside and outside the state are just as important to representation as individuals elected to public office. This new research on state feminism signalled the crucial connection between feminist insider activism and democratic performance through representation. By its focus on women’s policy agencies, the RNGS study thus explored feminist insider activism, defined as the extent to which WPAs have helped feminist women’s movement outsiders and ideas gain access to the policy process and have substantive impact on policy outcomes. Thus, the term feminist insider has an explicit operational meaning in RNGS research: those WPAs that were movement allies through gendering public policy debates in feminist terms and bringing forward feminist women’s movement actors into the policy sub-system at the end of the debates. Feminist insiders are defined by the results of their activities, not just their intent (McBride and Mazur, 2010: 125). Alongside the focus on movement–state relations through studying feminist insiders is the equally international literature in Feminist Comparative Policy (FCP) – analysis that identifies the ingredients for authoritative and feminist/gender equality policies. While FCP research took place, for the most part, in Western post-industrial democracies (Mazur, 2015) there was also work on countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (e.g. Lycklama a Nieholt et al., 1998). In this work, a major ingredient or driver for feminist policy success has been the ‘strategic alliances’ between women in office, women’s policy agencies and women’s movements (see Ahrens, Chapter 27 in this Handbook on ‘velvet triangles’; see also Holli’s 2008 review of the concept).

Do feminist insiders matter?  67 Thus, an important paradigmatic shift in comparative politics and gender scholarship has led to the emerging consensus that feminist insiders and insider activism are highly useful concepts to assess whether the state can become more feminist in its governance, for example, through new methodologies of consultation and through gender impact analysis of policy and programme delivery. This turn towards analysis of feminist insider activism can be found across all areas of comparative gender and politics research: state feminism, women’s movements, feminist policy formation and feminist institutionalism. It ultimately shows how feminist insiders are key to the process and outcomes of feminist governance, what Chappell and Mackay (2020) call a ‘feminist change agenda’.

RESEARCH DEFINITION OF FEMINIST INSIDER ACTIVISM (FIA) A Complex Causal Operational Definition From this overview, it is clear that any agenda for understanding feminist insiders must go beyond identifying and describing insiders and include an analysis of what insiders are actually doing in practice within all state arenas: how they are connected to the feminist movement and then, most importantly, the policy outcomes of their activities, the feminist movements to which they are linked and, because of their potential to represent both substantively and descriptively feminist interests, the degree to which these enhance the quality of democracy. The concept feminist insider activism, rather than feminist insiders, captures these complex relationships and the normative understanding that the goal of FIA is to put forth feminist movement agendas in order to produce concrete results and, in doing so, has the potential to improve overall democratic performance. The following working definition is designed to ‘travel’ across national contexts so that researchers can use it to collect data systematically with an eye towards building a comparative theory of FIA.5 Feminist insider activism comprises individuals and/or structures that formally operate within state arenas at any level and that have links to feminist movement actors and/or their ideas outside the state in order to advance those ideas in policy practice and/or policy instruments to enhance gender equality in policy outcomes and empower feminist movements. In the language of conceptualisation, feminist insider activism is an ideal-type concept rather than grey zone, meaning that the operational definition allows researchers to identify state– society interactions that are either instances of feminist insider activism or not. For example, the activities of women’s policy agencies that do not explicitly express outsider feminist movement ideas or help them access the policy process would not be considered instances of FIA. Figure 5.1 maps out the different dimensions of the concept and how they interrelate according to the level at which it is taking place – extra-national, national, subnational and local level. These are illustrated as contextual determinants. As Kenny and Verge argue in this Handbook (Chapter 6), the study of multilevel governance highlights the constitutional blueprint in each national setting and the international memberships and obligations beyond the national level that frame and affect feminist governance. Taking a closer look at the dimensions and their interrelations shows how this complex concept can be used in comparative research.

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Figure 5.1

Mapping feminist insider activism

Inside Actors: Agencies and Femocrats in a Range of State Arenas This dimension allows for insiders to be individuals or structures. It reflects work that looks either at individual activism, most of which tends to be focused on the US (Banaszak and Whitesell, 2017) or focuses on structures such as women’s policy agencies, most of which is comparative. State feminist literature has combined these by looking at the individual in charge of a WPA as a major actor in entering into successful state feminist alliances. Feminist insiders and femocrats such as upper-level civil servants, staffers and even ministers can also be located outside women’s policy agencies, bringing explicitly feminist ideas and action to the work of a broad range of governmental agencies (Sawer, 2020). This dimension also reflects the debate about what the state is, and where it ends and society begins. The state may be seen as a shifting complex entity with multiple access points (Chappell, 2013). Moreover, conceptions of the state and its boundaries shift from one country to another. While Andrew (2013) refers to women’s policy agencies as part of the ‘institutional harvest’ of the women’s movement in Australia, and Bereni and Revillard (2018) have shown how WPAs are ‘movement institutions’, particularly in the French case, Bereni (2021) has also argued that WPAs worked with the women’s movement to get parity laws on the books in France through a ‘women’s cause field’ that was both inside and outside of the state. At the same time, the words any level in our operational definition imply that state power in its broadest form includes a wide range of locations with statutory or constitutional authority. This includes all branches of government including police and courts and commissions, as well as the quasi state structures such as advisory commissions and women’s commissions in

Do feminist insiders matter?  69 political parties. Given that there are locations both within a given country and in its engagements at the transnational and international levels, there is the potential for a large number of cases or observations of feminist insider activism. Such broad conceptualisation shows great promise for increasing the number of observations to address the problem in qualitative comparative analysis of too few cases and too many variables (Lijphart, 1971). Connections Between Insiders and Outsiders As depicted in Figure 5.1, the women’s movement itself is the starting point for feminist insider activism. Work on feminist insiders has often emphasised the direct connections between movement groups and insiders through overlapping affiliations, for example, femocrats who are also members of movement organisations (e.g. Banaszak, 2010; Eisenstein, 1996; Sawer, 1990). In contrast, work on state feminism has shown that feminist movement ideas, not actors, can be the conduit for insider activism. The RNGS project’s conceptualisation of women’s movement is also quite helpful here (McBride and Mazur, 2008). Building on comparative movement scholarship, their approach identifies women’s movements by their ideas and the actors that present them in public life. Women’s movement ideas comprise explicit identity with women as a group, specific claims to represent women and the use of gendered language; feminist movement ideas are considered a subset of these ideas with the specific goals of striking down gender hierarchies and promoting gender equality. Thus, while insiders may connect with women’s movement ideas generally, they may not always connect with feminist movement ideas and actors. Studies that have looked at women insiders as a proxy for connections to the movement, without determining whether they supported women’s movement goals, are not studies of feminist insiders (e.g. Santoro and McGuire, 1997). To locate feminist insiders requires some discussion of whether women in the study supported feminist ideas or not, as we see in Banaszak’s (2010) study of women in the US federal bureaucracy. Alternatively, if men within the state connect with outsiders through supporting their ideas, they too could potentially be seen as feminist insiders. This dimension makes it clear that women’s movement outsiders can be formal organisations as well as more shifting structures such as protests; the approach and form of the outsider entity matters little, just that it is promotes feminist women’s movement ideas in public life. Policy Practice of Insiders: The ‘Tools of the Trade’ Once the insiders have been identified, the researcher can determine the tools these insiders formally use to pursue the feminist movement agenda and then study how the actors employ those tools; in other words, the policy practice of the insiders. The actual mechanisms and the outcomes of the tools and practice of the trade will vary across different types of political systems. It will be up to the researcher to see how this plays out in quite different institutional settings, for example the differences between presidential and parliamentary systems. As Banaszak and Whitesell (2017: 490) argue, the target of feminist insiders need not be just statutes, regulations or laws. The targets can include programmes, budgets, appropriations and administrative rules. In fact, some argue that budgets, specifically gender budgeting, has been a central tool for feminist insider action. The very nature of the business of governing and the inherent gender-biased patterns of state structures can also be the target of insider feminist

70  Handbook of feminist governance practice. Palmieri and Ballington’s survey of the ‘tools of the trade’ for international feminist governance (Chapter 15 in this Handbook) provides a useful checklist to help identify the full range of instruments for insider practice. Policy Outcomes: Feminist Content, Authoritative Post-Adoption, Gender Equality, Empowerment and Democracy As FCP analysts and students of feminist insider activism agree, we need to assess the outsider–insider nexus in the policy process from start to finish – agenda setting to policy implementation, evaluation and the outcomes. The development and application of the Gender Equality Policy in Practice Approach (GEPP) signals a focus on post-adoption processes and outcomes (Engeli and Mazur, 2018). The GEPP network has conducted comparative qualitative analyses of the practice of gender equality policy in employment, care and political representation across 50 countries. The network’s gender transformation measure gauges policy effects on gender-role change, gender equality and inclusive policy empowerment in terms of intersectionality – a move away from dominant heteronormative notions of gender. The measure has four levels of potential transformation: full, gender accommodation, gender neutral and row back (Engeli and Mazur, 2018). The gender transformation measure can also be used to assess the results of feminist insider activism. After insider actions are identified and traced using the various instruments, the researcher can study the content, implementation, evaluation and direct impact of the policy trail left by those actions. Did the policy instrument or output reflect feminist demands from the movement? Was it implemented and evaluated in terms of movement demands and ideas? Were movement actors brought into the process with the insiders? Was the problem solved and gender equality achieved in line with the ideas and demands of feminist movement actors? This policy outcome dimension also brings in the notion of descriptive and substantive representation, that is, empowerment. The question here is: to what degree do feminist insiders empower women’s movement actors and their ideas through both direct participation and the expression of women’s movement ideas in policy outcomes and processes? For example, immediate descriptive empowerment would be achieved when a member of a feminist movement organisation joins a state structure. Substantive empowerment occurs by bringing forward and inserting the movement ideas for gender equality into the policy debate frames and/or content of government affairs and policy. This representative potential means that if empowerment is achieved because of insider activism, then, the larger democratic process is improved, forming another potential indirect outcome of FIA (see Figure 5.1). Transversal Considerations Feminism: a necessary condition In this approach, to be considered FIA the ideas and actions that are explicitly pursued by the state actor/agency in question must be linked to the feminist ideas put forward by women’s movement actors. The ideas expressed by insiders and outsiders may reflect women’s movement ideas, but they are not feminist unless they explicitly seek to advance women’s rights, status and identities by striking down gender-based hierarchies. Thus, the conceptualisation brings feminist ideas to the fore as a first question to be considered, rather than just assuming that any actor from the women’s movement is feminist.

Do feminist insiders matter?  71 Putting intersectionality on the analytical radar This transversal dimension reflects current feminist research and theorising (see Townsend-Bell, Chapter 7 in this Handbook) by clarifying that all society-based claims-makers that speak for women need to be taken into consideration, including transgender individuals who identify as women, and not just those from middle-class, heterosexual and dominant ethnic/racial groups within a given country.6 It is imperative to examine ideas challenging gender hierarchies articulated by all racial and ethnic groups and the extent to which feminist insiders speak for them, especially if those ideas have been ignored or silenced in the political process. While an ultimate goal of FIA should be a full representation of intersectionality, it is not a necessary condition. At the same time, researchers need to include it in their analytical purview and may want to develop a scale for an intersectional FIA.

NEXT STEPS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR FEMINIST GOVERNANCE AND THE QUALITY OF DEMOCRACY This chapter has traced the definitions of feminist insider activism and its examination in case studies and cross-national research since the 1990s. The conceptualisation shows that a new research cycle is well underway. Feminist institutional research has suggested that the political opportunity structure of the state and its path-dependent gender biases and norms present formidable obstacles to feminist insider activists’ ability to achieve transformation and a gender justice agenda. Research on FIA in transitional or post-conflict settings with new political opportunity structures and institutions coming out of extreme periods of change points to the promise and the pitfalls of the absence of long-established conventions and path dependencies for effective action.7 FCP studies have shown that sectoral differences rather than regional differences are salient in understanding successful feminist policy outcomes and that left-wing governing majorities do not always produce feminist outcomes (Htun and Weldon, 2018; Kittilson, 2006; McBride and Mazur, 2010). Comparative gender politics research indicates that rising resistance and opposition, illiberal democratic forces and hard economic times also may be important intervening forces affecting the ability of feminist insiders to institute feminist governance (e.g. Bashevkin, 1998; Verloo, 2018). A long-standing problem in research on feminist governance is the imbalance in empirical studies between Western democracies and countries in the Global South. This gap is especially telling in the study of feminist insider activism. Although there have been a few studies of the role of women’s policy agencies and feminist alliances outside Western democracies (e.g. Gouws, 2022: Hassim, 2006; Kang and Tripp, 2018; Lycklama a Nieholt et al., 1998; Rai, 2003), the major theory-building effort on FIA is more of a mid-range endeavour that focuses on democratic and post-industrial contexts. Feminist analysts document that state–society relations in non-Western settings are radically different from those in the West, severely limiting the analytical usefulness of concepts and methods developed in Western settings (Valiente, 2007). FIA, if it exists at all, unfolds in a manner that is quite different from activism in Western post-industrial democracies. Economic challenges and chronic political instability in developing countries, exacerbated by the global turmoil associated with Covid-19 and environmental injustice, undermine many state-based feminist efforts. Feminist scholars with lived experience outside the Western context will need to study this emerging approach to movements, gender politics and the state,

72  Handbook of feminist governance and determine if it promises greater understanding of issues of feminist governance in their settings. A promising place to start is to assess the large literature on women’s policy agencies and women’s movements outside the Western world for evidence of feminist insider activism.8 Despite these limitations, the study of feminist insider activism has clearly moved from infancy into adolescence. A more precise conceptual mapping of this complex phenomenon could begin with a targeted rereading of literature on state feminism and women’s movement policy activity. From there, researchers might develop research questions and gather data on more instances of potential feminist insider activism in all arenas and levels of state action; this would comprise a new data collection project. The use of a variety of methodological and mixed methods approaches might help analysts adapt more easily to data availability and available resources for research. A careful articulation of representation and intersectionality within the study of insider activism will enhance broader theories and understandings of feminist governance. In the final analysis, not only does the study of feminist insider activism show potential for more in-depth knowledge of feminist governance, but also how such activism may increase state representativeness and responsiveness to gender interests and claims, despite current challenges. By contributing to the breaking down of gender-biased hierarchies and path dependencies within state and society, such findings could transform our understanding of the state. Indeed, in the context of the current challenges to gender equality through democratic backsliding, economic downsizing and downturns, and the fallout from Covid-19, a systematic focus on feminist insider activism may reveal whether ‘working from inside’ can be an important countervailing force.

NOTES 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

Mazur (2015: 2528) identifies the emergence of the international sub-area of ‘feminist comparative policy’ that ‘seeks to determine if, how, and why contemporary, Western, post-industrial democracies are feminist by focusing on the interface between gender politics and the state’. FCP research is classified into four separate streams of research with some areas of overlap. For a concise overview of work on femocrats, see Sawer (2016). See McBride and Mazur (2010) for more detail on the efforts of Chappell and other feminist institutionalists to develop theories of state change in response to the silences of non-feminist new institutional approaches and path dependency theory. For more on RNGS and its contributions to the study of women’s policy machineries and state feminism, see McBride and Mazur (2013). The approach used here follows the lead of social scientists who focus on good conceptualisation as a major stepping stone in theory-building and, in particular, work that calls for more attention for conceptualisation in comparative gender research that avoids the trap of concept stretching (Mazur, 2020; Sartori, 1970). Comparative analysis of intersectionality in ‘equality architecture’ in Walby and Verloo (2012) provides data for assessing whether WPA feminist insiders represent intersectional aspects of women movements. See the chapters on gender dynamics in post-conflict and transitional countries in Scheele et al. (2022). In 2011, for example, McBride and Mazur identified 134 discrete studies of women’s policy machineries in countries outside the Global North.

Do feminist insiders matter?  73

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Do feminist insiders matter?  75 Sawer, Marian (2020) ‘Gender Mainstreaming and the Substantive Representation of Women: Where Do Parliamentary Bodies Fit?’, Politics, Groups, and Identities 8(3): 648–60. Sawer, Marian and Abigail Groves (1994) Working From Inside: Twenty Years of the Office of the Status of Women, Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. Scheele, Alexandra, Julia Roth and Heidemarie Winkel (eds) (2022) Whose Rights, Which Rights? Framing Global Contestations of Women’s and Gender Rights, Bielefeld: Bielefeld University Press/ Transcription Publishers. Siim, Birte (1991) ‘Welfare State, Gender Politics and Equality Policies: Women’s Citizenship in the Scandinavian Welfare States’. In Elizabeth Meehan and Selma Sevenhuijsen (eds), Equality Politics and Gender, London: Sage, 175–92. Uthman, Io (2009) Feminist Insiders-Outsiders: Muslim Women in Nigeria and the Contemporary Feminist Movement, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Valiente, Celia (2007) ‘Developing Countries and New Democracies Matter: An Overview of Research on State Feminism Worldwide’, Politics and Gender 3(4): 530–41. Verloo, Mieke (ed.) (2018) Varieties of Opposition to Gender Equality in Europe, New York: Routledge. Walby, Sylvia and Mieke Verloo (2012) ‘Special Issue: Intersectionality in the Equality Architecture’, Social Politics 19(4): 433–621. Weldon, S. Laurel (2002) ‘Beyond Bodies: Institutional Sources of Representation for Women in Democratic Policymaking’, Journal of Politics 64(4): 1153–74.

6. Feminist perspectives on multilevel governance Meryl Kenny and Tània Verge

INTRODUCTION: GENDER AND MULTILEVEL GOVERNANCE Studies of federalism or multilevel governance (MLG) have very rarely taken into account issues of gender, while, at the same time, feminist political science has often ignored or underplayed the importance of territory and political architecture. Real-world developments have made these questions more pressing – as political decision-making has become more complex and diffuse, through processes of federalisation, decentralisation and transnational regional integration. Yet efforts to build theories of gender and MLG have been hindered by the lack of a ‘common language’ due to the diversity of approaches that have addressed this question, such as the literature on federalism and institutional architectures (e.g. Chappell, 2002; Haussman et al., 2010; Vickers et al., 2013), the literature on transnational or supranational governance (e.g. Abels and MacRae, 2016; Kantola, 2010) and the comparative literature on territorial politics (e.g. Alonso, 2018; Kenny and Verge, 2013; Thomson, 2019). The term MLG has also been used both in a general sense in the scholarly literature to address levels of governance beyond the nation state, and in a specific sense associated with the European Union (Hooghe and Marks, 2001; see also Part IV of this Handbook). In this chapter, we focus on the broader understanding of MLG, using it as an umbrella term covering feminist scholarship that examines relationships within, below and above the state through a gender lens. This term describes the dispersion of decision-making across multiple territorial levels, as well as state and non-state actors, ranging from international governmental and non-governmental organisations to community groups and social movements. Therefore, the ‘multilevel’ dimension of the concept captures the increased vertical interdependence of actors at different territorial levels (upwards and downwards between tiers of government), while the move towards ‘governance’ encapsulates less hierarchical and more horizontal (sideways) forms of policymaking and decision-making with a broader range of actors (Bache and Flinders, 2004; Hooghe and Marks, 2001; Sawer and Vickers, 2010). We begin the chapter by taking stock of the small but growing body of literature on the relationship between gender and MLG structures. Engaging with theories of governance that conceive of the state as a differentiated set of institutions and agencies with an open outcome regarding gender equality policy and women’s empowerment (Kantola, 2006), we evaluate the development of research on gender, territory and state architecture over time, focusing in particular on work on women, gender and federalism. We review existing findings as to how MLG arrangements affect and are affected by women’s movement organising, participation and representation (Vickers, 2020). In doing so, we highlight the insights of feminist research with regard to the gendered character and impacts of institutional architecture, which has shed new light on both how women’s movements and feminist actors can use MLG structures to 76

Feminist perspectives on multilevel governance  77 effect change, but also on how institutions either facilitate or obstruct reform efforts (Chappell, 2002; Vickers, 2013a). We then move on to consider two key questions that remain understudied in the gender and MLG field. First, we argue that analyses of whether women are advantaged or disadvantaged by multilevel arrangements must pay attention to the mediating actors in MLG, particularly to political parties. Second, we contend that the impact of institutional architecture on actors navigating MLG, specifically women’s movements and anti-gender movements, also deserves further examination. We conclude by reflecting on the utility of gendered approaches to studying MLG in ‘turbulent times’, pointing to new directions forward for feminist research on this topic.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GENDER AND INSTITUTIONAL ARCHITECTURE As discussed in more detail in Chapters 3 and 4 in this Handbook, feminist scholars conceive of the state as gendered. As Jill Vickers (2013a) argues, ‘gender makes states’, in that gender norms and stereotypes are embedded in policymaking – shaping the composition of structures, the unfolding of processes and the organisational culture of institutions. At the same time, ‘states make gender’ by regulating gender power relations on a daily basis through policies, laws, judicial rulings or spending decisions (Vickers, 2013a). Given that gender relations are historically dynamic and that the state’s position in women’s/gender politics is not fixed, the state is the focus of interest-group mobilisation (Connell, 1990). Indeed, early work on gender and MLG focused on whether federalism was a barrier to or an opportunity for women’s equality-seeking strategies. Feminist and LGBTI+ studies explored the ways federalism may accord an advantageous political opportunity structure to transfer activism across institutional levels (federal and state arenas) and venues (executive, legislative and judicial) when blockage is faced in either arena (Banaszak, 1996; Bashevkin, 1998; Chappell, 2002). Subsequent work turned to how federalism impacts women’s politics, which Vickers (2011: 136) conceptualises as involving ‘descriptive representation, organizational patterns in movements and interest advocacy, and projects promoting substantive representation’. This includes both conventional politics and feminist activism (Vickers, 2010: 433), as well as gender equality policy in a variety of sectors such as protection of rights, service delivery, gender-based violence policy, economic empowerment and political participation (Forster, 2020). The so-called ‘federal advantage’ includes women’s greater access to political institutions, since politics is ‘closer to home’ (Obiora and Toomey, 2010; Ortbals et al., 2012); the provision of multiple points of access for gender equality activists to forum shop; and the higher capacity to foster innovation through top-down, bottom-up or horizontal diffusion of learning processes and policy transfer (for a review, see Forster, 2020). However, scholars have also warned that these same features may pose various ‘federal disadvantages’ (Meier, 2014). On the one hand, the asymmetry in the provision of public services across sub-state units can potentially undermine the development of coordinated and integrated countrywide gender equality policies, yielding an uneven delivery of services and a broad diversity of policies and laws on the same issue (Celis and Meier, 2011; Chappell and Curtin, 2013; Franceschet, 2011). On the other hand, conservative actors may exploit the exist-

78  Handbook of feminist governance ence of multiple veto points with a view to obstructing or even rolling back gender equality progress (Grace, 2011; Haussman, 2005). For this reason, most accounts have gradually come to adopt a ‘conditional approach’ (Gray, 2010). That is, the positive or negative impacts of federalism on gender equality policy depend on the characteristics of individual countries, and their effects ‘vary between institutions, across institutional arenas, and policy or issue sectors, and with time and space’ (Vickers, 2010: 419; see also Chappell, 2002). For instance, gender equality policy innovation, policy transfer and race-to-the-top dynamics are more likely to be set in motion in either cooperative or competitive federations than in dual federalism where the centre and the sub-state units hold different jurisdictions (Vickers, 2011: 136; see also Beyeler, 2014). Dual federalism has been found to be potentially harmful for women’s rights as the existing gendered division of powers leaves the competences of high import to women – such as the regulation of ‘private life’ (e.g. family law), education, health or welfare – in the hands of the sub-state units. In contrast, the powers associated with masculinity (e.g. defence or external affairs) tend to be found at the federal level (Grace, 2011: 100; Irving, 2008: 69). This may lead to legal pluralism regarding fundamental rights and crucial social programmes, yielding an unequal protection of women and an uneven access to resources across the country (Chappell, 2001; Irving, 2008; Mettler, 1998), particularly when the two main tiers of government engage in a politics of blame shifting (Grace, 2011: 101). Still, state capacity and political will may constrain the danger of legal pluralism in federal countries (Vickers, 2013b). Also, party federalism, as will be further discussed in the next section, crucially contributes to shaping gender outcomes in MLG systems (Lang and Sauer, 2013). While the initial focus of much of the work on gender and state architecture has been on established federations, predominantly from the Global North, scholars have increasingly looked at federations in the Global South, such as Nigeria (Obiora and Toomey, 2010), India (Spary, 2020), Pakistan (Mufti, 2020), Brazil (Bohn, 2020) and Argentina (Lopreite, 2020). Recent work in the field has also started to look more systematically at intersectional power relationships, exploring how gender interacts with race, ethnicity, language, religion, sexual orientation and other structures of power, and demonstrating that the outcomes of particular MLG arrangements differ for majority and minority women (e.g. Smith, 2010; Vickers et al., 2020). The federal–unitary dichotomy has also given way to the inclusion of decentralised countries in the investigation of the relationship between gender and state architectures (Vickers et al., 2020). Indeed, sub-state units have more powers or autonomy (self-rule) in some so-called ‘unitary’ states than in some federations, albeit the cross-level decision-making capacity of sub-state units (shared rule) tends to be larger in federations. This shift has led scholars to increasingly consider federalism, decentralisation or devolution as ‘processes, not events’.1 Analyses have thus become less static and paid attention to the territorial dynamics fostered by the downloading, uploading or offloading of power over time, and how these shape the opportunities to mobilise and to effect gender change (Banaszak et al., 2003; Kenny and Verge, 2013; Russell et al., 2002; Verge and Alonso, 2020). These newer studies have left behind the ‘methodological nationalism’ (cf. Jeffrey and Schakel, 2013) of both feminist and mainstream political science, which has tended to focus on the nation state as the main unit of analysis. They have also increasingly acknowledged that the ‘nation’ and the ‘state’ are not always territorially coterminous, which has important implications for women and for gender equality. The saliency of territorial-based identities

Feminist perspectives on multilevel governance  79 matters for gender politics (Sawer and Vickers, 2010; Vickers, 2011). For example, scholars have found that in polities with a higher saliency of the ethno-territorial cleavage, gender equality strategies are more difficult to organise due to the competition of the relevance of sex/ gender with that of territory, yielding more fragmented progressive alignments and alliances (Vickers, 2011: 134; see also McAllister, 2001). Taking a multilevel approach also highlights that organised women’s movements do not only (or ideally) relate to unitary states (Vickers et al., 2020). For example, many regional women’s movements support territorial autonomy and even secession, as can be seen in nations like Catalonia, Quebec and Scotland (e.g. Alonso, 2018). This in turn raises important questions about territorial differentiation of political community (and gendered citizenship) within the state. Indeed, some sub-state units have adopted more progressive positions regarding certain gender equality policy domains than the centre, even where the national cleavage is prominent, as shown, for example by Quebec within Canada (Vickers, 2010), Scotland within the United Kingdom (Mackay, 2010), or Catalonia and the Basque Country within Spain (Verge and Alonso, 2020). Processes of constitutional and institutional restructuring can provide the women’s movement with the opportunity to push for gains in women’s descriptive representation, as well as to incorporate gender equality into wider political debates. Yet, new decentralised arrangements are also ‘nested’ within wider structures and historical legacies that may constrain possibilities for change (cf. Mackay, 2014; see also Thomson, 2019). Work on gender, federalism and decentralisation in the Global South, for example, highlights the extent to which patterns and effects of decentralisation are shaped by wider colonial and authoritarian legacies (Henders, 2020). Last but not least, since changes in formal institutions do not necessarily lead to greater gender equality, feminist scholars have also looked at the impact of informal institutions. These include gendered or apparently gender-neutral political discourses (Grace, 2011); mechanisms of path dependence such as the historical legacies of federations, as discussed above (Smith, 2018; Vickers, 2010, 2011); prevailing norms about gender relations; or reinterpretations of the division of powers that favour progressive outcomes – for example, the voiding of state family laws by the US Supreme Court on equal protection grounds (Banaszak and Weldon, 2011: 267). On the one hand, informal institutions may facilitate positive gender change, particularly when there is good fit and tight coupling between formal and informal institutional arrangements. For example, Mackay’s (2014) assessment of the successes and limits of devolution in Scotland highlights the ways in which campaigners linked formal rule changes (e.g. the introduction of family-friendly working hours) with informal norms and discourses around care and ‘new politics’. On the other hand, informal institutions may undermine formal institutions and processes (perhaps in the face of changing arrangements) or exist alongside formal arrangements as a parallel institution (see Helmke and Levitsky, 2004). For example, Grace (2020) highlights the ways in which formal rules about who can participate in intergovernmental decision-making in Canada are shaped by informal norms of masculine leadership and discourses of territory, which limit possibilities for pursuing women’s policy objectives. Likewise, executive federalism, characterised by lack of parliamentary oversight and intergovernmental decision-making behind closed doors, has been found by Sawer (2014) to hamper the implementation of a participatory/democratic model of gender mainstreaming in Australia.

80  Handbook of feminist governance

GENDER AND MLG: A RESEARCH AGENDA As outlined in the previous section, research on gender and MLG has developed and expanded in multiple directions: examining how MLG arrangements affect women’s political participation and representation; how women’s organising and presence shapes MLG arrangements; and how MLG arrangements shape, and are shaped by, ideas about gender (Vickers, 2013a). New research has expanded these concerns by investigating a broader range of MLG arrangements and country case studies, and by incorporating the ‘intersectionality imperative’ to consider the interplay between gender and other structures of power (see Vickers et al., 2020). Yet, there is still much that remains to be explored in this rapidly expanding field. Here, we focus on two key research agendas: the role of political parties in the operation of MLG and the ways in which (different groups of) actors navigating MLG arrangements are impacted by institutions. Gender, Political Parties and MLG Despite being the actors to whom modern democracies accord linkage, representative and governing functions, the role of political parties in the operation of MLG has been largely neglected. Yet, empirical examinations of how state architecture shapes women’s politics needs to consider parties as independent, complex organisations in their own right that are themselves multi-layered actors (Kenny and Verge, 2013). ‘Federal advantages’ might only further gender equality policy if political parties use them to put forward a progressive agenda, for instance through the work of women’s policy agencies (Lang and Sauer, 2013). Scholars have found party politics to matter more for advancing gender equality and LGBTI+ policies at the central level rather than at the regional level, with these policies expanding with left-wing governments thanks to the leading role of party feminists and the alliance of the central-level women’s policy agency with the feminist movement when the left is in power (Valiente, 2007). Furthermore, analyses of the gendered implications of MLG should take into account that the party system is one of the crucial institutional variables in which state architecture is ‘nested’ (Erk and Swenden, 2010: 201). Therefore, ‘vertical division of powers alone cannot explain variations in outcomes’ in a particular women’s rights policy, but they interact with party politics (Franceschet and Piscopo, 2013: 130). A small number of scholars have looked into how political party polarisation mediates gender outcomes, particularly doctrinal or morality policies such as sexual and reproductive rights and LGBTI+ rights. On the one hand, conservative groups often promote partisan conflict around doctrinal issues by resorting to negative states’ rights discourses in dual federalism polities (Vickers, 2010: 426) or by polarising voters for partisan advantage (Haussman, 2005). On the other hand, in the absence of adequate intergovernmental coordination mechanisms, both among sub-state units and between the latter and the federal level, the nature of the party system might provide incentives for political officials in some MLG countries to act as territorial agents. For example, party polarisation around morality issues (such as same-sex marriage) will be stronger in meso-level units with high religious diversity, as parties compete to own the issue and gain an electoral advantage, particularly when political careers are built at this level of government (Mariani, 2020). It should be noted, though, that moral divides within political parties, for instance around abortion rights, are more likely to be found in decentralised organisations, which leave the

Feminist perspectives on multilevel governance  81 central party with limited capacity to align all regional branches on a single position and to discipline deviations from the national party platform. In this vein, MLG arrangements matter for policy outcomes not because of the centre–periphery division of power but because of its effect on party dynamics, which may be either centralised (i.e. linked to countrywide concerns) or territorialised (i.e. linked to regional concerns) (Franceschet and Piscopo, 2013: 131). When political parties are centralised or integrated, they create connections across tiers of government through both formal and informal mechanisms, leading some authors to characterise these polities as ‘party federalism’. It is more likely to be found in parliamentary democracies where policy ‘innovation from above and from below has to be launched via parties’ (Lang and Sauer, 2013: 77). Intra-party organisational dynamics have also been found to mediate the relationship between formal institutions and women’s descriptive representation. Indeed, even if federalism or political decentralisation widen the possibilities for the selection and election of women candidates, parties are still the main vehicles through which selection processes occur for both executive and legislative office at all tiers of government. Specifically, the impact of MLG arrangements (existing or new) on electoral gender quota adoption and implementation is contingent upon the internal distribution of authority between the central and the regional branches of political parties. When moderate intra-party multilevel shared decision-making is combined with relatively limited autonomy for the regional branches, quota reforms are more successfully enforced at both tiers, thereby ‘overcoming the potential fragmenting effect of multiple levels’. On the other hand, high autonomy for regional branches undermines the central party’s capacity to effectively implement gender quotas (Kenny and Verge, 2013: 123). Moreover, in devolution processes, the creation of new institutions, with no incumbent candidates, and the choice of more gender-friendly electoral systems (i.e. proportional representation systems, as compared to plurality systems) has created new opportunities to make women’s representation a more prominent feature in party competition (Russell et al., 2002: 72). Actors Navigating MLG: Women’s Movements and Anti-Gender Movements A key question going forward for gender and MLG scholars is ‘which combination of conditions is positive or negative for attaining gender reform’ (Vickers, 2013a: 12). In other words, a ‘conditional approach’ to studying the interplay of gender and MLG structures needs to move beyond the question of whether MLG arrangements advantage or disadvantage women to a more nuanced analysis of ‘which specific elements of a given institutional arrangement are (or are not) renegotiable, and why some aspects are more amenable to change than others’ (Thelen, 2004: 36; original emphasis). Actors adapt their strategies to the tiers and venues they target (Fetner, 2008). The characteristics and historical legacies of MLG arrangements, including the specific division of powers, also facilitate or constrain women’s and LGBTI+ activism across tiers of government and across venues (Smith, 2018; Vickers, 2010; Vickers et al., 2013). Lobbying efforts, for example, are easier to launch in states where key policies for women and LGBTI+ people fall under federal jurisdiction (Bashevkin, 1998; Macdonald and Mills, 2010; Obiora and Toomey, 2010; Smith, 2004). This is also the case in symmetrical MLG arrangements that more closely resemble unitary states, which facilitate the crafting of alliances and the spread of policy innovation through a policy learning process across the entire polity (Chappell and Curtin, 2013; Vickers, 2011). Likewise, in cooperative federations where

82  Handbook of feminist governance there is a wide array of shared competencies – both vertically between the federal and sub-state units and horizontally between the sub-state units – progressive social movements find it easier to launch concerted lobby efforts at one level when the other level is not accessible (Mahon and Collier, 2010). Conversely, exclusive division of powers, where the ‘separate spheres’ paradigm prevails, increase the operational costs of promoting women’s and LGBTI+ groups’ interests throughout the polity. They require social movements to lobby several access points at once when the competence is located at the meso level, which entails the need for more resources (Mahon and Collier, 2010; Smith, 2004). These challenges for women’s organisations are heightened when the number of constituent units is larger; when they have bicameral (upper and lower) houses; when the federal Senate is elected; and when the polity is a presidential democracy with a strict separation between the legislative and the executive powers (Vickers, 2010: 424). Asymmetrical MLG arrangements, where different sub-state units have a dissimilar level of competences, also impose higher coordination costs (Celis et al., 2013; Celis and Meier, 2011), which may advantage more resourceful conservative counter-movements (Haussman, 2005; Macdonald and Mills, 2010). Territorial differences in gendered citizenship can also limit opportunities for women’s movements to deploy their strategies. In the United Kingdom, for example, while asymmetrical devolution has allowed for some degree of progressive change across its four nations, the dominant narrative in Northern Ireland has been one of ‘difference’, with abortion (and other gendered issues) considered ‘off limits’ by the central UK government (Thomson, 2019). Instead of opening up opportunities for ‘venue shopping’, devolution has created a ‘ping-pong’ effect, where no action on abortion and reproductive rights is taken in Northern Ireland, but the central UK government has also absolved itself of responsibility for these issues. The unidirectional examination of the opportunities for ‘venue shopping’ that vertical and horizontal divisions of power may afford has been gradually made more complex, as scholars have shifted to a ‘two-way street’ approach focused on investigating the (co-constitutive) relationship between institutions and actors (Chappell, 2002; Vickers, 2010). This implies ‘revers[ing] the causal arrow’ and to examine how organised women aim at changing or circumventing federal arrangements (cf. Vickers, 2010: 412). Indeed, similar institutions in MLG countries may accord the women’s movement different opportunities; that is, feminist activists do not just seek to take advantage of existing opportunities but also seek to turn them to their advantage for advancing their aims (Chappell, 2000). For example, women’s organisations and LGBTI+ groups have tried to ‘nationalise’ gender equality issues by means of constitutional litigation, as in the case of abortion rights and same-sex marriage. This strategy is more likely to succeed in asymmetrical MLG arrangements, since ‘ongoing contestation over the division of powers opens up political space feminists can use to change obstructive federal arrangements’ (Vickers, 2010: 413; see also Sawer and Vickers, 2001). Conversely, it is more difficult to deploy under MLG where an exclusive division of powers prevails (Vickers, 2010: 428). Further attention is also needed to how divisions of power may have a dissimilar impact on minority women and majority women, as well as the strategies that both groups might find more effective to push their demands forward. In Canada, for example, nation-building projects at federal and Quebec levels promoted progressive gender regimes to gain women’s support, culminating in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Dobrowolsky, 2000; Vickers, 2011). English-Canadian women were advantaged by federal control of family and criminal

Feminist perspectives on multilevel governance  83 law, but Franco-Quebec women benefited most from social policies at the provincial level, where Quebec had created their own, more ‘women-friendly versions’ of pan-Canadian programmes (Vickers, 2010: 425). Aboriginal women, however, were not advantaged, and continued to experience detrimental outcomes from colonialist federal laws (Green, 2003; Vickers, 2011). Gender and MLG scholars would also benefit from engaging further with the growing body of work on ‘anti-gender’ movements in Europe and beyond, which offers a crucial piece of the ‘puzzle’ in terms of explaining resistance to change (e.g. Kuhar and Paternotte, 2017; Verloo, 2018). Work in this area demonstrates how MLG arrangements also impact the strategies of anti-gender movements to oppose gender equality. For example, when marriage equality was upheld nationwide in the United States in 2015, the state level became the arena from which to obtain exemptions for both the clergy and private businesses from providing services to LGBT couples (Mariani, 2020; see also Haussman, 2010 on abortion policy). Looking above the state, research also points to the ways in which supra-national institutions like the European Union have provided a platform for radical right populist parties to both frame debates at European level and to connect to right-wing constituencies at the national level (Kantola and Lombardo, 2021). The effect of this has been to polarise debates on gender equality and to limit spaces for debating progressive gender policies in sub-state, national and international forums.

GENDER AND MLG IN TURBULENT TIMES The dispersion of political power from national governments to sub-state and supra-national ones has become a defining feature of contemporary democracies. Dialogue between mainstream studies of MLG arrangements and gender politics scholarship has been minimal to date, yet there is considerable value to bringing a gendered approach to the study of MLG. A gendered lens offers crucial insights into issues of power and change, exposing the extent to which MLG arrangements are gendered and investigating the conditions under which gains for women and gender equality can be achieved. Research in the field must continue to ‘ask the other question’, bringing an intersectional lens to bear on majority and non-majority women’s experiences of navigating different MLG arrangements. Looking beyond the Global North will be crucial to advancing this agenda, as well as considering MLG arrangements in non-democratic or semi-democratic countries. We must also consider not just positive cases of gender change, but also negative cases, and cases where no action has occurred. ‘Actions not taken are as important as those that are’ (Thomson, 2019: 202) – and in complex MLG arrangements, gendered issues may be difficult to mobilise around politically and the onus on institutions to act on gender equality can get lost. Furthermore, focusing not only on formal, but also informal institutions – and their interplay – will increase our analytical leverage, allowing scholars to better explain differential effects across MLG systems and over time (cf. Banaszak and Weldon, 2011). Finally, more systematic, comparative and mixed-method studies are needed across multiple and diverse federations in order to gather more data and to develop robust theories and concepts that can travel across different settings. These questions are all the more important given the challenges that lie ahead for federal and decentralised countries, including: global economic recessions; increases in political polarisation and the rise of populism; and the Covid-19 pandemic. Policy responses to these

84  Handbook of feminist governance kinds of crises may jeopardise the gains made by women, entailing a retrenchment of social and gender equality policies, as was the case of the global financial crisis of the last decade (Karamessini and Rubery, 2014). Indeed, policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic have already had a regressive effect on gender equality – in particular by significantly increasing the burden of unpaid care, which is carried out disproportionately by women. The austerity policies enacted by the European Union and enforced by central governments have affected the capacity of sub-state units to respond to economic crises – capacity which is shaped by the degree of fiscal centralisation of MLG arrangements and by the tax-raising powers and spending capacity of sub-state units. Yet, while federalism and MLG may potentially hamper responses to these contemporary challenges, there may also be the possibility that local, regional and national policy responses to these ‘crisis moments’ will lead to new opportunities for more progressive paths and gender regimes, creating spaces for women and for gender equality concerns.

NOTE 1. This phrase was memorably coined by the then Secretary of State for Wales Ron Davies (1998: 15) in the context of devolution in the United Kingdom. In a pamphlet published ahead of the first elections to the National Assembly for Wales, he explained: ‘Devolution is a process. It is not an event and neither is it a journey with a fixed end-point.’

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86  Handbook of feminist governance Kantola, Johanna and Emanuela Lombardo (2021) ‘Strategies of Right Populists in Opposing Gender Equality in a Polarized European Parliament’, International Political Science Review 42(5): 565–79. Karamessini, M. and J. Rubery (eds) (2014) Women and Austerity: The Economic Crisis and the Future for Gender Equality, London: Routledge. Kenny, Meryl and Tània Verge (2013) ‘Decentralization, Political Parties and Women’s Representation: Evidence from Spain and Britain’, Publius: The Journal of Federalism 43(1): 109–28. Kuhar, Roman and David Paternotte (eds) (2017) Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Lang, Sabine and Birgit Sauer (2013) ‘Does Federalism Impact Gender Architectures? The Case of Women’s Policy Agencies in Germany and Austria’, Publius: The Journal of Federalism 43(1): 68–89. Lopreite, Debora (2020) ‘The Federal Restriction of Women’s Rights: Argentina’s Politics on Abortion and Contraception’. In Jill Vickers, Joan Grace and Cheryl N. Collier (eds), Handbook on Federalism, Diversity and Gender, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 212–26. Macdonald, Laura and Lisa Mills (2010) ‘Gender, Democracy and Federalism in Mexico: Implications for Reproductive Rights and Social Policy’. In Melissa Haussman, Marian Sawer and Jill Vickers (eds), Federalism, Feminism and Multilevel Governance, Farnham: Ashgate, 187–98. Mackay, Fiona (2010) ‘Devolution and the Multilevel Politics of Gender in the UK: The Case of Scotland’. In Melissa Haussman, Marian Sawer and Jill Vickers (eds), Federalism, Feminism and Multilevel Governance, Farnham: Ashgate, 155–68. Mackay, Fiona (2014) ‘Nested Newness, Institutional Innovation, and the Gendered Limits of Change’, Politics & Gender 10(4): 549–71. Mahon, Rianne and Cheryl Collier (2010) ‘Navigating the Shoals of Canadian Federalism: Childcare Advocacy’. In Melissa Haussman, Marian Sawer and Jill Vickers (eds), Federalism, Feminism and Multilevel Governance, Farnham: Ashgate, 51–66. Mariani, Giulia (2020) ‘Religious Diversity and Party Control in the States: Explaining Adoptions of Same-Sex Marriage Laws’, Sexuality Research and Social Policy 17(1): 119–27. McAllister, Laura (2001) ‘Gender, Nation and Party: An Uneasy Alliance for Welsh Nationalism’, Women’s History Review 10(1): 51–70. Meier, Petra (2014) ‘Étudier les Systèmes Fédéraux à travers le Prisme du Genre: Un État des Lieux’, Fédéralisme Régionalisme 14. https://​popups​.uliege​.be/​1374​-3864/​index​.php​?id​=​1393. Mettler, Suzanne (1998) Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mufti, Mariam (2020) ‘Devolution and the Multilevel Politics of Gender in Pakistan’. In Jill Vickers, Joan Grace and Cheryl N. Collier (eds), Handbook on Federalism, Diversity and Gender, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 294–305. Obiora, Amede and Sarah Toomey (2010) ‘Federalism and Gender Politics in Nigeria’. In Melissa Haussman, Marian Sawer and Jill Vickers (eds), Federalism, Feminism and Multilevel Governance, Farnham: Ashgate, 211–25. Ortbals, Candice D., Meg Rincker and Celeste Montoya (2012) ‘Politics Close to Home: The Impact of Meso-Level Institutions on Women in Politics’, Publius: The Journal of Federalism 42(1): 78–107. Russell, Meg, Laura McAllister and Fiona Mackay (2002) ‘Women’s Representation in the Scottish Parliament and National Assembly for Wales: Party Dynamics for Achieving Critical Mass’, The Journal of Legislative Studies 8(2): 49–76. Sawer, Marian (2014) ‘Gender Equality Architecture: The Intergovernmental Level in Federal Systems’, Australian Journal of Public Administration 73(3): 361–72. Sawer, Marian and Jill Vickers (2001) ‘Women’s Constitutional Activism in Australia and Canada’, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 13(1): 1–36. Sawer, Marian and Jill Vickers (2010) ‘Introduction: Political Architecture and Its Gender Impact’. In Melissa Haussman, Marian Sawer and Jill Vickers (eds), Federalism, Feminism and Multilevel Governance, Farnham: Ashgate, 3–18. Smith, Miriam (2004) ‘Segmented Networks: Linguistic Practices in Canadian Lesbian and Gay Rights Organizing’, Ethnicities 4(1): 99–124.

Feminist perspectives on multilevel governance  87 Smith, Miriam (2010) ‘Federalism and LGBT Rights in the US and Canada’. In Melissa Haussman, Marian Sawer and Jill Vickers (eds), Federalism, Feminism and Multilevel Governance, Farnham: Ashgate, 97–110. Smith, Miriam (2018) ‘Historical Institutionalism and Same-Sex Marriage: A Comparative Analysis of the USA and Canada’. In Bronwyn Winter, Maxime Forest and Réjane Sénac (eds), Global Perspectives on Same-Sex Marriage: A Neo-Institutional Approach, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 61–79. Spary, Carole (2020) ‘Gender, Federalism and the State in India’. In Jill Vickers, Joan Grace and Cheryl N. Collier (eds), Handbook on Federalism, Diversity and Gender, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 279–93. Thelen, Kathleen (2004) How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomson, Jennifer (2019) Abortion Law and Political Institutions: Explaining Policy Resistance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Valiente, Celia (2007) ‘Are Gender Equality Institutions the Policy Allies of the Feminist Movement? A Contingent “Yes” in the Spanish Central State’, South European Society and Politics 12(3): 315–34. Verge, Tània and Alba Alonso (2020) ‘The Competitive Territorial Dynamics of the Spanish “State of Autonomies” through A Gender Lens’. In Jill Vickers, Joan Grace and Cheryl N. Collier (eds), Handbook on Federalism, Diversity and Gender, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 166–79. Verloo, Mieke (2018) Varieties of Opposition to Gender Equality in Europe, London: Routledge. Vickers, Jill (2010) ‘A Two-Way Street: Federalism and Women’s Politics in Canada and the United States’, Publius: The Journal of Federalism 40(3): 412–35. Vickers, Jill (2011) ‘Gendering Federalism: Institutions of Decentralization and Power-Sharing’. In Mona L. Krook and Fiona Mackay (eds), Gender, Politics and Institutions: Towards a Feminist Institutionalism, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 129–46. Vickers, Jill (2013a) ‘Is Federalism Gendered? Incorporating Gender into Studies of Federalism’, Publius: The Journal of Federalism 43(1): 1–23. Vickers, Jill (2013b) ‘Territorial Pluralism and Family-Law Reform: Conflicts between Gender and Culture Rights in Federations, North and South’, Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies 40(1): 57–82. Vickers, Jill (2020) ‘How Can Comparative Studies of Federations Be Gendered? Gendering Inter-Governmental Relations’. In Jill Vickers, Joan Grace and Cheryl N. Collier (eds), Handbook on Gender, Diversity and Federalism, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Vickers, Jill, Louise Chappell and Petra Meier (2013) ‘Special Issue on Gendering Federalism’, Publius: The Journal of Federalism 43(1): 1–150. Vickers, Jill, Joan Grace and Cheryl N. Collier (eds) (2020) Handbook on Federalism, Diversity and Gender, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing.

7. Seeking intersectionality in feminist governance Erica Townsend-Bell

INTRODUCTION Feminist governance’s concern is fomenting gender equality. Intersectionality’s intervention is to consider: where? at what level? Under what conditions, if any, can we speak meaningfully of gender unattached to other systems or even categories, where our attention is on the relationship expressed beyond basic descriptive addends? Feminist governance is still a concept-in-formation, but its basic elements are widely agreed upon. It refers to actors, entities, norms and policies directed towards achieving gender equality. It is multi-scalar and multilevel, taking place in and across multiple dimensions, in formal and informal settings. It may be direct or indirect in orientation (Chapter 1, this Handbook). That is, fomented by and under the aegis of feminism, or indirectly, in that actors, events and processes are influenced by, or at least partially aligned with feminist norms and values (Chapter 1, this Handbook). Halley (2018) suggests conceiving of feminist governance as a heuristic category, which is helpful in conceptualising the great breadth of action, structures, processes and people that the concept approaches. In all these dimensions it is constitutive of gender, and of the notion of gender equality (Halley et al., 2018; Kantola and Squires, 2012). Some basic critiques of, and questions about, feminist governance are also widely shared. Most fundamentally that feminist governance is an important corrective to undifferentiated models of governance, but not of a transformational variety (Bustelo, 2009; Sawer, 2007). Or rather, that the transformations which do occur are of feminism itself, with the result that feminism becomes yet another instrument of dominant neoliberal governmentalities, adapted to neoliberal priorities (Miller and Razavi, 1998; Prügl, 2015). Following this is the argument that a consistent practice of feminist governance is precarious and always at risk; increasingly so in the wake of more and more entrenched neoliberal global moves which reduce governance to a set of tools that prioritise resource access, capacity-building and other moves meant to centre self-sufficiency and the individual (Kantola and Squires, 2012). Banaszak et al.’s description of the great explosion of governance, in which state authority has been ‘uploaded’ to supranational organizations, ‘downloaded’ to substate governments, ‘laterally loaded’ to non-elected state bodies, and ‘offloaded’ to civil society and other non-state actors (2003: 4–7) remains a helpful heuristic itself for organising our understanding of the diffusion of power from the traditional state model. Taken together, these concerns frame yet another critique of feminist governance – that it has not sufficiently grappled with the fundamental questions of difference central to its interlocutors (Brah and Phoenix, 2004; Lewis, 2013; Mohanty, 2013). How could it be made to do so? What does intersectionality bring to the table? Centrally, a grappling with the concept of feminist governance itself. As Patricia Hill Collins (2015) argues, intersectionality has been understood as many things, but it is centrally a knowledge project, a lens that helps to excavate 88

Seeking intersectionality in feminist governance  89 the working of social formations that structure complex inequalities. It is also a multifaceted and multi-sited set of political projects, all centrally concerned with forging justice (Crenshaw, 1989; Rice et al., 2019). It is finally, relatedly, a theoretical framework useful for helping us to conceptualise enquiry, but to be most productive, this engagement must begin at the stage of initial conceptualisation (May, 2015). As such, I begin with two main questions. To what or whom does the feminist in feminist governance refer, and how is gender equality conceived of in the frameworks of feminist governance? Put differently, governance in search of what? How is gender equality conceived, for whom is it designated and how is it implemented? It is, perhaps, unsurprising that that an intersectionally oriented review of feminist governance raises many of the same critiques that have been wielded against feminism generally. Indeed, there is remarkable consistency and continuity in regard to the questions asked, the concerns raised and the populations centred. First, that feminism remains too focused on white, or mainstream, people and conceptions, such that feminist governance is insufficiently occupied with the needs and concerns of varied populations, which are instead ignored, overlooked or mischaracterized. Second, and as a result of these elisions, the problems that feminist governance highlights are themselves misunderstood, misconstrued or conceived too narrowly, both in scope and form, and the solutions too partial. I follow this discussion with consideration of more intersectional modes of feminist governance, alongside a set of other, overlapping resistant and interventionist knowledge projects, before ending with suggestions for a way forward.

FEMINIST GOVERNANCE FOR WHOM, EXACTLY? It remains the case that feminism is conceived of as unrelated to the lives, problems and experiences of many, women and people of colour major constituencies among them. Considerable conversation remains about how to address this problem most effectively, but there is surely no unfamiliarity with the basic argument that feminism remains too Eurocentric, too able-ist, too centred on heteropatriarchal modes, and too unattuned to the import of class relations, among other concerns. As such the focus here is not on the whiteness of feminist governance, but rather on a still very brief review of the ways in which this problem remains even in the face of both increased recognition, and fairly widespread and genuine commitment to tackling it. A variety of correctives to the dominance of mainstream feminism have been introduced over the years, including standpoint feminism, womanism, Third World feminism, multicultural feminism and, ironically, intersectional feminism. Nonetheless, scholars engaged on topics ranging from gender mainstreaming (Baines, 2010; Hankivsky, 2005; Walby, 2005), broader conceptions of state feminism (Skjeie and Langvasbråten, 2009; Squires 2009) and civil society organising (Lépinard, 2014) suggest that attempts to integrate the insights of intersectionality into the multi-layered sites of feminist governance are wanting. The persistent gap between the rhetoric of intersectionality and its application in practice is a key element of the problem (Townsend-Bell, 2021; Tungohan, 2016). The basic questions of intersectionality remain the same: who is not included here, and as a result, what – what problem, what experience, what alternate conception – is not included here? This stubborn gap ranges on a spectrum from unintentional – but nonetheless consistent and problematic – exclusion, to proactive hostility.

90  Handbook of feminist governance In one version of the problem the intersectional lens is truncated in its vision of the actors and issues central to feminism. As a consequence, certain problems and experiences are passively sidelined, or even excluded from conversation altogether. One widely discussed example of this concern manifested in the 2017 United States (US) Women’s March, with an emphasis on pink pussies as a basis of unity in solidarity, even as other participants pushed back on a specific colour or form of genitalia as the basis for inclusion and recognition in the category of woman. A similar issue arose in the 2017 Vancouver, Canada version of the march; the inaugural planning committee was called out for the dearth of non-white members for an event that proclaimed the explicit goal of creating an ‘INCLUSIVE, INTERSECTIONAL collective’ (Boothroyd et al., 2017: 712). In neither case was exclusion a likely goal, but such is the result when actual people fall outside of the imaginary of the feminist subject. Hence, routine questions regarding whether such a large number of participants would have turned out if the march themes were more centred on feminist issues typically understood as specific to particular sub-populations, such as high rates of missing Indigenous women and girls. Or how many participants were first-time marchers, because only now was their level of grievance large enough to motivate their mobilisation (Boothroyd et al., 2017). These questions, and the many women of colour who posed them, challenged the notions of feminist solidarity underlying the marches, affirming its limits where tangible subjects do not fit standard images as conceived. These limits also emerge in the now unquestioned linkage between gender and poverty, often problematised as the feminisation of poverty. The problem of a limited feminist imaginary is reversed here, as there is concerted attention to context and difference, but in a manner that effectively delimits the problem to certain parts of the world, and is frequently conceived as specific to certain, more melanin-rich shades of skin (Arora-Jonnson, 2011). Consequently, women of the Global South come to be flattened to a one-dimensional image as poor, disempowered Third World Women, even as women outside of this location, and struggling with similar issues, are unaddressed. These distortions reduce the likelihood of programmes that address specifically gendered experiences of poverty as they really manifest, and the probability that affected women act as agents of change to impact the problem. Mischaracterisation and oversight are not the only forms exclusion can take. More pronounced leans towards dominant group perspectives are visible across some cases. For instance, debates on the veil continue in France, as does the willingness of some prominent feminist groups to declare unequivocally and without reservation, no circumstance under which the veil is emancipatory (Lépinard 2020: 69). Similarly, Behl (2019) contends that the high-profile rape, torture and murder of Jyoti Singh in 2012 gathered such attention among many Indians because of the mistaken perception that she was a member of a middle-class family to whom such things should not happen. Meanwhile, the common reality of gendered violence against poor and working-class Indian women remains an unremarked phenomenon. Another, especially insidious, strand of the problem is one in which intersectionality is proactively derailed, whether because of a perceived competition between the primacy of gender versus other axes of difference, or because of a broader attempt to co-opt the language of intersectionality while working toward goals squarely in opposition to its prerogatives, or both (Bustelo, 2009; Esguerra Muelle and Bello Ramírez, 2014; Gianettoni and Roux, 2010; Lewis, 2013). Esguerra Muelle and Bello Ramírez reflect on the Colombian state’s appropriation of intersectionality for aims in opposition to its central interventions. According to them,

Seeking intersectionality in feminist governance  91 intersectionality has been understood, conveniently, as an individual issue of the crossing of stigmatized identities, where it is possible to exempt the State from its responsibility in the reproduction of the violences and inequalities that sustain these intersecting dominations … Little by little intersectionality has been converted into a technical concept for public management of ‘different’ groups within the nation-state. To that extent, instrumentalization has meant a dispossession of social movements’ tools of struggle and the confiscation of their emancipatory and counter-hegemonic knowledge. (2014: 29)

In yet other instances, the question of exclusion is both unsettled and largely unasked. There is a continued scarcity of analyses troubling the conception of what, precisely, is gained by the descriptive representation boosts of gender quotas, and for whom. Evidence indicates that elite women are most likely to be elected in many quota settings (Franceschet and Piscopo, 2014; Barnes and Holman, 2020). This finding begs the question whether elite women prioritise the concerns of the broad, and differentially empowered population of those gendered feminine; especially those only partially admitted to the category of woman, if at all. It is apparent across all these cases that gaps between rhetoric and practice remain, intentionally or not. A commonality across all of these varied instances are protagonists that make feminist, even intersectional claims, while maintaining a posture that proceeds from a perspective of difference as descriptive fact, rather than constitutive of power (Curiel, 2007; Gedalof, 2012; Prügl, 2015). It is precisely the idea that certain kinds of subject are integral to the conversation, while others are either outside of conception, or different in a way that is perceived as irrelevant to the central organising concern, that allows for this exclusion and inattention to power asymmetry.

FEMINIST GOVERNANCE FOR WHAT, EXACTLY? Writing in 1999, Carol Bacchi asked us to critically consider ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ Writing in 2020, Mikki Kendall answers, noting that her response is sure to differ from that of mainstream (white) feminists. The problem, according to Kendall, is the fact of serious deficits in basic needs for millions of US women, and a domestic feminist movement that remains inattentive to this problem, often due to sins of oversight and omission, but also commission. Kendall’s attention is on the US, but writings from other locations make clear that problems are just as easily flattened and misconstrued as populations, sometimes purposefully so. Moreover, the real problems that people, and particularly marginalised women, face are not necessarily delimited by geography. Instead, they share some important commonalities. Gendered violence is both an intra- and inter-state phenomenon, evoked in practices such as austerity cuts, the rise of carceral feminism and the continued use of the state as a weapon to police those non-normative peoples with the audacity to claim public space (Roberts, 2014; Williams, 2009). This insight is not a new one of course; it served as the originating ethos of the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), among other similar organisations (Townsend-Bell, 2012). But it bears repeating. As noted, attention to the ideas of intersectionality are on the rise in many dimensions. The uptake is especially noteworthy for intergovernmental and supranational entities, owing to their explicit mission to speak to the needs and problems of vast and varied human populations. The United Nations compels special attention here, given its early, multi-agential com-

92  Handbook of feminist governance mitment to intersectionality, a clear improvement over approaches that treated both categories and experiences of discrimination as distinct and primarily descriptive in nature (Chow, 2016; Coomaraswamy, 2002). Intersectional consideration is reflected in initiatives like the Women, Peace, and Security agenda, lauded as one of the more successful feminist governance interventions of the 21st century. The programme seeks to give concerted attention to inclusion, via the introduction of new frameworks that start from reassessing what the problem is, who is affected and how. However, the United Nations’ approach to intersectionality still understands it primarily as a gendered concept that speaks to categorical variation among women. Thus, as with the connection between gender and poverty, the mark as female is taken as the central, unifying problematic, with still insufficient attention to the import of context, and the workings of different kinds of difference (Chow, 2016). As a result, problems remain misconstrued: only some kinds of people are recognised as vulnerable to sexual and gender-based violence of the sort that matters, leaving the problem under-reported (Behl, 2019; Hagen, 2016). And women continue to be perceived primarily as victims of conflict in need of protection, rather than agential providers of strategies and resources that can allow for the creation of alternative futures (Martín de Almagro and Ryan, 2019). In these cases the issue is not one of inattention to non-mainstream actors. Rather, the issue is a focus that remains too decontextualised, thus flattening the category of women that agents of feminist governance seek to service. In other instances it is excessive attention to the mainstream that underlies the misperception. One significant area of enquiry is the interaction between feminist governance and austerity politics, and whether there can be any such thing as feminist governance and austerity in relation to one another (Rottenberg, 2018). Eschle and Maiguashca (2018) offer the helpful reminder that the debates about the co-option of feminist governance require significantly more unpacking of what constitutes feminism itself, and who has the capacity to decide. Griffin (2015) suggests a similar positionality, with the caveat that that which harms is clearly out of the set. ‘Feminism does not lose its credibility because of its association with governance until feminists start making policies that injure people’ (Griffin, 2015: 68). What constitutes injury, and what kinds of injuries register, are surely their own matters of debate. What is clear is that the supposed problems of austerity and crisis are only new for some, and the presumption that it is a problem equally felt is fundamentally misguided (Bassel and Emejulu, 2017; Emejulu, 2015; Griffin, 2015; Kendall, 2020; Wilkinson and Ortega-Alcázar, 2019). One concern of dominant, neoliberal discourses is the supposed problem of agency, or the lack thereof. Emejulu (2015) tracks the perception of agency as a portable ‘object’ often perceived as lacking in marginalised communities, and a problem that neoliberal, sometimes feminist, governance models seek to fix, particularly in the disadvantaged, ‘backward’ realms of the Global South. In one such instance, the state sought to grant agency by endowing poor, rural South African women with a rhetoric of rights, and a legal framework meant to increase their access to marital property. Instead, deficits of state capacity made the existence of legal frameworks more or less irrelevant to the majority of that population (Moore and Himonga, 2017). Notably, the actual problem of insufficient state capacity is shared among the marginalised populations of the North and the South. It does matter, in terms of seeking working strategies, whether the problem is a fundamental lack of resources, or an unwillingness to extend them. But whether state capacity is non-existent, unavailable or otherwise delimited, the issue in these cases is that it is too absent. In other instances it is too present. Tropes of ‘extraordinary sexism’ or excessive sexism (Bilge, 2010; Gianettoni and Roux, 2010), the

Seeking intersectionality in feminist governance  93 racialisation of Muslims and accompanying effects on discourses around gender and sexuality (Lewis, 2013), the rise of the punitive, carceral, feminist state (Roberts, 2014), and the gendering of religious oppression (Behl, 2019) abound. In those instances the actual problem is an unwelcome excess of state capacity, running after purported problems that do not exist, that have been misconstrued, purposefully flattened or otherwise delimited in inauthentic ways. In these, and numerous other instances, the actual problem is state violence, multifaceted, steady and unbounded by location, buttressing Patil’s argument that ‘there are no locals and globals, only locals in relation to various global processes’ (2013: 863).

A MORE EXPANSIVE FEMINIST GOVERNANCE? How can feminist governance be made to grapple with these concerns, or to do so in a better, more consistent manner? I highlight two major approaches to this question, which centre precisely around the question of whether feminist governance can be made to work for the many. First are intersectional responses that, while critical of contemporary systems, outline possibilities for working within them to actually push greater inclusion. One such approach is outlined within the ongoing Intersectionality-Based Policy Analysis (IBPA) project (Hankivsky et al., 2014). IBPA offers a variety of helpful and practical tools for crafting more intersectionally informed policy that begins by building on the Bacchi (1999) question, setting the stage for critical reflexivity around the conception of policy problems, solutions, populations and stakeholders that can be brought to bear in the creation of more equitable and responsive provision of health care. IBPA offers concrete strategies for assessing policy problems in a way that embeds intersectionality’s most basic question ‘who or what is missing here?’ directly into policy formation, implementation and analysis. Most practically, what this set of strategies offers is the opportunity for a bottom-up approach that can prioritise the conception of specific population groups and requirements as a primary factor, moving out from there to consider how to enlarge the group of people or issues addressed. The level of engagement, or even whether to engage at all, is up to policy actors, meaning that the intersectional analysis may well remain in the realm of identitarian, additive, diversity-linked territory, rather than leaning toward a more systemic assessment of difference (see also Parken, 2010). Thus, the tools are there but the uptake is optional, and largely based on the normative commitment of the policy actors (Jordan-Zachery, 2017). Intersectional praxis at the activist level is similarly based on a normative commitment to a radical reconceptualisation of difference, for the purpose of achieving social justice. Here, too, critical reflexivity and proactive, ongoing work towards building solidarity among actors, often in the form of intersectional coalitions, is a centrepiece. For instance, Chun et al. (2013) highlight the intersectional lens that links a varied diaspora of Asian immigrant women together in common cause through proactive and ongoing building of solidarity, rather than presuming common identity. Similarly Tungohan (2016) and Tormos (2017) argue forcefully for the capacity of broad, inclusive, intersectional coalitions to push for change across and within institutional structures. Here, too, though, there are potential roadblocks. First, there is the point that elisions, uneven emotional impacts and epistemic violence can and do occur even in cases of ethical commitment to coalition (Murib, 2018; Roshanravan, 2018). Such an outcome is particularly likely in the sort of mixed-race and mixed-gender coalitions that, while difficult to sustain, are arguably

94  Handbook of feminist governance necessary for pursuing real and wide-ranging sociopolitical change. However, as Cole (2008) and Chun et al. (2013) remind us, these fractures are equally as likely in women-of-colour or other more ‘homogeneous’ coalition spaces, unless proactively guarded against. Accordingly, we find scenarios in which coalitions work as sites of critical, and productive, if sometimes limited resistance, in that coalition actors do not engage with, or are not taken up by, the state or other governance entities; and spaces in which coalitions, while still potentially productive, remain fraught, particularly for some members (Carastathis, 2016; Laperrière and Lépinard, 2016; Roshanravan, 2018). Consequently, these inclusion strategies can and do have the potential to create meaningful change, particularly at the level of civil society, but also at the institutional level. Promisingly, such change has the capacity to be as multi-sited, multilevel and diffuse as feminist governance itself. But it remains the case that these approaches to change can be slow and uneven in uptake, if they are taken up at all. And they surely exact a non-trivial toll on their proponents, women and people of colour heavily represented among them, along the way. Because of this, some argue the need to move away from what D’Agostino (2021) calls the ‘predominant logic of inclusivity’. Such a move asks what happens when we stop seeking inclusion in spaces that are structurally, and perhaps constitutionally, unable to grant it. Hemmings argues that ‘gender agenda[s] [are] … consistently harnessed to cultural or economic difference from Western subjects and sites’ (2011: 9). She is joined by arguments that this objectification of marginalised women as less than fully human is also a persistent intra-Western phenomenon (Emejulu, 2015), and that ‘the archive of gender is structurally anti-black. Its assumptive logic, whether explicit in its presentation or not, maintains that all women have the same gender … [and] makes it conceptually impossible to think of gender violence as orienting more than the realm of gender’ (Douglass, 2018: 115). Given such presumptions, decolonialists and postcolonialists contend that there is little value in seeking inclusion and change within systems that are fundamentally incapable of granting it. Instead, decolonial, and some postcolonial, strains of theorising focus on two dimensions. One considers the origins that precede the contemporary constitutions of difference on which many strains of intersectionality tend to focus. Only by attending to the origins of modernity, and the systems of colonialism and imperialism that constitute it, can the conditions of hierarchy and the uneven relations of power that it imposed be dismantled (Lugones, 2010; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2015). Unpacking the invisible threads that organise the ongoing condition of coloniality and the erasures it fosters, especially its gendered dimensions, remains a major area of research enquiry (Pérez, 1999; Velez, 2019). Such work renders the reduction of specific group identity and cultural claims to mere ‘identity politics’ unsustainable. This shift to a space of epistemic plurality is another key dimension of decoloniality. Here commences a process of unlearning Western epistemological traditions, and of transition away from dichotomy as axiological to the organisation of world views. This move also poses a challenge to the negative effects that dichotomy creates, such as cultural erasure, violence and partialising of humanity. Instead, a permanent fracturing, for instance, of ‘enchantment with the idea of “woman” [and] the universal’ (Lugones, 2010: 753) ensues. Importantly, these fractures are irreconcilable and permanent. In this new environment a #MeToo movement originally conceived to name and connect the particular forms of sexual violence experienced by some black and brown girls in the US is not appropriated for a campaign that quickly shifts to feature prominent white women and their experiences of violence. Instead, resistance work against gendered violence remains attentive to the fact of differential

Seeking intersectionality in feminist governance  95 group experiences and unfolds accordingly. Thus, the Violence on the Land, Violence on our Bodies: Building an Indigenous Response to Environmental Violence (VLVB) group’s work on documenting the excessively large number of Indigenous women and girls murdered, missing or subject to other gendered violence takes care not to fall into the trap of anonymising them in ways that are complicit with the Indigenous erasure on which coloniality rests, furthering said violence. Instead unnamed victims remain called into community via labels designating them as ‘“our women”, “family members”, and “loved ones” – rather than nameless victims’ (Mack and Na’puti, 2019: 357). In this way, the fractures serve as a source of empowerment. Decolonial feminism emphasises a fragmented locus and lenses of partiality as a shared status of everyone, such that coalitions, which are still the most productive way forward, begin with no particular groups or logics claiming centre. In keeping with this approach, we see decolonial feminisms retain familiar ideas, such as coalition or affirmative action, but reimagine their possibilities. Thus, epistemologies that embrace ambiguity as a constitutive state, and regard coalitions as an ongoing internal and external practice of navigation, and as fundamentally relational, rather than instrumental or transactional, come to the fore (Osei-Kofi et al., 2018; Taylor, 2018). This approach echoes Walsh’s (2015) assessment of affirmative action as a potentially decolonial and transformational project when conceived in forms that expand different social, political and economic orders. In other words, decoloniality and other intervention projects do not always have to be distinct from ideas or processes common in liberal democratic, and even neoliberal, settings. It’s their conception and implementation that determines their positioning.

THE WAY FORWARD? The work reviewed here suggests that feminist governance has quite some way to go in connecting the gender equality mission with the insights of intersectionality. As it stands, much work in the feminist governance vein appears unreflexive on the questions of for whom is action taken, what problems need to be addressed, and what solutions might actually have impact. The diagnosis of un- or insufficient reflexivity is important here, because it suggests that the concern lies on a spectrum in which some inattention to varied subjects, their experiences and needs is purposeful. The gender ideology movement provides a particularly notable example. However, in many other instances, the issue is not one of intent but the need for meaningful translation of intersectional concepts into practice. So what can intersectionality, in tandem with other overlapping resistant knowledge projects, offer to feminist governance? Here again, we note a continuity of response. Intersectionality offers concerted attention to differential power, a willingness to grapple with partiality and ambiguity, and a call to honesty. It is difficult to imagine any successful pairing of intersectionality and feminist governance, much less intersectional feminist governance, that does not begin by clearly laying out the basic assumptions, goals and parameters of action that guide the union. Such an approach requires engaged consideration of/grappling with multiple questions. What is the problem? For whom is it a problem? How do we hope to address it? Who is the ‘we’ serving as agents of change? Who is the ‘they’ we hope to engage? Why? How? Proceeding from what lens? And what variant of that lens are we priming? Constant reflexivity, plus consistent discussion inclusive of a wide variety of differently located actors,

96  Handbook of feminist governance is the minimum requirement in avoiding the tendency to yield back to the mainstream that dogs so much feminist governance work. Taking this admonition seriously can begin to open a path forward, and to engage with the additional questions that the decolonial lens primes – on the origins of differential power, and the alternative strategies of organisation that epistemic plurality allows. These alternative approaches are on view in the attention to repair, restoration and new conceptions of justice that motivate decolonial feminist models of degrowth, and environmental justice. An embrace of epistemic plurality offers many such opportunities for convergence. For instance, new models of coalition and relations are not automatically built on divisions that must be overcome in strategic, temporary, alliance or superseded via the hard and often fleeting work of creating some unity in solidarity. Instead, such moves create possibilities for building new modes of socioeconomic, cultural and political relations, and new understandings of solidarity and relation.

REFERENCES Arora-Jonsson, Seema (2011) ‘Virtue and Vulnerability: Discourses on Women, Gender and Climate Change’, Global Environmental Change 21(2): 744–51. Bacchi, Carol (1999) Women, Policy and Politics: The Construction of Policy Problems, London: Sage. Baines, Donna (2010) ‘Gender Mainstreaming in a Development Project: Intersectionality in a Post‐ Colonial Un‐Doing?’, Gender, Work and Organization 17(2): 119–49. Banaszak, Lee Ann, Karen Beckwith and Dieter Rucht (2003) ‘When Power Relocates: Interactive Changes in Women’s Movements and States’. In Lee Ann Banaszak, Karen Beckwith and Dieter Rucht (eds), Women’s Movements Facing the Reconfigured State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–29. Barnes, Tiffany D. and Mirya R. Holman (2020) ‘Gender Quotas, Women’s Representation, and Legislative Diversity’, Journal of Politics 82(4): 1271–86. Bassel, Leah and Akwugo Emejulu (2017) Minority Women and Austerity: Survival and Resistance in France and Britain, Bristol: Policy Press. Behl, Natasha (2019) Gendered Citizenship: Understanding Gendered Violence in Democratic India, New York: Oxford University Press. Bilge, Sirma (2010) ‘Beyond Subordination vs. Resistance: An Intersectional Approach to the Agency of Veiled Muslim Women’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 31(1): 9–28. Boothroyd, Sydney et al. (2017) ‘(Re)producing Feminine Bodies: Emergent Spaces through Contestation in the Women’s March on Washington’, Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 24(5): 711–21. Brah, Avtar and Ann Phoenix (2004) ‘Ain’t I a Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality’, Journal of International Women’s Studies 5(3): 75–86. Bustelo, María (2009) ‘Spain: Intersectionality Faces the Strong Gender Norm’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 11(4): 530–46. Carastathis, Anna (2016) Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Chow, Pok Yin S. (2016) ‘Has Intersectionality Reached its Limits? Intersectionality in the UN Human Rights Treaty Body Practice and the Issue of Ambivalence’, Human Rights Law Review 16(3), 453–81. Chun, Jennifer Jihye, George Lipsitz and Young Shin (2013) ‘Intersectionality as a Social Movement Strategy: Asian Immigrant Women Advocates’, Signs 38(4): 917–40. Cole, Elizabeth R. (2008) ‘Coalitions as a Model for Intersectionality: From Practice to Theory’, Sex Roles 59(5–6): 443–53. Collins, Patricia Hill (2015) ‘Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas’, Annual Review of Sociology 41: 1–20.

Seeking intersectionality in feminist governance  97 Coomaraswamy, Radhika (2002) ‘Identity Within: Cultural Relativism, Minority Rights and the Empowerment of Women’, George Washington International Law Review 34(3): 483–513. Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1989) ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum 140: 139–67. Curiel, Ochy (2007) ‘La crítica postcolonial desde las prácticas políticas del feminismo antirracista’, Revista Nómadas 26: 92–101. D’Agostino, Serena (2021) ‘(In)visible Mobilizations: Romanian Women’s Intersectional Activisms in Romania and Bulgaria’, Politics, Groups, and Identities 9(1): 170–89. Douglass, Patrice D. (2018) ‘Black Feminist Theory for the Dead and Dying’, Theory and Event 21(1): 106–23. Emejulu, Akwugo (2015) Community Development as Micropolitics: Comparing Theories, Policies and Politics in America and Britain, Bristol: Policy Press. Eschle, Catherine and Bice Maiguashca (2018) ‘Theorising Feminist Organising in and against Neoliberalism: Beyond Co-Optation and Resistance?’ European Journal of Politics and Gender 1(1–2): 223–39. Esguerra Muelle, Camila and Jeisson Alanis Bello Ramírez (2014) ‘Interseccionalidad y políticas públicas LGBTI en Colombia: usos y desplazamientos de una noción crítica’, Revista de Estudios Sociales 49: 19–32. http://​dx​.doi​.org/​10​.7440/​res49​.2014​.02. Franceschet, Susan and Jennifer M. Piscopo (2014) ‘Power, Parties, and Elite Political Networks in Argentina’, Comparative Political Studies 47(1): 85–110. Gedalof, Irene (2012) ‘Interruption, Reproduction and Genealogies of “Staying Put” in Diaspora Space’, Feminist Review 100(1): 72–87. Gianettoni, Lavinia and Patricia Roux (2010) ‘Interconnecting Race and Gender Relations: Racism, Sexism and the Attribution of Sexism to the Racialized Other’, Sex Roles 62(5–6): 374–86. Griffin, Penny (2015) ‘Crisis, Austerity and Gendered Governance: A Feminist Perspective’, Feminist Review 109(1): 49–72. Hagen, Jamie J. (2016) ‘Queering Women, Peace and Security’, International Affairs 92(2): 313–32. Halley, Janet (2018) ‘Which Forms of Feminism Have Gained Inclusion?’ In Janet Halley, Prabha Kotiswaran, Rachel Rebouché and Hila Shamir (eds), Governance Feminism: An Introduction, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 23–53. Halley, Janet, Prabha Kotiswaran, Rachel Rebouché and Hila Shamir (eds) (2018) Governance Feminism: An Introduction, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hankivsky, Olena (2005) ‘Gender vs. Diversity Mainstreaming: A Preliminary Examination of the Role and Transformative Potential of Feminist Theory’, Canadian Journal of Political Science 38(4): 977–1001. Hankivsky, Olena et al. (2014) ‘An Intersectionality-Based Policy Analysis Framework: Critical Reflections on a Methodology for Advancing Equity’, International Journal for Equity in Health 13: 119. Hemmings, Clare (2011) Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jordan-Zachery, Julia Sheron (2017) Shadow Bodies: Black Women, Ideology, Representation, and Politics, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kantola, Johanna and Judith Squires (2012) ‘From State Feminism to Market Feminism’, International Political Science Review 33(4): 382–400. Kendall, Mikki (2020) Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot, New York: Viking. Laperrière, Marie and Eléonore Lépinard (2016) ‘Intersectionality as a Tool for Social Movements: Strategies of Inclusion and Representation in the Québécois Women’s Movement’, Politics 36(4): 374–82. Lépinard, Eléonore (2014) ‘Doing Intersectionality: Repertoires of Feminist Practices in France and Canada’, Gender and Society 28(6): 877–903. Lépinard, Eléonore (2020) Feminist Trouble: Intersectional Politics in Post-Secular Times, New York: Oxford University Press.

98  Handbook of feminist governance Lewis, Gail (2013) ‘Unsafe Travel: Experiencing Intersectionality and Feminist Displacements’, Signs 38(4): 869–92. Lugones, María (2010) ‘Toward a Decolonial Feminism’, Hypatia 25(4): 742–59. Mack, Ashley Noel and Tiara R. Na’puti (2019) ‘“Our Bodies Are Not Terra Nullius”: Building a Decolonial Feminist Resistance to Gendered Violence’, Women’s Studies in Communication 42(3): 347–70. Martín de Almagro, María and Caitlin Ryan (2019) ‘Subverting Economic Empowerment: Towards a Postcolonial-Feminist Framework on Gender (In)Securities in Post-War Settings’, European Journal of International Relations 25(4): 1059–79. May, Vivian (2015) Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries, London: Routledge. Miller, Carol and Shahra Razavi (1998) ‘From WID to GAD: Conceptual Shifts in the Women and Development Discourse’, UNRISD Occasional Paper, No. 1. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (2013) ‘Transnational Feminist Crossings: On Neoliberalism and Radical Critique’, Signs 38(4): 967–91. Moore, Elena and Chuma Himonga (2017) ‘Centring the Intersection of Race, Class, and Gender When a Customary Marriage Ends’, Agenda 31(1): 104–15. Murib, Zein (2018) ‘Unsettling the GLBT and Queer Coalitions in US Politics through the Lens of Queer Indigenous Critique’, New Political Science 40(1): 165–76. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. (2015) ‘Decoloniality as the Future of Africa’, History Compass 13(10): 485–96. Parken, Allison (2010) ‘A Multi-Strand Approach to Promoting Equality and Human Rights in Policymaking’, Policy and Politics 38(1): 79–99. Patil, Vrushali (2013) ‘From Patriarchy to Intersectionality: A Transnational Feminist Assessment of How Far We’ve Really Come’, Signs 38(4): 847–67. Pérez, Emma (1999) The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Prügl, Elisabeth (2015) ‘Neoliberalising Feminism’, New Political Economy 20(4): 614–31. Osei-Kofi, Nana, Adela C. Licona and Karma R. Chávez (2018) ‘From Afro-Sweden with Defiance: The Clenched Fist as Coalitional Gesture?’ New Political Science 40(1): 137–50. Rice, Carla, Elisabeth Harrison and May Friedman (2019) ‘Doing Justice to Intersectionality in Research’, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 19(6): 409–20. Roberts, Dorothy (2014) ‘Complicating the Triangle of Race, Class and State: The Insights of Black Feminists’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 37(10): 1776–82. Roshanravan, Shireen (2018) ‘The Coalitional Imperative of Asian American Feminist Visibility’, The Pluralist 13(1): 115–30. Rottenberg, Catherine (2018) The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism, New York: Oxford University Press. Sawer, Marian (2007) ‘Australia: The Fall of the Femocrat’. In Joyce Outshoorn and Johanna Kantola (eds), Changing State Feminism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 20–40. Skjeie, Hege and Trude Langvasbråten (2009) ‘Intersectionality in Practice? Anti-Discrimination Reforms in Norway’. International Feminist Journal of Politics 11(4): 513–29. Squires, Judith (2009) ‘Intersecting Inequalities: Britain’s Equality Review’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 11(4): 496–512. Taylor, Liza (2018) ‘Coalition from the Inside Out: Women of Color Feminism and Politico-Ethical Coalition Politics’, New Political Science 40(1): 119–36. Tormos, Fernando (2017) ‘Intersectional Solidarity’, Politics, Groups, and Identities 5(4): 707–20. Townsend-Bell, Erica E. (2012) ‘Writing the Way to Feminism’, Signs 38(1): 127–52. Townsend-Bell, Erica E. (2021) ‘Breaking Hegemony: Coalition as Decolonial-Intersectional Praxis’, European Journal of Politics and Gender 4(2): 235–53. Tungohan, Ethel (2016) ‘Intersectionality and Social Justice: Assessing Activists’ Use of Intersectionality through Grassroots Migrants’ Organizations in Canada’, Politics, Groups, and Identities 4(3): 347–62. Velez, Emma D. (2019) ‘Decolonial Feminism at the Intersection: A Critical Reflection on the Relationship between Decolonial Feminism and Intersectionality’, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 33(3): 390–406. Walby, Sylvia (2005) ‘Gender Mainstreaming: Productive Tensions in Theory and Practice’, Social Politics 12(3): 321–43.

Seeking intersectionality in feminist governance  99 Walsh, Catherine E. (2015) ‘Affirmative Action(ing)s and Postneoliberal Movement in South America and Ecuador’, Cultural Dynamics 27(1): 19–41. Wilkinson, Eleanor and Isabel Ortega-Alcázar (2019) ‘The Right to Be Weary? Endurance and Exhaustion in Austere Times’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 44(1): 155–67. Williams, Toni (2009) ‘Intersectionality Analysis in the Sentencing of Aboriginal Women in Canada’. In Emily Grabham, Davina Cooper, Jane Krishnadas and Didi Herman (eds), Intersectionality and Beyond: Law, Power and the Politics of Location, Abingdon: Routledge, 79–104.

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

INTRODUCTION Understanding approaches to studying feminist governance is important because it helps us reflect on how feminist governance scholarship is and should be situated within the broader political science and international relations disciplines. Such comprehension also provides an opening to evaluate existing research methods, as well as an opportunity to create innovative ways to incorporate and mainstream gender in these predominantly male-dominated and heteronormative fields. Drawing on Ackerly and True’s (2019) Doing Feminist Research in Political and Social Science, I argue that feminist governance scholars must follow feminist epistemology. Studying feminist governance without reflecting upon one’s own power and positionality as a researcher is akin to claiming feminism without recognising how various forms of oppression have an intersectional impact on how individuals experience and interact with the world. Such attentiveness includes awareness of the individuals and cases that may have been previously excluded. Even when scholars pay attention to the power dynamics, it is also vital to recognise that gender incorporation and mainstreaming development can often incur other ‘complex inequalities’ (Walby, 2005). For example, institutions could favour gender to a point where it is impossible to achieve intersectionality, although intersectionality is a repertoire for inclusion in feminist governance. That is, the prioritisation of gender could ignore other inequalities and injustices (Strid and Verloo, 2019; Benschop et al., 2019). Therefore, I specifically call attention to one of True and Parisi’s (2013) models of gender mainstreaming – ‘gender-as-intersectionality model’1 – and further advocate for intersectionality mainstreaming. This chapter suggests a break from orthodox procedures and analyses in the field but a continuation of diversity in methodological innovation in feminist governance research. It starts by discussing what it means to do feminist research. It offers suggestions on how to do feminist research by examining several research methods commonly employed by feminist governance scholars. By no means does this chapter review all research methods employed in feminist governance scholarship. Nonetheless, the discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of these methods is a starting point for researchers to think more broadly and comprehensively about not just the implications they can draw from their findings but also the impact their power has on the research subjects, as well as the discipline of politics and international relations. It concludes by offering insights into future directions for feminist governance scholarship.

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Studying feminist governance  101

PAYING ATTENTION TO POWER Feminist governance research employs feminist methodology – ‘a commitment to using a whole constellation of methods reflectively and critically, with the end aim being the production of data that serves feminist aims of social justice’ (Ackerly and True, 2010: 6). By this definition, there is not a particular method used in feminist governance research. Instead, scholars identify important research questions, engage with literature and concepts and gather and analyse data in a meaningful way to incorporate and mainstream gender. Gender incorporation and mainstreaming are a meta-gender equality strategy (Krook and True, 2012) to encourage academics, activists and policymakers to account for gender in policies and programmes so that the differential impact on women and men can be evaluated critically. Making the hidden nature of gender visible alters the way institutions view gender; gender mainstreaming challenges the existing patriarchal nature of institutions. Although such incorporation and mainstreaming of gender are considered an effective mechanism to eliminate barriers for women, scholars can only convincingly achieve gender incorporation and mainstreaming when their research is guided by feminist epistemology. The first step in following feminist epistemology is to pay attention to the power of the researcher when conducting a study. Rarely can research present a complete picture. Therefore, it is crucial to differentiate how knowledge is produced and what enables knowledge production in feminist governance scholarship. Only when one’s power is critically examined can the researcher see the people and voices lost in the research process. Researchers must be aware of the power they have and of how their power can be used to either advocate for the marginalised or silence the oppressed. Who is Being Studied and How are They Being Studied? Feminist governance scholars focus on the gender dimensions of the questions of who participates, how and why they participate, and the outcomes achieved by such participation in governance. However, regardless of how many features are shared, no group has an essential identity. Although being aware of group experiences based on an identity such as gender helps generate some perspectives, these perspectives can never be comprehensive without taking into account one’s standpoint, which is how one sees, understands and interacts with the world (Harding, 1992). The perspectives of the minoritised can help create more objective accounts of the world; paying attention to and giving a voice to the minoritised in and through scholarship helps feminist scholars recognise patterns that those with power may not be able to see. At the same time, taking a standpoint and being aware of one’s positionality also helps researchers communicate with their subjects and evaluate any biases in their research. For example, Fallon (2008) experiences obstacles during her field research in sub-Saharan Africa when she interviews women from women’s organisations. One of the hurdles that confronts her is the different understandings of vocabulary. Her participants respond strongly and negatively towards her usage of the word ‘politics’ as the organisations were deliberately distancing themselves from politics. Therefore, accounting for contextual difference, in this instance, what ‘politics’ means in different settings, is crucial for researchers to draw unbiased conclusions. Moreover, while scholars may agree that in feminist governance scholarship, all women’s participation must be accounted for, in reality many studies focus on the role of elite women in

102  Handbook of feminist governance international organisations and movements. The focus on elite women may not be deliberate as researchers can experience obstacles when identifying and recruiting participants for their study. Perhaps due to the difficulty of identifying and accessing women who are not official leaders, few studies include those who do not formally work for prestigious organisations. Such exclusion of grassroots women prevents scholars from creating multidimensional knowledge about how feminist governance works. For example, Chatty and Rabo (2020) show a sharp contrast between women who organise as formal and as informal groups in the Middle East. The gap is found because the researchers pay attention to women who mobilise on the ground. Using interviews and focus groups with leaders of civil society and women’s organisations, as well as government officials, Tripp (2016) compares women’s rights provisions in all African post-independence constitutions. Conversations with activists on the ground in Kenya and Somalia inform us about how changes are made over time and how women’s movements shape the difference between conflict and post-conflict constitutions. These examples show that experiences of players within feminist governance differ, depending on their identities, backgrounds and positionalities. Exclusion of grassroots women delegitimises informal participation or unconventional activism of women without access to resources, resulting in biased understanding of how feminist governance works. Therefore, to achieve a holistic picture of feminist governance, a comprehensive understanding of difference is needed. In addition to potential biases caused by an underrepresented sample in interviews and focus groups, using large datasets such as surveys also creates challenges. Large datasets often essentialise identity-based differences and ignore how various axes of identity and standpoint can shape one’s experiences. Large datasets put women in the same category without acknowledging that not all women who share identities have the same experiences. For example, Black women experience police brutality at a significantly higher rate than white women. Yet, large datasets often do not provide information beyond gender. For example, World Bank data encompasses many gender dimensions, including the gender ratio in educational attainment, women’s labour force participation, percentage of women in parliament, and so on. Using large datasets, scholars are able to show that female MPs are more likely to support family leave policies than men (Kittilson, 2006) and that female cabinet ministers are more likely to foster a female-friendly labour environment (Atchison, 2015), but not how women of colour may be underrepresented in the economic, political and cultural structures. Consequently, researchers can only tell part of the story. As demonstrated, part of practising feminist epistemology is about paying attention to intersectionality. Only when researchers recognise that gender is not the only identity and that it intersects with others in shaping one’s experiences can the study be as comprehensive as possible. Taking an intersectional approach prevents a monolithic explanation of a phenomenon. For instance, Martin de Almagro (2017) incorporates intersectionality when investigating the creation of the National Action Plans that implement the women, peace and security agenda in post-conflict countries. In particular, through analysing the subject position of women participants in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi and Liberia, she contends that these policymaking practices (re)produce gendered normativity and hierarchy. Because she doesn’t pay attention only to gender, she is able to offer nuanced (and also problematic) insights showing that gender is ranked higher than race, sexuality and class in women, peace and security agendas. Without an intersectional approach, she would not be able to demonstrate that gender also creates a binary category of participants – women as victims and women

Studying feminist governance  103 as agents. Neglecting race, sexuality and class can also essentialise participants and prevent understanding of how women’s oppression can vary by their multiple identities. Consequently, feminist governance scholars must not treat women as a homogeneous group as it legitimises the representation of women in these national agendas to secure and restore peace, which also means those without the privileges of white women are silenced.

WHO HAS AGENCY? In the research process, participants mostly do not have much power in shaping the research as they are often on the receiving end. For instance, participants in a survey are asked questions that are not constructed by them. Survey questionnaires can also be designed without sensitivity or inclusivity. Most surveys ask demographic questions and provide options that do not leave much room for one’s own interpretation. For example, surveys tend to ask participants what their sex is. It is only recently that researchers have become aware of the difference between sex and gender, hence creating questions that separate sex registered at birth and gender that participants identify with. Surveyors may also give limited options to answering the question of sex and/or gender, such as female and male, without recognising that participants may be non-binary. The lack of opportunity to interact directly with the surveyors may leave participants feeling powerless in the research process. Therefore, scholars must be aware of their own biases when constructing these questions. The tasks of researchers (asking questions) and participants (answering questions) create power differentials between subject and researcher. Therefore, a feminist approach to survey data requires scholars to ask themselves where they fit within the research process and how data production is shaped by their presence (Stauffer and O’Brien, 2018). Existing indicators in survey questionnaires need to be reconceptualised and re-operationalised for a more inclusive language, which helps researchers yield different and perhaps more accurate responses. Furthermore, as most researchers use standardised surveys, they are only able to analyse standardised responses. Yet, it is not appropriate for researchers to assume that measures apply consistently to both men and women. For example, scholars who are interested in the gender gaps in political knowledge in the past have tested men’s and women’s political knowledge using standard questions, which are often gendered. Instead of using traditional survey measures to test political knowledge, Dolan (2011) finds questions about women politicians result in women participants having higher scores than men. Similarly, scholars who are interested in the impact of feminist governance may evaluate women’s political participation by using standardised items on political activities, such as voting, petition-signing and participating in peaceful rallies (e.g. Liu, 2018; Liu and Banaszak, 2017). Yet, these traditional measures neglect other (non-conventional) activities that may be engaged in by women, especially women lacking the right to vote or go on a march. Many oppressed women may participate in politics in a different way, such as through organising events or starting petitions online and still remain excluded. Stepping away from traditional measures in a survey may yield completely different results from past studies. Therefore, researchers should acknowledge and overcome the issue of gendered, as well as other intersectional biases in their research designs (Stauffer and O’Brien, 2018). In addition to surveys, interviews are one of the ways to produce oral history and gather opinion and feedback on one’s experiences. Semi-structured and open-ended interviews par-

104  Handbook of feminist governance ticularly allow participants agency in defining their own issues. Although interviews can be subjective as participants’ conceptualisation and memories of the movement are not the same across individuals, meeting and talking to those who mobilise at the grassroots level provides a perhaps more realistic presentation of movements than official press releases. Also, while in-depth interviews and focus groups tend to be conducted with a relatively small sample, they show the complex ways in which movement actors experience the challenges and opportunities of mobilising, as well as achieving their goals. The complex relations among activists and between movements and official governing bodies are often difficult to capture with large quantitative data. In a way, interviews allow participants more agency in the research process as they can pause, ask questions and share thoughts that may not have been probed by a previously constructed survey. Nevertheless, interviews are often conducted in person, via the phone or the Internet, meaning that there is direct human contact. Such contact also means that researchers must be extra careful about the power they have as researchers on their subjects, especially where researchers might already know the interviewees through employment connections, political activities, and so on. These prior relationships create a power differential, suggesting that participants may find it difficult to be completely transparent in the interview. Therefore, researchers must not only build trust prior to the interviews, but they must also provide ways to mitigate risks and power differentials for the interviewees.

WHICH CONTEXT IS INCLUDED AND HOW IS IT INCLUDED? Accounting for context is as important as accounting for individual differences. Mannell (2012) conducts in-depth interviews with fieldworkers and senior management of non-governmental organisations in South Africa, finding perceptions that gender mainstreaming has become a technical concern of government bureaucrats rather than a political struggle. Funds are insufficient for gender structures to work; senior management support for gender units is lacking; and there is a failure to agree on gender goals. The idea of gender mainstreaming taken from the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 has met with the reality of insufficient resources for implementation and a failure to adequately address gender inequality (Rao and Kelleher, 2005). Such challenges are not unique to South African organisations. Yet, South Africa is unique in the sense that mainstreaming as a popular belief coincided with the end of apartheid in 1994. This sequence also means that key activists have moved from the resistance movement into the establishment, holding office in the parliament and the civil service. As experienced women become insiders, many women’s movements in South Africa are left fragmented (Meer, 2005). Furthermore, as women’s rights activists become insiders, international organisations believe that South Africa is capable of addressing gender injustice on its own and have reduced their support and help accordingly (Mannell, 2012). Mannell’s findings on how gender mainstreaming has failed in South Africa provide a nuanced perspective on feminist governance because she takes context into consideration. Moreover, as women in the Global South are often seen as ‘ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, religious, domesticated, family-oriented, victimized, etc.’ (Mohanty, 1988: 65), centring these women in a study without delegitimising, dehumanising or victimising them, in a way, gives women in the Global South their power back. Only when researchers

Studying feminist governance  105 care for the role and efforts of women with various marginalised identities can they understand the agency, capabilities and leadership of minoritised women. While large datasets may overcome the problem of excluding important cases and provide more generalisability, it is still crucial to pay attention to cases that are not represented in the sample. Researchers may use large datasets produced by these supra-national organisations, which are inherently political in determining which data and which countries are included. Data from the United Nations (UN), World Bank, European Union (EU), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) often neglect important dimensions other than gender. For example, the World Bank has data on women’s participation in the labour force. While the data helps people understand the extent to which women work outside the home, it neglects the fact that many women, particularly in non-Western countries, partake in informal labour. Their contribution is not recognised by such a measure. Similarly, most organisations do not include Taiwan because of its international exclusion. Nonetheless, if researchers use data provided by supra-national organisations and exclude Taiwan, one of the few countries with a female president, in their study of women in national governance, they are likely to arrive at biased conclusions. The scholarship on women’s leadership and Covid-19 is an example of how usage of such large datasets obtained through supra-national organisations is problematic. Taiwan has experienced one of the lowest Covid-19 infection and death rates. Scholars (e.g. Johnson and Williams, 2020) are interested in whether and how female leaders play a role in successfully tackling the pandemic. However, the important, successful case of Taiwan is missing from the large datasets provided by transnational organisations. In addition to using large datasets, researchers may also conduct other types of analyses, such as discourse analysis or institutional analysis, to understand feminist governance. However, these analyses have a number of limitations. First, researchers from the Global South are challenged by the biases of editors, who are based primarily in North America and Europe. Their interpretations and analyses of texts may be deemed insufficient because they are not conducted in English, creating obstacles to publication of non-Eurocentric or non-American-centric research. Second, researchers are rarely fluent in languages outside their region. As many feminist governance scholars are based in North America or English-speaking countries, they are likely to analyse documents in English, leading to an overly biased sample. Such over-representation of North American and European cases also creates a bias in the discipline, narrowing the sort of knowledge that is produced and reproduced. Further, it creates a bias in who we consider to be knowledgeable, which then not only determines whose works we engage with but also with whom we collaborate. Therefore, without decolonising and dissipating Westernised ways of interpreting and analysing texts, our knowledge will always be limited to a certain aspect of the ivory tower and to the certain aspect of the world.

HOW IS DATA ANALYSED AND SHARED? Feminist governance research should be guided by feminist epistemology, including the data collection process. The choices that scholars make in what methods to use and what data to gather matter for the conclusions that they can draw. These choices also matter for understanding the power relations involved in governance enquiry. While scholars may choose between

106  Handbook of feminist governance approaches to collecting qualitative and quantitative data, they should reflect upon their choice of methods, using a feminist research ethic (Ackerly and True, 2019). For example, in feminist governance scholarship, several approaches are undertaken to evaluate the role of gender in an institution (e.g. Krook and Mackay, 2010), including institutional analysis and discourse analysis. True (2008) conducts institutional analysis by examining the actors, structure, mechanisms and processes of these organisations to demonstrate that, for example, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and the EU mainstream gender as a governance strategy to increase trade capacity. Scholars also evaluate the contents, discourses, narratives and framing of texts. Through analyses of documents of the UN, for example, researchers can quantify and interpret common patterns expressed via words, themes or concepts, in these documents, revealing the power dynamics, positionality and biases within feminist governance. For instance, using a discourse analysis of UN documents on peace operations, Puechguirbal (2010) demonstrates that these documents often use gendered language that perpetuates gender stereotypes and removes women’s agency. Analysing the translation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 into National Action Plans in Australia, Georgia, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States, Shepherd (2016) also shows that some countries tend to focus on making ‘war safe for women’ instead of demilitarising. Without an analysis of important documents, we would not be able to grasp the extent to which these organisations and policies are gendered. However, these analyses are also not perfect. While it is impossible to be completely objective and prevent biased assumptions, researchers can acknowledge their own standpoint in the research process. As judgements are inevitable, being transparent about one’s own positionality should clarify any grey area, especially in the researchers’ interpretations of texts, observations or institutions. For example, researchers who conduct analysis of texts may provide a codebook, enabling coders to follow the same set of rules. Once the coders start the coding process, they need to constantly review the codebook and have discussions among coders. As the study concludes, inter-coder agreement must also be established and calculated, aiming for reliability of coding and analysis. Making the codebook available also enables readers to understand how texts are interpreted. Various platforms now allow for storage of qualitative data securely. Although most qualitative data are not shared, there is an increasing trend for journals to require or encourage authors to upload their qualitative data. Therefore, qualitative researchers need to make their data collection more transparent.

WHOSE WORKS ARE CITED? When demonstrating the significance of their research, researchers also have the power to explain contending theories. Whose works are cited and which perspectives and standpoints are engaged with indicate the inclusion and exclusion of not just feminist scholarship but also feminist scholarship from the Global South. When gender incorporation and mainstreaming are seen as ways to liberate the various levels of governance, we must also think of feminist governance research as a mechanism to liberate scholarship and the discipline. As white women feminist scholars from the Global North dominate the field of gender and politics, feminist governance scholarship must be decolonised by paying attention to the subjugation and subjection of people for the purpose of accumulating knowledge that serves white Western hegemony (Kessi et al., 2020). Citation is a way of reproducing sameness and exclud-

Studying feminist governance  107 ing difference (Mott and Cockayne, 2017). In order to produce inclusive and comprehensive knowledge, feminist governance scholars need to ask themselves if they only cite white scholars. If they also cite scholars of colour, scholars then need to pay attention to whether they only cite women of colour who are scholars from the Global North. When scholars cite women of colour from beyond North America and Europe, they also need to critically engage with Global South scholarship, rather than treat such citation as a box-checking exercise. If feminist scholars’ primary concern is to address issues of power and marginalisation, whose works are cited and which journals are referenced are also are crucial in the (re)production of knowledge, which may or may not reinforce a heteronormative, masculine and white way of seeing feminist governance. The sole citation of white, cis-gender and able-bodied scholars embodies a particular privilege and neglects untraditional/non-mainstream knowledge (Rose, 1993). The broader disciplines of political science and international relations have been (and still are) dominated by men and there is a lack of active disciplinary engagement with non-white, homonormative scholarship. Feminist scholars should have a conscientious engagement with this issue and treat citation as a performativity of power (Mott and Cockayne, 2017). When feminist epistemology is incorporated in research, the active citing of marginalised scholars means there is no longer an uncritical reproduction of power dynamics within the discipline. Citation is a way to reproduce certain bodies or to welcome bodies that have been previously left out (Ahmed, 2013). Being guided by feminist principles, feminist governance scholars can use citational practices as a tool to reflect and resist unethical hierarchies of knowledge and promote marginalised voices (Mott and Cockayne, 2017). What Other Methods Should be Considered? As demonstrated, interviews, focus groups, surveys, institutional analysis and discourse analysis are common methods through which scholars examine feminist governance. Nevertheless, there are ways in which scholars could further immerse themselves in the communities they study, as well as deriving causal inferences through precise measurement. Participatory action research allows researchers to immerse themselves in the communities that they study. Although some feminist governance scholars have conducted participatory research, more could be done when researching elites (e.g. Childs and Palmieri, Chapter 14 this Handbook) or women’s movements (Lambert et al., Chapter 9 this Handbook). In this approach, research is no longer the only or primary goal. Instead, participation and action are also ways in which researchers can generate knowledge – oftentimes via co-production. Not only does participatory action research enable researchers to understand the world and change it (Reason and Bradbury, 2001), it also enables the subjects to be the centre of the study while holding on to their agency in showcasing their experiences and activities. The methods that dominate the feminist governance field also lack a mechanism allowing researchers to derive causal inferences with precise measurement. In experiments, researchers can break down complex relationships, enabling them to explore the details of process and validating the conditions under which causal connections exist. Moreover, as experiments are a popular method today, conducting experiments gives feminist governance scholars an opportunity to mainstream their research in political science, broadening their audience beyond the gender and politics community. Although I call for more attention to innovative research methods to study feminist governance, such as participatory action and experiments, scholars still need to pay attention to the

108  Handbook of feminist governance power relations between themselves as researchers and their participants as subjects. In most research activities, participants have little agency. Participants answer questions formulated by researchers and partake in activities designed by researchers. Even when participants are agents of their own situation and experiences, they do not always have the same power to negotiate subject positions and claim agency in a research process (Amigot and Pujal, 2009). Therefore, in designing experiments, for example, researchers not only need to take research ethics into account, but they also need to be aware of the power hierarchy and the potential impact of the hierarchy on the outcomes. Thus, feminist scholars should practice reflexivity2 as an analytical device to not only ensure participant agency, but also to acknowledge that alternative explanations are possible outside of researchers’ own familiarity and subjectivity (Ackerly and True, 2008; van Stapele, 2014).

MOVING FORWARD The incorporation and mainstreaming of gender have been one of the goals in feminist governance scholarship as it seeks to influence institutional rules and norms and to promote change within organisations. Nonetheless, most studies focus solely on the gender aspect without paying attention to how other axes of oppressions can occur within formal and informal governance. Moving forward, feminist scholars must produce research to demonstrate to political elites, policymakers and actors within governance that it is not enough to address disparities between men and women. While women may be treated as the ‘other’ in existing institutions and structures, women are not the only ones being ‘othered’. Disparities among various marginalised groups need to be addressed in order to achieve greater equality. Feminist governance researchers need to incorporate intersectionality as a form of critical enquiry that can be a powerful tool in dismantling hegemony (Overstreet et al., 2020). Conventional single-axis approaches treat gender as a dichotomy, reaffirming the status quo embedded in our institutions, policies, structures, social movements and research (Collins, 2019). In other words, institutional transformation cannot truly occur unless critical praxis is used to acknowledge the struggles of women with intersectional identities (Overstreet et al., 2020). How might feminist governance scholars use critical enquiry to produce knowledge that uncovers the interlocking systems of power? First, scholars need to recognise the multiple oppressions experienced by various marginalised groups based on their gender, race, class and sexual orientation at both the individual and institutional levels (Hancock, 2007a). As scholars recognise that marginalisations are intersecting rather than additive, each category of difference also has within-group diversity that helps us conceptualise the role and impact of actors inside and outside governing bodies (Hancock, 2007b). Second, political scientists need to think about the epistemology that guides their research. I call for a postcolonial epistemology in which scholars destabilise and critique the Eurocentric theories, methods and practices of coloniality. As colonialism and Western domination have long silenced local knowledge and assumed that Western civilisation is the pinnacle of progress (Lentin, 2017), researchers need to get rid of the notion that the West is the norm. Instead of focusing on cases in the Global North or including a cross-sectional analysis, researchers should pay attention to colonial history, as well as contextual differences. It is researchers’ duty to ‘fight ignorance regarding the lives of subjects who have been marginalized’ (Ortega,

Studying feminist governance  109 2017: 505). Decolonial epistemology enables researchers to dismantle the insidious effects of hegemony and empire. As feminist governance scholarship has progressed towards being an integral part of political science, we scholars have offered numerous ways to conceptualise, understand and challenge existing institutions and structures. In various parts of society, some aspects of gender have been mainstreamed, albeit slowly. Moving forward, there is still room to improve and further mainstream not just gender but also other axes of identity and oppression. Future feminist governance research should incorporate intersectionality and be guided by decolonial epistemology in order to achieve the goal of greater equality.

NOTES 1. The gender-as-intersectionality model asks organisations to contextualise and adapt gender mainstreaming strategies while taking into account the needs of those with intersecting identities. 2. Reflexivity is an instrument for researchers to recognise how their own subjectivities impinge upon their research, enabling them to recognise how the knowledge produced could be biased (van Stapele, 2014).

REFERENCES Ackerly, Brooke and Jacqui True (2008) ‘Reflexivity in Practice: Power and Ethics in Feminist Research on International Relations’, International Studies Review 10(4): 693–707. Ackerly, Brooke and Jacqui True (2010) Doing Feminist Research in Political and Social Science, London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ackerly, Brooke and Jacqui True (2019) Doing Feminist Research in Political and Social Science, 2nd edn, London and New York: Red Globe Press. Ahmed, Sara (2013) ‘Making Feminist Points’, feministkilljoys. https://​feministkilljoys​.com/​2013/​09/​ 11/​making​-feminist​-points/​ (accessed 4 October 2022). Amigot, Patricia and Margot Pujal (2009) ‘On Power, Freedom, and Gender: A Fruitful Tension Between Foucault and Feminism’, Theory & Psychology 19(5): 646–69. Atchison, Amy (2015) ‘The Impact of Female Cabinet Ministers on a Female-Friendly Labor Environment’, Journal of Women, Politics & Policy 36(4): 388–414. Benschop, Yvonne, Vanessa Bernauer, Pradeepa Dahanayake, Ram Mahalingam, Tarani Joy Merriweather Woodson, Stella M. Nkomo, Jenny K. Rodriguez, Marieke Caroline Lisette Van Den Brink, Mieke Verloo and Dorian Woods (2019) ‘Exploring the Relationship Between Intersectionality and Inclusion: A Research Agenda’, Academy of Management Proceedings 2019(1): 14145. Chatty, D. and A. Rabo (eds) (2020) Organizing Women: Formal and Informal Women’s Groups in the Middle East, Abingdon: Routledge. Collins, Patricia Hill (2019) Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dolan, Kathleen (2011) Do Women and Men Know Different Things? Measuring Gender Differences in Political Knowledge’, The Journal of Politics 73(1): 97–107. Fallon, Kathleen M. (2008) Democracy and the Rise of Women’s Movements in Sub-Saharan Africa, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hancock, Ange-Marie (2007a) ‘Intersectionality as a Normative and Empirical Paradigm’, Politics & Gender 3(2): 248–54. Hancock, Ange-Marie (2007b) ‘When Multiplication Doesn’t Equal Quick Addition: Examining Intersectionality as a Research Paradigm’, Perspectives on Politics 5(1): 63­–79. Harding, Sandra (1992) ‘Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is “Strong Objectivity?”’, The Centennial Review 36(3): 437–70.

110  Handbook of feminist governance Johnson, Carol and Blair Williams (2020) ‘Gender and Political Leadership in a Time of COVID’, Politics & Gender 16(4): 943–50. Kessi, Shose, Zoe Marks and Elelwani Ramugondo (2020) ‘Decolonizing African Studies’, Critical African Studies 12(3): 271–82. Kittilson, Miki Caul (2006) Challenging Parties, Changing Parliaments: Women and Elected Office in Contemporary Western Europe, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Krook, Mona and Fiona Mackay (eds) (2010) Gender, Politics and Institutions: Towards a Feminist Institutionalism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Krook, Mona Lena and Jacqui True (2012) ‘Rethinking the Life Cycles of International Norms: The United Nations and the Global Promotion of Gender Equality’, European Journal of International Relations 18(1): 103–27. Lentin, A. (2017) ‘Decolonizing Epistemologies: Part 2, Race Critical, and Decolonial Sociology’, public seminar, The New School for Social Research. Liu, Shan-Jan Sarah (2018) ‘Are Female Political Leaders Role Models? Lessons from Asia’, Political Research Quarterly 71(2): 255–69. Liu, Shan-Jan Sarah and Lee Ann Banaszak (2017) ‘Do Government Positions Held by Women Matter? A Cross-National Examination of Female Ministers’ Impacts on Women’s Political Participation’, Politics & Gender 13(1): 132–62. Mannell, Jenevieve (2012) ‘“It’s just been such a horrible experience”: Perceptions of Gender Mainstreaming by Practitioners in South African Organisations’, Gender & Development 20(3): 423–34. Martin de Almagro, Maria (2017) ‘Transitional Justice and Women, Peace and Security: A Critical Reading of the EU Framework’, LSE Women, Peace and Security Working Paper Series. Meer, Shamim (2005) ‘Freedom for Women: Mainstreaming Gender in the South African Liberation Struggle and Beyond’, Gender & Development 13(2): 36–45. Mohanty, Chandra (1988) ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’, Feminist Review 30(1): 61–88. Mott, Carrie and Daniel Cockayne (2017) ‘Citation Matters: Mobilizing the Politics of Citation Toward a Practice of “Conscientious Engagement”’, Gender, Place & Culture 24(7): 954–73. Ortega, Mariana (2017) ‘Decolonial Woes and Practices of Un-Knowing’, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 31(3): 504–16. Overstreet, Nicole M., Lisa Rosenthal and Kim A. Case (2020) ‘Intersectionality as a Radical Framework for Transforming Our Disciplines, Social Issues, and the World’, Journal of Social Issues 76(4): 779–95. Puechguirbal, Nadine (2010) ‘Discourses on Gender, Patriarchy and Resolution 1325: A Textual Analysis of UN Documents’, International Peacekeeping 17(2): 172–87. Rao, Aruna and David Kelleher (2005) ‘Is There Life After Gender Mainstreaming?’, Gender & Development 13(2): 57–69. Reason, Peter and Hilary Bradbury (eds) (2001) Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice, London: Sage. Rose, Gillian (1993) Feminism and Geography, Cambridge: Polity Press. Shepherd, Laura J. (2016) ‘Making War Safe for Women? National Action Plans and the Militarisation of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda’, International Political Science Review 37(3) 324–35. Stauffer, Katelyn E. and Diana Z. O’Brien (2018) ‘Quantitative Methods and Feminist Political Science’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. https://​oxfordre​.com/​politics/​view/​10​.1093/​acrefore/​ 9780190228637​.001​.0001/​acrefore​-9780190228637​-e​-210. Strid, Sofia and Mieke Verloo (2019) ‘Intersectional Complexities in Gender-Based Violence Politics’. In Elizabeth Evans and Éléonore Lépinard (eds), Intersectionality in Feminist and Queer Movements, London: Routledge, 83–100. Tripp, Aili Mari (2016) ‘Women’s Movements and Constitution Making After Civil Unrest and Conflict in Africa: The Cases of Kenya and Somalia’, Politics & Gender 12(1): 78–106. True, Jacqui (2008) ‘Gender Mainstreaming and Regional Trade Governance in Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)’. In S.M. Rai and G. Waylen (eds), Global Governance, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 129–59.

Studying feminist governance  111 True, Jacqui and Laura Parisi (2013) ‘Gender Mainstreaming Strategies in International Governance’. In Gülay Caglar, Elisabeth Prügl and Susanne Zwingel (eds), Feminist Strategies in International Governance, London and New York: Routledge, 59–78. van Stapele, Naomi (2014) ‘Intersubjectivity, Self-Reflexivity and Agency: Narrating about “Self” and “Other” in Feminist Research’, Women’s Studies International Forum 43: 13–21. Walby, Sylvia (2005) ‘Gender Mainstreaming: Productive Tensions in Theory and Practice’, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society 12(3): 321–43.

PART II 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

INTRODUCTION Feminist governance understands governance as personal and political praxis. It aspires to support egalitarian dynamics, collective voice, an ethic of care and the valuing of diverse forms of knowledge and lived experience. This is in stark contrast to mainstream models of governance, where hierarchical power is vested in the few – to determine strategy, policy, budgets and risk appetite, monitor organisational performance and management of a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) (AICD, 2018). We have drawn on an alternative framing by the Indigenous Community Governance Project: ‘the evolving process, relationships, institutions, and structures by which a group of people, community, or society organises itself collectively, negotiates its rights and interests, gets things done, and make decisions …’. This includes who is recognised as a member, the management of work, negotiation with outsiders, who has authority and over what, accountability mechanisms, the enforceability of decisions, and how the group arranges themselves to achieve their goals (CAEPR, 2004: 12). We have expanded this definition to incorporate feminist deliberations, drawing from Batliwala’s (2011) work which evolves a model of feminist leadership predicated on understanding principles/values; power; politics/purpose; and practice. Our understanding of feminism is intersectional, engaging the intersections of gendered oppression with racism, classism, ableism, homophobia and transphobia, and other forms of oppressive power (Davis, 1983; Crenshaw, 1991; Chakravarthi, 2019; AWDF, 2016 [2007]) and that continues to evolve to better understand the diverse forms of identity that can inform an individual and community’s access to power (Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, 2019; Wong, 2020; Moreton-Robinson, 2020). We draw on organisational theory that acknowledges the relational dynamics between staff, community and other actors, as well as questions of individual and collective well-being (Chigudu and Chigudu, 2015). We have taken guidance from Freeman’s exploration of the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ and the importance of clarity of decision-making, accountability, distribution of authority, dispersal of tasks, and access and transparency (Freeman, 1972). And we have been inspired by the work of Machold et al. (2008) who assert the importance of centring an organization-wide ethic of care, of committing to approaches that ‘do no harm’ in the relations organisations have with least advantaged stakeholders, of reciprocity and the privileging of human relationships in decision-making, and of recognising the obligation of care within asymmetrical power relationships. In our understanding, feminist governance is a field of praxis as opposed to a singular set of practices or a ‘model’ and is shaped and informed by structural power dynamics of the specific 113

114  Handbook of feminist governance context, including race, class, caste, geopolitical positioning, and the legacies and ongoing practices of colonialism and casteism, alongside other axes of power. It is a value-imbued navigation that interrogates how women govern and are governed – how they get to have a voice, make decisions, exercise authority – and explores gendered understandings of masculinities and femininities within the theory and practice of governance (Rao et al., 2018). And it asks what power dynamics and structural considerations play out within groups of women (Ford-Smith, 1997). It is important to note that feminist organisations grow largely out of feminist social movements (Horn, 2013; Andrew, 2013; Alvarez, 1999) and thus carry movement concerns into their practices, including their governance. Non-patriarchal ways of working intersect with concerns over racism, ableism, heteronormativity, class and caste privilege, and so on. Although some contend that this represents an intrinsically ‘feminine’ approach, we would argue that it stems from an ethical concern with creating and sustaining systems that promote equality and inclusion and democratic forms of organisation and work, and that considers accountability to communities as a foundational principle. This is not to say that feminist governance exists without contradiction or indeed failure. Feminist organisations also sit within the confines of patriarchal systems and structures of government. They have been shaped by the pervasive ideologies of patriarchal neoliberalism and economic and political colonisation that have driven government and civil society approaches to governance across the world (Sawer and Andrew, 2013; Scheepers and Lakhani, 2020). These dynamics have had contradictory effects: on the one hand, feminist organisations have been strengthened in their ability to deliver important services. However, contracts and funding agreements have also restricted organisational design, management, strategy, priorities, feminist political advocacy, building feminist organisational cultures and (of course), governance. In this chapter we offer a series of encounters with feminist practices of governance. We recognise that feminist governance is an evolving field and remains an area for both documentation and analysis. The case studies stand as independent contributions from each author, and act as a springboard to our collective explorations of feminist revisions of governance. Our subsequent analysis offers an enquiry into feminist leadership and an exploration of the embedded power in organisations, a recasting of how we understand core governance concepts of strategy and risk, challenges to accountability flows, reframed concepts of time, and organisational frameworks that incorporate and value the care work that sustains our societies and political and economic systems.

FEMINIST GOVERNANCE EXPERIMENTS: CASE STUDIES Case Study 1: The Women’s Health Sector in Victoria, Australia In Victoria, the women’s health sector evolved from grassroots consciousness-raising on reproductive health rights for marginalised women. Initially in the 1970s these organisations were volunteer and collectivist in their approaches, focused on education and health promotion including building migrant and refugee women’s knowledge of sexual and reproductive health through workplace programmes in factories and farms. Volunteers delivered outstanding work that was unsustainable without government funding. With government funding came account-

Weaving a feminist power tapestry  115 ability requirements that eroded collectivist structures. The compulsory competitive tendering introduced in the 1990s for previously public services further eroded the non-hierarchical governance of community organisations. While bidding for contracts secured income, funding tended to be directed towards projects aligned to government priorities, with less recognition and financial support for grassroots consciousness-raising, movement building or advocacy. New contracts required an independent board which delegated operational management to a CEO. The Victorian women’s health sector has, however, continued to maintain feminist values and practices. While external engagement with government, philanthropic and private sector bureaucracies is more formalised through traditional governance and contract performance obligations, transformative gender practices persist internally, with consensus decision-making driving board and committee governance, holistic employment practices that provide flexible, supportive workplaces for women, and a commitment to intersectional consultation and lived experience in service design. More traditional feminist collectivism is particularly evidenced when women’s health services come together collaboratively for an advocacy campaign or funding opportunity. Here there is a return to a much flatter structure of leadership and engagement. In this environment, feminist CEOs of feminist organisations show a high-level desire for transparency, iterative policy, process and project design and equally shared resources, as well as dedication to ensuring application of an intersectional lens. The strategic work at this level – such as pro-choice and gendered violence reform advocacy – is slower and time-consuming, but is what has achieved shifts in state policy, including the decriminalisation of abortion and the adoption of recommendations from a Royal Commission into Family Violence. Case Study 2: Building Collective Advocacy Mechanisms with Government Funding Since 2002 the Australian Government has funded National Women’s Alliances to be the main channel for non-government organisation (NGO) access to government. From the establishment of this model the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) has been the lead contract holder for the Equality Rights Alliance (ERA),1 and auspiced the first contract of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women’s Alliance (NATSIWA). The YWCA Australia Board agreed to act as the legal home for ERA but supported it to act as a stand-alone entity. This was a significant disruption to the corporate governance model of the YWCA Australia Board – who effectively ‘sub-contracted’ strategy and financial management to a group who had no formal legal standing – creating a ‘legal fiction’ of leadership and governance. Through a collective process the network developed membership principles, decision-making guidelines, budgets, policy positions and influencing documents. The latter were endorsed ‘all or in part’ to enable a multiplicity of positions to be presented, although certain aspects of the membership principles create a set of non-negotiables that ERA articulates. In this way, ERA sought to challenge the idea that there should be a single, unified position on a policy issue, valuing the plurality of women’s voices and seeking to overcome the racism of the women’s movement in its universalisation of the interests of white, middle-class women. Recognising that gender equality change takes time, the annual workplan would include space for project wins that could be achieved within the life of the contract, while also supporting longer-term projects (for example, to position older women’s homelessness as a policy

116  Handbook of feminist governance priority). However, the requirement for Alliance workplans to be approved by government constrained the imagination of the advocates working together, and in some years resulted in activities being introduced to meet government priorities. Activities that the YWCA undertook on behalf of ERA – the employment of staff, the day-to-day management of the budget and the delivery of contracted activities – took on entirely different dimensions when a similar structure was adopted to auspice NATSIWA. Feminist recasting of traditional governance structures, in the context of racism, floundered as the ongoing impact of colonial dispossession and the imperative of self-determination for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples clashed with the YWCA’s formal role as the contract holder. It was simply not possible to honour the principles and practices of self-determination and voice by the NATSIWA Advisory Board despite the best intentions of all parties at the start of the agreement, constituting a failure of feminist recasting of governance. Case Study 3: Governance among the Women of Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council Aboriginal Corporation, Alice Springs, Northern Territory Aboriginal people have been practising methods of cultural governance since time immemorial, with culture at the heart of establishing structure and purpose to communities, offering important insights for alternative ways of approaching governance, informed both by matrilineal and patrilineal knowledge systems and kinship obligations. But colonial oppression and marginalisation has coerced Indigenous peoples into a Western model of governance that at some point contradicts the cultural foundation of their own governance structure. Aboriginal women are often the foundation of community and are recognised for their ability to look after family, group, the land, its resources, and related systems of knowledge and law. The number of women in governing roles in Aboriginal nations, communities and organisations is growing, but they face gender-based challenges in terms of decision-making power, respect and recognition for their voices, leadership and capabilities, unequal resource allocations, and overcoming structural barriers to women’s participation. Furthermore, Western disciplinary research has disproportionately privileged the stories and contributions of Indigenous men, while the Australian nation state reproduced its own institutional patriarchy by favouring the advancement and authority of Indigenous men (Davis, 2011). It is notable that in the past 10 years we have begun to witness a shift towards the feminisation of Indigenous leadership and governance (Oscar, 2017). The reclaiming of a feminist governance approach has been a notable trend, and the case study below explores the benefits of this approach. Aboriginal women within the homelands of the Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara, and Yankunytjatjara (NPY) formed the NPY Women’s Council (NPYWC) to give representation and power to the voice of women in the region. The NPYWC recasts traditional governance by encouraging the practice of culture, observing NPY women’s law, as well as promoting the interests and rights of the NPY women. For example, the administrative requirements of the council have been integrated into annual bush meetings, which unite women for both an annual general meeting (AGM) and ‘law and culture’ meetings, which are instrumental in transforming the governance–operational split of traditional approaches to governance.

Weaving a feminist power tapestry  117 This has been augmented by the Malparara way, meaning a person who is with a friend or companion. Malparara way recognises and values the knowledge, skills and resources of the local people while assisting them in gaining access to services that are delivered in a culturally appropriate and effective way, challenging the knowledge hierarchies of traditional governance frameworks. The NPYWC have taken this a step further when it comes to evolving service delivery, developing an approach that includes kulikatinyi (considering something over a long period of time); nyakuakatinyi (looking for something as one goes along); and palyaalkatinyi (making something as one goes along). This moves away from the traditional model of an organisational leader empowered to approve a static strategy at a point in time, and supports a more emergent approach, grounded in the lived reality of the women who need the services, and challenging notions of time/efficiency in decision-making in seeing change (Australian Indigenous Governance Institute, 2018). Case Study 4: Building a Feminist Culture in a Government-Sponsored Women’s NGO Mahila Samakhya (meaning Women Valued as Equals) was a historic programme fostered by the Ministry of Education, Government of India that promoted the use of feminist popular education (Miller and VeneKlasen, 2012) methodologies to organise and empower marginalised women in rural areas, with educational goals such as increased female adult literacy, and girl child enrolment and retention in school, as hoped-for by-products (Batliwala, 1996). The programme was launched in 1989 in in the state of Karnataka in South India through a government-created women’s NGO, Mahila Samakhya Karnataka, led by feminist staff, who mobilised marginalised Dalit2 and Indigenous women into village-level collectives in 300 villages, deploying multiple strategies for transforming their social, economic and political reality. By 1992, a mass movement of some 50,000 women had emerged, tackling issues as diverse as minimum wages for their labour, transparency and accountability of government anti-poverty schemes, proper functioning of local schools and health services, and dismantling oppressive caste and gender norms and practices. Given the radical nature of the feminist empowerment process adopted, the programme’s leadership simultaneously attempted to invert its traditional governance structure to build a more feminist culture within the organisation and create more direct accountability to the marginalised women the programme served. One innovation was to reverse the permission process for seeking leave/time off: each individual would have to get permission from those most affected by her absence, rather than her supervisor/s in the hierarchy – for example, activists would need permission from the village collectives, the District Coordinators from the activists and the Director from the District Coordinators. Interestingly, it was not government officials but many within the activist team who resisted this most strongly, exposing the deeply internalised sense of privilege, status and power that this change confronted. Rotating leadership and decision-making in the women’s collectives was another innovation – after discussions critiquing the patriarchal hierarchy of president, vice-president and secretary of the village council or the local cooperative that they were familiar with. The model of collective leadership eventually took hold, after navigating struggles to determine who would represent the collective in various forums and the rotating out of core leaders after a set term. Indeed, in a few years, collectives mocked the traditional hierarchical leadership model as outmoded and unfeminist.

118  Handbook of feminist governance Case Study 5: Participatory Resourcing in Feminist Funds Feminist Funds are funding mechanisms established by women’s rights activists – and more recently LGBTI+ rights activists to resource movement work based on the principle of ‘by, for and with’. The Central American Women’s Fund pioneered a model of participatory grant-making that enabled applicants themselves to lead in grant decision-making. This model inspired the participatory models for FRIDA, the Young Feminist Fund, and UHAI- EASHRI, funding East African LGBTI+ and sex worker rights activists. This devolution of grant decision-making beyond fund boards and staff to applicants is a significant step in shifting power around resourcing (see Gibson and Bokoff, 2018). Since its founding in 2010, FRIDA has continued to explore approaches to redistributing decision-making power and leadership within the fund and in relation to its grantees. After its first director, FRIDA initiated a co-directorship model as an experiment in shared leadership, hiring two full-time co-directors. Working collaboratively, they led and represented the organisation externally, while leading different aspects of oversight internally. FRIDA extended this culture of participatory thinking and decision-making in all areas including human resources policies and budgeting, and with all staff and grantees. In response to collective exhaustion amongst staff, for example, FRIDA initiated a collaborative process to create the Happiness Manifestx outlining principles of individual and collective care (Elboubkri and Johnson, 2019). Initiating a participatory culture required constant check-ins, learning and adaptation, given the tendency to default to vertical decision-making. The co-leadership model began to extend to board level and among staff with co-programme management leads. As participation became embedded as a practice and expectation, the co-directors noted growing complexity in how participation was operationalised. There was need to differentiate forms of participation and clarify what was required – for example feedback, a vote or a consensus decision. As the participatory culture evolved, it also became clearer where constituencies trusted others to make an appropriate decision. On difficult decisions there were also times when people returned to the idea of having senior leadership decide. The FRIDA experiment is ongoing in its modelling of alternative ways to distribute decision-making and manage leadership with a deep attention to the ways in which power is used more democratically in grant-making. In the words of former co-director Devi Leiper O’Malley, ‘participatory is not about getting “rid” of power; it’s about sharing it, negotiating it, maybe even making it bigger if you can’ (personal communication with Jessica Horn, 14 September 2020). Case Study 6: Young Pacific Women as Leaders in the YWCA Leadership and governance spaces in the Pacific context are framed by the intersection of culture, gender and age. This case study focuses on leadership of the Young Women’s Christian Associations (YWCAs) in Samoa, Fiji, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, which for a variety of reasons, have experienced challenges in embracing young women’s leadership. YWCA member associations have been formally required to ensure that at least 25 per cent of their board positions are held by young women (under 30 years of age), both to increase young women’s participation and to ensure that YWCAs act as incubators for young women’s leadership. But quotas alone have not functioned to either address biases against young women’s leadership or to support young women to step into leadership roles. Intergenerational co-leadership models have been trialled and many YWCAs have developed

Weaving a feminist power tapestry  119 young women’s leadership programmes. In the Pacific, Rise Up! evolved from a programme developed by the Solomon Islands’ YWCA to become a Pacific and Asia regional programme supporting the development of young women leaders. The programme is focused on peer-led leadership training and engagement opportunities among young women, particularly in rural areas. Monash University’s study of the impacts of the programme found that young women not only represented a new constituency, but also reframed visions of leadership. The young women challenged the dominant approaches to leadership by older women, preferring instead to lead in ways that are based upon collaborative, shared and horizontal power relationships, and in spaces that are often considered informal and private (Pruitt and Lee-Koo, 2020). However, while the programme supported young women to step into an alternative framing of leadership, they still faced barriers within YWCAs and in other women’s organisations in the Pacific – such as the masculine and ageist bias in leadership, the lack of community support and willingness to see young women as leaders (which may include backlash against them) and access to dedicated programmes that support young women’s leadership (Pruitt and Lee-Koo, 2020). Young women have shared that the main enablers of young women’s leadership are the widespread promotion of young women’s rights, the creation of safe spaces, the building of peer networks to allow young women to work together, the modelling of strong intergenerational leadership and the support of local communities (Pruitt and Lee-Koo, 2020). This is long-term work, and speaks to the importance of new ways of measuring impact and accountability. To support this, the Rise Up! Young Women coordinators developed a feminist, participatory approach to measuring programme success, grounded in their lived experience in delivering the programme, and challenging traditional accountability and Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) frameworks that position the MEL practitioner as the expert.

THE THREADS OF OUR LIVES: FEMINIST GOVERNANCE PRAXIS 1.

Modelling Feminist Leadership and Exploring the Embedded Power in Organisations

Feminist governance expands ideas of the who, what and how of leadership. In mainstream governance there is a common expectation that there should be individual leaders for the governance arm, led by a president, and an operational arm with considerable decision-making power led by a CEO (and executive team), with decision-making power delegated by a board. These leadership structures and practices are reflective of dominant social patterns of privilege, power and exclusion. NGO governing boards are increasingly drawn from more privileged constituencies with experience in corporate or NGO management, or capacity to access or leverage resources. While many feminist organisations replicate these dynamics, we maintain that feminist governance aspires to alternative conceptualisations of the everyday operation of power. It challenges the systems and structures that authorise power to be more easily exercised by certain individuals or bodies, and to be exercised in hidden, or even invisible ways, based on embedded privilege and identities. Feminist governance focuses on egalitarianism, collective

120  Handbook of feminist governance voice, an ethic of care, and the valuing of lived experience, and prioritises different knowledges and sites of authority. As our case studies demonstrate, feminist organisations continue to experiment with and reconceptualise models of leadership. They explore the use of less hierarchical structures – either in formal leadership aspects of the organisation (Mahila Samakhya); informal non-hierarchical practices for determining strategy and policy priorities and advocacy approaches (ERA, women’s health); alternative knowledges as the basis for community interventions or establishing measures for success (NYPWC, RiseUp!’s MEL framework); rotating leadership (Mahila Samakhya); diversity in leadership (YWCA, Mahila Samakhya); and the model of multilevel shared leadership and decision-making (FRIDA, YWCA, NYPWC). In addition to dismantling traditional notions of leadership, these innovations better distribute workloads and responsibilities, and enable more collective power to address complex questions. These approaches build on earlier experiments with ostensibly ‘flat’ structures that gave rise to hidden hierarchies of power and exclusion (Freeman, 1972) and, more recently, the recognition of organisational ‘deep structures’ as sites where dominant systems of power and privilege are subtly reproduced. These alternative approaches are not without their complexities and take time to develop, particularly given how deeply embedded hierarchical and individual leadership are in our collective psyche and professional practices. For example, as FRIDA sought to integrate participation in all processes, clarifying to both staff and grantees different mechanisms of participation (e.g. consultation, collective decision-making), it proved vital to create common understanding and expectations, alongside clarifying the nature of engagement sought in each case. As the model progressed, different actors also chose to opt out of some processes – as with grantees delegating certain kinds of decisions to FRIDA staff. Shared participation also comes with shared responsibility: some people may be less inclined to be included in tougher matters such as disciplinary processes. Efforts to shift power into different loci can also be fraught when they run into the formal requirements of corporate governance – as evidenced by the experiences of NATSIWA. Nonetheless, feminist governance, particularly in the recent past, has more directly addressed the power dynamics embedded within its own spaces and processes. The Mahila Samakhya, NATSIWA, Women’s Funds and YWCA case studies, for example, highlight how issues of embedded power and privilege were confronted by, or clashed with, mainstream notions of governance, creating sites of both tension and innovation. And the emergence of co-CEO and co-chair positions may herald the start of a recognition of feminism’s impact on masculinist notions of singular, hierarchical power. 2.

Reframing Strategy and Direction-Setting, Risk and Accountability

Although a variety of formats for organising collective action exist, the growth of the registered and externally funded NGO or community-based organisation as the primary model for managing feminist organising has had deep effects on ideas and practices of strategy, risk and accountability. Often termed ‘NGO-isation’ (Lang, 1997; Alvarez, 1999; Al-Karib 2018), feminist organisers have increasingly found themselves defaulting to, or obliged to follow, conventional top-down governance and decision-making structures, answering to externally established benchmarks. These dynamics are made even more complex by growing backlash against successful feminist activism and increasing state antagonism towards civil society

Weaving a feminist power tapestry  121 (Bishop, 2017), including by restricting external funding, targeting individual organisations and their staff, and regulations and legislation that limit NGO practice. In mainstream governance, priorities are often driven by donor policies and resource availability, rather than purpose. Accountability is practised more towards donors and legal and statutory requirements, and towards protecting the organisational ‘brand’, although the rhetoric may disguise this. Each of the case studies shows how feminist organisations challenge this by designing processes that integrate the representation and perspectives of their constituencies with the advancing of organisational purpose. For example, the NPYWC Bush Meetings, Mahila Samakhya annual leave planning and the WomenSpeak/ERA collective budget processes offer alternative forms of accountability. The WomenSpeak/ERA, women’s health and FRIDA case studies point to the collectivisation of strategy and advocacy, disrupting the idea of ‘single agendas’ for diverse women’s interests. These, alongside the FRIDA pursuit of a culture of participatory thinking and decision-making, point to significant feminist rewrites of strategy. This is not without its challenges, as highlighted by the resistance to young women’s leadership by some within YWCAs in the Pacific. Risk is another area of both experimentation and challenge. Corporate governance is predicated on boards setting risk appetite and creating apparatus to identify organisational risk, and then reduce it as far as possible. Feminist advocacy, however, is inherently risky, balancing the gains and losses associated with contesting power relations. For feminist advocacy and service organisations, prioritising the defence of women and trans people’s rights is the priority – even when this entails risking legal status, agreements or funding of activist organisations. WomenSpeak, for example, faced a conflict with their funder when they produced a report that called into question government policy settings. While raising these problems was in the purview of their advocacy, the nature of the WomenSpeak contract, and the provisions around approvals, raised red flags in risk management reporting to the YWCA board, and left the organisation open to greater pressure to amend the report. Financial sustainability is an ongoing concern for feminist organisations – linked strongly to the question of political autonomy (Lever et al., 2020). As explored in the women’s health case study, some feminist organisations navigate the tension between receiving government funding for service delivery and the need for political independence to engage in advocacy – including targeting government. Women’s Funds have made explicit choices to ‘fill in the gaps’ left by other institutional funding, supporting core operations as well as more political projects, including for marginalised and persecuted communities. While pushing back on existing risk definitions, feminist organisations have broadened notions of risk to include attention to risks faced by activists, with serious mechanisms to mitigate and respond. This expands organisational responsibility around risk and its resultant duty of care to consider not just individual organisations themselves but the communities they work with and the broader field of allied actors. 3.

Reframing Time

Underpinning our analysis of feminist governance is recognition of different conceptualisations of and approaches to time. Implicit in these subversions is a challenge to the pace and streamlined nature of mainstream corporate governance that expects immediate decision-making, quick resolution of problems and fast delivery of results. Feminist governance slows down to secure a more diffuse and meaningful form of authority, from sites that would commonly

122  Handbook of feminist governance not be engaged in decision-making (e.g. the subversion of annual leave approvals in Mahila Samakhya and the practice of emergent thought and action in the Malparara way). There is dissonance between the funder-driven time frames for impact and the intergenerational nature of feminist change (Batliwala and Pittman, 2010). Funders are very often constrained within the politics of budget allocations and, in the case of state funding, within short-term election-based cycles. As a result women’s organisations often receive one- to three-year grants with unrealistic expectations of significant shifts in generational patterns of inequality, or with a series of quantitative indicators that do little to demonstrate meaningful change. Feminist approaches to impact, which focus on self-identified indicators of change and demand longer time frames (YWCA and Women’s Funds), offer a different approach to the accountability framework. Our work takes time, is complicated and we need to pause, unpack how and where we succeeded, where we held the line, and where we failed. Intergenerational change cannot be achieved in a three-year programme (see also Hessini, 2020: 369). But, in our experience, changes are possible by acknowledging what our co-author Tanja Kovac calls ‘the beauty of persistent incrementalism’. To achieve deep structural change around long-held concepts of hierarchical masculinist power, feminist governance requires different time frames for measuring impact – and recognition that our slower pace achieves more sustainable change. 4.

Valuing and Incorporating an Ethic of Care

Feminist governance approaches have made significant contributions to considering ways to incorporate and value the care work that sustains our societies and political and economic systems. Mainstream human resources management has tended to focus on questions of performance and career advancement. More political questions of how organisational cultures and practices mirror, internally, the values and mission supposedly driving its external purpose are rarely addressed – much less the holistic well-being and growth of staff, or support for balancing professional and personal lives. Feminist Funds have developed HR policies that provide greater support for staff well-being than statutory requirements including around maternity leave, and support for staff mental and physical health – an example being FRIDA’s Happiness Manifestx. In line with this, FRIDA established a two-week break from external communications in response to the Black Lives Matter protests in mid-2020, recognising that staff themselves were being overwhelmed as they offered solidarity in a stressful political moment. These approaches create more space for recognition of staff members’ changing emotional states and the fact that a variety of factors can affect staff engagement and contributions and encourage organisations and management to be more nimble, compassionate and responsive, not solely fixated on outputs without attention to the impacts on the staff conducting work. Feminist organisations globally continue to integrate feminist care ethics into their policies and procedures, and practise support of their staff and volunteers both in managing the stress and dangers associated with feminist service delivery and advocacy (Horn, 2020; AWID 2014), and the balancing of competing demands of paid work and private sphere care work. This includes reimbursing child care costs incurred as a result of attending board or external meetings, including children in meeting spaces, ensuring that mental health services are provided in employee health packages, and supporting flexi-time and other policies to enable people to manage both health and care needs and their paid work.

Weaving a feminist power tapestry  123

CONCLUSION In this chapter we have explored the threads of feminist governance in women’s civil society organising across a range of national and cultural contexts. Through it we have traced the contribution of feminist ethics to reconceptualising the purpose and methodologies of governance. We have explored the many ways in which feminists attempt to shift governance power away from hierarchies and towards more participatory and collaborative methods that honour diversity. We have also noted the common difficulty posed by increasing formalisation associated with state and philanthropic funding of women’s organisations, as well as the shift from advocacy to service provision and the pressure this places on organisations and networks to conform to more corporate and masculinist models of decision-making, accountability and target-driven methodologies. We acknowledge that efforts at feminist governance are in process, entangled in the difficult work of reflecting on ourselves as agents of power and transformation, and grappling with the fact that we also bring experiences of the trauma of oppression into the ways that we articulate power in our leadership and our governance. However, we also recognise the innovation that feminist organising brings to questions of governance. These ‘experiments’ are what set feminist governance apart from other systems of governance – in particular, corporate governance models that have yet to grapple in any rigorous way with the replication of deep structures of unequal norms and power relations.

NOTES 1. Initially the WomenSpeak Network. 2. While the term Dalit literally means ‘the oppressed’, it is used to refer to people belonging to a group of castes formerly called ‘untouchables’.

REFERENCES AICD [Australian Institute of Company Directors] (2018) The Not-for-Profit Governance Principles, Sydney: AICD. Al-Karib, Hala (2018) ‘The Dangers of NGO-isation of Women’s Rights in Africa’, Al Jazeera, 13 December. https://​www​.aljazeera​.com/​opinions/​2018/​12/​13/​the​-dangers​-of​-ngo​-isation​-of​-womens​ -rights​-in​-africa/​. Alvarez, Sonia (1999) ‘Advocating Feminism: The Latin American Feminist NGO Boom’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 1(2): 181–209. Andrew, Merrindahl (2013) ‘The Institutional Harvest: Women’s Services and Women’s Policy Agencies’. In Sarah Maddison and Marian Sawer (eds), The Women’s Movement In Protest, Institutions and the Internet, London: Routledge, 87–104. Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice (2019) Healing Justice: Building Power, Transforming Movements, New York: ALFJ. Australian Indigenous Governance Institute (2018) Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council Aboriginal Corporation Case Study, 31 May 2013. AIGI Indigenous Governance Toolkit. AWDF [African Women’s Development Fund] (2016 [2007]) Charter of Feminist Principles for African Feminists, Nairobi: AWDF. AWID [Association for Women’s Rights in Development] (2014) Our Right to Safety: Women Human Rights Defenders’ Holistic Approach to Protection, Toronto: AWID.

124  Handbook of feminist governance Batliwala, Srilatha (1996) ‘Transforming Political Culture: The Mahila Samakhya Experience’, Economic and Political Weekly 31(21): 1248–51. Batliwala, Srilatha (2011) Feminist Leadership for Social Transformation: Clearing the Conceptual Cloud, New Delhi and New York: CREA. Batliwala, Srilatha and Alexandra Pittman (2010) Capturing Change in Women’s Realities: A Critical Overview of Current Monitoring and Evaluation Frameworks, Toronto, Mexico City and Cape Town: AWID. Bishop, Kate (2017) Standing Firm: Women and Trans-Led Organisations Responding to Closing Space for Civil Society, Amsterdam: Mama Cash. CAEPR [Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research] and Reconciliation Australia (2004) Indigenous Community Governance Project: Understanding, Building and Sustaining Effective Governance in Rural, Remote and Urban Indigenous Communities. ICGP 2004 Annual Report, Canberra: CAEPR, ANU. Chakravarthi, Uma (2019) Gendering Caste through a Feminist Lens, London: Sage. Chigudu, Hope and Rudo Chigudu (2015) ‘Strategies for Building an Organisation with a Soul’, African Institute for Integrated Responses to Violence against Women and HIV/AIDS (AIR). http://​ airforafrica​.org/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2015/​09/​Strategies​-for​-Building​-an​-Organisation​-with​-Soul​-for​ -web1​.pdf. Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1991) ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color’, Stanford Law Review 43(6): 1241–99. Davis, Angela Y. (1983) Women, Race and Class. Black women writers series. New York: Vintage Books, Random House. Davis, Megan (2011) ‘A Reflection on the Limitations of the Right to Self-Determination and Aboriginal Women’, Indigenous Law Bulletin 7(23): 6–8. Elboubkri, Nadia and Ruby Johnson (2019) ‘What Does it Takes to be Happy at Work? FRIDA Tries to Answer through the Happiness Manifestx’. GuideStar blog. Ford-Smith, Honor (1997) ‘Ring Ding in a Tight Corner: Sistren, Collective Democracy, and the Organization of Cultural Production’. In M. Jacqui Alexandra and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (eds), Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. New York and London: Routledge, 213–58. Freeman, Joreen (1972) ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’, The Second Wave 2(1). Sydney: Words for Women. https://​www​.jofreeman​.com/​joreen/​tyranny​.htm. Gibson, Cynthia and Jen Bokoff (2018) Deciding Together: Shifting Power and Resources through Participatory Grantmaking, New York: Grantcraft, Foundation Centre. Hessini, Leila (2020) ‘Financing for Gender Equality and Women’s Rights: The Role of Feminist Funds’, Gender & Development 28(2): 357–76. Horn, Jessica (2013) Gender and Social Movements Overview Report, Brighton: Institute for Development Studies. Horn, Jessica (2020) ‘Decolonising Emotional Well-Being and Mental Health in Development: African Feminist Innovations’, Gender & Development 28(1): 85–98. Lang, Sabine (1997) ‘The NGO-ization of Feminism: Institutionalization and Institution Building within the German Women’s Movements’. In Joan W. Scott, Cora Kaplan and Debra Keates (eds), Transitions, Environments, Translations: Feminisms in International Politics, New York: Routledge, 101–20. Lever, Esther, Kellea Miller and Kasia Staszewska (2020) Moving More Money to the Drivers of Change: How Bilateral and Multilateral Funders Can Resource Feminist Movements, Toronto: AWID and Mama Cash with support from the Count Me In! Consortium. Machold, Silke, Pervaiz Ahmed and Stuart Farquhar (2008) ‘Corporate Governance and Ethics: A Feminist Perspective’, Journal of Business Ethics 81(3): 665–78. Miller, Valerie and Lisa VeneKlasen (2012) Feminist Popular Education and Movement Building, Washington, DC: JUST Associates. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen (2020) Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism, 20th anniversary edition, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.

Weaving a feminist power tapestry  125 Oscar, June (2017) ‘I Have the Right and So Do You: The Power of Indigenous Women in Governance’, paper presented at Australian Indigenous Governance Institute Indigenous Women in Governance Masterclass, Sydney: Australian Human Rights Commission. Pruitt, Leslie and Katrina Lee-Koo (2020) ‘Critical Components for Advancing Young Women’s Leadership’. In Katrina Lee-Koo and Leslie Pruitt (eds), Young Women and Leadership, New York: Routledge, 26–44. Rao, Aruna, Joanne Sandler, David Kelleher and Carol Miller (2018) Gender at Work: Theory and Practice for 21st Century Organizations. Abingdon: Routledge. Sawer, Marian and Merrindahl Andrew (2013) ‘Hiding in Plain Sight’. In Sarah Maddison and Marian Sawer (eds), The Women’s Movement in Protest, Institutions and the Internet: Australia in Transnational Perspective, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 70–86. Scheepers, Ella and Ishtar Lakhani (2020) ‘Caution! Feminists at Work: Building Organisations from the Inside Out’, Gender & Development 28(1): 117–33. Wong, Alice (2020) Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, New York: Random House.

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

INTRODUCTION Since the First World Conference on Women, organised by the United Nations (UN) in Mexico City in 1975, bureaucratic mechanisms for the advancement of gender equality have been considered significant components of feminist governance. In 1995, at the Fourth UN World Conference on Women, these ‘national women’s machineries’ (NWMs) were identified as one of the 12 crucial areas of concern in the Beijing Platform for Action. By May 2020, all but one (North Korea) of the 193 countries recognised by the UN had established some type of institutional mechanism on gender and women’s issues (UN Women, 2020). At their best, these dedicated agencies can ensure routine attention to gender equality in government decision-making and provide channels for civil society activists to inform and influence it. However, they are highly subject to fluctuations in national executives’ support for gender equality and have been demoted or repurposed where populists are reviving traditional masculinities and traditional notions of ‘the family’. A government mechanism addressing women’s issues (if not necessarily promoting equality or empowerment) is now a universal feature of the state – every country has some version of this.1 NWMs are not created equal, however. They vary significantly in their positioning in the hierarchy of government offices, in their funding levels, in their institutional roles (advocacy, operational or accountability/watchdog functions), in their mandates, in their relative independence from the executive, and in the quality of their leadership. These variations, in part, determine their effectiveness in advancing women’s rights and addressing broader gender equality issues (such as protections for sexual and gender minorities) as well as their capacity to safeguard gender equality achievements. Effectiveness is also greatly affected by whether gender equality is a programmatic concern of the ruling party, whether dominant ideologies about the role of the state are welfarist or neoliberal (Harris-Rimmer and Sawer, 2016; Sawer, 1996), and whether the state itself has the capacity to enforce what can be unpopular policies. This chapter reviews the history of national women’s bureaucracies and their record in advancing women’s rights and equality in gender relations. It is based primarily on the now vast literature on NWMs, including studies previously published by this author (Goetz, 1995, 2009), with added insights from interviews with current or former members of bureaucracies for women in the Philippines, Turkey, USA and Argentina. After summarising evidence of impact of gender equality units and identifying conditions for their effectiveness, the chapter considers the role of the UN and regional institutions in providing support. The chapter also considers important secular shifts in national gender equality institutions. Once, these bureaucracies were viewed as classic examples of how feminists must work ‘in and against’ the state – as insurgent insiders, fighting internal government resistance, in uneasy cooperation with a demanding external feminist constituency. Gender equality units have suffered from being 126

National women’s machineries  127 sidelined from top decision-making and from chronic underfunding. ‘Femocrats’ – feminist bureaucrats dedicated to advancing gender equality (Sawer, 1990, 2016), often experience marginalisation. But now, in some contexts, working in a gender equality unit is no longer a career dead end for ambitious civil servants. The most influential gender equality machineries in welfare-oriented democratic states now boast high-profile feminist leaders and professional staff drawn both from the civil service and feminist movement, with less of a sense of the contingency and divided loyalties implied by ‘in and against’. Before proceeding, a note on terminology is needed. ‘National women’s machineries’ no longer adequately reflects the way mandates have shifted and diverged. In some states, these institutions address discrimination not just against women but against people with non-conforming sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC). ‘Gender equality machinery’ (GEM) is a more appropriate label for these bureaucracies. In contrast, some conservative populist governments have repurposed women’s rights bureaucracies to perform functions contrary to their initial mandate – such as encouraging traditional families, promoting women’s fertility and even colluding with authorities in persecuting homosexuals. It is wrong to use the term GEM to describe these institutions, and even ‘NWM’, which is linked to Beijing-era expectations about their role, seems misleading. To avoid a proliferation of abbreviations, however, ‘GEM’ will be used to describe national bureaucracies dedicated to promoting equality for women and other genders, and in the case of conservative family-promotion units, specific titles will be used as far as possible.

BACKGROUND TO AND DIFFUSION OF GEMS China and Cuba had the first state women’s bureaucracies, ranked low in the administrative hierarchy, set up in 1949 and 1960, respectively. These were state organs paralleling (and easily confused with) party women’s wings with similar functions; mobilising women citizens in support of national goals, such as increasing women’s engagement in the labour force or limiting the birthrate. By the time of the First World Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975, about a dozen countries, mostly developing nations such as Barbados, Ghana, Iraq and the Philippines, and also Australia and Canada, had women’s offices, often in response to a demand for state access from women’s movements. The Mexico City conference strongly endorsed the idea of these bureaucracies, as did all subsequent world conferences on women. The Beijing Platform for Action called for the establishment of these mechanisms at the highest possible level, with adequate resourcing, and mandates to, at a minimum, coordinate, facilitate and monitor government policies on gender equality and women’s empowerment. Since then, a number of women’s bureaucracies have shifted to ministerial status – there are currently 90 countries whose gender bureaucracies are ministries with the word ‘women’ or ‘gender’ in the title, though some of these are connected to women’s reproductive roles through the addition of words like ‘family’ or ‘children’ or ‘youth’. Ministerial status is not necessarily an upgrade – it can signify an underfunded silo. There are about 40 stand-alone agencies for women at a lower than ministerial level, such as women’s institutes, or national commissions on gender equality, and sometimes these are highly strategically located, for instance within the office of the president or prime minister. The remaining cases are women’s desks within other ministries with a focus on human development (labour, social protection, human rights), culture, justice and sometimes a rag-bag of remaindered issues. In Australia

128  Handbook of feminist governance the women’s movement has championed a wheel model, with a hub in the main coordinating agency of government so as to have access to all cabinet submissions, while the ‘spokes’ are in the departments and agencies.

STRUCTURE, FUNCTION AND FUNDING: WHAT WORKS? The chances that public authority and resources are deployed to promote gender equality depend on a variety of factors such as the strategies of feminist civil society organisations, the extent to which systems for the representation of group interests in politics give voice to feminist demands, and the normalisation of gender mainstreaming as a routine part of governing (Outshoorn and Kantola, 2007). An efficient gender equality unit can capitalise on these dynamics, but there is no agreement on the most desirable institutional model to produce an effective GEM. Over the past 50 years GEMs have taken a wide range of institutional forms. They seem to work best in strategic partnership with feminist organisations, in high-capacity states with the ability and resources to enforce implementation of equality policies, even against bureaucratic and social resistance. They are, however, almost completely dependent on the place of gender equality in the governing plans of ruling parties and are thus highly vulnerable to dismantling or relegation to ‘marginal policy ghettos’ when conservative political interests are dominant (Woodward, 2003). A number of cross-national studies have sought to explain the circumstances under which GEMs are established (True and Mintrom, 2001), but since GEMs have become universal, there is much more interest in identifying the conditions under which they deliver the best value for feminist policy objectives. Given the vulnerability of these bureaucracies, there is now a growing interest in identifying tactics for safeguarding policy advances of the past and in enabling these units to act as alternates or stand-ins for women’s activism in circumstances where conventional channels of political representation are blocked or compromised. Earlier effectiveness studies examined the ‘hardware’ of GEMs including whether they had ministerial status and a cabinet seat, whether they had clear mandates that do not overlap or compete with mandates of other equality agencies, adequate budgets, technical capacities for planning, access to gender-disaggregated data for gender impact assessment, an intersectoral mandate with gender focal points across government, and a capacity to promote gender-responsive budget analysis (Goetz, 2005). However, the confluence of all of these conditions and tools is rare (particularly the ‘adequate budget’ condition), and even when most are met, technical capacities do not always translate into policy effectiveness. Efforts to fight violence against women tend to be an area of greatest consensus, even under conservative governments. A study of OECD countries by S. Laurel Weldon (2002) finds that effective national gender equality bureaucracies are more significant determinants of strong policies to stop violence against women than are the proportion of political representatives that are women, provided that the women’s movement is strong and that there are effective channels of communication with and accountability to women’s movements. Dorothy McBride and Amy Mazur, who have led a multi-volume research project comparing women’s policy agencies in post-industrial states,2 distinguish four types according not to structure or function but according to the type of compact that they negotiate between the national women’s movement and governing authority (2010: 73). They identify ‘Insider’

National women’s machineries  129 agencies as those that adopt and advance women’s movement policy positions. ‘Symbolic’ agencies are simply place-holders, sometimes established in response to international expectations; they do not necessarily advance women’s movement positions. ‘Marginal’ agencies may present women’s movement demands but do not have the capacity to influence how policy debates are framed. Finally, ‘Anti-Movement’ agencies do not advance women’s movement positions (McBride and Mazur, 2010: 73). Success varies enormously by issue area, with most success scored by ‘Insider’ agencies in efforts to increase women’s political representation, and much less success in liberalising abortion rights. Left-wing political party support contributes to success in advancing issues associated with women’s labour rights, but unevenly. Region-specific efforts to catalogue GEM types and effectiveness are similarly inconclusive, but provide a great deal of nuance regarding the significance of institutional variations, the encompassing policy and political environment, and fluctuating influence depending on changes in governing parties. A 2017 analysis of gender policy machineries in Latin America, for instance, follows Beveridge, Nott and Stephen (2000) in distinguishing them according to policymaking style: bureaucratic, participatory, transformative (a combination of the previous two) and purely ceremonial (Gusta et al., 2017). The ‘pink tide’ of left-wing governments 1999–2016 brought a focus on political inclusion and social equality, but this did not consistently mean elevation in the status or capabilities of equality machinery (Blofield et al., 2017). On the other hand, in periods of right-wing government in places like Argentina, Brazil and Chile some aspects of women’s rights survived, for instance broadly accepted equality policies such as anti-violence against women (VAW) laws, or popular social policies with large constituencies dependent on their benefits (i.e. Conditional Cash Transfer programmes) (Blofield et al., 2017: 363). Some gender equality offices written off as ‘straightjackets’ under centrist or right-wing governments have been dramatically revived under current left-populist governments, as in Mexico and Argentina. The heightened need for mass social protection measures and anti-VAW programmes during the 2020 Covid-19 crisis has provided elevated visibility for the work of gender equality offices. There is consensus that equality machineries work best in high-capacity states with relatively low levels of corruption – states able to implement socially progressive policy even against the opposition of traditional interest groups. Some structural features can contribute to the influence and reach of equality machineries. For instance, according to UN Women, gender mainstreaming efforts are more effective when equality agencies are whole-of-government coordinating structures and it has been useful to establish gender focal points in both legislative and executive institutions. Gender focal points in subnational governments, down to municipalities, extend vertical policy coordination, and have been particularly effective when combined with participatory measures to engage grassroots women in local planning as in the Philippines and in parts of India.

THE ROLE OF GLOBAL AND REGIONAL INTERGOVERNMENTAL INSTITUTIONS IN SUPPORTING GEMS National gender equality bureaucracies have been strengthened – and to a degree protected – by global and regional multilateralism. The UN has played a vital role in legitimising and supporting these bureaucracies – not just by consistently urging its member states to create them, but through a range of reporting requests and annual meetings that require GEM staff

130  Handbook of feminist governance to provide responses. Delegations to the annual meetings of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), for instance, are normally led by the highest-ranking gender equality or women’s issues representative in a government. States have the option of including civil society representatives on delegations – though of course, once on the ‘inside’ of a government delegation, civil society representatives may find themselves less able to be critical of official positions. Preparation for negotiations on the annual themes addressed by the CSW usually require the assembly and submission in advance of national data on the topics in question, as well as participation in negotiations in New York to reach ‘agreed conclusions’. This is a capacity-building experience in itself, and requires domestic cooperation between the GEM and other ministries, as well as collaboration with the foreign ministry to ensure coherence in negotiating positions. Since 2012, when CSW negotiations on the topic of rural women failed to end with agreed conclusions because of coordinated opposition by the ‘Group of Friends of the Family’,3 negotiations have become highly contentious in areas such as same-sex and trans rights, sex and sexuality education for adolescents, reproductive health services, and increasingly, even the use of the word ‘gender’ itself (Goetz, 2020a). Conservative ‘norm-spoilers’ (Sanders, 2018) have assigned senior and experienced negotiators to the task of dismantling the international women’s rights regime. Blindsided, some countries have rushed to boost the seniority and rank of CSW delegates, accompanying gender equality representatives with negotiators from foreign ministries, or providing stronger staff support from New York-based UN missions. UN Women is the natural global counterpart of in-country gender equality institutions. As shown elsewhere in this volume, it keeps them constantly updated with gender mainstreaming tools, good practice examples and capacity-building through training (ITAD, 2019). UN Women (like its predecessors) also encourages gender equality units to develop national plans on aspects of women’s rights, strengthening their coordinating role across government. By early 2020, over 80 per cent of countries had a national action plan for gender equality and 68 per cent of states had specific anti-VAW plans (UN ECOSOC, 2020: 52, 47). As shown in Part III of this Handbook, UN Women has also been encouraging GEMs to initiate national planning on women, peace and security, as a means of implementing UN Security Council resolutions and 82 countries now have such plans. The CEDAW Committee, the treaty body overseeing the implementation of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, scrutinises reports from CEDAW members every four years. Producing the report is usually the responsibility of GEMs and the reporting process makes huge demands on their analytical and data capacities. The scrutiny of the CEDAW Committee is a form of ‘soft accountability’ which, while lacking enforcement measures, focuses a global gaze on national gender issues, sometimes prompting improvements. The UN’s flagship efforts to galvanise global goals, such as poverty reduction or climate change mitigation, also provide openings for GEMs to strengthen reporting capacities and to demand performance from other ministries. States need to report on progress in reaching the stand-alone gender goal in the Sustainable Development Goals framework (SDG 5) as well as gender-specific targets under other goals. As noted elsewhere in this Handbook (Chapter 11) this goal has, for the first time, an indicator regarding ‘systems to track and make public allocations for gender equality and women’s empowerment’ – creating a global demand for capacity-building in gender-responsive budgeting and auditing.

National women’s machineries  131 Also significant are indicators to measure target 16.7: ‘Ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision making at all levels.’ These indicators focus on the share of positions in public institutions held by different groups and how responsive and inclusive decision-making is according to public opinion surveys. While gender equality machineries should not be responsible for gender parity or inclusiveness in public administration, they are well placed to monitor these aspects of good governance. The UN’s report on 25 years of implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action shows, however, that not all gender equality machineries have risen to the occasion (UN ECOSOC, 2020). Regional governance institutions have also been important drivers of the creation and strengthening of gender equality machinery. As seen in Part IV of this Handbook, the European Commission and the European Parliament have provided European women’s movements with opportunities for policy influence and reasons to collaborate effectively. On the other hand, the European Institute for Gender Equality has documented diminishing status and authority of these institutions since 2012, with some no longer full ministries and with reduced budgets (EIGE, 2020). This is in part because of neoliberal austerity measures, but some observers have also argued that commitment to addressing a wide range of inequalities within gender, particularly those stemming from sexual orientation and diverse gender identities, can have a fragmenting effect (Krizsan et al., 2012). European Union accession conditions have provided a tremendous incentive for the establishment or strengthening of equality machineries in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in the early 2000s, and are of particular importance where domestic women’s movements are weak, where LGBTQI+ individuals experience serious discrimination and ‘anti-gender equality framing’ is more present in policy debates (Krizsan, 2012). Gender equality machinery does not, of course, operate in the mechanically predictable fashion implied by the industrial metaphor ‘machinery’. In spite of the requirement of reporting to the EU on meeting equality goals, these bureaucracies have been highly exposed to political shifts, as discussed below. Equality machineries in Africa have been limited by tiny budgets, sometimes weak women’s movements, human development challenges that compete with gender equality for resources, weak state capacity and corruption, conservative social attitudes, particularly towards women’s reproductive and sexual rights, and same-sex and trans rights, and in some contexts, the paralysing effect of armed conflict. Equality machineries even came under attack from international creditors such as the World Bank in the late 1990s as ‘low hanging’ targets for demolition in cost-saving drives (Sarr, 2009; UNECA, 2001: 4). Many, therefore, have suffered from donor dependency and take a short-term project-based approach. Low-income countries in other parts of the world likewise have gender equality machinery suffering from weak technical capacity, remoteness from decision-making centres and a lack of interest from national leaders in prioritising gender mainstreaming, suggesting ‘little progress has been made since 2015’ (UN ECOSOC, 2020: 54). Perhaps the best test of the effectiveness of gender equality institutions is their capacity to insinuate themselves into non-gender-stereotyped or high-power areas of government decision-making, or their capacity to defend women’s interests in moments of crisis, such as the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. In September 2020, UN Women and UNDP launched a gender analysis of Covid-19 response measures, which revealed the consequences of under-powered gender equality units: while many countries introduced new measures to respond to elevated levels of domestic violence, only 18 per cent of new social protection and labour market

132  Handbook of feminist governance measures extended income protection to women and only 10 per cent of economic stimulus measures were targeted to female-dominated sectors (UN Women and UNDP, 2020: 5).

THE NEW POLARISATION ON GENDER EQUALITY Gender equality machineries are created out of the conviction that gender-based inequality is a distinctive and politically salient form of injustice, affecting everyone. The rationale for stand-alone state entities is that the project of introducing change to all parts of the massive, complex set of formal and informal institutions that make up government, requires an internal champion and watchdog to keep the effort on track. But internal advocates of the vast policy changes expected of state feminism inevitably face resistance. On the one hand, femocrats are accused of being Trojan horses enabling the infiltration and outsize influence of what many conservatives still see as a minority and even elite interest. On the other hand, they are seen by feminist critics as hostage to or co-opted by the patriarchal logics and limitations of public policy institutions, and thus lacking the legitimacy and credibility needed to represent feminist perspectives within the state. GEMs have been active in most states for decades now. Is the ‘Trojan horse vs hostage’ dichotomy still meaningful, given changes in the nature and capacities of the state, in the size and strength of feminist movements, and also in the ferocity of misogynist reactions? At one extreme, gender equality efforts and advocates and even discourse have been outlawed and gender studies banned (Peto, 2018). Some GEMs have been repurposed to serve anti-feminist objectives, as we shall see below. But at the other extreme in a few states, feminism has become an establishment policy frame. This is certainly an emergent and incomplete process, but feminist equality objectives have been internalised in governance in a number of post-industrial welfare states. No Trojan horse is needed.

FEMINISM AS A VILIFIED MINORITY INTEREST AND THREAT TO THE STATE The electoral successes of illiberal leaders that, since the early 2000s, ended the ‘third wave’ of democratisation have often been accompanied by right-wing populist rhetoric that specifically targets feminists, femocrats and the social engineering projects of gender equality bureaucracies. Populism is not new, but has evolved and grown considerably as economic crises and globalisation have eroded traditional areas of male employment and deepened inequality (Hozic and True, 2016). State institutions for gender equality, and the femocrats who staff them, have sometimes become targets for populist outrage at policies seen as providing undeserved and unfair access to resources at the expense of male breadwinners (Sawer, 2004). Combined with resurgent nationalism and falling birth rates, illiberal regimes have set out to de-institutionalise gender equality bureaucracies. When these bureaucracies address same-sex and trans rights they trigger especially visceral reactions to concepts that defy ‘common sense’ understandings of gender as a biological given (Correa et al., 2018). The outright elimination, or demotion and conversion of gender equality bureaucracies into family promotion functions has been pursued as a key signalling device to communicate the credentials of populist leaders to conservative bases. In Brazil, one of the first acts of

National women’s machineries  133 Jair Bolsonaro after his inauguration was to fold the Secretariat for Women’s Policies into the Human Rights Ministry and to add ‘Family’ to the name of the Ministry. The Ministry’s mandate was revised to eliminate its role in ensuring protection from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity (Ghitis, 2019), and an anti-abortion evangelical pastor was appointed its leader. The approach of the Trump administration to US gender equality architecture was similar: including selective defunding and institutional marginalisation, and populating key functions with operatives drawn from the evangelical extreme of the Republican Party. Trump did not eliminate the Office of Global Women’s Issues (OGWI) or the Obama-era White House Council on Women and Girls, but he cut their programme budget to zero and failed until 2020 to appoint a head of the OGWI. Continuous discursive ‘cleansing’ was undertaken through combing out words like ‘gender’ and ‘foetus’, to the point that, according to a former official: ‘We were now aligned with Russia on family issues.’4 In the four years of the Trump administration there was a gap between conservative right-wing top appointees and femocrats lower in the hierarchy who used evasive tactics to slow down erosion of former gains. The women’s issues unit in Turkey has seen a steady set of demotions under President Erdogan, though he was initially supportive of efforts to meet international standards. As an EU accession country from 1999, Turkey set up a (non-cabinet) Ministry of Women, Family and Children. From 2011, however, a more conservative agenda set in. According to a former official: ‘Before 2011 we were busy amending laws and had on the whole good cooperation with the government. There was only the occasional flare from Erdogan about us being bad women, especially on bodily autonomy issues.’5 Around that time the government supported the establishment of ‘government NGOs’ set up by conservative women to put forward traditional positions on gender issues. In 2018 the Ministry was demoted to a desk in the Ministry for Labour, back to where it had started. The former official said that what Erdogan wants from the unit includes: ‘An effort to remove permanent alimony. An effort to unpunish child marriages. An effort to ban abortion.’ The area causing most contention is the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention on preventing violence against women – now framed as ‘acting against the family’.

FEMINISM AS ESTABLISHMENT: TOWARDS FEMINIST GOVERNANCE? The most successful GEMs are in wealthy countries with social democratic governments that have put gender equality high on their agendas. Recently some middle-income countries with left populist governments such as Mexico and Argentina are laying claim to the ‘state feminist’ label. Smaller and lower-income countries such as Uruguay and Bolivia are experimenting with radical expansions of state social protection and welfare systems to provide safety nets to women in the informal sector. Since the 2018 G7 summit in Canada in which a Gender Equality Advisory Council ensured the entire agenda reflected feminist issues, some male presidents (of France, Mexico and Argentina) and male prime ministers (of Canada and Sweden) have declared themselves to be feminists, and committed their governments to feminist policy reforms across the board. As discussed elsewhere (Chapter 16 in this Handbook), a number of countries have specifically committed to a feminist foreign policy, starting with Sweden. In some cases, domestic gender equality machineries have been upgraded, with Canada creating

134  Handbook of feminist governance a full, cabinet-rank Minister for Women and Gender Equality in 2018. In contrast, the Mexican National Institute for Women and the French Secretariat of Equality between Women and Men have remained small and focused on their catalytic roles. France and Mexico have taken on a leadership role in resuscitating the Beijing Platform for Action, building ‘Action Coalitions’ to address outstanding gaps instead of risking a fifth UN-organised World Conference on Women that might see right-wing populist governments eroding past gains. The position of the cabinet-level Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity in Argentina, its inclusive title (‘Genders’ in the plural) and its success in supporting abortion law reform reveals the impact of sustained feminist mobilisation, the presence of feminists in the legislature and in government, and a supportive national executive. A senior official explained the decision to create the country’s first gender ministry as ‘the outcome of women on the streets’ and successive mobilisations over violence against women and reproductive rights.6 Feminist support for Alberto Fernández’s electoral victory in October 2019 was rewarded by the ‘Micaela law’, named after a murdered feminist activist, making gender training mandatory for all government officials to ensure feminist policymaking is not the job of the gender ministry alone. The Argentine Ministry has been one of the few globally to be a core member of the national Covid-19 response team, and has mainstreamed gender considerations across the range of Covid health, social protection, labour and fiscal policies (UN Women and UNDP, 2020). Nonetheless, feminist activists and staff in the Ministry are under no illusions as to the precarity of this moment. According to a Ministry official: ‘We don’t know how long we will be here so we have to mainstream plus institutionalise ourselves – we know from Spain and Chile that the first thing to be dropped when the government changes is this ministry.’7 The boldness and speed of the policy work of the Ministry is impressive, given expectations that backlash increases to the degree that policies challenge religious doctrine, have significant budgetary implications or an emphasis on intersectionality (Blofield et al., 2017). Despite successes, feminist governance claims are frequently confounded by incompatible policies across government – such as Sweden’s and Canada’s continued arms sales to the misogynist regime in Saudi Arabia. Nonetheless, adoption by leaders of the ‘feminist’ label is not just cynical branding. It has costs. It is not an obviously popular or electorally rewarding decision. Even feminists have mixed feelings about state feminism as a version of feminism compatible with neoliberalism, falling short of hopes for radical institutional transformations (Achilleos-Sarll, 2018). Social and political dynamics that explain the deepening of feminist governance include the following: first, behind the central role of women’s mobilisation, long-term strategic planning by some gender equality institutions is paying off. Women’s movement struggles are mediated by formal and informal institutions, and it is clear that gender equality institutions are now significant shapers of the strategies and outcomes of women’s movement struggles. Second, the emergence of a ‘feminist establishment’ reveals the professionalisation of the feminist movement in the sense of being able to sustain street activist pressure while working with political parties to reframe policy. There is much more frequent changing of places between feminist activists, femocrats and women politicians, nationally and transnationally. Internationally, women from national gender entities now staff multilateral institutions, and vice versa. This circulation enables less antagonistic activist positions in response to the constraints on femocrats, but also more effective strategising to advance policy agendas and safe-

National women’s machineries  135 guard gains. This significantly dilutes earlier ‘in and against’ tensions that isolated femocrats even from their most important sources of information and inspiration. Third, transnational standard-setting in the areas of democracy and governance has helped identify feminist and women’s activism with democratisation, and the work of GEMs in the state with good governance. This is despite the effects seen in this chapter of populism or religious extremism pushing back against transnational norms and conditionality. Stronger awareness of some of the sickening extremes of patriarchy – particularly violence against women and sexual harassment – have encouraged more diverse social groups to demand a reckoning with sexism, deepening the feminist base. Finally, generational factors may explain acceptance of feminism as a governing system – today’s leaders have grown up with decades of feminism – it has become vernacularised in all but contexts dominated by religious extremists. The embrace of feminism by the establishment may have more popular support in social democracies than ever before, but it is not expected to be uncontroversial, or permanent. A paper on Sweden’s feminist foreign policy observes: ‘the use of the f-word represents a significant pivot away from the widely-accepted framing of gender mainstreaming and towards a controversial politics’ (Aggestam and Bergman-Rosamond, 2018: 323). To be effective, feminist governance can be expected to disrupt the elite privilege and power on which governance is based; backlash is inevitable, and considerable determination is needed to weather it (Goetz, 2020b). To be credible to its primary constituencies, feminist governance must shift the economic and social structures that generate gender-based inequalities.

CONCLUSION It is no surprise that gender equality bureaucracies can neither evade nor counter the policy preferences of governing regimes when they are hostile to the advancement of women’s and gender+ rights. Experience of dramatic policy reversals and status demotions has made femocrats invest in means of safeguarding women’s rights gains where possible, and transnational forums offer some opportunities to build alliances to help weather these episodes. There is no doubt, however, that the frequent changes in status of GEMs erode historical memory and institutional capacity. The stepped-up hostility to gender equality of the new generation of hyper-nationalist right wing populists has also pushed femocrats into a defensive position, wasting time on protecting past normative gains or even relitigating them. In spite of this vulnerability, which made this author once assert that GEMs are examples of ‘how not to approach gender-sensitive good governance’ (Goetz, 2009: 245), they have had staying power and sometimes a degree of transformative capability as a bridge between feminist movements and the state. GEMs seem to increase the chances that legislation to stop VAW will be passed; they have also built national capacities for gender-sensitive planning and budgeting, and in some cases, comprehensive social protection systems. In some contexts there are striking recent shifts, such as national leaders proclaiming feminist governments and feminist foreign policy. Among the many reckonings brought by the Covid-19 crisis, a reconsideration of the role of GEMs may be one. Responses to the pandemic have elevated the importance of the state in sustaining health management, the economy and social life. The importance of women’s care work, the relevance of social cohesion, the need for strong state (not random market) manage-

136  Handbook of feminist governance ment of health systems and the recognition of connections between well-being and security provide vital openings to feminist proposals to use public power to redress social injustice. GEMs are well placed to support such reassessments. Far from being unnecessary for feminist governance, they may well prove to be its anchors.

NOTES 1. In addition to the 192 countries on the UN’s list, Taiwan and Kosovo have administrative units for liaising with the national women’s movement, but no stand-alone government agency for women’s rights. 2. See the RNGS project, https://​pppa​.wsu​.edu/​research​-network​-on​-gender​-politics​-and​-the​-state/​. 3. Members of the Group of Friends of the Family can be found at https://​unitin​gnationsfo​rthefamily​ .org/​background​-2/​organisers/​. 4. Interview with former State Department official, 14 August 2020. 5. Interview with a former official of the Ministry of Women, the Family and Social Services, Turkey, 18 March 2019. 6. Interview conducted for this chapter, senior government official, 27 November 2020. 7. Ibid.

REFERENCES Achilleos-Sarll, Columba (2018) ‘Reconceptualizing Foreign Policy as Gendered, Sexualised and Racialised: Towards a Postcolonial Feminist Foreign Policy (Analysis)’, Journal of International Women’s Studies 19(1): 34–49. http://​search​.ebscohost​.com​.proxy​.library​.nyu​.edu/​login​.aspx​?direct​=​ true​&​db​=​qth​&​AN​=​128086027​&​site​=​eds​-live. Aggestam, Karin and Annika Bergman-Rosamond (2018) ‘Swedish Feminist Foreign Policy in the Making: Ethics, Politics and Gender’, Ethics and International Affairs 30(3): 323–34. Beveridge, Fiona, Sue Nott and Kylie Stephen (2000) ‘Mainstreaming and the Engendering of Policy-Making: A Means to an End?’ Journal of European Public Policy 7(3): 385–405. Blofield, Merike, Christina Ewig and Jennifer M. Piscopo (2017) ‘The Reactive Left: Gender Equality and the Latin American Pink Tide’, Social Politics 24(4): 345–69. Correa, Sonia, David Paternotte and Roman Kuhar (2018) ‘The Globalisation of Anti-gender Campaigns’, International Politics and Society, blog post, 31 March. https://​perma​.cc/​XV3G​-LSUC. EIGE [European Institute for Gender Equality] (2020) ‘Beijing+25: The 5th Review of the Implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action in the EU Member States’, EIGE, 5 March. https://​eige​.europa​.eu/​ publications/​beijing​-25​-fifth​-review​-implementation​-beijing​-platform​-action​-eu​-member​-states. Ghitis, Frida (2019) ‘Bolsonaro Could Realize His Critics’ Worst Fears—And His Supporters’ High Hopes’, World Politics Review, 10 January. https://​perma​.cc/​5X8E​-LEVW. Goetz, Anne Marie (1995) ‘The Politics of Integrating Gender to State Development Processes: Trends, Opportunities, and Constraints in Bangladesh, Chile, Jamaica, Mali, Morocco, and Uganda’, Occasional Paper 2, Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. Goetz, Anne Marie (2005) ‘Women in Politics and Public Life’. In Shahra Razavi (ed.), Gender Equality: Striving for Justice in an Unequal World. Geneva: UNRISD, 145–203. Goetz, Anne Marie (2009) ‘Governing Women or Enabling Women to Govern: Gender and the Good Governance Agenda’. In Anne Marie Goetz (ed.), Governing Women: Women’s Political Effectiveness in Contexts of Democratization and Governance Reform, New York: Routledge, 239–256. Goetz, Anne Marie (2020a) ‘The Politics of Preserving Gender Inequality: De-Institutionalisation and Re-Privatisation’, Oxford Development Studies 48(1): 2–17. Goetz, Anne Marie (2020b) ‘Feminist Principles in Global Affairs: Undiplomatic Practice’. In Christopher Ankersen and W. P. S. Sidhu (eds), The Future of Global Affairs: Managing Discontinuity, Disruption and Destruction, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 149–74.

National women’s machineries  137 Gusta, Ana Laura Rodriguez, Nancy Madera and Mariana Caminotti (2017) ‘Governance Models of Gender Policy Machineries Under Left and Right Governments in Latin America’, Social Politics 24(4): 452–80. Harris Rimmer, Susan and Marian Sawer (2016) ‘Neoliberalism and Gender Equality Policy in Australia’, Australian Journal of Political Science 51(4): 742–58. Hozic, Aida and Jacqui True (2016) Scandalous Economics: The Politics of Gender and Financial Crises, New York: Oxford University Press. ITAD (2019) ‘Corporate Thematic Evaluation of UN Women’s Contribution to Governance and National Planning’, ITAD, 2 July. https://​www​.itad​.com/​knowledge​-product/​corporate​-thematic​-evaluation​-of​ -un​-womens​-contribution​-to​-governance​-and​-national​-planning/​. Krizsan, Andrea (2012) ‘Equality Architectures in Central and Eastern European Countries: A Framework for Analyzing Political Intersectionality in Europe’, Social Politics 19(4): 539–71. Krizsan, Andrea, Hege Skjeie and Judith Squires (2012) ‘European Equality Regimes: Institutional Change and Political Intersectionality’. In Andrea Krizan, Hege Skjeie and Judith Squires (eds), Institutionalizing Intersectionality: European Comparative Analysis, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 209–39. McBride, Dorothy and Amy Mazur (2010) The Politics of State Feminism: Innovation in Comparative Research, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Outshoorn, Joyce and Johanna Kantola (eds) (2007) Changing State Feminism, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Peto, Andrea (2018) ‘Attack on Freedom of Education in Hungary: The Case of Gender Studies’, LSE blog, 24 September. https://​blogs​.lse​.ac​.uk/​gender/​2018/​09/​24/​attack​-on​-freedom​-of​-education​-in​ -hungary​-the​-case​-of​-gender​-studies. Sanders, Rebecca (2018) ‘Norm Spoiling: Undermining the International Women’s Rights Agenda’, International Affairs 94(2): 271–91. Sarr, Fatou Sow (2009) National Mechanisms for Equality in Francophone and Lusophone Africa, Accra, Ghana: UNECA. Sawer, Marian (1990) Sisters in Suits: Women in Public Policy in Australia, Crow’s Nest: Allen & Unwin. Sawer, Marian (1996) ‘Femocrats and Ecorats: Women’s Policy Machinery in Australia, Canada and New Zealand’, Occasional Paper 6, March, Geneva: UNRISD. Sawer, Marian (2004) ‘Populism and Public Choice in Australia and Canada: Turning Equality Seekers into “Special Interests”’. In Marian Sawer and Barry Hindess (eds), Us and Them: Anti-Elitism in Australia, Perth: API Network. Sawer, Marian (2016) ‘Femocrat’. In Nancy A. Naples (ed.), The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. https://​onlinelibrary​.wiley​.com/​doi/​ abs/​10​.1002/​9781118663219​.wbegss047. True, Jacqui and Michael Mintrom (2001) ‘Transnational Networks and Policy Diffusion: The Case of Gender Mainstreaming’, International Studies Quarterly 45(1): 25–57. UN ECOSOC (2020) ‘Review and Appraisal of the Implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and the Outcomes of the Twenty-Third Special Session of the General Assembly Report of the Secretary-General’. https://​undocs​.org/​E/​CN​.6/​2020/​3. UNECA (2001) Five Years after Beijing: What Efforts in Favor of African Women? Assessing Institutional Mechanisms for the Advancement of Women, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: UNECA. http://​hdl​ .handle​.net/​10855/​688. UN Women (2020) Directory of National Mechanisms for Gender Equality, UN Women. https://​ www​.unwomen​.org/​-/​media/​headquarters/​attachments/​sections/​partnerships/​nationalmechanisms/​ directory​-of​-national​-mechanisms​-en​.pdf​?la​=​en​&​vs​=​5018. UN Women and UNDP (2020) ‘COVID-19 Global Gender Response Tracker: Factsheet’, UNDP, 28 September. https://​data​.undp​.org/​gendertracker/​. Weldon, S. Laurel (2002) Protest, Policy, and the Problem of Violence Against Women: A Cross-National Comparison, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Woodward, Alison (2003) ‘European Gender Mainstreaming: Promise and Pitfalls of Transformative Policy’, Review of Policy Research 20(1): 65–88.

11. Gender-responsive budgeting Monica Costa and Rhonda Sharp

INTRODUCTION Since the 1980s, feminists have sought to challenge mainstream economic governance showing how economic policies impact differently, and often unequally, on women and men. Economic governance typically refers to the policy and regulatory system (institutions, rules and norms) that shape how economies operate and the roles and responsibilities of states, markets and families in that process (see Razavi, 2012). Reforms in economic governance, promulgated by international financial institutions and Western conservative governments, have resulted in rich and poor countries alike adopting fiscal and public sector financial management policies that promote private sector development and shrink government, often with particularly adverse impacts on women and their dependent children. The unequal impact of economic policies on women and men (with gender intersected by other structural inequalities and identities) results from the distinct positions they hold in the economy and in society. This gender inequality1 is often made invisible in mainstream economic policy, overwhelmingly ruled by neoclassical theory, a paradigm which prioritises markets over governments, and undervalues women and communities, and their reproductive roles and responsibilities. In contrast, a feminist approach takes account of the role of non-market as well as market work in the operation of the economy. Gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) has emerged as a feminist strategy to shine a light on the impact of government budgets on gender equality.2 GRB involves the application of gender impact analyses to government expenditure and revenue raising, and the reprioritisation of budgetary decision-making to promote gender equality. Central to the feminist idea of GRB is recognition that processes and outcomes of government budgets are as much political as they are technical. Fiscal policy and budgetary decision-making are perceived to be more responsive to democratic influences than other areas of economic policy, such as monetary and trade policy; hence, the feminist challenge to economic governance begins with GRB. The first GRB was an Australian innovation by feminists located within the state, known as femocrats, who in 1984 extended gender impact analysis to the budget. Before long, this innovation was being promoted across international feminist networks. It was celebrated in the 1985 meeting of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Working Party on Women and the Economy and in 1998 was selected as best practice by the UN expert group meeting on national machineries for gender equality (Sawer, 2002). GRB has emerged as an international movement with feminist networks instrumental in its spread. The burgeoning epistemic community in feminist economics and their networks, including in gender and development, have provided the intellectual foundations and support for GRB. This chapter details the evolution of GRB, from a feminist institutional innovation in Australia to the emergence of a global movement. It shows how political debates and economic governance reforms have shaped the policy space for GRB. We begin by examining how Australian feminists took advantage of opportunities provided by a newly elected pro138

Gender-responsive budgeting  139 gressive government to put gender on the economic policy agenda. We then outline how this innovation evolved into a global movement spearheaded by feminist networks and feminists in key international institutions. We argue that the endorsement of GRB by key international financial institutions continues to influence its framing in both positive and negative ways.

THE EVOLUTION OF GRB IN AUSTRALIA The close to 40-year history of GRB in Australia demonstrates how shifts in economic governance impact on the spaces available for feminist engagement with economic policies and governance. GRB is not legislated in Australia, so its rise and decline has been broadly associated with the changing agendas of different governments and changing economic circumstances (Sharp and Broomhill, 2013). The Introduction of GRB under a Labor Government (1983–96) GRB was introduced in 1984 by a newly elected federal Labor government,3 which initially adopted a Keynesian approach to economic policy and had a commitment to strengthen women’s policy machinery. The Office of the Status of Women (OSW) was returned to the chief policy coordinating arm of government, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, with responsibility for analysing all Cabinet submissions for their gender impact. This role, first introduced in the 1970s, represented institutional recognition by the Labor government of the feminist insight that public policy was unlikely to be gender neutral and so required systematic gender analysis (Sawer, 2007). GRB was first mooted at one of the intergovernmental meetings of Commonwealth, state and territory women’s advisors as a way to go beyond programmes specifically targeted at women and girls and exercise leverage on ‘mainstream’ budget expenditures. The idea of GRB was taken up and developed at the federal level by OSW with a high-level task force made up of departmental heads with responsibility for its implementation. The establishment of this task force was part of the incoming government’s formal women’s policy and the implementation of a cross-portfolio women’s budget programme was one of the first agenda items for the new body (Sawer, 2002). This programme, which became known as the Women’s Budget Statement (WBS), required each department to present an account of the gender impact of their policies and programmes in the forthcoming budget. All of these accounts were then published as a budget paper. The process revealed how deeply ingrained were departments’ assumptions about gender. The WBS initiative also provided, with varying degrees of success, a baseline gender analysis and a window to monitor and compare year on year how well departments were attempting to address gender inequality. Initially, the WBS assumed, and indeed achieved, an increased level of consciousness-raising within departments about the gender impacts of their policies and programmes (Summers, 2002). As a result of the WBS initiative, spending did increase in social welfare areas, although the economic portfolios were slower and less comprehensive in their gender assessments and plans for change (Sharp and Broomhill, 1990, 2002). In particular, there was resistance by the Treasury to providing a gender analysis of the impact of different taxes, including the

140  Handbook of feminist governance dependant spouse tax rebate that mainly reduced men’s income tax. On the other hand, child care gained recognition as an economic policy issue. The quarterly intergovernmental meetings of women’s advisors led to women’s budget processes spreading to all state and territory governments over the decade from 1984. From the beginning, these meetings served to establish the understanding that the implementation of GRB required both a technical and political strategy. They also highlighted the importance of engaging economists with a feminist perspective in GRB work. The Impact of Changing Economic and Political Contexts on the Potential of GRB Within a year of the Labor government taking office at the federal level the global economic environment dramatically changed. Austerity policies introduced under the conservative governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher reflected a global transformation of the dominant economic paradigm from Keynesianism to neoliberalism. In this context, the near loss of an early election in 1984 led to an almost immediate backtrack on the Labor government’s expansionary budgetary approach. While the expanded role for feminist structures of governance continued, the ability of femocrats to achieve ambitious goals was undermined. The WBS continued to be published throughout the life of the Labor government but resistance inside the bureaucracy remained strong and a detailed WBS could not be sustained. Outside political pressure from the women’s movement weakened as it increasingly treated the WBS as an internal bureaucratic exercise, left to the femocrats. Nevertheless, its policy relevance continued to be defended within the Parliamentary Labor Party by its Status of Women Committee, which managed in 1993 to stop an initial proposal to eliminate it (Sawer, 2002). Following the defeat of the Labor government in 1996, a centre right Coalition government adopted a more aggressive neoliberal policy approach, cutting government services and reducing the progressivity of the taxation system (Sharp and Broomhill, 2013). The WBS was rebadged and departments were no longer required to provide a published assessment of the impact of their policies on men and women. While Australia’s innovative experiment with a feminist governance approach was on the wane, new strategies emerged from femocrats such as commissioning detailed costings of policies. To avert a threat to child care funding, a femocrat commissioned an assessment of the programme which found it generated a net gain due to extra tax revenue and savings on social security payments (Anstie et al., 1988). This illustrates the increasing sophistication of gender analyses and their use in policy advocacy. After a decade of conservative government, Labor returned to office in 2007 but the Office for Women was not reinstated within the central policy coordinating Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, and the Minister for Women remained outside the Public Expenditure Committee, the powerful Cabinet body that considered all budget bids. In this institutional context, influencing budgetary decision-making was difficult. A new centre right Coalition government elected in 2013 did return the Office for Women to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, something the women’s movement had long lobbied for, but at the same time ceased publishing anything relating the budget to women. However, there has been a new emphasis on gender equality in Australia’s foreign policy which gained momentum under Australia’s first woman Foreign Minister Julie Bishop. Australia required 80 per cent of its foreign aid to target or improve gender equality (see Chapter 16 in this Handbook) and contributed to improving the OECD aid flows committed to targeting gender equality as a policy objective.

Gender-responsive budgeting  141 Without a federal government statement, the National Foundation for Australian Women took up the challenge of producing A Gender Lens on the Budget – an annual gender analysis of the budget from outside government. While such outside analyses are important for encouraging accountability, they are not a substitute for an internal process. Strong advocacy by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) has continued for the return of GRB processes inside government. More recent government and parliamentary initiatives in Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory show that the idea of a government-led GRB continues to simmer in Australia. Following pressure from the women’s movement, the centre right Coalition government published a Women’s Budget Statement in the 2021 budget, although focusing on gender-specific measures of women’s safety, economic security, and health and well-being.

THE GLOBAL SPREAD OF GRB Early international initiatives demonstrated the variety of ways in which feminists were leveraging GRB. In 1989, the UK Women’s Budget Group, a network of gender researchers and advocates, began publicly commenting on the gender impacts of the Thatcher government’s neoliberal taxation and social security policies (Elson, 2021). In 1993, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom published a one-off Canadian Women’s Budget highlighting the opportunity cost for social programmes and services of spending on federal defence. The first example of a legislated GRB occurred in the Philippines in 1995, including a policy goal of at least 5 per cent of total development budgets to be allocated to gender and development (Kanwar, 2016). The South African Women’s Budget Initiative initiated by the Mandela government incorporated the Australian model and was distinguished by its cooperative relationship between civil society activists and parliament (Govender, 1996). The South African experience influenced a Ugandan women’s NGO to build GRB capacity amongst women parliamentarians to improve their participation in parliamentary debates (Kusambiza, 2013). The spread of GRB gained momentum at the 1995 Fourth World Women’s Conference. The Beijing Platform for Action delivered a transformative blueprint for policymaking that remains relevant today (Esquivel and Rodriguez Enriquez, 2020). It built on feminist critiques from the 1980s, which showed that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank’s structural adjustment, international trade and aid policies were undermining gender justice and the realisation of women’s rights. The inclusion of financial recommendations in the Platform for Action reflected an awareness that its ambitious gender equality agenda would not be implemented without attention to the impact of budgets on women. In addition, the Platform for Action elevated the concept of gender mainstreaming in global policy circuits, offering a tailor-made discourse and practice for GRB to draw upon and expand. The first large-scale international GRB project was initiated in 1996 by a meeting of Commonwealth ministers for the status of women. The Commonwealth Secretariat’s engagement with early feminist critiques of the structural adjustment policies of the IMF and World Bank positioned it to play a transnational role in GRB, assisting the governments of South Africa, Sri Lanka, Barbados, St Kitts and Nevis, and Fiji to design and undertake pilot GRBs (Hewitt, 2002).4 Conceptual and practical advice was provided by UK, South African and Australian feminist economists involved in the development of GRB initiatives in their own countries and they contributed the first GRB manual, How to Do a Gender Sensitive Budget

142  Handbook of feminist governance Analysis (Budlender and Sharp, with Allen, 1998). These Commonwealth pilot programmes were short-lived and narrow in their achievement, but they generated knowledge, practices and networks that were crucial in the development of a GRB rationale and its repertoire of concepts, tools and practices. By the early 2000s, GRB initiatives were established in 20 countries and four regions (UNIFEM, 2000). The spread of GRB to developing countries was assisted by the greater openness of development research to heterodox thought, including feminist economics (see Woolley, 2005). However, in practice, governments were earmarking funds for gender-specific programmes, and were ignoring the gender impact of general policies and programmes that accounted for the vast majority of spending (estimated to be in the order of 95–99 per cent of total expenditure) (UNIFEM, 2000). An expanded agenda for GRB was set out in UNIFEM’s Progress of the World’s Women 2000 report with a macroeconomic framework that integrated the productive contributions of non-market activity (volunteer, domestic, informal work) with the market economy. It highlighted the role and under-measurement of the paid and unpaid care work disproportionately done by women. This framework showcased the work of feminist economists including that of the report’s distinguished coordinator, Diane Elson. UN Women (and before it UNIFEM) played an important role in disseminating GRB frameworks and practices, a role that was particularly crucial in the spread of GRB to the Global South. A second wave of GRB concepts and practice emerged from a high-level conference in Brussels in 2001 that brought together key players from 48 countries to mobilise support for the goal of implementing GRB in all countries by 2015 (UNIFEM, 2002). It provided impetus for the growth of GRB while a Council of Europe report in 2005 provided a definition that gained currency across Europe. Pilot initiatives were launched in Ireland and Malta, with more systematic approaches woven into government processes in Austria, Sweden and Andalucia, Spain (Klatzer et al., 2018). Critically, the Brussels conference recommended GRB as a tool to achieve good economic and financial governance. The adoption by international financial institutions of the ‘good governance’ agenda (as it was initially termed) reset the economic role of institutions and the management of the public sector, offering opportunities for GRB. Governance reforms emphasised rules for expenditure and revenue systems that would achieve accountability, transparency, participation and predictability of government. This was accompanied by a shift to performance- or results-based budgeting that could facilitate GRB with the development of, for example, gender-sensitive output and outcome indicators to plan and monitor services (Budlender, 2007; Holvoet and Inberg, 2014; Sharp, 2003). However, the implementation of performance budgeting within the context of neoliberal policy framings has also been problematic for GRB. First, equity has received little attention as a criterion of performance (Sharp, 2003). Second, the adoption of fiscal rules that limit expenditures by shifting activities from the public to the for-profit sectors has contributed to women’s reduced access to services. Neoliberal economic governance, as the early Australian experience demonstrates, narrows the fiscal space for GRB and undermines its potential for feminist economic reform. This emphasis on performance gained renewed attention with developments in financing for development debates following the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. Aid recipient countries were expected to provide strong financial and procurement systems, including medium-term budget frameworks, to ensure that donor money was effectively spent. Feminist networks and individual feminists in key international agencies and donors saw in these debates an opportunity to advocate for GRB by highlighting the congruence between its

Gender-responsive budgeting  143 goals and those of effective development financing (Budlender, 2007; Khan, 2015).5 Feminist transnational networks were successful in crafting a global GRB indicator – Goal 5 Gender Equality, Target 5.c – under the 2015 UN’s Sustainable Development Goals that monitors the proportion of countries with systems to track and allocate government funds to gender equality and women’s empowerment. It was a further attempt to translate the vision that gender should be systematically woven into the budget cycle (see Khan, 2015). However, regular reporting of this indicator is not mandatory, and the UN reports a low level of full adoption of this indicator (UN ESC, 2019: 66). The 2000 Women, Peace and Security agenda is another example of an international commitment recognising the potential of GRB, in this instance to highlight the links between militarised government budgets and adverse peace and gender impacts. While there has been a slow uptake of this agenda by international financial institutions (True and Svedberg, 2019), feminist advocacy in countries such as Timor-Leste demonstrate how post-conflict recovery offers opportunities to advance a GRB initiative with assistance from key donors (Costa, 2018). The opportunities for GRB increasingly narrowed in a context of globalisation of trade, investment and finance. Governance reforms in public finances were mediated by reduced government capacity to raise revenue and manage international borrowing (Elson, 2021). The ensuing crises, culminating in the global financial and economic crisis, were often made worse by austerity policies. The EU economic governance reforms, for example, gave a focus to debt and budget deficit reduction which, combined with reductions in government services and benefits, adversely impacted on women and increased gender inequalities (Klatzer et al., 2018). These macroeconomic policies also rejected the kind of public investment that could open the fiscal space to support gender equality (see Elson, 2021; Seguino, 2017). GRB was reignited globally in the aftermath of the 2007–08 crisis. The 2008 Session of the Commission of the Status of Women buttressed demands for more financing for gender equality, recognising that insufficient budget resources and political will were undermining women’s and gender equality agendas. A further development was that international financial institutions were giving more credence to the link between gender equality and economic policy. As concerns grew over the social dimensions of macroeconomic policies, the IMF turned to the potential for possible macroeconomic gains through gender equality policies. Outside the IMF, transnational space for promoting feminist ideas in foreign economic policy had expanded and included support from the high-powered Women in G20 (see Chapter 16 in this Handbook). Inside the IMF voices such as that of Janet Stotsky (2006) had long argued that financing for gender equality captures positive externalities from improving women’s health, education and employment opportunities, thereby increasing economic growth. She demonstrated that within the framework of mainstream economics GRB is ‘good budgeting’ (Stotsky, 2006: 7). This argument was echoed in 2016 by IMF managing director Christine Lagarde, in response to the large-scale IMF study of the international impact of GRB. This study of 23 countries provides evidence that GRB has shaped fiscal policies to address the needs of women and girls in areas such as education, health and infrastructure. In addition, GRB work has led to improvements in administration and accountability of government spending (Stotsky, 2016; Stotsky and Zaman, 2016). Further weight to GRB as a strategy for good budgeting came from an IMF analysis of GRB’s contribution to the G7 initiative on gender equality in 2017. The report showed that among the wealthy G7 countries fiscal policies seeking to impact on labour and human capital

144  Handbook of feminist governance contributed to both gender equality and economic growth. It suggested that GRB could provide a ready-made technical fix stating that it ‘does not require a new approach to budgeting’ (IMF, 2017: 10). A further example of how GRB has been framed within the context of mainstream budgeting rules is the design of a gender module to supplement the World Bank’s influential Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA). PEFA is a widely used World Bank tool to diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of public financial management systems. Like the IMF’s large-scale study of GRB impact, which was also externally funded and researched, the PEFA supplementary gender module was initiated and funded outside the World Bank by a multi-donor trust. The gender module seeks to determine the extent of gender mainstreaming throughout the budget cycle by posing 22 questions about the different processes for managing government finances and scoring the results against 31 PEFA indicators. Theoretically this PEFA gender module provides a practical means of applying a gender lens to the budget, using the language and expertise with which its public finance users are familiar, and potentially contributing to greater engagement with GRB by finance-related ministries. However, there is a danger that the PEFA and other technocratic approaches will markedly shape the meaning and practice of GRB and be seen as providing a GRB blueprint (Hadley, 2019). The PEFA gender module focuses on financial and fiduciary controls, at the expense of the processes for developing policy and endorses practices (such as tagging) that remain contested within the GRB community of practice. GRB evaluations that exclude policy goals and actions along with the political dimension of budgets are unable to provide meaningful analyses as to why GRB works, or not. Over the past decade, the IMF and the World Bank have helped disseminate GRB, albeit in a limited form. The transformative potential of GRB is ultimately curtailed by the tightly held neoliberal views of these international financial institutions, placing market rationality at the centre of economic policies. While there is greater acknowledgement of the costs of gender inequalities arising from institutional biases, norms and power (Prügl, 2017), and some initial inroads into integrating GRB in the agendas of these organisations, there is limited evidence that economic thinking and the types of policy alternatives endorsed have changed (see Burgisser, 2019). Women are still narrowly framed as contributing inputs to economic growth, with policies designed to bolster women’s labour market engagement and little understanding of political economic country contexts such as that of fragile state contexts (True and Svedberg, 2019: 342). This is in part because these institutions are engaged in a ‘reconstruction of neoliberalism so that it dons a feminist face’, preserving earlier commitments to market rationality and aligning those commitments with calls for more equality (Prügl, 2017: 47). Given this, it is not surprising that GRB research and practice remains marginal, often at the discretion of staff and externally funded, with True and Svedberg (2019) describing support for gender work within international financial institutions as akin to ‘voluntary work’. Since the early 2010s, GRB’s contribution to economic governance has gained traction within the OECD with its recognition of the ‘power of the purse’ in influencing government-wide policymaking to achieve national goals. One response of the OECD has been to develop an indicator that seeks to capture key elements of governance for embedding GRB practice: strategic framework, tools of implementation and an enabling environment (Downes and Nicol, 2019). The indicator shows that half of the 17 OECD countries engaged in GRB are classified as having an ‘introductory’ practice level, and the rest classified as having a ‘mainstreamed’ practice level. No country was classified as ‘advanced’ practice.

Gender-responsive budgeting  145 This work engages with feminist research into the practice of GRB and has the potential to be a useful political tool for feminist advocacy. Nevertheless, the OECD’s GRB work has yet to be mainstreamed within the institution and to gain broad-based support within its membership. Crucially, for over three decades, GRB’s feminist ambition has been fostered by the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE). Encompassing researchers from the Global North and South, IAFFE has played a critical role in providing the intellectual muscle for an engagement with economics from a feminist perspective. An active and multidisciplinary intellectual GRB community developed within IAFFE and fostered the growth of specialised formal and informal networks like the European Gender Budgeting Network. IAFFE recognised the need to challenge the ‘strategic silence’ of neoclassical economics around gender (Barker, 2006) by influencing economic governance within institutions. Key to IAFFE’s impact is its quality journal, Feminist Economics, showcasing the wealth of global feminist research and paving the way for the institutionalisation of feminist economics. The spread of GRB was significantly enhanced by networks linking feminist economists with activists. For example, the International Working Group on Gender, Macroeconomics and International Economics, established in 1994, was critical in the development of gender-sensitive macroeconomic modelling and training for feminist activists and practitioners from UN institutions and national ministries (see Çağlar, 2010, 2012). This work illustrates how economic knowledge can serve as a form of feminist political intervention. These networks created intellectual space for the development of GRB normative frameworks giving renewed emphasis to policy processes, reproduction work and gender equality outcomes – using capabilities (Addabbo et al., 2019) and human rights approaches (Elson, 2008). This work complemented the equality framework that underpinned Australia’s GRB work.

FINAL REFLECTIONS: NEW AVENUES AND CHALLENGES FOR GRB? Australia’s GRB innovations seeded a global movement to engage with budgets to achieve gender equality. In turn, Australia has benefited from this global movement and has been reinventing GRB in the context of changing fiscal spaces. The evolution of GRB in Australia has been subject to peaks, declines and the green shoots of reinvention, having never completely disappeared despite neoliberal budgetary pressures and political ideology, and having been sustained by the national women’s movement and the global GRB movement. A similar pattern has emerged across the world. The first wave of the international spread of GRB came as feminists expanded gender mainstreaming to ensure gender equality was adequately resourced. A second wave emerged in the early 2000s with the promulgation of economic governance reforms by international financial institutions, but the neoliberal framing of these reforms blunted their feminist potential. Feminist critiques of economic policy in the aftermath of the 2008 economic and financial crisis and gender debates within international financial institutions created the space for a renewed interest in GRB, or a third wave. Greater credence has been given to the link between gender equality and economic policy by the IMF, OECD and World Bank, but the contradictions of neoliberal framing remained. The global Covid-19 pandemic has triggered unparalleled economic and social challenges. It has changed work, and placed care – health care, unpaid care, child care, aged care – at the forefront of economic activity. Women, particularly low-income, migrant, Indigenous and

146  Handbook of feminist governance other groups of economically vulnerable women, bear a heavy load of increased care work and greater job insecurity. Governments worldwide have committed unprecedented resources to tackle the economic and social impacts of the Covid-19 crisis and to set the course for economic recovery. Fiscal expansion under stimulus budgets gives GRB advocates more room to manoeuvre. The head of the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva, has called for an inclusive post-Covid-19 recovery with ‘gender-responsive fiscal policies’ (see Georgieva et al., 2020). While these are positive cues, there is limited evidence that the IMF has developed a systematic approach to address gender equality in its work, and that it has turned away from its well-worn neoliberal policies that have effectively deepened gender inequality (see Burgisser, 2019; Fresnillo and Serafini, 2020). At the country level, GRB advocates have argued that the menu of policy options presented is inadequate for the task. A common response of governments is to stimulate the economy with investments in physical infrastructure, such as in the traditionally male-dominated sectors of construction, manufacturing and energy. These policies are ill-suited to address the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on women, resulting from the loss of service and care jobs, ineligibility for social security benefits and increased time burdens of unpaid work. Feminist economists have challenged such fiscal strategies – arguing for a recovery led by investments in social infrastructure. Investing in care and education has the strongest economic growth multiplier effects while also responding to the structural problems of the sex segmented labour market exposed by the pandemic (see the special issue of Feminist Economics on Covid-19, published March 2021). However, for GRB to be a force for transformation in the era of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis it needs to continually, and strategically, engage with the fundamental political nature of budgets. In such contestations there can be a hidden politics operating around economic policy knowledge. Gender knowledge concerning fiscal policies is regularly overlooked or actively denied, as demonstrated by Covid-19 stimulus budgets in many countries. Denial of feminist knowledge cannot be explained by a simple gap in knowledge, an accident, an epistemological oversight or epistemic injustice. Rather, it is inextricably linked to how power and its use achieves political purposes (Franzway et al., 2009; Mills et al., 2014). In other words, the denial of feminist knowledge is a sign that a non-egalitarian gender politics is at play that frames women and men’s roles and responsibilities in particular ways, often to women’s economic and social detriment. Transformative economic policies will not emerge without a better understanding of the production of knowledge, including an understanding of the practices of not knowing or ignorance in economic policy (Sharp, 2019). Neoliberal macroeconomic policies have impacted on GRB’s transformative potential and macroeconomic decisions and their impacts are relatively insulated from scrutiny from a gender perspective. In practice, GRB has focused on gender analyses of direct budgetary impacts on provision of services, infrastructure, income transfers, jobs in the public sector, budget decision-making process, taxation and user charges. Such analyses are critical, but mainstreaming gender into budgets is also needed at the macroeconomic policy level. Macroeconomic policy does not affect people directly but works through indirect channels via the impact of the budget on the private sector and through the budget’s influence on aggregate demand, and thus on job creation and economic growth (Elson and Sharp, 2010). These indirect processes, combined with an impression of objective modelling and decision-making control in the hands of powerful institutions, lends an invisibility to macroeconomic policy that makes challenging it from a gender perspective difficult. However, macroeconomic policy provides the world view that frames how the economy operates, including what counts

Gender-responsive budgeting  147 as economic activity and the roles and responsibilities of governments, markets and families. The Covid-19 crisis provides a springboard for a fourth wave of GRB theory and practice. We need continually to acknowledge the political nature of budgets and this means challenging the dominant framework of economic knowledge as well as the budgetary decision-making processes that shape gender impacts.

NOTES 1. There is a recognition of the need to include trans and non-binary identities in the use of the term gender in GRB (see Canadian Government, 2020). Similar to the experiences of gender-sensitive parliaments (see Chapter 14 in this Handbook), the capacity of GRB frameworks to incorporate these and other identities has yet to be fully conceptualised and applied. 2. Government budgets impact on people through a variety of direct and indirect channels: direct channels are provision of services, infrastructure, income transfers, public sector jobs, taxation, user charges and budget decision-making processes; indirect channels operate through the impact of the budget on the private sector (via government contracts, grants and subsidies), and the macroeconomic or fiscal policy impacts from the use of government spending and revenue-raising to influence the economy as a whole through the level of aggregate demand, employment, prices and economic growth (see Elson and Sharp, 2010). 3. Australia has a federal system, made up of the Commonwealth (the federal level), six states and two territories. 4. NGO actors such as the Bretton Woods Project and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) had highlighted the impacts of the policies of international financial institutions on post-conflict countries. 5. See Gender Responsive Budgeting and Aid Effectiveness Knowledge Briefs, 2010, UNIFEM. https://​ www​.unwomen​.org/​en/​digital​-library/​publications/​2010/​1/​knowledge​-briefs​-grb​-aid​-effectiveness.

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Gender-responsive budgeting  149 Razavi, Shahra (2012) ‘Governing the Economy for Gender Equality? Challenges of Regulation, Feminist Strategies in International Governance’. In Gülay Çağlar, Elisabeth Prügl and Susanne Zwingel (eds), Feminist Strategies in International Governance, New York: Routledge, 217–32. Sawer, Marian (2002) ‘Australia: The Mandarin Approach to Gender Budgets’. In Debbie Budlender and Guy Hewitt (eds), Gender Budgets Make More Cents: Country Studies and Good Practice, London: Commonwealth Secretariat, 43–64. Sawer, Marian (2007) ‘Australia: The Fall of the Femocrat’. In Joyce Outshoorn and Johanna Kantola (eds), Changing State Feminism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 20–40. Seguino, Stephanie (2017) ‘Financing for Gender Equality: Reframing and Prioritizing Public Expenditures to Promote Gender Equality’. In Zohra Khan and Nalini Burn (eds), Financing for Gender Equality: Realising Women’s Rights Through Gender Responsive Budgeting, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sharp, Rhonda (2003) Budgeting for Equity: Gender Budget Initiatives within a Framework of Performance-Oriented Budgeting, New York: United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). Sharp, Rhonda (2019) ‘Gender-Responsive Budgeting in Challenging Times’, 4th Annual Ailsa McKay Memorial Lecture, 26 June, WiSE Research Centre, Glasgow Caledonian University. Sharp, Rhonda and Ray Broomhill (1990) ‘Women and Government Budgets’, Australian Journal of Social Issues 25(1): 1–14. Sharp, Rhonda and Ray Broomhill (2002) ‘Budgeting for Equality: The Australian Experience’, Feminist Economics 8(1): 25–47. Sharp, Rhonda and Ray Broomhill (2013) A Case Study of Gender-Responsive Budgeting in Australia, London: Commonwealth Secretariat. Stotsky, Janet (2006) ‘Gender Budgeting’, IMF Working Paper 06/232. Stotsky, Janet (2016) ‘Gender Budgeting: Fiscal Context and Current Outcomes’, IMF Working Paper 16/149. Stotsky, Janet and Adnan Zaman (2016) ‘The Influence of Gender Budgeting in Indian States on Gender Inequalities and Fiscal Spending’, IMF Working Paper 16/227. Summers, Anne (2002) Recorded Interview with Anne Summers, by Sara Dowse, 14 May 2002 (TRC 4852), Canberra: National Library of Australia. True, Jacqui and Barbro Svedberg (2019) ‘WPS and International Financial Institutions’. In Sara Davies and Jacqui True (eds), Oxford Handbook of Women, Peace and Security, New York: Oxford University Press, 336–50. UN ESC (2019) Review and Appraisal of the Implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and the Outcomes of the Twenty-Third Special Session of the General Assembly, Report of the Secretary-General (E/CN.6/2020/3), Commission on the Status of Women Sixty-Fourth Session (9–20 March 2020). UNIFEM (2000) Progress of the World’s Women 2000, London: UNIFEM. UNIFEM (2002) Gender Budget Initiatives: Strategies, Concepts and Experiences, New York: UNIFEM. Woolley, Frances (2005) ‘The Citation Impact of Feminist Economics’, Feminist Economics 11(3): 85–106.

12. Specialised parliamentary bodies Marian Sawer

INTRODUCTION Since International Women’s Year in 1975, the existence of governmental machinery for promoting gender equality has become a marker of good governance across the world. As Anne Marie Goetz shows elsewhere in this Handbook (Chapter 10), the UN has played a key role in promoting such machinery, monitoring its development and identifying good practice. Interestingly, at first the UN’s emphasis was on machinery within executive government. However, by the 1990s, gender-focused parliamentary bodies (GFPBs) had begun to multiply. By 1997 there were enough of them in Europe for a European Network of Parliamentary Committees for Equal Opportunities to be established. The UN began including parliamentary bodies in its monitoring of national mechanisms for promotion of gender equality and by 2010 found that their establishment was a growing trend (Jahan, 2010: 24). The main international body to champion these new parliamentary bodies was the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) and their creation and operation became the subject of an IPU data collection from 2006. The IPU began holding annual seminars for members of such parliamentary bodies as part of its efforts to strengthen parliamentary capacity to promote gender equality. The role of the IPU in developing the concept of ‘gender sensitive parliaments’, in which GFPBs play their part, is analysed by Sarah Childs and Sonia Palmieri in Chapter 14 of this Handbook. The IPU, together with the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), commissioned studies of these new parliamentary bodies and of the factors contributing to their effectiveness (Gonzalez and Sample, 2010; Palmieri, 2011, 2013). The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has likewise included them in its gender equality tool kits. GFPBs are viewed by such international agencies as playing a significant role in gender mainstreaming – the term used internationally from 1995 as shorthand for the process of ensuring that gender perspectives are introduced into all areas of governance (see Chapter 4, this Handbook). While emphasising the contribution of specialised bodies, agencies also warn against placing responsibility for parliamentary and legislative gender mainstreaming and oversight solely in such gender-mandated bodies rather than in parliamentary leadership (OECD, 2018: 48–60). This overview tracks the emergence and recognition of GFPBs as a significant gender equality mechanism and the emergence of a research literature drawing on feminist institutionalism and legislative studies to throw light on their operation. Existing research draws attention to both the achievements and limitations of GFPBs as a form of feminist governance, whether in terms of inclusivity, responsiveness or policy outcomes. While the focus of this chapter is on GFPBs it by no means suggests that they are the only conduit for feminist policy influence in 150

Specialised parliamentary bodies  151 parliament. At the cabinet level, the role of feminist ministers is receiving increased attention, while the role of feminist ministerial staffers deserves much greater prominence. The chapter begins by outlining the different types of GFPB, followed by an account of the origins and diffusion of such bodies and their sustainability over time. This is followed by sections on research relating to each of the main types of parliamentary body. This includes the extent to which they provide a channel for more diverse groups of women to engage with parliament or more technical questions concerning contribution to the legislative process or executive scrutiny. The chapter concludes by offering some indicators of feminist governance that can be applied to such bodies, as well as pointing to constraints imposed by long-standing parliamentary traditions and newer populist threats.

TYPES OF PARLIAMENTARY BODY The three main types of GFPB dealt with in this chapter are: standing committees or commissions, women’s caucuses and all-party parliamentary groups. Standing committees or commissions are permanent bodies of their parliaments, constituted under standing orders, with membership reflecting the representation of political parties in the parliament. As is the case with any parliamentary committee, dedicated gender equality committees may hold public hearings and consult with their associated policy communities. Ministers and government officials may be brought before the committee to answer questions concerning the gender effect of policies, programmes or legislation. Half of the countries responding to a 2011 OECD survey indicated that such committees were used as an accountability mechanism and to oversight progress in implementing gender equality policies (OECD, 2014: 158). Women’s parliamentary caucuses are relatively informal bodies, not covered by standing orders, although they vary considerably in terms of structure and decision-making processes. They are basically of two types, cross-party caucuses and single-party caucuses. Precisely because they cannot be seen to take a partisan approach, international development programmes and agencies have primarily supported cross-party caucuses. Donor agencies have viewed them as an important element in democracy strengthening through promoting women’s political participation. While the IPU collects data on these two types of GFPB, a third type can be identified – all-party parliamentary groups (APPGs), also called parliamentary friendship groups. These differ from caucuses in terms of needing approval by a presiding officer or comparable parliamentary authority as having cross-party membership and meeting other requirements, but do not operate under standing orders. Examples of APPGs promoting gender equality include current UK groups on preventing sexual violence in conflict and promoting equality for women in state pensions. In the European Parliament these issue-based groups are called intergroups and, as in national parliaments, an LGBTI group has played an important advocacy role. The three types of GFPB cover the spectrum from the most formalised (standing committees, whether dedicated or multi-portfolio) to the least formalised (women’s caucuses), with parliamentary groups coming somewhere in between. Standing committees may have a strongly institutionalised role in applying a gender lens to the legislative process, for

152  Handbook of feminist governance example, the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM Committee) of the European Parliament (see Chapter 24 in this Handbook). By contrast, a women’s caucus such as those found in sub-Saharan Africa may be a much more informal body, specialising in providing support to its members through mentoring, training, capacity-building, confidence-building, networking, discussions and information sharing. The resources available to such bodies also vary considerably, whether the parliamentary resources and staff allocated to a standing committee or the technical or research help that may be provided to women’s caucuses by, for example, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) or by non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Some researchers have questioned the usefulness of distinguishing between standing committees and women’s caucuses, on grounds of the variability in formality and parliamentary integration of the latter (Allen and Childs, 2019). GFPBs indeed operate in very different ways in different political and institutional contexts and within different parliamentary traditions. However, the broad patterns that have been observed and the discrete data collections that exist seem to justify the maintenance of existing distinctions. At the same time, despite these differences in type and modes of operating, these bodies share a mandate, whether bestowed by parliament or self-generated, to promote gender equality. This is the distinguishing feature of the GFPBs that are the subject of this chapter. They are an institutionalised means of conducting parliamentary deliberation or executive scrutiny from a gender perspective. In most cases they also provide an access point for women’s movement organisations to engage with the legislative process.

ORIGINS AND DIFFUSION In many countries the establishment of GFPBs came after a significant inflow of women into parliament. Critical actors sought to capitalise on new numbers by creating an institutionalised platform for claims-making (Sawer, 2015: 106). For example, the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM Committee) of the European Parliament was established after the number of MEPS rose from 5 to 16 per cent in 1979 and Simone Veil was elected as President of the Parliament (Kantola, 2010). In the Finnish Parliament, a Women MPs’ Network was established after a record number of women were elected in 1991 while in Sweden, the Speaker’s Network for Women Parliamentarians was similarly established after the election of a record number of women in 1994. An increase in the number of women legislators, however, is not always the most significant factor accounting for the formation of women’s caucuses. In the US context, for example, party has played a role as caucuses are only formed where Democrats are in control of State legislatures (Mahoney and Clark, 2019: 685). In new democracies, women’s caucuses and other GFPBs were often established after the adoption of gender quotas brought large groups of women into parliament but women’s caucuses could also be critical actors in the introduction of quotas. As discussed further below, another factor in the spread of women’s caucuses has been the timing of democracy building. When this occurs after the consolidation of gender equality norms at the international and regional levels, norm diffusion can be important influence (Adams et al., 2019). The creation of GFPBs provides institutional legitimacy for advocacy that might otherwise be seen as special pleading, even where the political culture is already relatively feminised. In

Specialised parliamentary bodies  153 Sweden, members of the Speaker’s Gender Equality Group described it as not only providing legitimacy for the promotion of gender equality in the parliament, but also for work in their party groups (Freidenvall and Erikson, 2020). Or, as a study of the Scottish Parliament’s Equality Committee put it, the Committee was ‘a strong institutional signal that women’s policy issues constitute an appropriate arena for legislative initiatives’ (Chaney, 2012: 452). In Uruguay, the creation of a women’s caucus, the Bancada Femenina, was helped by the fact that several of its members had previously been unsuccessful in promoting individual legislative initiatives on gender issues, so were receptive to the proposal for collective action (Johnson and Josefsson, 2016: 853). The ways in which GFPBs have multiplied around the world raises interesting questions about norm diffusion, institutional transfer and the critical actors involved, which are relevant to the more general diffusion of feminist governance. One way in which institutional transfer comes about is through the dissemination of ‘best practice’ models by international standard-setting bodies such as the IPU, the OECD and the OSCE and their promotion by transnational governance bodies. Such models are given additional legitimacy when they are adopted in neighbouring countries that are a traditional source of comparison and policy borrowing (Adams et al., 2019). Civil society and women’s movement organisations may also bring pressure for the replication of bodies seen to operate successfully in other countries and these initiatives may be supported by donor agencies. Specialised parliamentary bodies may themselves play an active role in promoting similar bodies elsewhere, such as the FEMM Committee’s support for such a body in the Tunisian Parliament or the model provided by the Ugandan women’s caucus (the Uganda Women’s Parliamentary Association) for neighbouring countries in Africa (Adams and Wylie, 2020: 621). Similar to the FEMM Committee in the European Parliament, women’s caucuses within international parliamentary associations may also reinforce the need for women’s caucuses within the parliaments of member nations. A case study of the role of the Women’s Network of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Portuguese-Speaking Countries shows how it leveraged gender equality norms and strategies to support the establishment of a women’s caucus in Timor-Leste (Costa, 2016). All of these conduits for institutional transfer contribute to the kind of institutional isomorphism associated with gender mainstreaming and recorded by international monitoring bodies. International pressure may, however, have contradictory effects. The conditionality associated with the process of European Union (EU) accession has been a significant influence in the creation of GFPBs such as parliamentary standing committees in candidate countries. However, the institutional strength of these bodies has been greatly affected by contextual factors. In Eastern Europe such factors include rejection of communist-era legacies such as women’s workforce participation and the strength of ‘anti-gender’ movements defending traditional values from outside influences (Chiva, 2017). The rise of nativism and right-wing populism, whether in Eastern Europe, Turkey or Latin America, has seen a rejection of the ‘foreign ideologies’ exemplified in gender equality machinery. In the Pacific (see Chapter 35, this Handbook) the priority given to gender equality by aid donors may also have contradictory effects. While populist pushback is one threat to GFPBs, there is also the general precariousness affecting feminist institution-building. As with women’s policy agencies, ‘gender mainstreaming’ becomes an argument that the continued existence of specialised bodies is unnecessary

154  Handbook of feminist governance and that, in the case of parliament, all parliamentary committees should have responsibility for gender issues (Ahrens, 2016: 782). Accompanying the attempted mainstreaming or streamlining of specialised bodies is often the suggestion that as gender equality has now been done it is time to move on to more important issues. Given such precariousness, support from civil society and women’s movement organisations can be crucial for survival. Studies of the institutional harvest of the women’s movement indicate the vulnerability of policy bodies within government, particularly those that lack ongoing engagement and support from social movement actors (Andrew, 2013). There may often be a mutually constitutive relationship between this political base outside and gender equality bodies inside. For example, campaigns by the European Women’s Lobby (EWL) have played a vital role in ensuring the continued existence of the FEMM Committee of the European Parliament (Kolthoff, 2007: 95).

STANDING COMMITTEES By 2020 the IPU recorded some 134 ‘gender equality committees’ operating in national parliaments and 90 cross-party women’s parliamentary caucuses. The numbers are somewhat fuzzy because of the reliance on survey returns and the inclusion in them of some multi-portfolio committees without an explicit gender designation. It should be noted that there has been evolution in the nomenclature of such formal parliamentary bodies, as with other feminist governance institutions, with the substitution of ‘gender’ for ‘women’, in many places (see Chapter 10, this Handbook). Parliamentary committees with a gender equality remit have been the subject of an expanding literature and have generally been found to make an important contribution to gender mainstreaming. This contribution has included initiation of gender equality laws, review of implementation and application of a gender lens to other legislative proposals. In South Korea, the Standing Committee on Gender Equality and the Family has promoted initiatives such as the gender budgeting clause included in the 2006 National Finance Act (Costa et al., 2013: 334). As noted by Joan Grace (2016), a gender-focused parliamentary committee can enable members to apply a gender lens to policy in a way that would be impossible in their own party rooms. Dedicated gender equality committees have also been tasked with auditing national women’s machinery, as in India, or may commission audits of gender mainstreaming in government, as in Canada. As with all gender-focused parliamentary bodies, good working relationships with women’s policy agencies, gender research institutes and women’s NGOs may be helpful in identifying key gender issues. Alison Woodward has coined the term ‘velvet triangle’ to capture this kind of policy interaction and mutual support between feminist politicians, femocrats, gender researchers and women’s NGOs (Woodward, 2003). In general, the creation of standing committees with a gender equality remit reduces the pressure on individual women parliamentarians to raise such issues, possibly at the risk of their parliamentary careers. Transfer of responsibility to parliamentary bodies also means that male parliamentarians are no longer absolved from responsibility and can also play their part. There are now a number of case studies of dedicated standing committees1 as well as a comparative study of the Danish Committee and the Finnish Committee for Employment and Equality (Holli and Harder, 2016). This comparative study drew on a legislative studies

Specialised parliamentary bodies  155 approach as well as feminist institutionalism and highlighted the different functions performed by the gender equality committees of the two different countries. In the case of Finland, the committee conducted legislative review, while the Danish committee conducted executive oversight (of the gender equality ministry). Both committees were found to have a high level of interaction with NGOs, and also with gender equality agencies and gender scholars in the Finnish case. In some countries, such as Croatia and Nepal, there is representation of outside gender equality bodies on the parliamentary committee itself, a fruitful subject for future research. Apart from dedicated parliamentary committees, in many parliaments there are multi-portfolio committees that include gender equality. Sonia Palmieri has noted from IPU data that multi-portfolio committees that include gender equality concerns fall into two main subgroups – those with a heavy emphasis on social affairs and the family, and those more focused on human rights, and legal and constitutional matters. She found examples of the former in El Salvador, Poland and Norway, and examples of the latter in Estonia, Ireland and Zambia. Women are much less likely to chair the multi-portfolio committees than the ones dedicated to gender equality and less likely to form a majority of members (Sawer et al., 2013).

WOMEN’S CAUCUSES Bodies providing support for the establishment and strengthening of women’s caucuses include the IPU, the National Democratic Institute, the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, UNDP and UN Women. Support from the IPU has included step-by-step guidelines on how to set up and organise a women’s caucus, with examples of successful strategies and policy accomplishments. Examples of caucus accomplishments range from the introduction of gender quotas and legislation for ending violence against women to the banning of smoking (an initiative of the Mongolian women’s caucus) (IPU, 2013: 12–15). As already mentioned, women’s caucuses vary considerably in terms of formality of structure and decision-making processes. For example, in Uruguay the caucus has no leadership structure, meets in plenary sessions and decides work plans by consensus, while in Zimbabwe when consensus cannot be reached decisions are taken by secret ballot (IPU, 2013: 32). Women’s caucuses often have capacity-building functions for new women parliamentarians as well as providing a safe space for the exchange of information and networking. While women’s caucuses may be formed subsequent to the adoption of gender quotas and an inflow of women into parliament, they may also play an active role in the adoption of quotas. They have become particularly common in Africa, where they had been created in 38 national parliaments by 2015, constituting 45 per cent of such caucuses worldwide (Adams and Wylie, 2020). Research on African experience with women’s caucuses is likely to become of increasing importance in the GFPB research. While caucuses such as these are created by women parliamentarians, men are often invited to participate in one capacity or another. In Uganda, the women’s caucus started involving men to increase receptivity to its legislative initiatives. Male associate members became critical actors in the promotion of gender equality legislation such as the prohibition of female genital mutilation (Johnson and Josefsson, 2016: 850). Apart from achieving male allies the Ugandan caucus has achieved increased organisational efficiency through attracting international financial donors to pay for its secretariat.

156  Handbook of feminist governance In policy work, there can be a complementary relationship between women’s caucuses and standing committees with a gender remit and the more formal body may have its origins in women’s caucus lobbying. In Finland, the Women MPs’ Network achieved the inclusion of a gender equality mandate in the remit of a standing committee by 2000. In Uruguay, the Banca Femenina succeeded in creating a gender-focused standing committee, with the committee’s formal access to legislative procedures complementing the outreach of the women’s caucus to the women’s movement and to the media (Johnson and Josefsson, 2016: 854). In Timor-Leste, the cross-party women’s caucus worked closely with a gender-focused standing committee as well as with women’s machinery in government and with the women’s movement on the introduction of gender-responsive budgeting (Costa et al., 2013). As well as enabling gender-focused deliberation and policy initiatives, the promotion of collaboration between women legislators across party lines is itself a significant function of women’s caucuses. Such collaboration may be particularly valuable in the context of increased political polarisation, as has been noted in relation to the increased number of all-party parliamentary groups. As centre right parties move further to the right to meet the challenge of right populist parties, cross-party collaboration can both become more difficult and more highly valued when institutional space enables it to occur. In countries with strong party systems, however, the role of single-party caucuses may be more sustainable than cross-party initiatives, particularly in centre left parties. There are stronger traditions of collective work in these parties than in centre right parties where, broadly speaking, women share in more individualistic traditions. There are now some substantial case studies of single-party caucuses. These include a 30th anniversary study of the Status of Women Committee (SWC) of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party in Australia, based on interviews and meeting records. The SWC was established in 1983 by a feminist senator, Pat Giles, who before entering parliament had been a founding member of the Women’s Electoral Lobby. SWC membership is open to all Labor women parliamentarians, who meet weekly during sitting weeks in order to ‘exert some feminist muscle on the reform agenda’ (Sawer and Turner 2016: 771). It has survived proposed streamlining of party committees in 1996 and 2007. The UK Parliamentary Labour Party’s Women’s Committee was established a year earlier, in 1982, by leading feminist politician Harriet Harman. It is similarly open to all Labour women parliamentarians although there is a smaller core of regular attenders. As in the Australian case, speakers include representatives of the party’s front bench, who makes themselves available for a feminist grilling, as well as representatives from women’s advocacy organisations. Both of these long-lived women’s caucuses have functioned as a significant site for integrating feminist perspectives into party policy, whether in government or opposition, as well as providing support for women ministers (Allen and Childs, 2019). The Liberal Women’s Caucus in the Canadian Parliament, established in 1993, has been found to play a similar role in grilling ministers (or shadow ministers) on the gender impact of their activities, as well as acting as a personal and professional support network for Liberal women (Steele, 2002). As with feminist governance scholarship generally, case studies of women’s caucuses serve a function beyond simply that of scholarly analysis. Histories of women’s caucuses such as those documented by the OSCE help sustain them by contributing to institutional memory – inspiring new participants with a record of past accomplishments while also cataloguing lessons learned (Palmieri, 2013: 69).

Specialised parliamentary bodies  157

ALL-PARTY PARLIAMENTARY GROUPS While APPGs share certain features, such as the need for recognition by a presiding officer or similar parliamentary authority, they also come in different shapes and sizes. Unlike standing committees, parliamentary groups do not operate under standing orders and in general are not provided with parliamentary resources such as secretariats. Instead, characteristically, NGOs provide secretariat services for them. For example, in the UK, the Fawcett Society (‘Closing the inequality gap since 1866’) has provided the secretariat for the APPG on Sex Equality and the APPG on Women in Parliament, while in Australia the Parliamentary Friends of Women for Election is serviced by the NGO of the same name. However, there are exceptions to this dependence by parliamentary groups on external bodies for resourcing. Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians, a parliamentary group examined both by Jennifer Curtin (in Celis et al., 2016) and Sonia Palmieri (2020), is entitled to have a parliamentary officer as its secretary, by virtue of its relationship with the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association. In Sweden, the Speaker’s Gender Equality Group has also benefited from secretariat services provided from within the parliament (Freidenvall and Erickson, 2020). In Australia, a case study found that participation in an APPG helped build trust across party lines thus enabling co-sponsored legislation removing a ministerial veto on chemical abortion (Sawer, 2012). The parliamentary group concerned was that on population and development. There are now 65 national parliaments with such groups focused on reproductive rights and gender equality – created in the wake of the 1994 UN Conference on Population and Development to ensure governments honoured commitments made there. The establishment of these particular APPGs was supported by US philanthropic foundations and by the UN Fund for Population Activities. One study has compared the quality of the substantive representation of women provided by different types of specialised body in the Belgian, United Kingdom and New Zealand parliaments (Celis et al., 2016). The criteria applied were those of responsiveness and inclusiveness, with inclusiveness being judged by the diversity of the civil society groups interacting with the parliamentary body. One recommendation was for more inclusive hearing processes on the part of standing committees and another for more transparency and accountability on the part of parliamentary groups.

CONCLUSION Specialised parliamentary bodies have been evaluated from different perspectives. One example has already been referred to – an evaluation framework focusing on inclusivity and responsiveness as measures of the quality of substantive representation (Celis et al., 2016). Another evaluation framework examines the extent to which specialised parliamentary bodies exhibit various characteristics of feminist institution-building or feminist governance. Such characteristics as first listed in Sawer and Turner (2016) include some or all of those in Table 12.1. As can be seen from Table 12.1, the extent to which feminist governance can be exhibited in specialised parliamentary bodies is constrained by broader parliamentary norms and traditions – the problem of ‘nested newness’ identified so well by Fiona Mackay (2014). It may not be

158  Handbook of feminist governance Table 12.1

Characteristics of gender-focused parliamentary bodies

Feminist indicators

Possible constraints

Initiated by feminist critical actors

Requirement for authorisation by parliamentary or party authorities

Create space and legitimacy for women-centred deliberation

Deliberation may be curtailed by party interests or by time constraints due to constituency, parliamentary and party responsibilities

Act as gateway for diverse groups of women to access the

Speed of parliamentary process may prevent adequate

legislative process

community participation; resources may be lacking to support participation by vulnerable groups

Apply a gender lens to all legislative proposals; promote specific Lack of technical expertise and support for legislative and gender equality proposals; oversight gender mainstreaming in

budgetary gender analysis; effect of party ideology in inhibiting

government

full analysis of distributive impact of policy

Non-hierarchical and consensus-based organisational style

Avoidance of divisive topics

Presenting an alternative to dominant norms (as a feminist

Difficulty in gaining parliamentary allies

reference group)

Source: Based on Sawer and Turner (2016: 766).

possible to exhibit a full range of feminist organisational values in a specialised parliamentary body, such as a standing committee, thanks to standing orders and the need to conform to existing practices. Nonetheless, particularly if there is adequate technical support, such committees can play a crucial role in ensuring a gender lens is applied to legislative proposals, as well as to policy and programme delivery. One obstacle to the contribution of GFPBs to gender mainstreaming is the strength of partisan loyalties and suspicion of women cooperating across party lines to advance equality agendas. Where there are strongly entrenched party systems combined with majoritarian political cultures, the room for collaborative work may be narrowed. Hence, the significance of single-party women’s caucuses in these countries, which, as we have seen, are found predominantly in centre left parties. Despite the difficulties of working across party lines, significant collaboration has taken place between parliamentary women on issues such as women’s health and violence against women, where issues of redistribution are less at stake. Another obstacle to the effective operation of GFPBs can be lack of adequate resources. Resources required can include expert technical support for the application of a gender lens to legislative or budgetary proposals as well as administrative support. Such support may come from inside the parliament, be funded by international donors or be provided by NGOs, as is often the case for parliamentary groups. But one of the most important resources is time. Parliamentarians are already juggling the demands of parliamentary, party and constituency work, let alone family responsibilities. Consulting with and responding to diverse equality-seeking groups in order to promote gender equality may require time-consuming processes at odds with the speed of much parliamentary activity in the digital age. GFPBs are a relatively recent addition to the universe of feminist governance and one that presents particular challenges. Nonetheless, both scholars and practitioners are helping to locate the place of these bodies in gender equality architecture and their role in promoting more inclusive democracy and more responsive public policy. As noted, the presence of GFPBs, particularly of the more formal type, can be an important signal that parliament itself is taking responsibility for promoting gender equality, rather than leaving it to the efforts of individual women parliamentarians. The institutionalising of gender equality agendas within

Specialised parliamentary bodies  159 parliaments has assumed an additional strategic importance in light of populist movements contesting these agendas. Research into what makes such specialised bodies sustainable will be of considerable relevance to their future, whether in their current form or some form not yet visible. Like other feminist governance research, it contributes knowledge that is co-produced and has immediate relevance to policy and practice in the building of more just political institutions.

NOTE 1. These include studies of the FEMM Committee of the European Parliament (Ahrens, 2016, 2017), the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women (Grace, 2016), the Parliamentary Women’s Delegations in France (Green, 2016) and the Danish Committee on Gender Equality (Harder, 2017).

REFERENCES Adams, Melinda J., John A. Scherpereel and Kristin N. Wylie (2019) ‘The Adoption of Women’s Legislative Caucuses Worldwide’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 21(2): 249–70. Adams, Melinda and Kristin Wylie (2020) ‘Transnational Organizing, the Boosting Effect, and Women’s Legislative Caucuses in Africa’, Politics, Groups, and Identities 8(3): 615–26. Ahrens, Petra (2016) ‘The Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality in the European Parliament: Taking Advantage of Institutional Power Play’, Parliamentary Affairs 69(4): 778–93. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​pa/​gsw005. Ahrens, Petra (2017) ‘Assessing the Impact of Parliamentary Design: The Case of the Danish Gender Equality Committee’, Scandinavian Political Studies 40(4): 434–56. Allen, Peter and Sarah Childs (2019) ‘The Grit in the Oyster? Women’s Parliamentary Organizations and the Substantive Representation of Women’, Political Studies 67(3): 618–38. Andrew, Merrindahl (2013) ‘The Institutional Harvest: Women’s Services and Women’s Policy Agencies’. In Sarah Maddison and Marian Sawer (eds), The Women’s Movement in Protest, Institutions and the Internet: Australia in Transnational Perspective, London: Routledge, 87–104. Celis, Karen, Sarah Childs and Jennifer Curtin (2016) ‘Specialised Parliamentary Bodies and the Quality of Women’s Substantive Representation: A Comparative Analysis of Belgium, United Kingdom and New Zealand’, Parliamentary Affairs 69(4): 812–29. Chaney, Paul (2012) ‘Critical Actors vs. Critical Mass: The Substantive Representation of Women in the Scottish Parliament’, British Journal of Politics & International Relations 14(3): 441–57. Chiva, Cristina (2017) ‘Hostages to Fortune? Group Representation in the Committee Systems of Post-Communist Legislatures’, paper presented to the Fourth European Conference on Politics and Gender, Lausanne, 8–10 June. Costa, Monica (2016) ‘Gender-Focused Institutions in International Parliamentary Bodies: The Case of the Women’s Caucus of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Portuguese-Speaking Countries’, Parliamentary Affairs 69(4): 748–62. Costa, Monica, Marian Sawer and Rhonda Sharp (2013) ‘Women Acting for Women: Gender-Responsive Budgeting in Timor-Leste’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 15(3): 333–52. Freidenvall, Lenita and Josefina Erikson (2020) ‘The Speaker’s Gender Equality Group in the Swedish Parliament – a Toothless Tiger? Politics, Groups, and Identities 8(3): 627–36. Gonzalez, Keila and Kristen Sample (2010) One Size Does not Fit All: Lessons Learned from Legislative Gender Commissions and Caucuses, Lima: International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) and National Democratic Institute (NDI) for International Affairs. Grace, Joan (2016) ‘Presence and Purpose in the Canadian House of Commons: The Standing Committee on the Status of Women’, Parliamentary Affairs 69(4): 830–44.

160  Handbook of feminist governance Green, Manda (2016) ‘The Parliamentary Women’s Delegation in France: Making Women’s Voices Heard?’, Parliamentary Affairs 69(4): 860–75. Harder, Mette Marie (2017) ‘Assessing the Impact of Parliamentary Design: The Case of the Danish Committee on Gender Equality’, Scandinavian Political Studies 40(4): 434–56. Holli, Anne Maria and Mette Marie Staehr Harder (2016) ‘Towards a Dual Approach: Comparing the Effects of Parliamentary Committees on Gender Equality in Denmark and Finland’, Parliamentary Affairs 69(4): 794–811. IPU [Inter-Parliamentary Union] (2013) Guidelines for Women’s Caucuses, Geneva: IPU. http://​archive​ .ipu​.org/​pdf/​publications/​caucus​-e​.pdf. Jahan, Rounaq (2010) Strengthening National Mechanisms of Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women: A Global Synthesis Study, New York: UN Division for the Advancement of Women. http://​ www​.un​.org/​womenwatch/​daw/​T​echnicalCo​operation/​tcprog​_strengthening​.htm. Johnson, Niki and Cecilia Josefsson (2016) ‘A New Way of Doing Politics? Cross-Party Women’s Caucuses in Uganda and Uruguay’, Parliamentary Affairs 69(4): 845–59. Kantola, Johanna (2010) Gender and the European Union, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kolthoff, Kristi (2007) ‘The European Women’s Lobby’. In IPU, The Role of Parliamentary Committees in Mainstreaming Gender and Promoting the Status of Women, Geneva: IPU, 94–6. Mackay, Fiona (2014) ‘Nested Newness, Institutional Innovation and the Gendered Limits of Change’, Politics & Gender 10(4): 549–71. Mahoney, Anna and Christopher J. Clark (2019) ‘When and Where Do Women’s Legislative Caucuses Emerge?’, Politics & Gender 15(4): 671–94. OECD (2014) Women, Government and Policy Making in OECD Countries: Fostering Diversity for Inclusive Growth, Paris: OECD Publishing. OECD (2018) OECD Toolkit for Mainstreaming and Implementing Gender Equality, Paris: OECD. https://​www​.oecd​.org/​gov/​toolkit​-for​-mainstreaming​-and​-implementing​-gender​-equality​.pdf. Palmieri, Sonia (2011) ‘Setting up Dedicated Gender Mainstreaming Infrastructure’. In Sonia Palmieri, Gender-Sensitive Parliaments: A Global Review of Good Practice, Geneva: IPU, 39–60. Palmieri, Sonia (2013) A Comparative Study of Structures for Women MPs: Women’s Parliamentary Bodies in the OSCE Region, Warsaw: OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR). https://​tandis​.odihr​.pl/​bitstream/​20​.500​.12389/​21680/​1/​07764​.pdf. Palmieri, Sonia (2020) ‘Finding a Space for Women’s Intersectionality? A Review of Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians’, Politics, Groups, and Identities 8(3): 637–47. Sawer, Marian (2012) ‘What Makes the Substantive Representation of Women Possible in a Westminster Parliament? The Case of RU486 in Australia’, International Political Science Review 33(3): 320–35. Sawer, Marian (2015) ‘Beyond Numbers: The Role of Specialised Parliamentary Bodies in Promoting Gender Equality’, Australasian Parliamentary Review 30(1): 105–22. https://​www​.aspg​.org​.au/​wp​ -content/​uploads/​2017/​08/​APR​-2015​-06​-WINTER​_FA​_web​.pdf. Sawer, Marian, Lenita Freidenvall and Sonia Palmieri (2013) ‘Playing their Part? Parliamentary Institutions and Gender Mainstreaming’, paper presented to the Third European Conference on Politics and Gender, Barcelona. https://​papers​.ssrn​.com/​sol3/​papers​.cfm​?abstract​_id​=​2488867. Sawer, Marian and Alicia Turner (2016) ‘Specialised Parliamentary Bodies: Their Role and Relevance to Women’s Movement Repertoire’, Parliamentary Affairs 69(4): 763–77. Steele, Jackie (2002) ‘The Liberal Women’s Caucus’, Canadian Parliamentary Review Summer: 13–19. Woodward, Alison (2003) ‘Building Velvet Triangles: Gender and Informal Governance’. In Thomas Christiansen and Simona Piattoni (eds), Informal Governance in the European Union, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 76–93.

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

INTRODUCTION Contemporary institutions of feminist governance have gradually evolved since the 1970s, including initiatives to strengthen gender equality and women’s inclusion and empowerment within elected local governments, regional assemblies and national parliaments. Gender equality has become a central goal of national governments and international organisations around the globe. The roots of this demand extend back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, which enshrines the equal rights of men and women, including the right to participate in government. A series of other documents signed by United Nations (UN) member states over the years – including the World Plan of Action in Mexico City in 1975 the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in 1979, and the Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies in 1985 – resulted in a landmark commitment in the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, signed by all member states at the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women, to a target of gender balance in decision-making positions.1 The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (‘Rio+20’) renewed member states’ commitment to achieving gender equality for women and girls, where the effective participation of women is seen as critical for achieving all other aspects of sustainable development. In Goal 5, the Sustainable Development Goals recognise gender equality as a fundamental right in itself, and instrumentally valuable as a necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world. Facilitating access by women to elected office is an important goal in and of itself, but also central to concepts of feminist governance, as a way of transforming institutions, laws and practices. Eliminating barriers to the election of more women doesn’t guarantee that this will necessarily advance feminist ideals and policies. There are also important questions about which women are successful and whether there is inclusion by race and ethnicity, sexuality and gender identity, class and caste. But ensuring that governments reflect the diversity of the societies they represent guarantees a balanced perspective which enables an inclusive approach to policymaking and service delivery. As the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) emphasises: ‘Gender diversity in public institutions is particularly crucial, given that these decision-making bodies create the rules that affect people’s rights, behaviours and life choices.’2 Despite commitments to women’s empowerment and gender equality, and considerable progress over the years, in many countries these goals have often fallen short in practice. The data tells us that women are underrepresented at all levels of decision-making and most countries today fall short of the ‘gender balance’ target established by the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action. Figure 13.1 illustrates the trends in descriptive representation during the last century, measured in parliaments by major global region. The figure shows the growing inclusion of women after the end of the Second World War, a process accelerating from the 1970s onwards in Latin America and Western Europe, North America and Australasia, followed by more recent progress from the early 1990s in many other parts of the globe. 161

162  Handbook of feminist governance By 2020, the global share of women in national parliaments (single/lower house) was 25 per cent, up from 11.6 per cent in 1995. Data from 133 countries and areas show a higher share of women in local government, at 36.3 per cent as of 1 January 2020. Only 13 per cent of countries have reached gender balance (40 per cent or more) in national parliaments, while 15 per cent have achieved it in local government. Figure 13.1 indicates steady progress towards achieving gender equality in elected office in many regions, but not all, since the Beijing Declaration.3 Women have also made gains in parliamentary leadership roles since the Beijing Declaration; for example, the proportion of women speakers has doubled from 10.5 per cent in 1995 to 20.5 per cent today.4 At the same time, progress worldwide remains uneven; for example, several national parliaments continue to lag behind with 5 per cent or even fewer women representatives, while even today a few states have no women in parliament. As Figure 13.1 illustrates vividly in the cases of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, there can also be sharp reversals, caused in these countries by the fall of the Soviet Union and the initial abandonment of legal gender quotas for parliaments, before a gradual recovery in the region.5

Note: The percentage (%) of the lower (or unicameral) chamber of the national legislature who are female. Source: Varieties of Democracy V10.0 (July 2020). https://​www​.v​-dem​.net/​dsarchive​.html.

Figure 13.1

A century of women in parliament

What more can be done? The Beijing Platform for Action suggests that the target of equal representation might only be achieved through greater use of positive action in candidate selection.6 Today, as illustrated in Figure 13.2, many regions have adopted this strategy and around 130 countries have implemented constitutional, legal or party gender quotas specifying the minimum proportion of women candidates and/or elected officials.7 Scientific knowledge about the effectiveness of these policies has expanded (Dahlerup, 2006; Krook, 2009). The Platform for Action did not solely focus on these policies as a solution, however. It also highlighted a range of other measures, like ‘career planning, tracking, mentoring, coaching, training, and retraining’ for women and ‘public debate on the new roles of men and women in society and in the family’.8

Promoting gender equality in elected office  163

Note: Is there a national-level gender quota for the lower (or unicameral) chamber of the legislature? National-level quotas either reserve some seats for women in the legislature (as a whole or per district) or mandate through statutory law that all political parties must nominate a certain percentage of female candidates or candidates considered for nomination. Source: Varieties of Democracy V10.0 (July 2020). https://​www​.v​-dem​.net/​dsarchive​.html.

Figure 13.2

A century of gender quota laws

The Platform for Action recognised that quotas alone may not suffice to achieve gender equality in elected office. There is also the need for programmes expanding the pool of potential female candidates, supporting women’s legislative capacities and promoting broader transformation in public views towards women in politics (cf. Franceschet et al., 2012). Moreover, formal quotas may not be an option in all states and political parties, due to institutional barriers and ideological objections (Krook et al., 2009). Around one third of UN member states have not yet adopted gender quotas.9 Further, poorly designed policies can prove ineffective in achieving their stated goals (Hoodfar and Tajali, 2011; Jones, 2009). In these cases, alternative strategies are required. In contrast to the extensive literature on quotas, however, non-quota measures have been subject to less systematic research. Promoting a more comprehensive approach, this chapter draws on theories of political recruitment and the public/private divide to highlight ongoing challenges to change. The first section conceptualises a range of policy solutions for overcoming women’s exclusion. The second presents examples of each type of intervention by civil society, political parties, parliaments and the state. The sheer variety of these measures reveals a wide menu of options for promoting women in politics, while also underscoring the need for a multifaceted approach to tackle the diverse obstacles to women’s political inclusion. Many initiatives are ‘downstream’ projects, however, rather than being upscaled to encompass many contexts and societies. The conclusion suggests that future work is needed to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of these various strategies and their broader impact on feminist governance.

164  Handbook of feminist governance

PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS: A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Devising effective strategies for change requires beginning with an analysis of the status quo, illuminating what must be done. There are multiple interpretations as to why women are underrepresented in political life. These views can be reconciled when political recruitment is theorised as a multi-stage process. Models of Political Recruitment The political recruitment process is most commonly conceptualised as a sequential model (Figure 13.3) progressing from (1) activists eligible to run for office; (2) those who aspire to run for office; (3) those nominated to run for office; (4) those elected to office; and (5) women’s empowerment. If no barriers are at work, the characteristics of individuals at each stage of the ladder should be similar (Norris, 1997). The transition from stage 1 to stage 2 concerns the supply of available aspirants, the move from stage 2 to stage 3 reflects the demand for certain types of candidates, and the shift from stage 3 to stages 4 and 5 involves the outcome of elections (Norris and Lovenduski, 1993). This model sparked debates as to whether women’s underrepresentation stems primarily from gender differences in ambition that cause fewer women than men to consider running for political office, biases in the recruitment practices and preferences of gatekeepers, or institutional failures in elections (Ashe and Stewart, 2012; Kantola, 2019; Lawless and Fox, 2005; Norris and Lovenduski, 1993).

Figure 13.3

The recruitment process

Persistent inequalities indicate that ‘sex’, biological differences between women and men, and ‘gender’, the social meanings given to these differences, introduce important distortions. Gender roles in many societies lead women to have fewer resources of time and money and lower levels of political ambition (Lawless and Fox, 2005; Norris and Lovenduski, 1993).

Promoting gender equality in elected office  165 Similarly, selectors may perceive female aspirants as less competent or to pass them over for selection due to concerns about voter bias. Policy Interventions The political recruitment model suggests three key transition moments: from activist to aspirant, from aspirant to candidate, and from candidate to elected official. Stages of recruitment can be matched to various interventions, illustrated in Figure 13.1, permitting the elaboration of strategies as well as comparisons of their goals and projected effects. The activist to aspirant moment requires women to believe that they have the qualifications and resources to run for office. A key barrier is overcoming perceptions that women do not belong in politics, both among gatekeepers and among activists. Awareness-raising campaigns and monitoring can help by highlighting the exclusion of women and how women contribute to politics. Civil society actors are well placed to organise such efforts, but these may also benefit from financial and moral support from the state. A related tactic by parliaments is symbolic action within political institutions recognising the roles that women play in political life. Reforms to legislative working conditions can make politics more ‘women-friendly’ by suggesting that women’s participation is valued. Finally, laws to punish violence against women in politics may be essential, when their personal security is at risk. A second obstacle facing aspirants concerns women’s self-confidence in pursuing a political career. Civil society organisations and political parties have the most to contribute in this respect. The first task is to identify women who might be candidates. This can be done via various kinds of recruitment and outreach initiatives, assembling lists of names through personal contacts, group mailings or even online suggestion boxes. Party rules and procedures can also require gatekeepers to expand their recruitment efforts, for example by specifying that a certain minimum number of women have to be considered for nomination. The next step is to cultivate the skills, knowledge and connections these women might need in order to wage a political campaign, in turn inspiring confidence in their own abilities to stand as candidates. These goals are best served through capacity development programmes for women, which might also include a mentoring component. Together, these various ‘transition 1’ strategies can enhance the supply of female candidates, undermining dynamics of personal socialisation and public prejudice to produce a more supportive environment for women to pursue a career in politics. Interventions at the aspirant to candidate stage, in contrast, seek to compel gatekeepers – most often, party elites – to revise their implicit or explicit biases against potential female candidates. Electoral gender quotas operate primarily at this moment in the recruitment process. In countries with reserved seats, parties have an incentive to put forward female candidates in order to maximise their seat allotment in political assemblies. In the case of quotas applying to the number of candidates, parties have more leeway to comply with quota regulations (Krook, 2009; Murray et al., 2012). An important obstacle, as noted above, is that elites may believe that women are not viable candidates. A number of strategies can help combat this perception. Within the party, soft targets, internal quotas and women’s sections can provide leadership opportunities crucial to accumulating political experience. State actors can also play a significant role when parties are reluctant, by using party funding regulations to create incentives or impose sanctions encouraging parties to include women. These ‘transition 2’ measures address

166  Handbook of feminist governance the demand for female candidates, employing both direct and indirect strategies to combat outdated beliefs about women being ineffective or unqualified candidates. Lastly, the transition from candidate to elected official involves ensuring that women have the resources and support to win. Access to sufficient finance is often critical to success. For individual candidates, special funding opportunities may be available from their own parties. Alternatively, civil society groups may organise fundraising networks to collect and distribute money to female candidates to increase the success rates of their campaigns. The regulation of party funding can also contribute, albeit in a more indirect manner, by tying public financing to the election – and not just the selection – of women. A second way that states can intervene is by imposing placement mandates on quota policies. As the research literature observes, simply nominating more women is no guarantee that greater numbers of women will be elected. What matters is whether women are nominated to ‘winnable’ districts or positions on party lists (Jones, 2009; Krook, 2009). Once women are elected, parliaments can introduce or support provisions to assist women in being effective legislators, such as women’s caucuses and gender-specific research and training. ‘Transition 3’ strategies thus augment the effects of demand-side initiatives, while also reinforcing supply-side programmes to empower women politically.

ACTORS AND AIMS: CATEGORISING STRATEGIES Disaggregating the recruitment process opens up a host of creative solutions to overcome the underrepresentation of women in political life. Civil Society Actors Civil society groups have engaged in awareness-raising and training of potential female candidates, as well as fundraising. Raising awareness: One strategy seeks to reshape public opinion towards women in politics. Changing traditional gender stereotypes may increase the number of women considering a political career, as well as altering how voters and political parties view female candidates. Strategies include media-based campaigns, as well as publishing data to monitor women’s exclusion. Media campaigns are quite varied. In the Czech Republic, for example, a poster campaign was sponsored by the group Fórum 50% in the run-up to the 2006 elections. The group placed posters in the Prague subway and street network featuring a long row of ties and the caption: ‘Do you really have a choice?’ The message implied that while there were some differences among men in politics, there was actually little true ‘choice’ among candidates – who were still almost exclusively men. Excluding women therefore undermined democracy by restricting the options available to voters.10 Data monitoring can also be a powerful tool. Evidence from university research centres,11 as well as international organisations like the Inter-Parliamentary Union,12 have been instrumental in raising awareness of the extent of women’s exclusion – as well as highlighting major gains. Data disaggregated to the party level can ‘name and shame’ those that nominate few women, damaging a party’s reputation and possibly its electoral success.

Promoting gender equality in elected office  167 Recruitment initiatives: A necessary first step towards greater gender equality in elected office is to identify and encourage women to run for office. Recruitment initiatives organised by civil society organisations are particularly well developed in the United States, where the majoritarian electoral system, combined with ideological hostility to gender quotas, make it difficult to achieve sudden increases in women’s political representation. A campaign along these lines is the 2012 Project, a non-partisan campaign initiated by the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.13 Women interested in being candidates were connected to leadership institutes, think tanks, training programmes and fundraising networks designed to help them succeed. Training programmes: Capacity-building initiatives have developed exponentially since the 1980s, when only a few programmes existed worldwide. Such programmes are now run by non-partisan networks, university centres and even international organisations. Networks like the 300 Group in the United Kingdom (UK) were based on the realisation that women often did not know where to start when pursuing a nomination for office.14 In the United States (US), many of these programmes are based at universities.15 More internationally grounded, the Women in Public Service Project (WPSP) seeks to build a new generation of global female leaders.16 Fundraising networks: These initiatives seek to ensure that women have the financial resources to wage a successful campaign. Perhaps the most well-known programme is EMILY’s List, a group founded in 1985 in the US which solicits campaign contributions from supporters across the country for selected women candidates.17 The group claims to have trained over 9,000 women and helped elect over 1,400 women to federal, state and local office.18 Similar fundraising groups have been established in Australia, the UK and Italy. Political Parties Political parties are more heavily involved in ‘transition 2’ tactics, due to their central role in selecting candidates (UNDP-NDI, 2011). Gender quotas: Reforming their nomination procedures, many socialist and social democratic parties globally have amended their statutes to establish gender quotas (Kittilson, 2006; Krook, 2009). A major reason for the rise in the proportion of women in parliament has been the implementation of formal gender quota laws, especially those with thresholds defining the minimum number of women candidates, with legal sanctions for non-compliance and agencies overseeing their implementation, and with gender-ranked lists of candidates alternating male and female nominees. South American countries adopted several early measures but the use of legal gender quotas expanded rapidly worldwide after Beijing. Soft targets: Established democracies in Western Europe, North America and Australasia have been reluctant to enact quota laws, in part because many parties in these countries had adopted gender quotas in their internal rules governing the candidate nomination process. Other parties use internal regulations and procedures that seek to encourage, but do not require, the selection of more female candidates (Krook et al., 2009). In New Zealand, party quotas using all-women shortlists were proposed by the leader of the NZ Labour Party following the adoption of a new electoral law in 1993. This idea was rejected but the party adopted a target in late 2013 (Curtin, 2017). Women’s sections: Women’s sections have traditionally served the party’s broader interests, such as helping fundraise and canvass voters. Yet, over time, these have also come to serve

168  Handbook of feminist governance as a platform for women inside parties (Lovenduski and Norris, 1993), contributing to policy development, coordinating the activities of female party members and providing support and training to newly elected female office-holders – as well as supporting a more general transformation within the party by sensitising party members, male and female, to the importance of gender equality (UNDP-NDI, 2011: 17). Internal leadership quotas: Quotas for internal party bodies, such as on party governing boards or national executive committees, expand women in party leadership. These policies are sorely needed: a joint report by the United Nations Development Programme and the National Democratic Institute estimated that women were between 40 and 50 per cent of party members globally, but occupied only 10 per cent of party leadership positions (UNDP-NDI, 2011: 15). Internal quotas can present women with leadership opportunities and help them gain important experience. Recruitment initiatives: Women’s sections and party leaders have also devised new ways of recruiting women candidates. Prior to the adoption of formal quotas in Sweden, women’s sections inside the major parties assembled databases containing the names and curriculum vitae of potential female candidates, which could be presented to party officials as they sought to find women to put on their lists (Wistrand, 1981). Capacity-building programmes: Programmes can be offered to women currently running for office, as well as to those who might consider doing so in the future, focusing on topics like fostering motivation, improving public speaking and demystifying the campaign process. While this strategy is most commonly pursued by civil society actors, one party-based initiative is Women2Win in the British Conservative Party. The group seeks to promote ‘the brightest and best women the party has to offer’ through support, advice and training in public speaking and media skills.19 In El Salvador, the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional sends money from the party budget to the National Ministry for Women, which uses it for national assemblies for party women, training and consultations with women (Sidhu and Meena, 2007: 20). Campaign funding: Financial support can help overcome perceptions that women are not viable candidates, as well as compensate for the fact that women often lack access to the formal and informal networks that supply campaign funds. Women may also have expenses not incurred by men, for example to help with household tasks, child care or extra security (Sidhu and Meena, 2007: 10–11). One approach is to create a special internal party fund for women’s campaigns, while another is to provide subsidies of one kind or another to female candidates. A party fund within the Liberal Party in Canada assists women with campaign costs (UNDP-NDI, 2011: 28). Party subsidies seek to overcome one of the major financial barriers to women’s participation, especially the need to pay a deposit in order to register a candidacy. In Sierra Leone, several parties – including the main opposition party – have reduced or waived nomination fees for women. Similarly, the ruling People’s Democratic Party in Nigeria introduced a waiver of the mandatory registration fees for women aspiring to any elective post on the party label.20 Parliamentary Actors Legislatures can signal that doors are open to women and thus make politics a more attractive career for women. Once women have moved from candidate to elected official, parliaments

Promoting gender equality in elected office  169 can enhance their capacities by providing resources, capacities and skills training to help them be more effective legislators. Images: Parliaments worldwide are saturated with practices that can reinforce as well as challenge social hierarchies.21 Certain legislatures, for instance, provide a separate list of female members, highlighting women in parliament.22 Some websites showcase events related to gender equality, like anniversary celebrations of women’s right to vote and the passage of women-friendly legislation (Palmieri, 2011). In France, a special section of the parliamentary website was added on the history of women in politics.23 Working conditions: According to a global survey of MPs, many women perceive the traditional working practices of parliaments as problematic (Ballington, 2008), highlighting ‘work–life balance’ issues as the greatest challenge when serving in parliament (Palmieri, 2011: 97). One problem concerns the timing of sittings. Many chambers work late into the night, precluding MPs from being home with their families. Recognising this was a problem, several legislatures have established new rules. In Denmark, no votes may take place after 7 p.m., while in Sweden evening votes are avoided as much as possible. Additionally, voting is generally not done on Mondays or Fridays. Another family-friendly provision involves aligning the parliamentary schedule with the school calendar, which has now been done in nearly 40 per cent of parliaments (Palmieri, 2011: 92). Debates over child care and breastfeeding have become more common in recent years, with the election of greater numbers of younger women. The response has been uneven. In Germany, child care centres cater to staff, but not members themselves, while in Sweden, all MPs are entitled to use the centre. In Scotland, child care facilities are available to members and visitors from the public, viewed as ‘an important part of creating an open and accessible Parliament’.24 Research and capacity-building: Some legislatures have devised new ways to support women in parliament once they are elected, both individually and as a group. While some legislatures offer brief induction sessions for newly elected members, resources for deeper capacity-building may be incomplete – especially for those without informal mentors. To combat this problem, a Research Centre for Women’s Advancement and Gender Equality was established in Mexico in 2005 to provide specialised technical support and analytical information services. While the centre works with both men and women, with the aim of promoting gender equality policies,25 in practice it works largely with female deputies to craft bills. Women’s caucuses: Women’s caucuses can support women’s legislative work, bring women together across partisan lines and serve as a means to connect with actors in civil society (Archenti and Johnson, 2006). They can range from more formal organisations, with permanent offices and objectives, to more informal groups, with meetings convened as necessary, to non-formal gatherings. The degree of cooperation often depends on the strength of party politics, with women being less likely to come together where partisan divides are strong. A comprehensive model is the Forum of Rwandan Women Parliamentarians, established during the transitional assembly in 1996. All female members in both houses of parliament are included. Formally recognised, with its own office, the Forum engages in advocacy on behalf of women, identifying legislative priorities and reviewing legislation to ensure that it is gender-sensitive. To this end, the caucus coordinates with the Gender and Family Promotion Committee inside parliament, as well as with women’s groups in civil society (Palmieri, 2011: 46). At the same time, it also seeks to build up the capacity of members through training workshops, administrative assistance and expert technical advice.26

170  Handbook of feminist governance State Actors Finally, state actors engage primarily by seeking to influence how political parties approach the nomination and capacity-building of female candidates. The state can address aspirant-to-candidate dynamics by encouraging parties to select more women through positive and negative incentives linked to party funding regulations and publicly provided campaign support. Actors at this level can also enhance the likelihood that female candidates will be elected through regulations tying public finance to women’s election, not just their nomination, and by implementing new laws to combat violence against female politicians. These various strategies can, in turn, encourage women to run for office due to increased resources and security for their campaigns. Party funding: In countries where parties are publicly funded, regulating how these funds are used can be an effective way of promoting women’s participation.27 Candidate-centred regulations present incentives for parties to nominate or elect greater numbers of women, with funding being conditional on how many women are put forward by a given party. Parties may lose a share of funding if they do not nominate a certain percentage of female candidates, as in France where state subsidies are reduced by 75 per cent of the difference between the proportions of women and men if these exceed more than 2 percentage points, and in Ireland, where party funding is reduced by 50 per cent if parties do not nominate at least 30 per cent women.28 In other countries, parties are rewarded for nominating women. In Ethiopia, a required percentage is not specified, but support is determined according to how many women are nominated by each party. In Georgia and Italy, rewards are more explicitly enumerated. In Georgia, a party will receive an additional 10 per cent of the funds it is entitled to if there are at least 20 per cent candidates of a different sex per group of 10 candidates. In Italy, the proportion of state funding lost by parties that do not respect the legislative quota for European Parliament election is, in turn, distributed as a bonus to parties that do comply. In states as diverse as Bolivia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Colombia, Mali and Niger, between 5 and 10 per cent of state funding is allocated to parties based on their share of women elected, encouraging parties to elect as many women as possible. In other countries, the regulation is more explicitly formulated as a bonus. Laws can also require that parties earmark a certain percentage of their public funding for activities that contribute to capacity-building for women. Each party in Mexico, for instance, must devote 2 per cent of their annual public funding to the training, promotion and development of women’s leadership skills. In Panama, at least 10 per cent of the 25 per cent of party funding dedicated to civic and political education activities must be channelled solely towards the training of women. Campaign support: In a global survey of 300 MPs, lack of finances emerged as one of the most significant factors deterring women from entering politics (Ballington, 2008: 18). States can intervene by indirect funding of political campaigns. In Timor-Leste, more broadcast media time is given to parties that place women in high positions on their party lists, which in past elections has had the effect of encouraging the nomination of women and their visibility during the campaign (Sidhu and Meena, 2007: 31; UNDP-NDI, 2011: 30). In Afghanistan, a 2014 regulation required the state-run media to provide equal facilities to all candidates, including broadcasting and advertising messages free of cost.29 Anti-violence laws: The issue of electoral violence against women running for and/or holding elected office is increasingly recognised. It includes inflicting physical, sexual or psy-

Promoting gender equality in elected office  171 chological harm or suffering intended to deter women’s political participation. Acknowledging this problem, legislators in several Latin American countries, including Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala and Mexico, have sought to enact laws to prevent and punish all forms of persecution, harassment and violence against women in politics (Salguero Carrillo, 2009). In 2012, Bolivian legislators approved the ground-breaking Law against Harassment and Political Violence against Women. This was in response to demands from women’s organisations who pointed out that, over the previous eight years, police had received more than 4,000 complaints of harassment from women participating in politics – a figure that most likely does not reflect the full extent of the problem, given that many incidents are not reported.30

CONCLUSIONS: ELECTORAL QUOTAS AND BEYOND Many contemporary efforts to promote gender equality in elected office have revolved around gender quotas as one way to strengthen feminist governance. Yet women leaders have different interests, values and concerns, as well as coming from diverse political parties, racial and ethnic groups, and socioeconomic sectors. Moreover, backbench representatives often have limited capacity to change either parliamentary procedures or policy outcomes. As a result, more inclusive legislative bodies reflecting principles of gender equality do not mean that feminist concerns in the electorate will be reflected automatically in processes of governance. Nevertheless, the substantial body of research summarised in this Handbook indicates that women in elected office have the capacity to advance feminist governance (cf. Bacchi, 1999; Franceschet et al., 2012). While quotas constitute a crucial mechanism for achieving gender equality, they do not exhaust the list of options available for recasting the political recruitment process. The diversity of supplementary measures – implemented by civil society groups, political parties, parliaments and state agencies – suggests a broad array of creative solutions. In states with quotas, additional strategies may expand the pool of potential candidates and promote a broader transformation in public views towards women in politics. In those without quotas, other strategies present an alternative path to women’s political integration. Evidence from around the world suggests that the main barriers to women’s increased election are political, rather than social, economic or cultural (Kittilson, 2006; Krook, 2010). Dramatic changes are thus not likely to occur without deliberate interventions to increase the number of viable female candidates, empowering women in governance.

NOTES 1. Par. 182, http://​www​.un​.org/​womenwatch/​daw/​beijing/​fwcwn​.html. 2. https://​www​.oecd​.org/​gov/​women​-in​-government​.htm. 3. Inter-Parliamentary Union (2020) Women in Parliament: 1995–2020: 25 Years in Review. https://​ www​.ipu​.org/​resources/​publications/​reports/​2020​-03/​women​-in​-parliament​-1995​-2020​-25​-years​ -in​-review. 4. IPU. http://​archive​.ipu​.org/​wmn​-e/​speakers​.htm. 5. Pippa Norris and Mona Lena Krook (2014) Handbook on Promoting Women’s Participation in Political Parties, Warsaw: OSCE. http://​www​.osce​.org/​odihr/​120877. 6. Par. 184, 189, 192, 194. http://​www​.un​.org/​womenwatch/​daw/​beijing/​fwcwn​.html. 7. For the lists of countries, see http://​www​.quotaproject​.org; https://​www​.idea​.int/​data​-tools/​data/​ gender​-quotas/​country​-overview.

172  Handbook of feminist governance 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Par. 194. http://​www​.un​.org/​womenwatch/​daw/​beijing/​fwcwn​.html. For the lists of countries, see http://​www​.quotaproject​.org; https://​www​.idea​.int/​data​-tools/​data/​ gender​-quotas/​country​-overview. http://​www​.5050democracy​.eu/​. See, for example, http://​www​.cawp​.rutgers​.edu/​fast​_facts/​index​.php. http://​www​.ipu​.org/​wmn​-e/​classif​.htm and http://​www​.ipu​.org/​wmn​-e/​classif​-arc​.htm. http://​www​.cawp​.rutgers​.edu/​education​_training/​2012Project/​index​.php. Personal interview with Lesley Abdela, founder of the 300 Group. For a state-by-state list, see http://​www​.cawp​.rutgers​.edu/​education​_training/​trainingresources/​ index​.php. http://​womeninpublicservice​.org/​. http://​www​.emilyslist​.org. http://​emilyslist​.org/​who/​we​_are​_emily/​. http://​www​.women2win​.com. Nigeria Report to the UN CEDAW Committee, April 2003, p. 19. http://​www2​.warwick​.ac​.uk/​fac/​soc/​pais/​research/​gcrp/​. http://​www​.aph​.gov​.au/​About​_Parliament/​Parliamentary​_Departments/​Parliamentary​_Library/​ Parliamentary​_Handbook/​womennow; http://​www​.parliament​.uk/​mps​-lords​-and​-offices/​mps/​; http://​www​.assemblee​-nationale​.fr/​histoire/​femmes/​index​.asp. http://​www​.assemblee​-nationale​.fr/​histoire/​femmes/​citoyennete​_politique​.asp. http://​www​.scottish​.parliament​.uk/​visitandlearn/​12522​.aspx. http://​www3​.diputados​.gob​.mx/​index​.php/​camara/​001​_diputados/​006​_centros​_de​_estudio/​05​ _centro​_de​_estudios​_para​_el​_adelanto​_de​_las​_mujeres​_y​_la​_equidad​_de​_genero/​000d​_que​ _hacemos. http://​www​.rwandaparliament​.gov​.rw/​parliament/​forumrwpf​.aspx. All data is from http://​www​.idea​.int/​political​-finance/​, unless explicitly specified in the text. https://​www​.dfa​.ie/​irish​-consulate/​sydney/​news​-and​-events/​latest​-news/​irelands​-experience​-of​ -parliamentary​-gender​-quotas​.html. http://​aceproject​.org/​epic​-en/​CDCountry​?set​_language​=​en​&​topic​=​ME​&​country​=​AF. http://​www​.unwomen​ . org/​2 012/​0 6/​ b olivia​ -approves​-a ​-landmark ​-law ​ -against​-harassment​-of​ -women​-political​-leaders/​.

REFERENCES Archenti, Nélida and Niki Johnson (2006) ‘Engendering the Legislative Agenda With and Without the Quota’, Sociología, Problemas e Prácticas 52: 133–53. Ashe, Jeanette and Kennedy Stewart (2012) ‘Legislative Recruitment: Using Diagnostic Testing to Explain Underrepresentation’, Party Politics 18(5): 687–707. Bacchi, Carol Lee (1999) Women, Policy, and Politics, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ballington, Julie (2008) Equality in Politics, Geneva: Inter-Parliamentary Union. Curtin, Jennifer (2017) ‘Ardern Vows to Improve Cabinet Gender Balance’, RNZ, 20 October. https://​ www​.rnz​.co​.nz/​news/​political/​342022/​ardern​-vows​-to​-improve​-cabinet​-gender​-balance. Dahlerup, Drude (ed.) (2006) Women, Quotas, and Politics, London: Routledge. Franceschet, Susan, Mona Lena Krook and Jennifer M. Piscopo (eds) (2012) The Impact of Gender Quotas, New York: Oxford University Press. Hoodfar, Homa and Mona Tajali (2011) Electoral Politics: Making Quotas Work for Women, London: Women Living Under Muslim Laws. Jones, Mark P. (2009) ‘Gender Quotas, Electoral Laws, and the Election of Women: Evidence from the Latin American Vanguard’, Comparative Political Studies 42(1): 56–81. Kantola, Johanna (2019) ‘Women’s Organizations of Political Parties: Formal Possibilities, Informal Challenges and Discursive Controversies’, NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 27(1): 4–21.

Promoting gender equality in elected office  173 Kittilson, Miki Caul (2006) Challenging Parties, Changing Parliaments: Women and Elected Office in Contemporary Western Europe, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Krook, Mona Lena (2009) Quotas for Women in Politics, New York: Oxford University Press. Krook, Mona Lena (2010) ‘Studying Political Representation: A Comparative-Gendered Approach’, Perspectives on Politics 8(1): 233–40. Krook, Mona Lena, Joni Lovenduski and Judith Squires (2009) ‘Gender Quotas and Models of Political Citizenship’, British Journal of Political Science 39(4): 781–803. Lawless, Jennifer and Richard L. Fox (2005) It Takes a Candidate: Why Women Don’t Run for Office, New York: Cambridge University Press. Lovenduski, Joni and Pippa Norris (eds) (1993) Gender and Party Politics, London: Sage. Murray, Rainbow, Mona Lena Krook and Katherine A. R. Opello (2012) ‘Why Are Gender Quotas Adopted? Parity and Party Pragmatism in France’, Political Research Quarterly 65(3): 529–43. Norris, Pippa (1997) Passages to Power: Legislative Recruitment in Advanced Democracies, New York: Cambridge University Press. Norris, Pippa and Joni Lovenduski (1993) ‘“If Only More Candidates Came Forward”: Supply-Side Explanations of Candidate Selection in Britain’, British Journal of Political Science 23(3): 373–408. Palmieri, Sonia (2011) Gender-Sensitive Parliaments: A Global Review of Good Practice, Geneva: Inter-Parliamentary Union. Salguero Carrillo, Elizabeth (2009) ‘Political Violence Against Women’, The World of Parliaments: A Review 36. http://​www​.ipu​.org/​news​-e/​wop/​36/​4​.htm. Sidhu, Gretchen Luchsinger and Ruth Meena (2007) Electoral Financing to Advance Women’s Political Participation, New York: United Nations Development Programme. UNDP-NDI (2011) Empowering Women for Stronger Political Parties, New York and Washington, DC: United Nations Development Programme and the National Democratic Institute. Wistrand, Birgitta (1981) Swedish Women on the Move, Stockholm: Swedish Institute.

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

INTRODUCTION The ideal and practice of gender-sensitive parliaments (GSP) is just two decades old. We date the first publication as Gender Sensitizing Commonwealth Parliaments, produced by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA) in 2001. We argue the 2010s publications by the Inter Parliamentary Union (IPU) were critical to GSP’s wider dissemination and uptake. By 2020, GSP was a truly global political phenomenon – an emergent and arguably widely accepted international norm – and we posit, an important and successful case of feminist activism in the field of governance. This is not to say that the world’s parliaments have achieved gender sensitivity. In too many parliaments women lack equal representation, descriptive, substantive and symbolic. Conceived of as workplaces, most elected political institutions remain modelled on the preferences and habits of the male elected representatives and the male parliamentary clerk and officials who built, maintain and continue to overpopulate them. This ‘state of the art’ study offers the first analysis of competing GSP frameworks and toolkits, illuminating how the ideal and practice of GSP has developed over time. We are moreover keen to show how GSP efforts constitute a positive example of iterative dialogue between academics and practitioners, even as these relationships are not always straightforward. Gender insensitive parliaments are characterised by male-dominated membership and leaderships which legitimise male decision-makers and masculinised decision-making; they ignore the differential impacts of policy and legislation across demographic populations; and in privileging and normalising (some) men, they moreover marginalise and fail to represent women. As a norm, GSP articulates a set of expectations, and demands institutional actions to bring about: equality of participation and leadership between women and men; infrastructure provision, working practices and environments that meets women’s needs; a non-discriminatory parliamentary culture, with the elimination of sexism, gendered bullying and sexual harassment; and the substantive representation of women across all the work of parliament, including its legislative and policy outputs. In sum, GSP are inclusive, with women and men sharing genuine power, and with their core business and systems oriented towards the goal of gender equality. Amidst multiple transnational efforts, lessons learned in one country are ‘taken abroad’ and shared via international governmental organisations (IGOs), parliamentary organisations, and individual and organised groups of elected members and officials and clerks. Two illustrations: the ‘Mother’ of the UK Parliament, Harriet Harman MP, recently shared her experience of introducing proxy voting for MPs on ‘baby leave’ with the Canadian parliament; the former Speaker of the New Zealand Parliament, the Rt Hon. David Carter, having held a key role in the IPU executive, played an influential role in implementing family-friendly practices back home (Palmieri and Baker, 2022). There is informal evidence too of inter-parliamentary com174

Gender-sensitive parliaments  175 petition, with, for example, head clerks apparently vying to be the most inclusive institution – ‘we have more gay MPs than you’, or ‘we have gender balance in our executive ranks’.1 With all this activity, it is not surprising that politics and gender scholars, especially those who wish to see political institutions re-gendered/feminised, have also taken a keen interest in GSP. For scholars associated with feminist institutionalism (FI) the relationship is stronger still: as central democratic institutions parliaments have long been of interest to FI because their core functions – representation, oversight, legislation – all contribute to, exacerbate or reinforce, societal gendered conceptions, relations and structures. Academic interests are both conceptual and empirical: not content with simply understanding the extent to which parliaments are gender sensitive, academics have been concerned with nature of the ‘gender’ and ‘sensitive’ components of the GSP approach. And, in some of this work, a clear demarcation between the academic (who studies) and the practitioner (who acts on/in an institution) is blurred, alongside the positive effects and associated tensions that the GSP academic must negotiate as they go about their work. We are, admittedly, professionally (and personally) invested in all this. Palmieri is the author of key 2010s IPU documents, and a cross-over academic/practitioner having worked on GSP at global, regional and national levels; Childs is the author of The Good Parliament Report, the outcome of a secondment to the UK House of Commons and the 2020 CPA GSP Guidelines; and together we co-authored the 2020 UN Women GSP Covid-19 Guidelines. Our grounded GSP experiences permit particular insights into the relationships and power dynamics that arise when advancing GSP regarding (a) the feminist epistemic community and (b) within the non-feminist practitioner community. In reflecting on these experiences, we explore the politics of parliamentary transformation, institutional resistance and opportunities presented by crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic. A key observation is that parliamentary acceptance of the GSP norm depends significantly on institutional culture – which in some cases remains unapologetically masculinised (see Lovenduski, 2005) – and capacity, as well as the extent to which gender-sensitive norms can easily be translated into local contexts.

GENDER-SENSITIVE PARLIAMENTS: A 20-YEAR HISTORY The body of work that constitutes GSP guidance is long-standing. We have only recently come to appreciate that this work dates back to 2001, when the CPA organised a study group to examine ‘conventions and language embedded in Standing Orders that possibly affect behaviour and attitudes towards women’ – quickly widened to explore other ‘aspects of parliamentary life which women find alienating or difficult’. The CPA was clear that across Commonwealth parliaments women were underrepresented on the basis of their gender; that this constituted an unacceptable state of affairs; that women’s greater political participation is a societal ‘good’; and that once present within a parliament, women must gain ‘real’ power. In addition to its formal recommendations and informal suggestions, the 2001 CPA Report spent considerable time discussing the role that the CPA as an external, supranational organisation could and should play in bringing about GSP reforms, alongside identifying internal parliamentary actors and institutions: Women MPs who should highlight the poor behaviour by male MPs, act as role models and directly encourage young women (schoolgirls and university students) to participate in politics; Political parties, who must ‘recognise’ the need to provide

176  Handbook of feminist governance support for women candidates; and a parliament’s Speaker, to ensure a ‘high’ standard of debate. Interestingly, the IPU’s 2011 GSP report was not inspired by the CPA’s work, but rather followed from its own (2006) workshop report on the role of parliamentary committees in mainstreaming gender equality, and its (2008) Equality in Politics survey, which highlighted the need for more research into ‘parliamentary interventions addressing gender inequality and discrimination within their structures, processes and practices, and policies’. Both of these publications were driven by Julie Ballington, who, in her previous role at International IDEA, had steered the second edition of the publication Women in Parliament: Beyond Numbers (2008). Together, these reports acknowledged the importance of women elected representatives’ presence but reoriented the focus towards the conditions under which women might use their numbers ‘to contribute substantively to policy making’. In his foreword to the IPU 2006 report, Anders B. Johnsson – then IPU Secretary General – remarked: ‘ultimately, parliaments must become gender sensitive, and mainstreaming gender equality in committee work and parliamentary outputs is essential for ensuring respect for women’s rights.’ Since the early 2000s, then, GSP approaches have been advanced by a range of organisations, albeit underwritten by a core set of GSP specialists (see Appendix, Table A14.1). In the chronology below, we outline the institutions and authors behind each publication, and summarise their distinctive contributions with respect to GSP definitions and foci, and methodology and method. In reviewing these approaches, our intention is to distil critical, non-negotiable aspects from those less imperative, as well as noting the critical methodologies supporting parliaments’ review of their gender sensitivity. Importantly, we note that this is a comparison of essentially ‘political documents’ produced through compromise among diverse political stakeholders, frequently but not exclusively parliamentarians. Such compromises are often necessary to achieve consensus about what can be done in relation to GSP in a particular case, or at an organisational or international level. As authors of some of these publications, we have had to participate in such negotiations, reflecting the realities of engendering change on the ground, rather than from the perspective of the ivory tower;2 our work has at times been reorganised and reframed to meet alternative politics and priorities.3 Definition and Foci Early GSP approaches – detailed in definitions and recommendations – revolved around women’s participation and leadership. GSP were defined as institutions that ‘remove barriers’ for women (principally as MPs) and that are ‘responsive’ to women’s interests. Not surprisingly, the emphasis of early recommendations lay in redressing significant imbalances in terms of women’s leadership (across political and parliamentary roles); the management of work and family responsibilities; and voice (e.g. through the promotion of cross-party women’s caucuses). A second theme evident in early definitions is the equation of gender sensitivity with ‘efficiency’ and ‘effectiveness’, drawing on neo-institutionalist arguments of improved functionality. Linking gender sensitivity with stronger workplace practice aimed to showcase parliaments as institutions for the ‘modern society’ and to encourage greater ‘buy-in’ among those not yet converted. The modern parliament could leave behind its discriminatory past by adopting gender management tools and restructuring its organograms: instituting affirmative action in selection processes; developing codes of conduct that punished sexist behaviour; creating new mechanisms for policy and legislative influence (e.g. a dedicated committee).

Gender-sensitive parliaments  177 Gender equality was, arguably, an implied benefit of GSP, rather than its ultimate objective. Indeed, the emphasis on ‘structures, processes, methods and work’ assumed that the institutionalisation of gender mainstreaming would circumvent political resistance to gender equality as an institutional objective. Over time, however, GSP iterations and toolkits have more clearly articulated parliament’s responsibility to deliver gender equality. The importance of this shift lies both in the recognition that gender equality should be the ultimate objective of all parliamentary work, and that parliaments are responsible for that outcome. No longer can women MPs, and/or women parliamentary workers be primarily responsible for the labour of feminising their political institutions; such acts even when shared with good men are not sustainable in the long term and indeed may very well face institutional backlash and backsliding from parliamentary and other critics. Taking this opportunity to clarify these elements in a new definition of GSP, we suggest: A GSP values and prioritises gender equality as a social, economic and political objective and reorients and transforms a parliament’s institutional culture, processes and practices, and outputs towards these objectives. What we are suggesting, in other words, is that a ‘missing ingredient’ from earlier GSP work, including our own, has been the recognition of the gender equality-oriented culture required to fuel and entrench gender sensitivity; this results not simply from the institutionalisation of mainstreaming GS processes and practices, even though the institutionalisation of GSP is fundamental. Rather, it is an internally and externally driven understanding and acceptance of the normative principle of gender equality for all, and by all. It is captured, we argue, in the distinction between gender-sensitive parliaments (noun) and gender-sensitising parliaments (verb). From what we have observed to date, cultivating and sustaining such a cultural transformation is far from easy, and requires greater academic and IGO attention to GSP advocacy, conceptualisation, operationalisation, and implementation and review. Methodology and Method Encouraging parliaments to reflect on – and change – their institutional processes, practices and cultures has to date been achieved in various ways. Across IGOs and parliamentary associations there are differences in methodological approaches to GSP activity and support, with some based on quantitative assessment methods, while others take a mixed method approach. The EIGE, for example, developed an online assessment survey, the statistical results of which are published on its website, ranking parliaments from most to least gender sensitive.4 More qualitative approaches, conversely, have been supported in one of two ways: (i) self-assessment, driven by the parliament and supported by an international organisation; or (ii) an audit, conducted by an ‘independent person or group of individuals (such as auditors, researchers or parliamentary development specialists)’ (IPU 2016: 9). For the IPU, the difference in these two processes lies in ‘ownership’: the former being owned by the parliament, while the latter is externally motivated, and in some sense autonomous. Data on audits has not as yet been systematically gathered (Childs, 2016; Verge et al., 2019), although ‘stock-taking and reform-planning’ exercises have been carried out with support from the IPU in Bangladesh (2012), Chile (2012), Colombia (2019), Georgia (2018), Kenya (2016),

178  Handbook of feminist governance Namibia (2018), Rwanda (2012), Serbia (2019), Sweden (2010), Tanzania (2017), Turkey (2012), Uganda (2012) and the United Kingdom (2018).5 Is the audit or the self-assessment preferable? The IPU’s general preference has been to support self-assessments because they facilitate a particular operationalisation of GSP that works ‘with’ a parliament’s history, politics, institutional characteristics and the preferences of its institutional actors. For the IPU, GSP is not a fixed ideal or a prescriptive model; its expectations have, and we would argue should, move with the times, and reflect the particular institutional and indeed wider context. A similar, admittedly inherited, sentiment characterises the approach of the UN Women in their Covid-19 GSP primer and checklist, in which there are procedural outcome goals and questions to ask of institutions rather than a set of objective measures to impose on a parliament. The likelihood of a parliament responding positively to the self-assessment and implementing GSP reforms is, all other things being equal, enhanced, because they are owned and ‘fit’ the case. On the other hand, audits, because of their greater autonomy, may provide for more critical analysis and more radical recommendations. Here, there may be the possibility of advocating for reforms beyond the ‘low hanging fruit’, and to address gender insensitivities that require substantial reform and/or which would normally be avoided because they disadvantage powerful parliamentary actors and vested interests. We remain ultimately agnostic. Determining which approach – audit or self-assessment – constitutes the best option should be determined by a case- and context-specific answer. Most importantly, neither the audit nor the self-assessment denies the value of the gender expert, which is for us absolutely critical to a successful GSP exercise. Without specialist guidance, GSP efforts risk pandering to the prejudices and preferences of parliamentarians. Of note: a number of parliamentary self-assessments supported by the IPU (and other IGOs) have been facilitated by an external actor. Where gender experts are deployed – whether external or ‘in-house’ – audits and self-assessments benefit from an aspiration at least and a ‘shared vision’ of gender sensitivity at best. It must be said, however, that the role of the gender expert differs in self-assessment and audit: if in the former s/he facilitates the parliament’s assessment of gaps and strategies for redress, in the latter, the gender auditor plays a stronger hand in the determination of recommendations to ensure that they meet the standard of local and/or international gender experts.

BUILDING GENDER-SENSITIVE PARLIAMENTS: A FEMINIST ENDEAVOUR? Parliaments do not become gender sensitive on their own. Along with the guidance and methodology outlined above, building GSP requires support – and considerable leadership and persuasion – from international organisations and parliamentary associations, domestic civil society gender practitioners and academics. We now turn to the feminist academic’s role in this process. GSP and the Feminist Academic GSP was at first a practitioner-led activity; only more recently has it become something that academics study and do. Accurate at the general level this statement risks, as already intimated, masking the back-and-forth movement between academia and the field for key GSP

Gender-sensitive parliaments  179 practitioners – not least Palmieri (Box 14.1) – and of failing to recognise the different roles that academics have played in advancing GSP as both an ideal and as a practice, and of the tensions (and reputational risk) that might be associated with these different positions and roles. With no single definition or model of GSP (as the first section of this chapter lays out) the academic working directly with international organisation or parliamentary association will adopt their particular approach and methodology. Whether the academic is commissioned or acting more independently will, moreover, mediate how they approach their work on the ground and publication and other outputs. To what extent can one be critical or revise the approach or particular measures, or mix and match between models? Childs, for example, has shifted in the last five years from GSP to Diversity-Sensitive Parliaments and back to GSP, as if such a move is unproblematic conceptually or practically. Those working with more than one governmental organisation or association over time will need to navigate these differences in definition, models and methodology.

BOX 14.1 BETWEEN ACADEMIA AND THE FIELD In 2010, the IPU chose Palmieri as its GSP project lead, on the basis of her academic and parliamentary experience: she had taught university-level gender politics; investigated the gendered dynamics of Australian parliamentary committees in her doctoral thesis; and had worked for the Australian Department of the House of Representatives. As a consequence, the IPU’s GSP report was informed by a feminist institutionalist understanding of parliament, if not explicitly framed in those terms. Palmieri continued to work with the IPU as a ‘GSP expert’, deployed on short-term missions to the parliaments of Egypt (2016), Fiji (2016), Tanzania (2017), Rwanda (2012) and Uganda (2012), as well as a researcher, designing and leading a new project to capture GSP change in the parliaments of Belgium, Bolivia, Namibia and New Zealand (2018–19). Through other organisations, including the OECD [2016; 2017], OSCE ODIHR [2013; 2015], UNDP [2011; 2012; 2015], UN Women [2014–15; 2020] and the World Bank [2016], Palmieri has engaged with national and regional actors, to encourage GSP understanding and endorsement. These experiences have informed both practice, in the form of new GSP guidance (Childs and Palmieri, 2020), and theory, including conceptualisations of GSP as a research agenda (Palmieri, 2018), and as an emergent international norm (Palmieri and Baker, 2022). In 2015, Childs ‘invited herself’ into the UK House of Commons, prompted by her earlier experiences working behind the scenes towards the establishment of the Women and Equalities Committee (Childs and Challender, 2019). Responding to the feminist desire to transform as well as study the world (Campbell and Childs, 2013), and enabled by a governmental and university impact agenda, Childs received funding that enabled a full-time secondment at Westminster. That she, a ‘known feminist’, was let in reflected the fact that Childs had sufficient academic credentials, and established inter-personal relations on both the political (from 1997) and administrative side of the House (from early 2000s), at a time when a Clerk, who valued academic/parliamentary links, could sign off a pass form. A non-partisan approach, alongside academic books on the two main parties, plus formal (The 2010 Speaker’s Conferencea) and informal (Improving Parliamentb) advisory roles in the House, meant that for key political GSP actors, including the Speaker, Childs’

180  Handbook of feminist governance feminism would be welcome. Formally independent, she was responsible for the content of her Report neither to Mr Speaker nor to the House but to her university; the extent to which claims to be able to ‘change’ the institution as a consequence of the secondment would be realised. Such accountability meant that The Good Parliament could never be a ‘fantasy feminist shopping bag’ of reforms, but would need to be made up of a series of technically accurate and politically viable recommendations.c Sources: a https://​www​.parliament​.uk/​business/​committees/​committees​-a​-z/​other​-committees/​speakers​-conference​ -on​-parliamentary​-representation/​. b http://​appgimpro​vingparlia​mentreport​.co​.uk/​download/​APPG​-Women​-In​ -Parliament​-Report​-2014​.pdf. c Childs (2016).

The feminist academic brings something distinctive to the project of GSP – academic knowledge that might at times ‘get in the way’ of a practitioner’s goals. If the academic is also working with a parliament, their academic knowledge will be mediated through the knowledge they gain of the institution when they are in the field too. Put baldly, the academic seeking to bring about GSP change, armed with the international organisation/parliamentary association model, is facing two or even three pathways: the ivory tower; the real-world parliament in front of them; and/or (where they are commissioned), the international organisation/parliamentary association. Reconciling these can be a quotidian task. That said, we would suggest that any academic attuned to the history of GSP work over the last two decades, and well-read in FI, will be cognisant that re-gendering parliaments is going to be a hard, messy and exhausting business. GSP and the Feminist Epistemic Community Building GSP is very much characterised by the ‘feminist art of the possible’. By this we do not mean to imply that ‘anything goes’. Instead, we suggest three accountability tensions that are characteristic of and mediate the feminist art. First, accountability to feminist identities and communities. GSP feminist content is not always explicitly stated in the work undertaken by GSP practitioners – international organisation/parliamentary association and/or academic. Oftentimes this will be strategic and justified by the political context on the ground and perceptions of negative audience reception. But questions are left about the costs of hiding our feminist ‘ends’. And there is, moreover, the question of whose feminism, and how much feminism counts? Are some gender insensitivities simply non-negotiable but others up for discussion and, if necessary, diluting and/or downgrading? What if the context is such that GSP work ends up producing recommendations that are far from the author’s own feminist sensibility but which are nonetheless adjudged to have the best chance of engendering positive change? And what of alternative or competing feminist definitions? Is the GSP academic accountable to other feminist perspectives, even when they may not be as cognisant of the complexity of the institutional constraints that she is working with (defined by the international organisation/parliamentary association and/ or parliament itself)? In particular cases there may be differences of perspective between extra-parliamentary feminist actors and parliamentary actors (women MPs, and feminists on the political and administrative side) that require some form of reconciliation. Should she have contemporaneous accountability obligations to a wider feminist community/ities, or merely expect to be held to account later?

Gender-sensitive parliaments  181 Such considerations shift the debate onto the terrain of feminist co-option scholarship (see Chappell and Mackay, 2020; Eschle and Maiguashca, 2018; Holvikivi, 2019; Chapter 4 in this Handbook), and on to contemporary feminist debates regarding women’s intra-group differences. Consideration should therefore be given to what is hidden by use of the term gender in GSP. For much of its history, the term gender referred to men and women, and gender inequality to the differences in access to decision-making and the outcomes of such decisions, and between women and men. In effect, gender was a synonym for sex (Carver, 1996), even as it was conceptualised as socially constructed.6 At the same time, women’s access to political power and the experiences of women in society were always mediated by other aspects of their identity. Accordingly, and we would suggest unproblematically, a GSP approach would need to be an intersectional one (Crenshaw, 1991; Hill Collins and Bilge, 2016). The capacity of GSP frameworks to capture and/or redress intersectional parliamentary gender insensitivities have yet, we would argue, to be fully interrogated or foregrounded in GSP publications/ frameworks, or in audits. What changes, for example, in conceptualising and operationalising GSP if one starts from the perspective and experiences of the most marginalised women? What reforms might be necessary to permit her to participate and participate effectively in a parliament? What kinds of policy outcomes does she require of her parliament? Likewise, what changes are required to the framework when trans and non-binary identities are included (cf. Tremblay, 2019)? Claims that a shift from gender to diversity sensitive framework might be more effective on the ground, more theoretically appropriate, and thus the best strategy – demand (future) interrogation.7 Second, accountability to feminist objectives and standards. GSP is not best thought of as a fixed standard with discrete indicators but manifest in multiple, context-specific ways, with specific parliaments achieving gender sensitivity to a greater or lesser extent. As contexts change, so too should standards of gender equality and thus gender sensitivity. Feminists should aim high with GSP conceived as a progressive set of aims that are responsive to new opportunities and challenges, and with attention to building capacity to resist backlash through the normalisation and entrenchment (read: institutionalisation) of GSP ideals and practices. As the CPA 2020 Guidelines make explicit, in the 20 years between publications there have been developments, positive and negative, on the ground in terms of women’s political participation, as well as developments in the study of women’s political representation, that should be brought to bear on revisions and new standards. Recall how the UN’s ‘30 per cent’ goal for women MPs is more frequently today challenged by the ideal of 50:50 equal presence, or parity. More specifically, a couple of recommendations in the 2001 CPA GSP Report would not end up in the revised 2020 Guidelines because they are no longer considered sufficient. The informal and opaque practice of ‘pairing’ MPs to assist those with new babies is now rejected in favour of providing the parent MP with a proxy vote or some other formal and transparent means to register their position. Pairing may still work for those with an illness, but today the notion that the pregnant or new mother MP is ‘ill’, or that her rights to leave should be dependent upon the agreement of another member, has much less credibility. Ditto, the apparent growing acceptance of MPs breastfeeding in the world’s parliaments which in turn reflects greater social acceptability of public breastfeeding. Finally, accountability to feminist practice. Here we very briefly refer to established notions in the wider feminist literature regarding how best to undertake research: critical (self‑) reflection, the emancipatory ideal and the ethical responsibility to those we work with and for. Taking such feminist research commitments into the parliamentary field may be easier said

182  Handbook of feminist governance than done. This might be due to the practicalities of the project, such as time and resources, although it may also be constrained by the approach to GSP adopted by the international organisation/parliamentary association. Collaborations and co-production may simply not be feasible within the terms of consultancy, for example; a purely or largely quantitative method of determining GSP cannot give ‘voice’ to women in a parliament (whether MP, official or other worker), even as it may provide other highly useful data. Similarly, a top-down approach may miss the views of those women at the bottom of the hierarchy or those marginalised to the sides, and/or few in number, and yet these perspectives may be critical to fully capturing the (intersectional) gender insensitivities in a particular institution. One of us vividly recalls being told by senior male politicians not to accept the views of women elected representatives who were, because of their newness as Members, simply misunderstanding, and hence wrongly critiquing, how the parliament worked. Discounting views in this way rather goes against the idea of accountability to our research subjects and for ensuring our research benefits women. And do we, as GSP practitioners, take sufficient stock of our previous work in any systematic and critical fashion, or engage in reflective exercises with the beneficiaries of our inquiries (MPs and staffers)? Once again, the question of working with (diverse) extra-parliamentary feminist actors comes into view. In all this, then, there is more we could do to subject our own efforts – to gather data, to identify reforms and to persuade those with the power to change things – to systematic and careful self-criticism. GSP and the Non-Feminist Practitioner Community Notwithstanding that feminist impact on electoral politics can occur in multiple spaces (Campbell and Childs, 2013: 185), the GSP project requires direct change in parliaments, endorsed – at least at some level – by a non-feminist community of practice. This raises three inter-related challenges for the feminist GSP academic and/or practitioner: anti-gender resistance, individual credibility and time. Perhaps in recognition that GSP require both gender targeted and gender mainstreamed interventions, resistance is often couched in seemingly ‘gender-neutral’ terms. Resisters argue that ‘men face the same obstacles as women’ to political participation and leadership, and that gender is but ‘one of many issues’ to be considered by parliament. These arguments place the GSP feminist in a difficult position: she can either accept that these arguments are made in good faith, albeit with considerable gender blindness, or she can take them as a disingenuous attempt at dismissal. Either way, mounting persuasive counter-arguments to this resistance requires, at the very least, individual and institutional credibility. Here again, challenges arise. Even where she is introduced as a ‘GSP expert’, for example, Palmieri has seen her credibility in the field contested on three counts: age (too young), experience (not a Member of Parliament) and nationality (from the Global North). Aside from a general preference among parliamentarians to learn from their peers (notably other MPs, preferably from their own region), credibility is questioned where the practitioner appears to lack cultural knowledge: during a workshop, a male MP tellingly spoke, ‘But Sonia, in our villages, women are often referred to as “the kitchen”’; in another, having sensed her audience of women MPs required some kind of acknowledgement of cultural affinity, Palmieri felt compelled to declare her African ancestry. Building credibility, however, requires time – something the practitioner does not always have, presenting a third set of challenges. Positive examples of GSP change have happened while practitioners were deployed for significant periods of time. In Fiji, for example,

Gender-sensitive parliaments  183 the United Nations Development Fund seconded a parliamentary staffer from the Welsh Assembly for five months to support the work of parliamentary committees. Having established some trust and credibility among both MPs and staff with whom she worked every day in their inquiries, this practitioner was able to develop guidance on gender-sensitive legislative scrutiny, based on the IPU standards.8 Considerable time and space are also required where GSP change is encouraged through MPs’ self-assessment and reflections. As shown elsewhere in this Handbook (Chapter 9) time is both central to the concept of feminist governance and a major challenge. Being notoriously time poor, asking MPs to spend time reflecting on parliamentary functionality and gender sensitivity results in either disjointed, unfocused reflection (with MPs coming in and out of deliberations), or skewed attendance (with the ‘converted’ over-represented). Finally, it is clear that time plays another key role in norm diffusion – for GSP to be more widely endorsed and implemented across the world’s parliaments. As mentioned earlier, the IPU has supported GSP interventions in 13 countries since the publication of its 2011 report. But in the words of one of its senior officers, ‘10 years is not a long time’!9

CONCLUSION An apposite moment to take stock of the ideal and practice of GSP occurred in 2020: parliaments around the world have had to respond to new and gendered challenges raised by Covid-19; and representative democracy is facing seemingly more contestation from populist, anti-democratic and anti-feminist forces. The mushrooming of GSP approaches means that political actors and other interested parties do not suffer from a lack of knowledge about how to go about transforming their elected political institutions into ones that are inclusive of women and seek redress of gender inequality. We have some concerns, nevertheless, that this multiplication might risk a disjointed GSP narrative and that there may be at times something of a competition rather than cooperation between international organisations. Instead of a global consortium of organisations that can pool donor resources, each of these organisations tends to attract small funds, allowing only for limited interventions rather than comprehensive, ‘transformative’ projects. Yet, and at the same time, there is much that is positive: there is a much stronger international norm that women’s participation and representation in politics is both necessary and desirable; and multiple international governmental and parliamentary association actors are actively interested in, and have the institutional backing to, support GSP. Related to this, there may be some evidence of trust in these various actors, and in their ‘localised’ approaches and tools (e.g. those designed at the regional level by EIGE). Some of these actors have strong connections in parliaments built over decades of development partnership. The Covid-19 pandemic has made GSP more rather than less urgent, underlining that GSP are not merely luxuries for the good times. The UN Women ‘Primer for Parliamentary Action’ identifies a number of opportunities that should not be wasted in the wake of the crisis, including: promoting gender equality as a matter of human rights and democracy; trialling and showcasing institutional reflexivity, adaptation and innovation; leading by example and including women’s different experiences, perspectives, talents and skills in all crisis responses to ensure better informed decisions, fairer outcomes, and evolution of ‘group think’ and traditional ways of doing things; and taking the everyday opportunities to address gender equality.

184  Handbook of feminist governance With the IPU, UN Women and the CPA and Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians all having produced pandemic-responsive GSP updates and standards, and/or new guidelines and checklists that update GSP, no parliament can feign ignorance of how to respond in a GSP fashion to the current crisis. Nor deny its importance. In deciding how best to proceed, we wish to draw attention, once again, to the importance of gender-sensitising parliaments. Our refined definition declares that a GSP as an institution that values and prioritises gender equality as a social, economic and political objective and reorients and transforms a parliament’s institutional culture, processes and practices and outputs towards these objectives. Even as we recognise that efforts towards its realisation will be fashioned by a ‘feminist art of the possible’ in a particular case – with all the attendant questions this raises for the actor – academic, international organisation/parliamentary associations – and parliamentary – who undertakes such work – we close with a call to arms: as the earliest work on GSP boldly asserted, removing gender insensitivities from the world’s parliaments is not only about fairness; it is also, and we concur, essentially about good governance. In its 2020 incarnations, GSP is more explicitly about gender equality and, thus, about feminist governance.

NOTES 1. 2.

Private recollections. The work of Lena Wängnerud (2015) is perhaps a purely academic consideration of GSP, and more precisely, of the substantive representation of women. 3. We acknowledge that in our current (academic) positions, we are less constrained by such political pressures. 4. https://​eige​.europa​.eu/​gender​-mainstreaming/​toolkits/​gender​-sensitive​-parliaments/​assessments/​ overview. 5. Global lesson-learning from these self-assessments is limited, because – by design – the results of these exercises remain the property of the individual parliament and are not usually published. 6. We do not suggest that GSP works with anything other than socially constructed ideas of gender and gender difference. 7. See Childs (forthcoming) Building Feminist Institutions: The Making of the Good Parliament. 8. Personal communication, August 2020. 9. Personal communication, September 2020.

REFERENCES Ballington, Julie (2008) Equality in Politics, Geneva: Inter-Parliamentary Union. Campbell, Rosie and Sarah Childs (2013) ‘The Impact Imperative: Here Come the Women ☺’, Political Studies Review 11(2): 182–9. Carver, Terrell (1996) Gender is Not a Synonym for Women, London: Lynne Rienner. Chappell, Louise and Fiona Mackay (2020) ‘Feminist Critical Friends: Dilemmas of Feminist Engagement with Governance and Gender Reform Agendas’, European Journal of Politics and Gender 4(3): 321–40. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1332/​2515​10820X1592​2354996155. Childs, Sarah (2016) The Good Parliament Report, University of Bristol. https://​ www​ .bristol​ .ac​ .uk/​media​-library/​sites/​news/​2016/​july/​20​%20Jul​%20Prof​%20Sarah​%20Childs​%20The​%20Good​ %20Parliament​%20report​.pdf. Childs, Sarah and Chloe Challender (2019) ‘Re-Gendering the UK House of Commons: The Academic Critical Actor and Her “Feminist in Residence”’, Political Studies Review 17(4): 328–39. Childs, Sarah and Sonia Palmieri (2020) A Primer for Parliamentary Action: Gender-Sensitive Responses to COVID-19, New York: UN Women.

Gender-sensitive parliaments  185 Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA) (2001) Gender-Sensitizing Commonwealth Parliaments: The Report of a Commonwealth Parliamentary Association Study Group, London: CPA. https://​www​.iknowpolitics​.org/​sites/​default/​files/​cpa​_gender​20sensitiz​ing20commo​nwealth20p​ arliaments​_2001​_1​.pdf. Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1991) ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color’, Stanford Law Review 43(6): 1241–99. Eschle, Catherine and Bice Maiguashca (2018) ‘Theorising Feminist Organizing in and Against Neoliberalism: Beyond Cooption and Resistance?’ European Journal of Politics and Gender 1(1): 223–39. Hill Collins, Patricia and Sirma Bilge (2016) Intersectionality. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Holvikivi, Aiko (2019) ‘Gender Experts and Critical Friends: Research in Relations of Proximity’, European Journal of Politics and Gender 2(1): 131–47. IPU (2006) The Role of Parliamentary Committees in Mainstreaming Gender and Promoting the Status of Women, Geneva: IPU. IPU (2008) Equality in Politics: A Survey of Women and Men in Parliaments, Geneva: IPU. IPU (2016) Evaluating the Gender Sensitivity of Parliaments: A Self-Assessment Toolkit, Geneva: IPU. Lovenduski, Joni (ed.) (2005) State Feminism and Political Representation, New York: Cambridge University Press. Palmieri, Sonia (2018) ‘Gender-Sensitive Parliaments’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​acrefore/​9780190228637​.013​.215. Palmieri, Sonia and Kerryn Baker (2022) ‘Localising Global Norms: The Case of Family-Friendly Parliaments’, Parliamentary Affairs 75(1): 58–75. Tremblay, Manon (2019) ‘Uncovering the Gendered Effects of Voting Systems: A Few Thoughts about Representation of Women and of LGBT People’. In Marian Sawer and Kerryn Baker (eds), Gender Innovation in Political Science: New Norms, New Knowledge, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 91–114. Verge, Tània, Nazia Chowdhury and Irina Ulcica (2019) Gender Equality in National Parliaments across the EU and the European Parliament. 2019 Results from EIGE’s Gender-Sensitive Parliaments Tool, Vilnius: European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE). Wängnerud, Lena (2015) The Principles of Gender-Sensitive Parliaments, London: Routledge.

2016

2016

2012

parties, parliamentary staff).

and men, girls and boys to fully realise their

Co-operation and Development

in all processes, practices and procedures.’

themselves model and advance gender-sensitivity

potential requires that parliaments and legislatures

interests. Ensuring equal opportunities for women

Organisation for Economic

that all policies, including legislation, promote their practice (largely drawn from IPU research); key actions

Parliaments

to consider; pitfalls to avoid.

Analysis of ‘why this is important’; examples of good

Each area includes:

the women and men they represent, but also ensure

Gender-Sensitive Practices in

representation).

expected to both reflect the wishes and needs of

(oversight and accountability, mainstreaming, balanced

Equality in Public Life –

in the realisation of the gender equality agenda. As representatives of the people, parliaments are

(Independent consultant)

OECD Recommendation on Gender

Governance: Implementing the 2015

‘Parliaments and legislative bodies are core actors

review and action. Self-assessment questions across three main areas

Sonia Palmieri

Toolkit for Gender Equality in

areas, emphasises parliamentary ownership of GSP

Inter-Parliamentary Union

Self-assessment methodology across the seven action

Parliaments: A Self-Assessment Toolkit

legitimate’.

mainstreaming, culture, male champions, political

a modern society’; ‘is more efficient, effective and

Evaluating the Gender Sensitivity of

(composition and leadership, policy framework,

‘addresses and reflects the equality demands of

Assembly in 2012, outlining seven ‘key action areas’

‘a positive example or model to society at large’;

Policy document, unanimously endorsed by the IPU

change and examples of good GSP practice.

Inter-Parliamentary Union

‘responds to the needs and interests’ of both

cross-party collaboration. Research-based global report, presents evidence for

barriers to women’s full participation’ and offers

(Independent consultant)

A Global Review of Good Practice

A political institution that:

operations, methods and work’; ‘has removed the

Sonia Palmieri

Gender Sensitive Parliaments:

for work/family balance, and women’s leadership and

Presents 14 recommendations, emphasises the need

participation in parliament.

psychological barriers to women’s access and full

Defines political, cultural/economic, institutional and

by advisors from Finland.

Parliaments

and Tobago)

Association

women’.

First report of an all-female MP Study Group, supported

Plan of Action for Gender Sensitive

Representatives of Trinidad

Commonwealth Parliamentary

the barriers which inhibit fullest participation by

Distinctive contributions

women and men in terms of its ‘structures,

(Clerk, House of

Parliaments

A parliament that is gender sensitive ‘removes

GSP definition

Inter-Parliamentary Union

Jacqui Sampson-Jacent

Gender Sensitizing Commonwealth

2011

Author(s)

Publication

2001

Chronology of GSP guidance

Year

Table A14.1

APPENDIX

186  Handbook of feminist governance

Nazia Chowdhury and Irina

Equality

(IPU)

Note for Parliaments

Inter-Parliamentary Union

Zeina Hilal

Gender and COVID-19: A Guidance IPU definition

parliamentary interventions.

presents key questions to consider and examples of

First appraisal of GSP responses to the 2020 pandemic;

GSP research agenda.

are used effectively toward promoting gender equality.’

institutionalism and GSP; outlines a comprehensive

‘They ensure that their operations and resources

(University of Canberra)

Makes explicit the link between feminist

processes. IPU definition +

Sonia Palmieri

2020

IPU).

Gender Sensitive Parliaments

18 recommendations have been actioned since 2016;

and effective in its many functions’ (following the

2018

recommendations directed at nine institutional actors;

representative, transparent, accessible, accountable

emphasises the importance of institutionalizing DSP

sensitive parliament’ (DSP) audit; presents 43

The Good Parliament is one that is ‘truly

First published report of a parliamentary ‘diversity

exercises.

2019 results of European parliaments’ self-reporting

review and action.

functions), emphasises parliamentary ownership of GSP

areas (access, influence, spaces, legislation, symbolic

Online quantitative self-assessment tool across five

Distinctive contributions

(University of Bristol)

reiteration of the IPU definition.

respects and delivers on gender equality’ +

‘A parliament is gender-sensitive when it actively

GSP definition

Sarah Childs

The Good Parliament

(ICF S.A.)

2016

Equality

European Institute for Gender

European Parliament

Parliaments across the EU and the

Gender Equality in National

(Universitat Pompeu Fabra),

European Institute for Gender

2019

Tània Verge

Gender Sensitive Parliaments Toolkit

2018

Ulcica

Author(s)

Publication

Year

Gender-sensitive parliaments  187

Draws on short survey completed by 21 CPA

in the future.’ ‘Parliaments must work to become gender

(Australian National University) Sarah Childs (Royal Holloway University of London)

Gender Sensitizing Parliamentary

Standards

Commonwealth Parliamentary

Association

institutionalisation and GSP processes.

and wider well-being of the public, both now, and

Palmieri

UN Women

2020

accompanying checklist; emphasises the importance of

effective containment of the disease, and the health

of London) and Sonia

COVID-19

COVID-19 response and recovery decision-making

GSP standards and accompanying checklist; emphasises the importance of institutionalisation.

equality for all.’

Parliamentarians, Foreword)

Chairperson of the Commonwealth Women

(Hon. Shandana Gulzar Khan, MNA

parliaments undergoing a formal GSP Audit; presents

environment and must actively champion gender

GSP recommendations; restates the importance of CPA

Parliaments; reviews progress against the 2001 CPA

and disenfranchisement in their parliamentary

recognise the detrimental role of gender privilege

sensitive institutions, meaning they ought to

This is vital for public order and the rule of law, the address women’s needs; provides a primer and

the COVID-19 pandemic with gender sensitivity.

Highlights practical actions to ensure parliaments’

(Royal Holloway University

Distinctive contributions

Gender-Sensitive Responses to

‘Parliaments have a responsibility to respond to

Sarah Childs

A Primer for Parliamentary Action:

2020

GSP definition

Author(s)

Publication

Year

188  Handbook of feminist governance

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

INTRODUCTION The practice of feminist governance around the world is underpinned by ‘normative work’ expressed in conventions, declarations, regulatory frameworks, agreements, guidelines, codes of practice and other standard-setting instruments, at global, regional and national level (UNEG, 2012: 5). A vast array of organisations work to support the translation of global liberal norms into national policy, legislation and programmatic action, including global intergovernmental bodies, such as the United Nations (UN) system, and regional intergovernmental bodies, like the African Union and the European Union. Specialised international agencies, like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE ODIHR), the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) and the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), contribute to standard setting and dissemination, as do international non-governmental organisations (too many to name). While normative frameworks – such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action – provide a road map for change, tools such as handbooks and self-assessment guides help achieve that change at country level. They provide examples of good practice and advice on national implementation of global norms. Yet, despite their critical role in feminist governance, and an increasing investment from the international donor community in their production and dissemination, relatively little is written about these tools – or their impact – in the academic literature (exceptions here include Arora-Jonsson and Sijapati-Basnett, 2017; Prügl, 2010; and Sawer, 2021). In part, this may be because these tools are only rarely developed – and/or used – by academics. We write this chapter as authors of various handbooks and tools that have been used by practitioners in the field of women’s political participation and leadership. While Palmieri is an academic, she is well known to the development practitioner community, having worked in (and as an independent consultant for) a number of transnational organisations. Ballington has held senior advisory roles within the UN system for over a decade, preceded by extensive experience with International IDEA and the IPU.1 Together and separately, we have developed extensive guidance through which different institutions – including parliaments, electoral administrators and political parties – might become more inclusive and respectful of gender equality. It is from these positions that our reflections spring and our evidence is collected. This chapter is an exploration not only of the efficacy of feminist governance tools to support women’s political participation and leadership, but of the process by which we have arrived at our conclusions: that is, through the lens of our ‘critical friendships’ (Chappell and Mackay, 2020; Holvikivi, 2019) in this particular field. We find that feminist governance tools are the 189

190  Handbook of feminist governance products of those who develop them, and those who use them, and that there is considerable scope to increase both of these pools. In doing so, we see opportunities for stronger collaboration between academics and practitioners; between experts in the Global North and South; and with end-users.

FEMINIST NORMATIVE FRAMEWORKS Particularly since the adoption of the Beijing Platform for Action in 1995, much attention has focused on ensuring the improved participation of women in public life. The normative framework for women’s electoral and political participation is set out in covenants and conventions, human and political rights declarations, UN resolutions, reports, and action plans and existing UN policy on gender equality. The goal of achieving women’s full participation in public life has its origins in the principles of non-discrimination and equal enjoyment of political rights enshrined in the following instruments: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) adopted in 1948; the Convention on the Political Rights of Women (CPRW, 1952); and other regional conventions that explicitly state that the enjoyment of such rights shall be without distinction of any kind, including sex or gender. Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR, 1966) elaborates the rights of all citizens not only to take part in the conduct of public affairs, but also ‘to vote and to be elected at genuine periodic elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret ballot, guaranteeing the free expression of the will of the electors’ and ‘to have access, on general terms of equality, to public service in his [sic] country’. Women’s right to participate fully in all facets of public life has continued to be a cornerstone of UN resolutions and declarations. CEDAW affirms the right of women ‘to hold public office and perform all public functions at all levels of government’, calling on state parties to ensure women’s equal rights to vote, stand for election and take part in formulating policy, including through the adoption of temporary special measures (Article 4). The 1995 Platform for Action established women’s participation in decision-making as a critical area of concern and set a target of ‘gender balance’ in legislative, executive and administrative bodies. The Commission on the Status of Women Agreed Conclusions 2021 (E/CN.6/2021/L.3) and 2006 (E/2006/27-E/CN.6/2006/15) and the General Assembly Resolution 66/130 (2011) further call on states to promote women’s political participation, and governments have consistently been urged to implement measures to substantially increase the number of women in elective and appointive public offices and functions at all levels, with a view to achieving equal representation of women and men, if necessary through positive action. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2015) places gender equality as both a goal and a means of implementing the Agenda, and includes Target 5.5 to ensure women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and public life. Recent normative advances have tackled a major obstacle to women’s political participation, gender-based violence, with General Assembly resolutions calling attention to the issue and calling on states to intensify efforts to eliminate it (A/73/301). States that are parties to international conventions share the responsibility for upholding and implementing these obligations across a range of institutions. CEDAW, in fact, is one of the most widely acceded UN conventions, with 189 states party, indicating – at least at the

Tools of the trade  191 level of public discourse – that there is global agreement around the importance of gender equality. The continued reality of gender inequality across all societies, however, suggests there is a disjuncture between an acceptance of normative gender equality obligations, and the implementation of actions to achieve substantive change. Tools of feminist governance – such as handbooks, manuals, action plans and checklists – have been promoted and developed as a mechanism by which global standards may be more realistically attained in diverse contexts. True (2008) suggests that the idea for such tools originates from the Australian and New Zealand ‘femocrat experiment’ of the 1990s.2 She writes, [femocrats] did leave a legacy: the diffusion of feminist ideas on gender as a legitimate frame for policy analysis in government. Moreover, many of their ideas, such as gender budget analysis, time-use surveys for unpaid work, gender checklists and gender-impact statements subsequently spread to other countries and importantly, to international organisations such as the UN and the EU. (2008: 95)

In fact, over the past two decades, the production of feminist governance tools has increased considerably (see Appendix). Their popularity is evident not only in their number and publication by a range of transnational bodies, but also in the diversity of languages into which they are translated. This guidance is largely based on codification of best practices, as well as extensive research with duty bearers (such as politicians and policymakers), practitioners and development experts, to present practical options for institutions to consider in developing their own plans of action to achieve gender equality (Box 15.1). The question to be more carefully considered, then, is to what extent has this guidance succeeded in implementing global norms of gender equality, and what might hinder its effectiveness.

BOX 15.1 CREATING THE TOOLS WITH RESEARCH Our own experience, spanning over 20 years, illustrates the link between research and quality tools. In the early 2000s, and as the Manager of the Women in Politics Project at International IDEA, Ballington developed the Global Database on Electoral Quotas, launched in partnership with Stockholm University in 2002. The website showcases the growing number of countries that have adopted legislated gender quotas. In order to expand knowledge and deepen understanding of how quotas work in practice, IDEA organised regional workshops in Asia, Latin America, Africa and Europe, each one bringing together researchers and practitioners ‘to allow country- and region-specific information on quota implementation and enforcement to be collated, and a network of researchers and experts working in this field to be developed’ (Ballington, 2004: 8). Each workshop report included the research papers presented as well as analysis and synopses of the discussions that followed. This ground-breaking research – and the Global Quota Database it informed – provides policymakers, political actors and parties, as well as gender equality advocates and election practitioners with an accessible resource on gender quotas. A rigorous research process also informed the IPU’s plan of action and evaluation toolkit for gender sensitive parliaments, published in 2012 and 2016, respectively. Palmieri led the multi-country, collaborative research project in 2010, which commissioned case studies from 17 different parliaments, five regional reports (Africa, Arab States, Asia-Pacific, Europe and Latin America) and three sets of questionnaires administered globally to par-

192  Handbook of feminist governance liamentarians, parliamentary party groups and parliamentary staff (see also Chapter 14 of this Handbook).

CRITICAL FRIENDSHIP AS METHODOLOGY In answering these questions, we draw on practitioners’ accounts of their development and use of governance tools, as well as their perceptions of overall effectiveness. Most, but not all, of these practitioners would be known as ‘gender experts’, part of an increasing professionalisation of gender mainstreaming efforts across various institutions of democratic governance (True, 2008: 91). In describing our group of respondents, we take Kunz et al.’s (2019: 24) definition of gender expertise as ‘specialized knowledge about what gender is, how gender inequality is perpetuated and what is necessary to change this’. In generating new knowledge, our respondents have been involved in the development and dissemination of good practice guides, manuals and handbooks on inclusive electoral management bodies, promoting women’s participation in political parties and elections, implementing electoral gender quotas, eradicating violence against women in elections and politics (including sexism, harassment and bullying), gender-sensitive parliaments and legislative scrutiny (including budgetary scrutiny), establishing women’s parliamentary caucuses, running practice parliaments for women, and improving awareness and understanding of the CEDAW process and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)/Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) among parliaments. We held semi-structured interviews with 14 development practitioners of our personal acquaintance who are either affiliated with international development organisations or independent consultants and, at the time of interview, were based in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Myanmar, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States of America (we discuss below the implications of this predominantly Global North sample).3 In truth, these interviews might be better described as ‘conversations with friends’, having usually begun with a brief catch up on our personal lives. Our project applies the lens of ‘critical friendship’ (Chappell and Mackay, 2020; Chappell and Waylen, 2013; Holvikivi, 2019) in three respects: as research with known acquaintances and (former) work colleagues; as ‘critical recognition’ of the work of ‘friends’; and as ‘critical dialogue’ with those ‘friends’. We outline these further, cognisant that our interpretation of the term differs to some extent from its original conceptualisation. On the first, we were – in all cases but one – well known to each other through previous work experience and, in some cases, long-standing friendships. We differ in one sense from Chappell and Mackay’s position that critical friends are ‘external to the organisation’ (2020), given that one of us remains very much an ‘insider’ (i.e. Ballington, within the UN system, although interviews were conducted by Palmieri alone). Palmieri, however, might be considered a ‘recovering femocrat’ (Chappell and Mackay, 2020) and therefore more in line with core understandings of the term. In reflecting on our positionality, we take heart from the idea that ‘feminist work is often done from locations that are neither fully inside nor fully outside an academic discipline, professional organisation or social formation’ (Holvikivi, 2019: 135; see also Hesse-Biber, 2012). Arguably more pertinently, we see this research as part of a much larger conversation among friends, supplemented by ‘informal exchanges in … workshops … social encounters

Tools of the trade  193 … and through email and social media’ (Holvikivi, 2019: 134). More than a few of these conversations presented an opportunity for us to critically reflect on our collective body of work. There is a related point of departure in the categorisation of these friends as ‘gender experts’. While Kunz et al. (2019: 27) found their ‘gender experts’ to have varying degrees of affinity with ‘feminism’ (however defined), most of our experts readily self-identify as feminists. Indeed, on being thanked for her participation in the research, one of our experts said with some conviction, ‘always happy to support the sisterhood!’ (Participant A). This may point to a peculiarity of experts working in the women’s political participation/democratic governance space, where practitioners share similar university and work backgrounds, with a common emphasis on feminist studies. Second, we see this research as a depiction of ‘critical friendship’ in its recognition of the work done – either collectively, as a group of gender specialists, or individually – in the development of feminist governance tools that has, to date, gone relatively unnoticed. Indeed, we welcome the opportunity afforded us in this chapter to highlight – and critique – this work, done predominantly by friends on the inside, cognisant of the fact that they are rarely thanked for their efforts. This reflection from Holvikivi’s interviews certainly resonates with us: … [it’s] feeling like you’re endlessly banging your head against the wall trying to make things better and then [academics] who fundamentally want the same things you do come along and tell you that you are part of the problem. (Sarah, 2016, quoted in Holvikivi, 2019: 139)

Where we are in complete alignment with Chappell and Mackay’s understanding of critical friendship, however, is in the conduct of the research. While interviews were structured around a core set of questions asked of each participant (e.g. around the benefits and challenges involved in developing and implementing gender governance tools, and lessons learned in their deployment), there were certainly ideas that we wanted to test, and contestation around those ideas became part of the conversation. We too aimed to challenge assumptions and ‘speak hard truths constructively’; we are, ultimately, desirous of ‘a two way relationship that creates space to negotiate the goals of gender expertise and how it is practised’ (Holvikivi, 2019: 131).

IN TRANSLATION: WHAT IS GAINED AND WHAT IS LOST? The creation and dissemination of tools that translate global norms into regional and local contexts is now a firmly established development practice (see Jacobsson and Sahlin-Andersson, 2006; Lobel, 2004). Not all tools are alike, however. Some are written for a regional audience (e.g. the OSCE region, or the Asia-Pacific); others are more global – and therefore generic – in nature, with options for national discussion and localisation. While some tools are written as ‘step by step’ guidance, others allow for stakeholders to determine their own approach to achieve gender equality through, for example, self-assessment exercises. Asked what they considered to be some of the key strengths of this approach, our participants routinely noted that tools were a positive first step towards national implementation of key democratic standards. Tools, they noted, ‘open the door for discussion … consultation’ (Participant N); they are ‘a starting point for a conversation … not a prescription or an obligation’ (Participant I). Once these ‘windows of opportunity’ (Participant F) had been opened – that is, once a conversation had been broached around possibilities for change – development

194  Handbook of feminist governance practitioners felt it was ‘hard to go back’ (Participant A). Some of our experts explained that ‘tools help [policymakers] gain political support to convince their colleagues’ (Participant M), and have the effect of bringing a range of diverse stakeholders together, to ‘enable partnerships at the national level’(Participant M). Tools, therefore, act as a catalyst for an initial consideration of a problem, and critically, its potential solutions. For many of the practitioners we spoke to, the most significant benefit of these tools was that they also pointed to new actions, or approaches, to enable gender equality change. When implemented well (a point to which we will return), tools point to alternative strategies for feminist governance. They ‘encourage people in-country to have an international reference point, [provide] comparison as a motivator for change, [act as] peer pressure’ (Participant I). In this vein, Sawer (2021) has referred to tools as ‘soft’ and ‘inquisitive regulation’ that assumes practices implemented in neighbouring countries will stimulate ‘comparison and policy borrowing’. In some cases, success is evident: ‘new [gender equality] policies have been inspired by our guidelines’ (Participant L); rather than simply asking the local women’s organisation what they thought about an issue, one of our interviewees explained that a manual on gender sensitive legislative scrutiny allowed a parliamentary committee to cast its net wider in seeking gender advice (Participant N). Tools can therefore be enablers of change, particularly where they ‘allow people to find the solutions themselves’ (Participant M). For the feminist practitioner, tools have lent credibility to gender equality concerns. As one of our respondents remarked, no one believed violence against women in politics existed, so the tool is useful to say ‘this is a thing’ (Participant F). While the credibility gap is well researched,4 our respondents felt that tools had allowed them, in the field, to say, ‘it’s not just my view’ (Participant D); ‘tools normalise and put up front [the standard]’ (Participant J). For others, tools have helped practitioners articulate an entirely different narrative in the field. Rather than having to respond to the questions, ‘what does this norm mean?’, ‘is this relevant to our context?’ or ‘do we need to consider these issues?’, tools have encouraged a different set of questions around how the standards should be applied (Participant G). As one of the more senior gender experts retorted, ‘quotas and standards work – so get over yourself – they have proven that women make a difference in life expectancy’ (Participant A). There was consensus among the respondents that tools also simplify the complexity of development assistance. By providing concrete, how-to ideas (Participant K), tools ‘provide something that can be learned from – they’re practical – they break it down with headings and pull outs’ (Participant G); ‘I wouldn’t have been able to do what I did without the standards already established; I would have been making it up’ (Participant B). To a lesser extent, some of the group considered the power of tools in their ability to support practitioners in navigating the political dynamics in the field; ‘when talking to local organisations, it’s useful to say we have all the legal frameworks [in place], now … what is the political impact?’ (Participant F). Overall, there was consensus that ‘we would be in a much worse place without them’ (Participant A). All that said, respondents considered that tools also lost something in their translation of global standards and norms, primarily because they are unable – on their own – to achieve substantive gender equality change. For some, this was because of a ‘superficial implementation’ particularly evident where political institutions have agreed to consider a normative standard as a consequence of outside pressure, but without any genuine internal motivation. The result might be a policy that ‘has no teeth, no sanctions’, and/or an institution that considers it ‘has ticked the gender box’. Tellingly, practitioners know well that they are ‘trying to convince

Tools of the trade  195 very conservative, traditional men’ (Participant B); ‘the information is acknowledged but nothing is done to transform the practices’ (Participant C). For others, however, the limits of tools in achieving substantive change relate to how they are used; ‘we need to get better [at helping] our regional people translate the norms’ (Participant J). Two key obstacles are evident in the translation of global standards through the medium of feminist tools: localisation, and the source of ‘demand’. Despite their presentation of good practices from around the world, localisation remains a constant challenge. One of our respondents considered that this guidance can be ‘detached from the working reality of [policymakers] and therefore not very relevant’. For another, tools that failed to carefully consider local context resulted in ‘lazy implementation’ (Participant E) and provoked resistance and ‘greater hostility to foreign actors’ (Participant F). The difficulty here arises both in the development of the tool and in its implementation. One of our ‘insiders’ noted that there were simply not ‘enough resources [time and people] to work through the [internal] reports systematically and identify good practices’ (Participant K). From the consultant’s perspective, localisation is challenged when there are ‘competing toolkits, making it difficult to know which one to use; which one has more value’ (Participant G). The demand for feminist tools represents a further source of contention for some, with one of our informants acknowledging that their production can be an ‘easy’ use of donor funding (Participant N), rather than the result of local stakeholders expressing an interest or need in this particular area. This highlights an important point, usually asked by evaluators, about how user needs are identified and how tools are developed taking into account the national context. Where they are implemented with local backing, it tends to be with the blessing of those ‘who are already wishing to improve’ (Participant I). The missing dimension here, for two respondents at least, was the women’s movement which globally now struggles to ‘speak to power holders’ (Participant A). Whereas gender equality change is expected from this ever decreasing community of activists, there was a feeling that more was needed to socialise gender equality objectives among the ‘mainstream’ policy community: ‘we need to speak in other languages and mindsets … with the “unusual suspects”. Ministers for women will usually be on board, but maybe we should also be talking to the ministers for planning’ (Participant K).

CRITICAL LESSONS: SPECIALISTS AND SPACES If feminist tools are to be effective, not only in their development but in their implementation, we consider two critical lessons must be heeded: gender expertise requires stronger validation in the field of democratic governance; and that expertise requires space for stronger collaboration and reflection. While the role of gender experts is clearly critical in feminist governance, and some of our respondents literally ‘pleaded’ for more technical capacity (Participant A), there is a fundamental need to support their work in the face of ‘everyday resistance’ in the field. As one of our gender experts noted, ‘we cannot take for granted that the democracy assistance community knows what a gender perspective is … gender advisors are seen as “irritating”. They “slow things down”; gender expertise is seen as a “soft field”’ (Participant F). This recalls Kunz and Prügl’s (2019: 9) point that the claim to gender expertise must be recognized by its audience: in this case, the democracy assistance community, which is heavily male-dominated. Yet this expertise is questioned, if not contested outright: gender experts in democracy assistance are constantly required to demonstrate their ‘mainstream’ subject matter

196  Handbook of feminist governance expertise – in elections, in parliamentary procedure, in political party administration – before they can legitimately apply their gender expertise. A related challenge is the limited uptake or usage of gender equality tools by the broader democracy assistance community. Tools are intended to provide clear and practical guidance not only to feminist practitioners but the larger technical assistance community so that gender concerns can be mainstreamed into broader democracy or electoral assistance programmes. How, then, does the gender expert build credibility in the field? One – perhaps obvious – avenue is to expand the pool of gender experts; increasing the numbers, particularly of women, in the field might mainstream, and legitimise, their role in democratic governance. In this, Bardall has suggested: In redefining its engagement in this area, communities of practitioners should proactively revisit gender balance in the field of practice and hold democracy assistance providers accountable to meeting gender goals both in projects and internal structures. (2019: 4)

Of note is the strategy adopted by one of the practitioners we interviewed of ‘surrounding herself with women’ when building teams in-country (which, interestingly, she said was done relatively easily in all fields except information technology) (Participant D). Crucially, expanding the pool requires much more engagement with the Global South. It is not lost on us that the group of practitioners interviewed for this chapter are predominantly from the Global North. While we may represent Kunz et al.’s (2019: 34) ‘figure of the global gender expert’, we absolutely agree that there is a need to ‘learn from and cede space to knowledge produced in the Global South’ (Holvikivi, 2019; Medie and Kang, 2018). One of the more instructive processes by which a tool has been developed in the past five years involved someone from the Global North being seconded to the Global South for an extended period of five months, working day-to-day alongside colleagues, even before the tool was conceptualised. Indeed, the idea for the manual came from local counterparts, and was eventually produced with local references (actors and processes) throughout. Reflecting on this experience, the gender expert noted the ‘need to tailor the tool to the politics, culture and psychology of [stakeholders]’ (Participant B). More emphasis is also required on the space in which gender experts work, and the networks in which they engage. Space for ‘co-creation’ (Participant H) is needed with local authorities and CSOs (Participant E), as well as between academics and practitioners (Participant F), and with those who will ultimately use the tools (Participants I and M). Creating this collaborative space has to be resourced. In her desire to see ‘local sources of gender expertise’ cultivated, for example, Palmieri has previously called for gender-sensitive development assistance programmes to build in partnerships between experts of the Global North and South so that generic tools are not only more context appropriate, but also applied (e.g. through training exercises) by local experts on a continuing basis when the international expert departs (2019: 186–7). This more ‘participatory’ approach prioritises local knowledge over global expertise and builds capacity for experimentation that is more likely to ‘stick’ (Chappell and Waylen, 2013: 605). It also requires a different kind of gender capacity-building and training. Lucy Ferguson’s work (2019) is instructive in this respect, noting that gender equality trainers should employ feminist methods to allow greater reflection and reflexivity that acknowledges and interrogates privilege, and focuses on the process – rather than just the outcome – of feminist governance practice (see also Palmieri and MacLean, 2021).

Tools of the trade  197 In sum, and as one of our respondents noted: For tools to work, you need networks (exploring in country, over time, with mentoring, supporting you to explore your own relationship with the norm/standard) … access to information (when you need it) … and safe spaces in which you are protected when experimenting with change – either a Facebook group, or brought to you at your own place of work. (Participant J)

CONCLUSION Feminist governance tools are an intermediary between broad global norms and concrete positive action on gender equality at national level. They were never meant as ‘silver bullets’ and are certainly not communicated as ‘one size fits all’ remedies. Some may question their effectiveness or long-term impact, especially when piecemeal or small-scale gender equality interventions are designed and implemented. No one handbook, toolkit or intervention will on its own reform national norms and policies. However, showcasing comparative examples and codifying good practices remains the crucial starting point for critical actors willing to take critical actions towards the gender transformation we collectively seek. In this chapter we have sought to critically reflect on a body of work that we would (somewhat self-interestedly) argue is insufficiently acknowledged. One reflection in this process, perhaps, is that the collaboration between a former-insider-turned-academic, and an insider, has been instrumental in this process. Our critical friendships have facilitated access to both a known group of gender experts, and the necessary space to critically examine our contribution to the development and effectiveness of feminist tools. On reflection, some development practitioners took the opportunity to be self-critical (‘there is more we can do’); others pointed to the structural disadvantages faced in prosecuting an agenda which is constantly marginalised in the democratic government community of practice. Both points are valid and useful. There is certainly resistance to feminist governance in the field but, as Ferguson notes, resistance is essential to the ‘contestation required for transformative change’. We agree with her that this necessitates, on our part, ‘transformative courage’ (Ferguson, 2019: 125). We suggest that courage is to be found in stronger collaboration. While we have provided evidence of the benefit of collaboration with the academy, there is, most particularly, a need to engage, on a more equal basis, with experts in the Global South. Resourcing alone will not be sufficient here: it requires dedicated political commitment too – and humility – from the full spectrum of critical actors in this space.

NOTES 1. 2. 3.

Julie Ballington has authored this chapter in her personal capacity. On the ‘femocrat experiment’, see Eisenstein, 1991; Sawer, 1990. Interviews were conducted remotely (via Zoom) between August and September 2020, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, while both parties were working from home, and were recorded with consent (in accordance with an approved ANU ethics protocol). Of the 14 participants, two were men, 12 were women. Two others were invited to participate, but were unable to commit time to the project. Given the small sample size, we have chosen to de-identify participants’ reflections in this chapter. Letters are ascribed to each based on when the interview was held (i.e. ‘Participant A’ was the first interviewed, in August 2020).

198  Handbook of feminist governance 4. The contestation over women’s ‘credibility’ as experts has been evidenced in the spheres of journalism (e.g. Martin, 2020) and politics/policy (e.g. Borrelli, 1997; Embacher et al., 2017). Gender analysts reviewing the 2020 Australian federal budget provoked the claim from political insiders that they lacked credibility (see Lambert, 2020).

REFERENCES Arora-Jonsson, Seema and Bimbika Sijapati-Basnett (2017) ‘Disciplining Gender in International Organizations: The Texts and Practices of Gender Mainstreaming’, Gender, Work and Organization 25(3): 309–25. http://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​gwao​.12195. Ballington, Julie (ed.) (2004) The Implementation of Quotas: African Experiences, Stockholm: International IDEA. Bardall, Gabrielle (2019) A Feminist Approach to International Democracy Assistance, November, International Foundation for Electoral Systems. Borrelli, Maryanne (1997) ‘Gender, Credibility, and Politics: The Senate Nomination Hearings of Cabinet Secretaries-designate, 1975 to 1993’, Political Research Quarterly 50(1): 171–97. http://​dx​ .doi​.org​.virtual​.anu​.edu​.au/​10​.1177/​106591299705000109. Chappell, Louise and Fiona Mackay (2020) ‘Feminist Critical Friends: Dilemmas of Feminist Engagement with Governance and Gender Reform Agendas’, European Journal of Politics and Gender 4(3), 321–40. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1332/​2515​10820X1592​2354996155. Chappell, Louise and Georgina Waylen (2013) ‘Gender and the Hidden Life of Institutions’, Public Administration 91(3): 599–615. Eisenstein, Hester (1991) ‘Speaking for Women? Voices from the Australian Femocrat Experiment’, Australian Feminist Studies 6(14): 29–42. http://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​08164649​.1991​.9994626. Embacher, Kimberly, Rory McGloin and Keith Richards (2017) ‘When Women Give Health Advice Online, Do We Listen? The Effect of Source Sex on Credibility and Likelihood to Use Online Health Advice’, Western Journal of Communication, 82(4): 439–56. Ferguson, Lucy (2019) ‘Exploring Privilege Through Feminist Gender Training’, European Journal of Politics and Gender 2(1): 113–30. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1332/​2515​10819X1547​1289106059. Hesse-Biber, Sharlene Nagy (2012) ‘Feminist Research: Exploring, Interrogating, and Transforming the Interconnections of Epistemology, Methodology, and Method’. In Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber (ed.), Handbook of Feminist Research: Theory and Praxis, 2nd edition, Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Holvikivi, Aiko (2019) ‘Gender Experts and Critical Friends: Research in Relations of Proximity’, European Journal of Politics and Gender 2(1): 131–47. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1332/​2515​10819X1547​ 1289106068. Jacobsson, Bengt and Kerstin Sahlin-Andersson (2006) ‘Dynamics of Soft Regulations’. In Marie Laure Djelic and Kerstin Sahlin Andersson (eds), Transnational Governance: Institutional Dynamics of Regulation, New York: Cambridge University Press, 247–65. Kunz, Rahel and Elisabeth Prügl (2019) ‘Introduction: Gender Experts and Gender Expertise’, European Journal of Politics and Gender 2(1): 3–21. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1332/​2515​10819X1547​1289106077. Kunz, Rahel, Elisabeth Prügl and Hayley Thompson (2019) ‘Gender Expertise in Global Governance: Contesting the Boundaries of a Field’, European Journal of Politics and Gender 2(1): 23–40. https://​ doi​.org/​10​.1332/​2515​10819X1547​1289106112. Lambert, Tarla (2020) ‘The Government Wants #CredibleWomen to Shut Up about the Budget’s Shortcomings. We Won’t’, Women’s Agenda, 8 October. https://​womensagenda​.com​.au/​latest/​the​ -government​-wants​-crediblewomen​-to​-shut​-up​-about​-the​-budgets​-shortcomings​-we​-wont/​. Lobel, Orly (2004) ‘The Renew Deal: The Fall of Regulation and the Rise of Governance in Contemporary Legal Thought’, Minnesota Law Review 89: 343–470. Martin, Justin (2020) ‘It Depends on Who’s Asking: Interviewer Gender Effects on Credibility Ratings of Male and Female Journalists in Six Arab Countries’, International Journal of Public Opinion Research: 1–20. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​ijpor/​edz053.

Tools of the trade  199 Medie, Peace and Alice J. Kang (2018) ‘Power, Knowledge, and the Politics of Gender in the Global South’, European Journal of Politics and Gender 1(1–2): 37–53. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1332/​2515​ 10818X1527​2520831157. Palmieri, Sonia (2019) ‘Feminist Institutionalism and Gender-Sensitive Parliaments: Relating Theory and Practice’. In Marian Sawer and Kerryn Baker (eds), Gender Innovation in Political Science: New Norms, New Knowledge, Basingstoke: Palgrave MAcmillan, 173–94. Palmieri, Sonia and Melissa MacLean (2021) ‘Critical Reflection as Feminist Pedagogy: Teaching Feminist Research in the Field’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 24(3): 439–59. https://​doi​ .org/​10​.1080/​14616742​.2021​.1907206. Prügl, Elisabeth (2010) ‘Feminism and the Postmodern State: Gender Mainstreaming in European Rural Development’, Signs 35(2): 447–75. Sawer, Marian (1990) Sisters in Suits: Women and Public Policy in Australia, Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Sawer, Marian (2021) ‘Comment: Enhancing Equality in Public Life’. In Ramona Vijeyarasa (ed.), International Women’s Rights Law and Gender Equality: Making the Law Work for Women, London: Routledge, 98–103. True, Jacqui (2008) ‘Gender Specialists and Global Governance: New Forms of Women’s Movement Mobilisation?’ In Sandra Grey and Marian Sawer (eds), Women’s Movements: Flourishing or in Abeyance? London: Routledge, 91–104. UNEG [United Nations Evaluation Group] (2012) ‘UNEG Task Force on Evaluation of Normative Work – Survey Analysis’, New York: UNEG.

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APPENDIX: TOOLS TO SUPPORT WOMEN’S POLITICAL PARTICIPATION AND LEADERSHIP International IDEA, n.d., Interactive Overview of Combinations of Electoral Systems & Quota Types. International IDEA, 2002, Women in Parliament: Beyond Numbers. International IDEA, 2003–2005, Implementation of Quotas: Regional Series. International IDEA, 2011, Election Coverage from a Gender Perspective: A Media Monitoring Manual. International IDEA, 2014, Funding of Political Parties and Election Campaigns: A Handbook on Political Finance. International IDEA, 2016, A Framework for Developing Gender Policies for Political Parties. International IDEA, 2016, A Framework for Developing Internal Gender Policies for Electoral Management Bodies. International IDEA, 2016, Guide on Constitution Assessment for Women’s Equality. International IDEA, IPU and Stockholm University, n.d., Gender Quota Database. International IDEA, IPU and Stockholm University, 2014, Atlas of Electoral Gender Quotas. International IDEA and NDI, 2010, One Size Does Not Fit All: Lessons Learned from Legislative Gender Commissions and Caucuses. IPU, 2003, Handbook for Parliamentarians: The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and its Optional Protocol. IPU, 2004, Handbook: Parliament, the Budget and Gender. IPU, 2013, Guidelines for Women’s Caucuses. IPU, 2016, Evaluating the Gender Sensitivity of Parliaments: A Self-Assessment Toolkit. IPU, 2017, Plan of Action for Gender-Sensitive Parliaments. IPU, 2019, Guidelines for the Elimination of Sexism, Harassment and Violence against Women in Parliament. NDI, 2011, Democracy and the Challenge of Change: Training Modules to Increase Women’s Political Participation. NDI, 2017, Program Guide: Stopping Violence against Women in Politics. OECD, 2010, Atlas of Gender and Development: How Social Norms Affect Gender Equality in Non-OECD Countries. OECD, 2016, OECD Toolkit for Mainstreaming and Implementing Gender Equality Implementing the 2015 OECD Recommendation on Gender Equality in Public Life. OSCE ODIHR, 2004, Handbook for Monitoring Women’s Participation in Elections. OSCE ODIHR, 2007, Implementation of Gender Equality and Equal Opportunity, from Idea to Practice. The Handbook for Municipal Gender Equality Focal Points and Bodies. OSCE ODIHR, 2011, Gender Equality in Elected Office: A Six-Step Action Plan. OSCE ODIHR, 2014, Handbook on Promoting Women’s Participation in Political Parties. OSCE ODIHR, 2015, Creating Mentor Networks in the OSCE Region: A Practical Roadmap. OSCE ODIHR, 2015, Manual for Gender Equality at the Local Level. OSCE ODIHR, 2017, Making Laws Work for Women and Men: A Practical Guide to Gender-Sensitive Legislation. OSCE ODIHR, 2019, Inclusion of Women and Effective Peace Processes: A Toolkit. OSCE ODIHR, 2020, Use of Gender-Sensitive Language in Public Administration. ParlAmericas, 2018, Multi-Party Caucuses for Gender Equality: A Handbook for Parliamentarians in Latin America and the Caribbean. UN Habitat, 2008, Gender in Local Governments: A Handbook for Trainers. UN Women, 2020, A Primer for Parliamentary Action: Gender-Sensitive Responses to COVID-19. UN Women, 2020, Electoral Campaigning and COVID-19 Guide. UN Women and UNDP, 2017, Preventing Violence against Women in Elections: A Programming Guide. UNDP, 2007, Gender Mainstreaming in Practice: A Toolkit. UNDP, 2010, Handbook for Women Candidates. UNDP, 2017, Scrutinising Legislation from a Gender Perspective: A Practical Toolkit. UNDP and NDI, 2011, Empowering Women for Stronger Political Parties: A Guidebook to Promote Women’s Political Participation.

Tools of the trade  201 UNDP Pacific Centre and PIFS, 2008, Utilising Temporary Special Measures to Promote Gender Balance in Pacific Legislatures: A Guide to Options. UNDP and UN Women, 2015, Inclusive Electoral Processes: A Guide for Electoral Management Bodies on Promoting Gender Equality and Women’s Participation.

PART III INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

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

INTRODUCTION It’s time to become a little braver in foreign policy. I think feminism is a good term. It is about standing against the systematic and global subordination of women. (Margot Wallström, 2016, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Sweden) In a globalized world, gender inequality is holding us back. (Julie Bishop, 2014, Foreign Minister, Australia)

Feminist governance encompasses norms and ideas and the advocacy and policymaking networks, which shape and diffuse them. Feminist principles and approaches are also reflected in political institutions across national, subnational and transnational levels. Hence, while feminist governance is wide-ranging, its definition and categorisation is contested. In foreign policy the emergence of feminist governance can be seen in the growing number of foreign policy strategies on gender equality and women’s empowerment as well as in their mainstreaming across foreign policy bureaucracies, branches or sections dedicated to gender equality and multilateralism. It is also reflected in the working methods of these institutions that consciously partner with women’s civil society organisations and movements to achieve core foreign policy objectives. Feminist governance, in addition, serves an agenda-setting function at intergovernmental meetings, such as the G7 and G20, and through the creation of transnational governance networks and tools. Finally, a burgeoning feminist foreign policy movement outside governments is promoting the values of feminism and their application to the practice of foreign policy. Since Sweden launched its avowedly ‘feminist’ foreign policy (FFP) in late 2014, there has been a phenomenal diffusion and endorsement of not only the brand, but of key feminist principles, as expressed by former Swedish and Australian Foreign Ministers Margot Wallström and Julie Bishop in the epigraphs. Standing up for women’s rights and reducing gender inequality around the world are now embraced as core foreign policy goals by a multitude of state and non-state actors that seek to promote stability, peace and sustainable development. Yet, feminist foreign policies do not come out of the blue. Indeed, the pattern of international diffusion in the case of feminist governance in foreign policy is in some ways reversed compared to other major examples of feminist policy change, such as on the prevention of violence against women (cf. Htun and Weldon, 2012). FFP is not an innovation, per se, that began with civil society and their claims on the state. Rather, the policy entrepreneur, in this instance, is the activist state and leader – Sweden and Wallström, respectively – in setting forth the agenda and then identifying allies in civil society and academe to assist in transforming the institution of foreign policy. In this chapter, we argue that feminist foreign policy has emerged from and through the advocacy of feminist actors inside government (cf. Banaszak, 2010). These actors have sought allies outside of government. Their policy entrepreneurship 203

204  Handbook of feminist governance has been enabled and supported by a broad movement encompassing knowledge, governance and advocacy networks. These networks also take a critical stance on the future development of feminist foreign policy aiming to promote the transformative impact of such policies. Observing this trend, feminist international relations scholarship has examined the advent of gender mainstreaming and explicitly feminist foreign policies and their effects in an increasing number of countries around the world (Aggestam and True, 2020; Aggestam and Bergman-Rosamond, 2016). Feminist principles concerned with gender equality and women’s rights have become part of foreign policy across various domains, including aid and development, humanitarian protection, security and defence, and trade and economic multilateralism (as discussed throughout this Handbook). In this chapter, we ask, how far and in what ways is feminist governance becoming a normative, ideational and institutional feature of foreign policy reflected across the domains of foreign policy? To address this question, we examine three types of feminist governance in foreign policy. First, we examine the diffusion and localisation of the international Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda within diverse country foreign policies as well as the creation of new international alliances to promote sexual health and reproductive rights (SHRH) in foreign policy in the context of significant inter-state contestation. Second, we assess the role of transnational governance networks of women and feminist foreign policy leaders. Third, we highlight the burgeoning feminist foreign policy movement – as reflected in new think tanks, media, research institutes and other philanthropic initiatives that interface with women’s movements, conferences and universities. We also consider the emergence of state-of-the-art foreign policy expertise, handbooks and toolkits, and the kinds of new knowledge being produced to advance feminist foreign policies. Regardless of whether or not particular states adopt or reject explicitly ‘feminist’ foreign policies the mobilisation of a movement and an epistemic community will ensure that feminist governance is embedded in foreign policy institutions and available for any actor to draw on and further expand in foreign policy practice.

DIFFUSION OF FEMINIST FOREIGN POLICIES The emergence and diffusion of feminist normative frameworks in foreign policies are a relatively recent phenomenon. The promotion of pro-gender equality norms in foreign policy is perceived by some states as a window of opportunity to enhance global leadership and nation branding. In 2014, Sweden was the first country to frame its foreign policy as feminist, arguing that the pursuit of gender equality is not only a goal in itself but also a means of achieving other objectives – such as peace, security and sustainable development. Former Foreign Minister Margot Wallström argued that ‘a feminist approach is a self-evident and necessary part of a modern view of today’s global challenges.’ Sweden’s feminist foreign policy has advanced principles of women’s rights, women’s equal representation and women’s equal access to resources, which have influenced the country’s policy choices and alliances (Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2018). In this normative vision, peacebuilding, conflict resolution and humanitarian response are core activities of foreign policy. Following Sweden’s lead, Justin Trudeau’s government in Canada announced in 2017 that it was developing a feminist international assistance policy that would require development aid to be 100 per cent contributing to gender equality and also to support women’s rights organisations. As a result, Canada is now among the top four donors providing aid focused

The rise of feminist governance in foreign policy  205 on gender equality. In addition, Canada’s foreign security policy aimed to address the gender imbalance in UN peace operations by promoting increased participation and training of female peacekeepers (Fillion, 2018). Australia has also pursued a foreign policy gender strategy since 2016, making gender equality and women’s empowerment core objectives across all domains of foreign policy. On her appointment as Foreign Minister in 2014, Julie Bishop questioned why only 50 per cent of overseas development aid had to address gender equality and immediately raised the bar, requiring 80 per cent of Australian aid investment to target or improve gender equality (True, 2016: 228–9). Most recently, the new Coalition government agreement in Germany referred to approaching foreign policy ‘alongside feminist foreign policy’ (Koalitionsvertrag 2021: 144). Apparently, this was a point of contention among the parties prior to this language being agreed upon. Developing countries have also been following the trend towards feminist foreign policies. Mexico launched its feminist foreign policy in September 2019 and planned a major conference, Generation Equality Forum in May 2020 in collaboration with UN Women and France as well as women’s civil society to mark the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action (Government of France et al., 2020). Unfortunately, the forum had to be cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic and is now ongoing via working groups with the outcome forum held in Paris in June 2021. The forum showcased and strengthened both Mexico and France’s feminist foreign policies.1 South Africa has promoted gender equality as a foreign policy objective and has adopted a National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security (Haastrup, 2020). With its election to the UN Security Council in 2019, South Africa has been an active champion of the WPS agenda, and of gender equality in the state’s foreign policy, focusing in particular on women’s roles in mediation and conflict resolution, especially in the African region and in conjunction with the African Union. In line with their feminist or gender equality-focused foreign policies, a number of countries have established a global ambassador position specifically to promote women’s rights and gender equality internationally.2 This new office provides an institutional mechanism for the development of normative feminist principles to inform foreign policy. The promotion of feminist foreign policies reflects a broader global shift in political power and a gradual power shift in gender relations as women’s economic and political participation increases. It also reflects geopolitical power, and the reality that for some states, soft power tools are often their main mechanism of diplomacy. Aggestam and True (2020) find that those countries that are not in the Permanent Five of the UN Security Council, the control room of international politics, but would like to influence global affairs, seek to have normative influence on international agendas through what they do, who they ally with and where they spend their development aid dollars, and so on. It is these ‘middle power’ countries that strive to promote their own self-interest while aspiring to be influential global players that adopt feminist or pro-gender equality foreign policy. Promoting a feminist foreign policy may also have a positive impact on the state’s identity or international brand, further enabling the state’s multilateral and bilateral influence. In their study of EU member states’ perceptions of Swedish feminist foreign policy, Sundström and Elgström (2020: 419) found that two-thirds of EU diplomatic representatives regarded Swedish feminist foreign policy positively even though labelling a country’s policy ‘feminist’ was seen as ‘more controversial than carrying out gender-promoting policies within the context of “ordinary” foreign policy’. Some EU members noted that Sweden’s feminist

206  Handbook of feminist governance foreign policy had given it a ‘specific mark’ that had helped Sweden’s overall branding and appeared to be somewhat envious of the country’s enhanced foreign policy role. However, feminist governance in foreign policy goes beyond the perception of the brand to consider the salience of a gender or feminist perspective and policy framework in what states do as well as say. Every country is unique and has its own set of experiences, set of actors, set of opportunities and constraints. Gender equality has been widely institutionalised and socially embedded in the state feminism practised by several Swedish governments. Hence, to bring it into foreign policy made sense as the next step. In contrast, for a country like Mexico, with more ambiguous domestic implementation of gender equality commitments, the impetus was to elevate its leadership in the global realm, as a G20 state. Feminist foreign policy has allowed the country to gain some international visibility in multilateral forums, to demonstrate that they could be part of global leadership especially representing the Global South. The confluence of gender policy developments achieved in intergovernmental organisations, especially the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, the UN Security Council’s Women, Peace and Security agenda, and the promotion of gender equality by the G7 (see Timeline, Chapter 1 in this Handbook), has enabled and supported the rise of feminist foreign policy. It has also facilitated the creation of new international alliances, for example to promote SHRH in foreign policy, in the face of backlash against gender equality by some states. In sum, the international diffusion of feminist foreign policy represents a new window of opportunity available to all countries to redesign their foreign policies with gender inclusion and equality at their heart.

FEMINIST FOREIGN POLICY GOVERNANCE NETWORKS Transnational governance networks of, inter alia, women and feminist foreign policy leaders are a major mechanism for promoting feminist governance in specific foreign policy domains such as security, trade and economic integration, and humanitarian aid. Logics of power and secrecy frequently operate in foreign policy domains to exclude women from decision-making positions and to mask the relevance of feminist or gender perspectives, for instance on issues of national security, such as terrorism and violent extremism, where male-only groups and norms of masculinity encourage and justify the use of violence. Feminist foreign policy-relevant governance networks subvert that logic of foreign policy power. They create an alternative logic of empowerment promoted through diplomacy that supports women and men to deliver peace and prosperity through principles of human rights and gender equality. Stone et al. (2020) observe that governance networks are a transnational structure that unites agents with ‘a similar cause and connecting a vast number of heterogeneous people, with different political culture backgrounds and policy interests, enabling the translation and legitimation of policies’. Such a transnational governance network may involve state and non-state actors across countries, and from the local to global realms. Innovative ideas such as those pertaining to feminist foreign policy may be developed in the network and diffused from there, rather than adopted by states emulating one another. We see precisely this transnational dynamic in new feminist governance networks since the early 2000s. Networks of women foreign policy leaders pre-date the branding of foreign policy as ‘feminist’, but they have prepared the ground for them, breaking down masculine hegemonies and enabling new forms of leadership and governance. Women’s foreign policy leader-

The rise of feminist governance in foreign policy  207 ship may result in distinct foreign policies, as Bashevkin (2016) has shown with her study of international aid targeting women’s empowerment in the Global South (see also Barnes and O’Brien, 2018). There are formal networks such as the Network of Women World leaders created by Madeleine K. Albright in the 1990s while she was US Secretary of State (True, 2003). There is also the informal network created by Samantha Power (2019), and Albright before her, of women UN ambassadors. These networks have provided mutual support and they mitigate the pressure on women leaders to adopt traditionally masculine policy agendas, including the use of force. Recently, a group of women leaders has formed to save multilateralism in the face of the trend started by the US administration under Trump to withdraw from global treaties and ditch funding for women’s reproductive rights in developing countries as well as situations of crisis. Such networks have been changing the script for female foreign policy leaders and enabling a more gender-inclusive style of foreign policymaking (Leimbach, 2019; Lyons, 2019). Albright’s Network of Women World Leaders As US Secretary of State, Albright sought to promote global gender issues. In a speech given at the Department of State in 1999 she stated that: ‘Working with a variety of agencies and forward-looking NGOs … we have brought international women’s issues into the mainstream of our foreign policy, which is right where they belong’ (quoted in True, 2003: 380). Bringing together women foreign ministers from around the world, in the late 1990s Albright calculated that people sharing two key identities – as women and foreign ministers – could agree to new emphases and perspectives and form a base from which to leverage significant broader policy change. Albright created a strategic coalition that transcended cultural and political differences to forge international support for gender equality issues. The commitment among these women foreign ministers was to meet face to face regularly, to take each other’s telephone calls and to promote a unified front on foreign policy issues having a particular impact on women.3 For example, in 1999, women foreign ministers from 14 nations wrote a letter to Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations, calling for a new international framework to end the widespread transnational trafficking of human beings – predominantly women and children – in the service of prostitution, domestic servitude and other forms of profiteering.4 These actions were prompted by the networking efforts of feminist-oriented women in foreign policy decision-making roles who had been reaching out to women’s non-government organisations (NGOs). Samantha Power’s Female UN Ambassadors Network Former US Ambassador to the United Nations (2012–16), Samantha Power said that being the only woman on the UN Security Council made her a feminist (Ryan, 2017). By the end of her tenure as ambassador, however, she was one of 37 women ambassadors leading their UN permanent mission in New York. In 2014, the UN Security Council nearly reached gender parity for the first time, with six women ambassadors on the 15-member Security Council. This shift was short-lived: the number of women ambassadors on the Council dropped to four in 2016 and to one in 2017. Responding to violence against political women, Power (2019) started a campaign called #FreeThe20 and mobilised her female and male ambassador peers at the UN. This campaign focused on 20 women who had been locked up by their

208  Handbook of feminist governance governments for championing human rights or women’s rights, including sexual harassment. Intergovernmental networking of this sort raises the profile of gender perspectives on a range of global public policy issues. They have prepared the ground for the emergence of a feminist approach to foreign and defence policy, grounded in feminist thinking, approaches and policy preferences. G20/W20 Convening The creation of the W20 (Women in the G20) within the G20 intergovernmental forum established a new transnational space for promoting feminist and gender equality principles in foreign economic policy. Turkey founded the W20 in 2015 during the year it hosted the G20, showing its credibility as a state power willing to address gender equality in the global economy. The previous year, Australia had hosted the G20, making gender inequality a major agenda item. Members agreed upon a target to close the economic participation gender gap by 25 per cent, thereby demonstrating Australia’s diplomatic capacity as a ‘middle power’ through the promotion of gender equality (Harris-Rimmer, 2015). In 2016, China used the opportunity of hosting the G20 and W20 to showcase its leadership and state strength in this area. In 2018, Germany convened the G20/W20 and included a panel on women’s economic leadership in which Angela Merkel as well as Canadian foreign minister Chrystia Freeland, International Monetary Fund (IMF) head Christine Lagarde and Ivanka Trump, special advisor to the US president, participated. This high-powered group elevated the W20 governance network and generated consensus on the importance of giving women economic power and reducing gender inequalities by addressing barriers to women’s economic participation such as the cost of child care, lack of technical and skill-based education and the need for mentors and networks supporting women. In 2018, the W20 meeting coincided with the launch of the World Bank’s women entrepreneurs’ start-up capital fund. A technology business leader from Kenya emphasised the need for women to be involved in the co-design of innovative technology platforms as well as connectivity to accelerate the inclusion of women. The panel of global leaders also highlighted the importance of safeguarding women’s human rights to education, health care, reproductive rights and maternity leave as fundamental to participation in the economy, thus articulating core feminist principles as relevant. Women Political Leaders (WPL) at the Munich Security Conference Like the G20/W20, the Munich Security Conference (MSC) is a leading global forum for world leaders to discuss important national and international policy concerns, but with regard to international security rather than the economy per se. Since 2016, the Munich Security Conference has been committed to achieving equitable inclusion of ‘female perspectives on peace, security and defence policies’ (quoted in Women Political Leaders, 2020). Increasing women’s participation in foreign and security decision-making must be the first step of feminist governance in foreign policy. Since 2018, the MSC has collaborated with Women Political Leaders, who created the annual Reykjavik Index on Leadership with Kantar, a leading data, insights and consulting company based in London. The index aims to measure women and men’s attitudes towards women’s leadership across 23 sectors (including governance and politics, the judiciary and a range of business sectors) in ten nations including the G7 nations as well as India, Nigeria and Kenya. The results have been both surprising and alarming, with

The rise of feminist governance in foreign policy  209 just 46 per cent of society being very comfortable with a woman as head of government, and 48 per cent with a woman as CEO of a major national company. The Munich Conference has become an intergovernmental platform to address the absence of progress in closing gender gaps in leadership. In 2020, a high-level panel was held with leaders sharing proposals on how to disrupt discriminatory perceptions of female professionals and leaders in the peace and security field, which included the female foreign minister of South Korea. Town hall discussions were also held in 2018 and 2019 on amplifying women’s leadership in peace processes and peacemaking and to bring global good practices for constructing sustainable peace. The Munich conference has allowed side events and the participation of NGOs to further build the transnational governance network. In 2020, there was a side event entitled ‘No Peace without Feminism: Why every state needs a feminist foreign policy’, involving men and women, state and civil society leaders. It noted the exclusion of women and other political minorities from foreign and security processes and the need for foreign policy to counter discriminatory and patriarchal structures around the world. Transnational governance networks empower feminist entrepreneurs to build coalitions and teams to persuade others of the merits of a feminist or gender equality soft power approach to foreign policy. Norm or policy entrepreneurs need not be women, as illustrated by the cases of William Hague (Davies and True, 2017) and Justin Trudeau (Aggestam and True, 2020), but women’s transnational governance networks have been crucial enablers and amplifiers. As more women enter positions of foreign policy leadership, we are seeing approaches to foreign policy that contrast with hyper-masculine and strongman approaches. Gender and leadership scholarship predicts that balance of men and women in leadership positions should enable gender differences (both masculine and feminine approaches) to come to the fore within the foreign policy leadership of both women and men (Eagly and Johannesen-Schmidt, 2001; Mandell and Pherwani, 2003).

THE RISE OF A FEMINIST FOREIGN POLICY MOVEMENT With feminist foreign policy, Margot Wallström and Sweden gave a name to a movement already well underway. The key ideas were given a brand that gained international popularity – even notoriety in some quarters. In so doing, it advanced feminist governance by enabling a common movement across transnational women’s governance networks and women’s civil society organisations. Non-state groups have become significant actors in expanding the feminist foreign policy movement, amplifying and expanding the normative principles in state foreign policies and the ideas advanced by women leaders’ networks in transnational forums. The burgeoning feminist foreign policy movement is now reflected in new media platforms, NGO coalitions, research and philanthropic initiatives that interface with states and international organisations. As with the WPS agenda, this civil society engagement has been vital in furthering feminist governance in foreign policy (True and Wiener, 2019: 556; Björkdahl and Mannergren-Selimovic, 2019). Before feminist foreign policy was articulated, the WPS agenda had spawned a transnational network of advocates, practitioners, scholars and policymakers positioned in and coming from different institutions and locations and engaged in the same quest to transform international peace and security. As a result, much learning and sharing of gender perspectives on foreign policy issues had already occurred between and among state and non-state actors.

210  Handbook of feminist governance Civil society was used to monitoring governments’ foreign and security policies and holding them to account in open debates at the UN Security Council to challenge the dominant security discourse of women as immutable victims of conflict (see Chapter 9, this Handbook). Feminist advocacy was also pursued in other venues where international peace and security decision-making was influenced or undertaken, such as NATO, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and regional organisations such as the European Union, African Union, and Association of Southeast Asian Nations, as well as other UN institutions such as the UN CEDAW Committee, the Human Rights Council, and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) (Cook, 2016; O’Rourke, 2020). However, since Sweden declared it was conducting a feminist foreign policy, new spaces for activism, monitoring and accountability have emerged. For example, in 2018 Sweden hosted a large-scale conference on Gender Equality in Stockholm, inviting feminist groups and leaders from around the world; and in 2019 the same multi-stakeholder conference was hosted by the Tunisian government. A US coalition for a feminist foreign policy for America was formed in 2019. The coalition involved a number of major NGOs and policy advocates, including the International Council for Research on Women, Amnesty International, Women’s Environment and Development Organization, Planned Parenthood, Rockefeller, Open Society and New America Foundations – all cognisant of the ‘quietly growing trend in the international community’. The group released a discussion draft paper, ‘Toward a Feminist Foreign Policy in the United States’ endorsed by over 70 organisations.5 They stated that it was ‘a collective effort to develop a vision for the highest standard of U.S. foreign policy that promotes overarching goals of gender equality, human rights, bodily autonomy, peace and environmental integrity, while prioritizing the articulation of concrete policy recommendations’ (ICRW, 2020a).6 Mindful of other countries’ feminist foreign policies and the groundwork of feminist research and analysis the US coalition asked, ‘what would a feminist foreign policy for the USA in 2021 look like? And what needs to change in US policy, funding and programming to be considered “feminist”?’.7 Meanwhile, we have seen a media platform with offices in London, New York and Berlin called ‘The Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy’ flourish online via social media (with almost 15,000 Twitter followers) and public events to popularise feminist concepts and representation in foreign policy. New alliances of long-time feminist NGOs have now joined forces with the feminist brand and explicit agendas to transform humanitarian action in the case of the Feminist Humanitarian Network,8 and conflict prevention in the case of FIRE – Feminist Impact for Rights and Equality (comprising Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, MADRE, the Nobel Women’s Initiative, Medica Mondiale, and Kvinna till Kvinna). As Moghadam discusses (Chapter 22 in this Handbook), the latter most recently published their five principles for a feminist ceasefire as a feminist take on the UN Secretary-General’s March 2020 call for a global ceasefire during the Covid-19 pandemic. Even older women’s peace activism, for instance, was rebranded, as in the case of ‘Codepink’ into ‘The feminist foreign policy project’ connecting to and leveraging off the burgeoning FFP movement. Feminist Foreign Policy Expertise Like most, if not all, gender policy reform since the 1980s, efforts from above at the level of international organisations and political leaders are not sufficient to change norms, ideas and

The rise of feminist governance in foreign policy  211 institutional practices unless they are supported by social movements and subject to ongoing critical scrutiny by gender activists and scholars. The latter is why it is important to include the emergence of FFP expertise as part of feminist governance and alongside changes in state foreign policies. FFP expertise can be seen in the construction of new knowledge generated and shared in publications, events, toolkits and the like, translating research into policy frameworks and recommendations (see Kunz and Prügl, 2019). The Swedish government itself has produced a Handbook on Feminist Foreign Policy (Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2018) to enable the diffusion of knowledge on its approach; there has been a flurry of feminist scholarship on gender and foreign policy over the past several years as well as policy- and practitioner-friendly handbooks and guidance notes.9 Indeed, the growth of an epistemic community championing FFP parallels the earlier growth of an epistemic community in support of gender-responsive budgeting to ensure that fiscal spending promotes equality. Similar to FFP, gender-responsive budgeting arose as a feminist initiative from within governments, as demonstrated by the ongoing publication of national gender budget statements in Australia, India, Nepal and South Korea, among other countries (see Chapter 11 in this Handbook). As Diane Stone (2012: 1) has argued, ‘the “soft” transfer of ideas and information via networks whether they be personal, professional or electronic is rapid and frequent.’ This knowledge diffusion fuels policy transfer, while policy transfer, evident in the spread of state feminist foreign policies ‘lays down routes for the continuous circulation of knowledge’ by individuals, networks and institutions (Stone et al., 2020: 1). Feminist expertise and knowledge networks on foreign policy are increasingly visible nationally, regionally and globally. Intellectual exchanges on feminist foreign policy are promoted by universities and research institutes (and webinars), including by bespoke centres focused on gender, peace and security and global women’s leadership. Some universities have created new courses and accredited qualifications to build the knowledge and technical capacity to undertake feminist foreign policies (e.g. MA in Women, Peace and Security at LSE in the United Kingdom; a Graduate Certificate in Gender, Peace and Security at Monash University in Australia; and a Feminist Foreign Policy course at Sciences Po in France). In addition, foreign policy think tanks in Europe and the US, such as Foreign Policy Interrupted (Zenko and Wolf, 2015; Zenko, 2011) and the US Council on Foreign Relations and Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy, have highlighted gender gaps in foreign policy through high-profile media and convening. Some are loose relationships to exchange information with like-minded policy institutes, university centres and government agencies. In Australia, the International Women’s Development Agency, an NGO, has launched a new project to map the impact of feminist foreign policy and the strategies for further advancing these policies within and across countries (ActionAid Australia et al., 2020). Individual expert advisors also act as policy entrepreneurs, advocating for particular feminist policy ideas vis-à-vis particular governments and international agencies, such as UN Women and the UN Commission on the Status of Women, within a tighter epistemic community. Feminist expertise and the emergent epistemic community focused on FFP seek to evaluate foreign policies and practices in light of feminist principles and norms, and to guide their implementation rather than being responsible for their actual implementation.

212  Handbook of feminist governance

CONCLUSION Feminist governance is becoming a normative, ideational and institutional feature of foreign policy in an increasing number of states driven by leadership and transnational governance networks, feminist NGOs, activism and research. We have argued that feminist foreign policies do not come out of the blue; rather, they are enabled and supported by a burgeoning global social movement encompassing knowledge, governance and advocacy. This FFP movement is critical to the future development and transformative impact of actual feminist foreign policies. The emergence and direction of feminist governance in foreign policy, moreover, is not linear. Since it is taking place in a highly contested global, political environment, we see states adopting feminist foreign policy at the same time as we also see rising misogyny and the scapegoating of women by populist political leaders, parties and non-state actors worldwide. The growth of illiberal democracies and right-wing populism has led to foreign policy reversals in some countries, with a growing remasculinisation of foreign policy, marked by prioritising short-term security concerns over more considered engagement in longer-term conflict prevention. That said, the social, economic and political momentum in favour of gender equality is too strong to ignore. Moreover, the increased presence of women leaders in powerful positions and the development of gender-responsive policies seem to go together in driving societal change. One outcome of states adopting feminist foreign policy is that there is stronger feminist ‘networked governance’, that is, coordination within civil society and between civil society and governments across areas of foreign policy including but also beyond the ‘women, peace and security’ agenda. Recent events have further solidified the future of feminist foreign policy in the short term. Feminist leadership in foreign, security and public health policy has proven highly effective in reducing the spread and severity of Covid-19 globally. We have observed how feminist alliances across policy areas have been vociferously building on the feminist foreign policy movement, calling for a feminist Covid-19 Policy and Recovery10 and for ‘feminist peace’, especially in light of the 2021 change in the US presidency (see Chapter 17 and 22 in this Handbook).11 As this global crisis unfolds, feminist civil society organisations and the wider epistemic community continue their mobilisation efforts to ensure that feminist principles of governance are embedded within foreign policy and security institutions. In doing so, these networks create space for any actor to call on and expand their foreign policy practice in a stronger and more peaceful feminist direction.

NOTES 1. France, Mexico and UN Women, Generation Equality Forum, https://​www​.gob​.mx/​sre/​prensa/​ mexico​-presents​-national​-strategy​-for​-generation​-equality​-forum​-2020​-to​-mark​-25th​-anniversary​ -of​-beijing​-platform​-for​-action​?idiom​=​en. 2. Sweden, the USA, Seychelles, the UK, Iceland, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, Australia, Finland, Canada, Luxembourg; see https://​www​.cfr​.org/​blog/​ambassadors​-gender​-equality​-who​-they​-are​ -what​-they​-do​-and​-why​-they​-matter. 3. Some diplomatic missions of United Nations member states complained about Secretary Albright’s effort to put women on the agenda and, in particular, they objected to the way she discussed policy issues with other women foreign ministers from around the world. Because male foreign ministers represented their countries, the countries reasoned, they were being excluded from important

The rise of feminist governance in foreign policy  213

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

high-level opportunities to network and deliberate. Secretary Albright was quick to retort that if these countries felt excluded, they should appoint woman foreign ministers (True, 2003: 380). United Nations News Agency, ‘14 Women Ministers Seek End to Human Trafficking’, 15 October 1999. Other collaborations among the 15 women foreign ministers included advocating the election of two women judges to the International Criminal Court, condemning the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi and human rights violations in Burma and leading an international campaign to stop the spread of HIV/AIDs. ICRW 2020a, https://​www​.icrw​.org/​publications/​toward​-a​-feminist​-foreign​-policy​-in​-the​-united​ -states/​. ICRW 2020b, https://​www​.icrw​.org/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2020/​12/​FFPUSA​-AboutUs​-Dec​.2020​ -ICRW​.pdf. Personal email correspondence, 2019. Feminist humanitarian network comprises 48 members, including local and national women-led organisations working in the Global South, international organisations and individuals. See https://​ www​.feminis​thumanitar​iannetwork​.org/​. See Davies and True (2019); Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security and Peace Research Institute Oslo (2017, 2019); Women Political Leaders and Kantar (2018); Brown (2019); Global Counterterrorism Forum (2014, 2019); Cheung et al. (2021). The following statement has been endorsed by more than 1,600 individuals and women’s networks and organisations from more than 100 countries, to demand that states adopt a feminist policy to address the extraordinary challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic in a manner that is consistent with human rights standards and principles. See http://​femin​istallianc​eforrights​.org/​blog/​2020/​03/​ 20/​action​-call​-for​-a​-feminist​-covid​-19​-policy/​. In January 2021, a new feminist peace initiative led by Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, MADRE, and Women Cross DMZ released A Vision for a Feminist Peace: Building a Movement-Driven Foreign Policy. The framework aims to reimagine US foreign policy built on intersectional feminist principles led by social movements. See https://​www​.fem​inistpeace​initiative​.org/​.

REFERENCES ActionAid Australia, CARE Australia, International Women’s Development Agency, Oxfam Australia, Plan International Australia (2020) ‘A Feminist Foreign Policy for Australia – Joint Submission to the 2020 Review of Australia’s International Development Policy’. https://​iwda​.org​.au/​resource/​a​ -feminist​-foreign​-policy​-for​-australia​-joint​-submission. Aggestam, Karin and Annika Bergman-Rosamond (2016) ‘Swedish Feminist Foreign Policy in the Making: Ethics, Politics, and Gender’, Ethics & International Affairs 30(3): 323–34. Aggestam, Karin and Jacqui True (2020) ‘Gendering Foreign Policy: A Comparative Framework for Analysis’, Foreign Policy Analysis 16(2): 143–62. Banaszak, Lee Ann (2010) The Women’s Movement Inside and Outside the State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barnes, Tiffany D. and Diana Z. O’Brien (2018) ‘Defending the Realm: The Appointment of Female Defense Ministers Worldwide’, American Journal of Political Science 62(2): 355–68. Bashevkin, Sylvia (2016) ‘Numerical and Policy Representation on the International Stage: Women Foreign Policy Leaders in Western Industrialised Systems’, International Political Science Review 35(4): 409–29. Bishop, Julie (2014) ‘Women in Media – National Press Club Address’, Minister for Foreign Affairs Speech. http://​foreignminister​.gov​.au/​speeches/​Pages/​2014/​jb​_sp​_141029​.aspx​?w​=​tb1CaGpkPX​ %2FlS0K​%2Bg9ZKEg​%3D​%3D. Björkdahl, Annika and Johanna Mannergren-Selimovic (2019) ‘WPS and Civil Society’. In Sara E. Davies and Jacqui True (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Women, Peace and Security, New York: Oxford University Press, 428–38.

214  Handbook of feminist governance Brown, Katherine (2019) ‘Gender Mainstreaming Principles, Dimensions and Priorities for PVE’. Guidance Note, UN Women. https://​www​.unwomen​.org/​en/​digital​-library/​publications/​2019/​09/​ gender​-mainstreaming​-principles​-dimensions​-and​-priorities​-for​-pve. Cheung, Jessica, Dilek Gürsel, Marie Jelenka Kirchner and Victoria Scheyer (2021) Practicing Feminist Foreign Policy in the Everyday: A Toolkit, Berlin: Heinrich Böll Foundation. Cook, Sam (2016) ‘The “Woman-In-Conflict” at the UN Security Council: A Subject of Practice’, International Affairs 92(2): 353–72. Davies, Sara E. and Jacqui True (2017) ‘Norm Entrepreneurship in International Politics: William Hague and the Prevention of Sexual Violence in Conflict’, Foreign Policy Analysis 13(3): 701–21. Davies, Sara E. and Jacqui True (2019) The Oxford Handbook of Women, Peace and Security, New York: Oxford University Press. Eagly, Alice H. and Mary C. Johannesen-Schmidt (2001) ‘The Leadership Styles of Women and Men’, Journal of Social Issues 57(4): 781–97. Fillion, Stephanie (2018) ‘As Sweden and Canada Push Their Feminist Foreign Policy, Others Resist the Label’, Passblue, 12 February. Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security and Peace Research Institute Oslo (2017) Women, Peace and Security Index 2017/18, Washington, DC: GIWPS and PRIO. Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security and Peace Research Institute Oslo (2019) Women Peace and Security Index 2019/20, Washington, DC: GIWPS and PRIO. Global Counterterrorism Forum (2014) ‘Good Practices on Women and Countering Violent Extremism’. https://​www​.thegctf​.org/​About​-us/​GCTF​-framework​-documents. Global Counterterrorism Forum (2019) ‘Addendum to the GCTF Good Practices on Women and Countering Violent Extremism, with a Focus on Mainstreaming Gender’. https://​www​.thegctf​.org/​ About​-us/​GCTF​-framework​-documents. Government of France, Government of Mexico and UN Women (2020) ‘Generation Equality Forum’. https://​www​.gob​.mx/​sre/​prensa/​mexico​-presents​-national​-strategy​-for​-generation​-equality​-forum​ -2020​-to​-mark​-25th​-anniversary​-of​-beijing​-platform​-for​-action​?idiom​=​en. Haastrup, Toni (2020) ‘Gendering South Africa’s Foreign Policy: Toward a Feminist Approach?’, Foreign Policy Analysis 16(2): 199–216. Harris-Rimmer, Susan (2015) ‘A Critique of Australia’s G20 Presidency and the Brisbane Summit 2014’, Global Summitry 1(1): 41–63. Htun, Mala and Laurel S. Weldon (2012) ‘The Civic Origins of Progressive Policy Change: Combatting Violence against Women’, American Political Science Review 106(3): 548–69. ICRW (2020a) Toward a Feminist Foreign Policy in the United States, Washington, DC: International Center for Research on Women. https://​www​.icrw​.org/​publications/​toward​-a​-feminist​-foreign​-policy​ -in​-the​-united​-states/​. ICRW (2020b) Coalition for Feminist Foreign Policy in the United States: About Us. https://​www​.icrw​ .org/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2020/​12/​FFPUSA​-AboutUs​-Dec​.2020​-ICRW​.pdf. Koalitionsvertrag Zwischen, SPD, Bundni 90, Die Grunen und FDP (2021) Mehr Fortschrittwagen, Bundnis Fur Freiheit Gerechtigkeit und Nachhaltigkeit. https://​www​.spd​.de/​fileadmin/​Dokumente/​ Koalitionsvertrag/​Koalitionsvertrag​_2021​-2025​.pdf. Kunz, Rahel and Elisabeth Prügl (2019) ‘Introduction: Gender Experts and Gender Expertise’, European Journal of Politics and Gender 2(1): 3–21. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1332/​2515​10819X1547​1289106077. Leimbach, Dulcie (2019) ‘Three Ex-UN Leaders Form a Women’s Group to Save Multilateralism’, PassBlue, 21 February. Lyons, Kate (2019) ‘Rise of the “Strongman”: Dozens of Female World Leaders Warn Women’s Rights Being Eroded’, The Guardian, 28 February. Mandell, Barbara and Shilpa Pherwani (2003) ‘Relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Transformational Leadership Style: A Gender Comparison’, Journal of Business and Psychology 17(3): 387–404. O’Rourke, Catherine (2020) Women’s Rights in Armed Conflict under International Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Power, Samantha (2019) The Education of an Idealist, New York: Dey Street, William Morrow. Ryan, Jennifer (2017) ‘Samantha Power: “Being the Only Woman in the UN Made Me a Feminist”’, The Irish Times Women’s Podcast, 13 November.

The rise of feminist governance in foreign policy  215 Stone, Diane (2012) ‘Transfer and Translation of Policy’, Policy Studies 33(6): 1–17. Stone, Diane, Osmany Proto De Oliveira and Leslie A. Pal (2020) ‘Transnational Policy Transfer: The Circulation of Ideas, Power and Development Models’, Policy and Society 39(1): 1–18. Sundström, Malena Rosén and Ole Elgström (2020) ‘Praise or Critique? Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy in the Eyes of Its Fellow EU Members’, European Politics & Society 21(1): 418–33. Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2018) Handbook: Sweden Feminist Foreign Policy, Stockholm: Government of Sweden. True, Jacqui (2003) ‘Mainstreaming Gender in Global Public Policy’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 5(3): 368–96. True, Jacqui (2016) ‘Gender and Foreign Policy’. In Mark Beeson and Shahar Hameiri (eds), Navigating International Disorder: Australia in World Affairs 2011–2015, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 224–41. True, Jacqui and Antje Wiener (2019) ‘Everyone Wants (a) Peace: The Dynamics of Rhetoric and Practice on “Women, Peace and Security”’, International Affairs 95(3): 553–74. Wallström, Margot (2016) ‘A Feminist Approach is Self-Evident and Necessary’, UNA-UK Magazine, 12 December. Women Political Leaders (2020) ‘Women at the Peace & Security Table to Make a Difference – Munich Security Conference 2020’. https://​www​.w​omenpoliti​calleaders​.org/​event/​women​-at​-the​-peace​ -security​-table​-to​-make​-a​-difference​-munic​-security​-conference​-2020/​. Women Political Leaders and Kantar (2018) ‘The Reykjavik Index for Leadership’. https://​www​.kantar​ .com/​inspiration/​equality/​the​-reykjavik​-index​-for​-leadership​-2018. Zenko, Micah (2011) ‘City of Men’, Foreign Policy, 14 July. Zenko, Micah and Amelia Mae Wolf (2015) ‘Leaning from Behind: Women in Foreign Policy and Media’, Foreign Policy, 24 September.

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

INTRODUCTION Existing international organisations and institutions play an important role in advocating for health and human rights. The 1948 WHO Constitution, the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) all articulate an individual right to health that is inclusive, irrespective of gender, religion and ethnicity. The 1948 WHO Constitution defines health as ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’ (WHO, 1948). The 1966 ICESCR defines health in Article 12 as: ‘the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health’ (UN General Assembly, 1966). In 2000, the UN Economic and Social Committee adopted General Comment 14 concerning the right to the highest attainable standard of health (Article 12 of ICESCR). The General Comment recommended that States integrate a gender perspective in their health-related policies, planning, programmes and research in order to promote better health for both women and men. A gender-based approach recognizes that biological and socio-cultural factors play a significant role in influencing the health of men and women. (UN CESCR, 2000)

In 1979, Article 12 in CEDAW provided that States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination against women in the field of health care in order to ensure, on a basis of equality of men and women, access to health care services, including those related to family planning. (UN General Assembly, 1979)

The CEDAW Committee, like the UN Economic and Social Committee in relation to the ICESCR, has provided a series of advice and recommendations on the gender inclusive right to health (OHCHR, n.d.). Neither of these processes, however, is legally binding on member states’ practice of health governance (Bennett and Davies, 2019). The World Health Organization (WHO) remains the only international health organisation that can call upon its 194 member states, through the World Health Assembly, to meet their health system obligations under the 1948 WHO Constitution, and specifically, health emergency response under the International Health Regulations (2007). The debate has been what should be the ambition of WHO Secretariat power over member states: technical standard-setting advice or normative politically positioned demand for reform (McInnes and Lee, 2012: 49)? WHO has been the normative lead or ‘focal point’ for over 60 years in health research, health policy and guidelines (Hanrieder, 2015: 192). There are a growing number of disease-specific global health initiatives such as UNAIDS, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Global Alliance for Vaccination and Immunisation (GAVI) and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). WHO, however, remains the 216

Feminist governance in global health  217 only international (state member) organisation with a mandate to fund, advise and legislate all areas of health under the 1948 WHO Constitution. Despite funding, political and technical challenges, WHO maintains its lead as the technical standard-setting agency for global health governance, especially in the area of infectious disease surveillance and response. We contend that WHO has maintained this leading role because the organisation has not sought to challenge states’ unequal ‘gendered processes of power’, especially health emergency response (Waylen, 2014). Feminist research ‘alerts us to the importance of studying silences and absences in familiar institutions’ (Ackerly and True 2010: 7). On the one hand, the World Health Organization is not silent concerning gender. For two decades WHO has promoted a definition of gender that reflects feminist principles: ‘gender is the socially constructed characteristics of women and men – such as norms, roles and relationships of and between groups of women and men. It varies from society to society and can be changed. The concept of gender includes five important elements: relational, hierarchical, historical, contextual and institutional’ (WHO, n.d.). On the other hand, as we will discuss, there is little evidence that these elements are consistently promoted across the global health programmes, especially health emergency response, within WHO. In the area of health emergencies, where pre-existing gender inequality can significantly affect access to care, treatment and recovery, WHO is the critical agency to define and promote a gender inclusive vision of infectious disease surveillance and response that is receptive to the gender mainstreaming activities occurring around it in other UN organs (as revealed in Chapter 23 of this Handbook). At WHO’s helm in health emergency response, its technical advice remains blind to the fact that women’s needs may be different to men’s (gender equity) and health care may be determined by gender equality (Davies et al., 2019). This chapter examines why WHO has failed to promote a gender inclusive response to health emergencies up to (and including) the Covid-19 pandemic. The chapter will proceed in three stages. First, the chapter will present a brief history of WHO to illustrate why this institution, and its health emergency programme in particular, deserves examination. Second, the chapter will examine the institutional structures within WHO that have sought to promote feminist knowledge and research. In the final section, the chapter will examine why WHO’s own gender concept is repeatedly excluded from WHO health emergency response recommendations, including the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The chapter concludes with suggestions on the next steps required for WHO to enact gender-inclusive institutional reform for gender mainstreaming to permeate across the work and activity of WHO, especially in the area of health emergency response.

WHO: A BRIEF HISTORY The 1948 WHO Constitution itself is absent of gendered language. References in the document are to ‘peoples’; and the document refers to the need to ensure that access to health care and health well-being is attained for every individual ‘without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition’ (WHO, 1948). WHO was a direct descendent of the health organisation of the League of Nations Permanent Health Organisation; and its function was and is to introduce a shared ‘technical’ standard of public health such as nutrition advice, child and maternal health, physical education, cancer treatment and drug addiction (Hanrieder, 2015).1 Reflecting the functionalism of its time – to reduce political tensions and

218  Handbook of feminist governance promote universal acceptance of its recommendations – WHO was to be less political and more scientific in its orientation (Chorev, 2012). This tension affects WHO’s operations to this day: it is a political organisation always trying to dress itself in technical robes so as not to offend member states. However, Chorev (2012) argues that while WHO may be politically and financially subject to the whims of its members, the organisation has institutional agency. The WHO Headquarters, especially the Secretariat led by the WHO Director-General, has some normative influence over the direction of the organisation, even the budget and programme priorities. The WHO bureaucracy has its own principles and interests that has determined, in the past, whether it adopts a political, technical, public sector or private sector mentality. WHO has a history of health policy entrepreneurialism. Key global health initiatives that originated from WHO leadership include ‘Health for All’, Access to Essential Medicines, International Code of Marketing Breastmilk Subsidies, Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, and infectious disease eradication programmes like the smallpox eradication campaign during the Cold War. The growth of donor-led health aid and entrepreneurialism has increasingly occurred outside of WHO; and WHO is not the first place that states and philanthropic donors call to coordinate a health initiative. However, one area where WHO remains the undisputed ‘focal agency’ (Hanrieder, 2015: 204) is infectious disease surveillance and response to health emergencies. In this area WHO has undisputedly ‘owned’ the space with authority drawn from the International Health Regulations (IHR), an instrument adopted by WHA member states that guides states and the WHO response to infectious disease outbreaks, or, as termed in the IHR, public health emergencies of international concern (Moon et al., 2015). As the next section will discuss, feminist knowledge and practices exist within WHO but they remain marginalised and excluded from health emergency response.

FEMINIST KNOWLEDGE AND WHO Many epistemological battles have been fought to recognise the inclusion of feminist methodologies in sciences, technologies and medicine (Mukhopadhyay and Prügl, 2019; Shannon et al., 2019). A review of global gender data found that ‘the overall pattern of gender equality for women in science, medicine, and global health is one of mixed gains and persistent challenge’ (Shannon et al., 2019). The 1995 Beijing Declaration at the Fourth World Congress for Women called for the collection of gender sensitive and sex-disaggregated health data; promoting gender equality and leadership in health care services, policies and programmes; and ensuring research, advice and treatments that were women-centred (United Nations, 1995). Twenty-five years later, the field of health continues to have a gender problem (Davies et al., 2019). As a WHO report revealed in 2019, women are hired disproportionately in low-income health roles (WHO, 2019); there are few women in senior positions in health sciences, private health insurance, research and pharmaceutical companies; and few gender-sensitive policies in health-related civil society organisations, philanthropic and internal organisations (IOs) (Global Health Council, 2019; Global Health 50/50, 2020). As the leading health institution, WHO has sought to develop a public health approach to gender, implementing efforts to mainstream gender within the organisation and programmes (WHO, n.d.). In 2001, WHO adopted a commitment to gender mainstreaming (WHO, 2001); and six years later a gender strategy was adopted by WHO’s Executive Board (EB120.R6.2)

Feminist governance in global health  219 and World Health Assembly (WHA60.25) (WHO, 2008). The strategy introduced mechanisms to operationalise gender mainstreaming within WHO, including training materials, a toolkit for gender analysis and a gender road map (WHO, 2003, 2011a). The formal adoption of WHO’s Gender Strategy was to be a ‘game-changer’ for the governance of this international organisation (WHO, 2008). Three years later, WHO’s (2011b) internal review of the success of its gender strategy across the organisation demonstrated ‘limited’ success: less than one quarter of WHO publications published sex-disaggregated data; few WHO units had integrated gender and sex into the programmes, or monitoring and evaluation; and only a third of public dialogue and speeches from WHO mentioned gender. The report concluded that ‘the impact on day-to-day work has been limited’ (WHO, 2011b). In 2016, an internal report on WHO’s gender strategy referred to ‘considerable progress’ but the basis of this is unclear. The report provides case studies on specific programmes as ‘models of progress’; there is no data provided in the report to reveal the policy and programmatic gaps for gender mainstreaming that may persist (WHO, 2016). This means we are unable to assess the claim that gender mainstreaming has increased across WHO and its programmatic activity. The formal adoption of WHO’s gender strategy laid the framework for feminist governance within WHO’s internal practices and health programmes (Walyen, 2014), but there is no evidence of transformational practices across the whole organisation. The central unit for gender guidance and mainstreaming advice within WHO sits within the Department of Equality and Human Rights, which comprises five people (WHO directly employs 7,500 people). The mandate for this team’s work has been vertical: addressing individual pillars of health such as gender and tobacco, and gender and tuberculosis. Moreover, the gains made in the (small) gender programme remain unclear as there are no benchmarks on what gender and tobacco, for example, should look like in WHO- or state-level practice. For the first time, WHO Director-General Dr Tedros declared in his 2017 election manifesto that gender equality within WHO would be a core focus. However, the gender team has not grown in size and they have continued to be given specific areas for engagement (not, for example, the instruction to conduct a gender audit of WHO’s 80-plus programmes). Before the Covid-19 pandemic, this team almost exclusively focused on gender and universal health coverage, and women’s leadership challenges within the health workforce (see WHO, 2019). These are important issues, and research on women’s leadership has ‘broken through’ to impact on health emergency response (as we discuss below). There remains, however, no reference to the integration of knowledge on gender and sex, including monitoring and evaluation, within the health emergency programme – one of WHO’s largest programmes (Mazumdar, 2020). This gap is illuminating, given the gender-specific harms that health crises manifest. Formally, the key governing mechanism for health emergencies within WHO is the IHR (2005). Women and gender are mentioned twice within the IHR: as a category of travellers whose rights must be protected under Article 32, and in Article 50, which recommends equal gender representation on the IHR Review Committee. After the Ebola outbreak in West Africa (2014–15), an external review of WHO’s response found that gendered experiences of the outbreak were not considered and not included in risk communication recommendations (WHO, 2015: 20). In the wake of this report, there was a growth in global health advocacy movements focused on women’s representation and leadership in global health, as well as the mainstreaming of gender equality in global health programmes (Dhatt, 2020). Two notable movements were the United States-based Women in Global Health (WIGH) (launched in 2015) and the

220  Handbook of feminist governance United Kingdom-based Global Health 50/50 (launched in 2018). Both strongly advocate for gender equality in health outcomes and greater women’s representation in UN institutions (including WHO) and other health-affiliated organisations. In the wake of these campaigns, women’s representation is one area where there was progress in WHO’s health emergency response programme. Specifically, increased female representation in the IHR’s Emergency Committees (ECs) which designate a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC). For H1N1 (2009) there were two women out of 15 members and similar levels of representation were seen for MERS 3/13 and Ebola (2014) 2/13.2 By the time of the Zika outbreak in 2016, committee representation had grown to 6/21 and in 2019 representation was (almost) equal for Ebola 2019 at 5/10 (there was regression for Covid-19 which only had 4/16 women). Within WHO Health Emergencies Programme (HEP) gender inclusion has been interpreted as women present within the outbreak response system. Representation is, however, only one aspect of gender mainstreaming (Davies et al., 2019). From an intersectional view, the women in the EC discussions are elite, highly educated and professionalised. They are more likely to have come from the Global North, or have been educated there, and represent an elite social group to facilitate their entry into a global organisation. This approach of ‘add women and stir’ presumes representation equals inclusion (Davies et al., 2019), when neither women scientists nor women public health officials are automatically feminists (Harman, 2016). This is revealed in the content of the assessments and regulations that inform the health emergency programme. The self-assessment (SPAR) for WHA member states to meet their IHR obligations has no reference to gender considerations in capacity-building, preparedness or outbreak response. There is no requirement for collection of sex-disaggregated data in health emergencies (WHO, 2018). In the Joint External Evaluation (JEE) exercises of states’ performance in IHR core capacities, there is no consideration of gender equality measures for workforce, risk communication, human rights legislation, human resourcing (i.e. child care and schooling) during emergencies, or gendered impact on health care workers’ access to personal protective equipment (WHO, 2005). The HEP toolkits to manage outbreaks have no mention of gender, gender definitions, gender audit, nor any gender inclusive practice guidance for each PHEIC, or in the ‘what can WHO do in health emergencies’ pages on WHO’s website (WHO, 2018). The gap between formal participation and the inclusion of gender knowledge, methods and approaches within WHO health emergency programme confirms that while equal representation matters, women’s participation is not the same as creating a space for feminist knowledge to ensure advice and programmes are reaching women and high-risk groups on the ground at risk of infection and neglect. This is fundamentally at odds with WHO’s own 2008 Gender Strategy: ‘programmes are responsible for analysing the role of gender and sex in their areas of work and for developing appropriate gender-specific responses in all strategic objectives on a continuing basis’ (WHO, 2008). Thus, while more women may be formally present in WHO, gender-inclusive policies and gender empowerment practices are still missing from WHO’s health emergency best practice recommendations for the organisation itself and its member states (Lowndes, 2019). As we discuss below, the consequence of WHO’s exclusion of feminist practices from its emergency response programme is the exclusion of recommendations that would address the politics of gender relations: addressing how culture, knowledge and behaviours affect outbreak response on the ground.

Feminist governance in global health  221

GENDER-INCLUSIVE HEALTH EMERGENCY RESPONSE: COVID-19 AS A TEST IOs craft their legitimacy like any other actor (Chorev, 2012). IOs have their own institutional culture that ‘sustain and enable their particular modalities of operation’ (Ni Aoláin and Valji, 2018: 61). In a crisis, gender ‘preconditions’ have a huge effect on society – they can reinforce unequal gender structures or reverse gender progress (Hozic and True, 2016; Tanyag, 2018). WHO has a history of excluding gender-specific recommendations because this would require WHO to end the charade of being an apolitical institution. A feminist response to health emergencies requires WHO to confront states with behavioural, cultural and regulatory practices that are gendered and discriminate against individuals’ right to access health, economic and political resources (Kunz et al., 2019). Despite the criticism that WHO failed women and girls in their response to the 2014–15 Ebola outbreak (WHO, 2015: 20), WHO did not recommend the collection of sex-disaggregated data during the Zika virus outbreak occurring across Latin America in 2016 (Diniz, 2017). Any effort to consider sex and/or gender as a determinant for risk of infection was thwarted at the first stage of data collection in the Zika outbreak (Pacheco, 2016). The public health recommendations made by WHO and reissued by the affected states was that women should avoid pregnancy and reduce risk of infection through household vector control and insecticide. Gendered norms in Latin America (especially amongst poor and ethnic minority communities) led to these responsibilities falling on women. These responsibilities fell on women who already experience significant gendered barriers (autonomy, cultural, financial) to access sexual and reproductive services (Wenham et al., 2019). WHO issued advice and policies that were wholly unsuitable to the management of the spread of infection and failed to relieve the additional burden of the outbreak on women. The exclusion of gender-inclusive recommendations in WHO’s advice on health emergency response had a similar impact during the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 2018–19. Gender experiences were excluded from WHO risk communication strategies, including access to minimum services for sexual and reproductive health care, women’s at-home caregiving roles and survival sex strategies (Holt and Ratcliffe 2019; International Rescue Committee, 2019). The consequence of no gender analysis in WHO health emergency care delivery and risk communication became visible when the false promise of access to early vaccine interventions was used by men – employed by the government and WHO – to procure sex from women and girls (McKay et al., 2019; Flummerfelt and Peyton, 2020). At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, WHO was again slow to include gender-specific advice in its recommendations in response to the outbreak. This time, however, WHO was not permitted to remain silent for long. Perhaps this was due to the scale of the Covid-19 pandemic compared to previous health emergencies where the spread and risk was more geographically limited; and perhaps this was due to the first ‘shared’ global experience of the differential impact a health emergency has on women and other marginalised groups. There were numerous commentaries and blogs detailing the gendered vulnerabilities to infection risk, and the secondary effects of outbreak interventions (Peterman et al., 2020; Wenham et al., 2020; UNICEF, n.d.; UN DGC, 2020). For example, CARE International was one of the first to outline how first responders needed to consider the multifaceted concerns which women face in the design and implementation of ‘lockdown’ response efforts during Covid-19 (Haneef and Kalyanpur, 2020). WHO Lebanon was the first within that organisation to present a gender

222  Handbook of feminist governance framework analysis within their programmatic response to Covid-19 with UN Women, and identify how underlying gender inequalities will compromise the containment response (UN Women Lebanon, 2020). Slowly, WHO Headquarters began to engage in conversation about gender relations during the Covid-19 health emergency. There are more websites, speeches and webinars being hosted by WHO on women and gender. The IHR Emergency Committee for Covid-19 had announced the outbreak as a PHEIC on 30 January 2020 and, on 3 April 2020, Dr Tedros first referred to the impact of lockdowns and associated risks (WHO, 2020a). On 1 May 2020, the Covid-19 PHEIC statement included, for the first time, gender-specific recommendations on the right to access sexual and reproductive health care during lockdown, and identified the increased risk of domestic violence in lockdown situations (WHO, 2020b). In the same month, May 2020, the World Health Assembly adopted a resolution calling for an evaluation of the global response to the Covid-19 outbreak, including a review of the IHR. In this IHR review, for the first time, was the inclusion of review of gender-specific recommendations in health emergency preparedness and response. Indeed, May proved a pivotal point for WHO’s position on gender inclusion. Collecting sex-disaggregated data for Covid-19 was recommended to assist with informing the trends concerning infections amongst health care and essential workers. Meeting this recommendation required states to prioritise the collection of sex disaggregated data (at the time less than 50 states were consistently collecting this data; see Global Health 50/50, 2020). In 2020, the majority of Covid-19 lockdown measures failed to consider the gendered impacts of such public health interventions and little advice on the gender harms of lockdown came from WHO (Peterman et al., 2020; Wenham et al., 2020). It was not until September 2020 that Dr Tedros announced the creation of the first Gender Working Group within the Health Emergencies Programme (which is yet to convene).

CONCLUSION The absence of feminist practices is particularly harmful in health emergencies. Prior to Covid-19, WHO had declared five PHEICs under the IHR: H1N1 (2009), Ebola (2014), Wild Poliovirus (2014), Zika (2016) and Ebola (2019). Each outbreak has directly affected the health risks and health outcomes of women, men and non-binary people differently, and required gender-sensitive risk communication messages to different groups according to their gendered social reproductive roles (Davies and Bennett, 2016; Smith, 2019; Wenham and Farias, 2019). However, gender expertise, gender-sensitive data and feminist-informed methodologies have been absent from WHO’s initial response to each crisis, including the initial response to Covid-19. WHO is captured by the dictates of its member states but not in the way usually ascribed. WHO has been the normative lead or ‘focal point’ for over 60 years in health research, health policy and guidelines. It has secured this status through a delicate balance of political and technical engagements with its member states. As the leading technical international organisation for health governance, WHO has the agency to promote gender-inclusive knowledge, methods and recommendations on health emergencies, but it has chosen not to. Pressing for a change in the power of gender relations requires WHO to recommend states to change their practices. Until Covid-19, this was a step too far for the organisation. It only did so in 2020

Feminist governance in global health  223 due to groundswell of demand for WHO engagement and thus was a relatively ‘risk-free’ step. Time will tell whether Covid-19 will bring the necessary change for WHO to adopt feminist practices in its governance of health emergencies.

NOTES 1.

WHO has its own World Health Assembly (WHA) which meets annually in Geneva and comprises health ministry representatives from each member state. The WHA approves the organisation’s yearly programmes and budget, and sets major policy. There is also an Executive Board, with a rotating membership based on technical expertise and geographical origin, which oversees all of the WHA’s decisions and the WHO Director-General’s work. WHO also has six regional offices with separate budget autonomy in the implementation of its programmes: Africa, Eastern Mediterranean, Europe, Pan America, South East Asia and Western Pacific. 2. EC: H1N1 – 2/15; MERS – 3/13; Polio – 6/20; Ebola (WA) – 2/13; Ebola (2018) – 5/11; Zika – 6/21; Yellow Fever – 4/8; Ebola (Oct. 2018) – 5/10; Ebola (Apr. 2019) – 6/13; Ebola (June 2019) – 5/10; Ebola (Oct. 2019) – 5/12.

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226  Handbook of feminist governance WHO [World Health Organization] (2011b) Gender Mainstreaming in WHO: Where Are We Now? Report of the Baseline Assessment of the WHO Gender Strategy, Geneva: World Health Organization. https://​apps​.who​.int/​iris/​bitstream/​handle/​10665/​44403/​9789241500135​_eng​.pdf​?sequence​=​1. WHO [World Health Organization] (2015) Women and Health: 20 Years of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. Report by the Secretariat, A68/16, Geneva: World Health Organization. https://​ apps​.who​.int/​iris/​bitstream/​handle/​10665/​252844/​A68​_16​-en​.pdf​?sequence​=​1​&​isAllowed​=​y. WHO [World Health Organization] (2016) A Foundation to Address Equity, Gender and Human Rights in the 2030 Agenda: Progress in 2014–2015, Geneva: World Health Organization. https://​www​.who​ .int/​gender​-equity​-rights/​knowledge/​equity​-gender​-and​-human​-rights​-in​-2030​-agenda/​en/​. WHO [World Health Organization] (2018) IHR Review Committee on Second Extensions for Establishing National Public Health Capacities and on IHR Implementation, Geneva: World Health Organization. https://​extranet​.who​.int/​sph/​news/​ihr​-self​-assessment​-annual​-reporting​-tool​-spar​-2018. WHO [World Health Organization] (2019) Delivered By Women, Led By Men: A Gender and Equity Analysis of the Global Health and Social Workforce, Human Resources for Health Observer Series 24, Geneva: World Health Organization. https://​apps​.who​.int/​iris/​bitstream/​handle/​10665/​311322/​ 9789241515467​-eng​.pdf​?ua​=​1 WHO [World Health Organization] (2020a) ‘WHO Director-General’s Opening Remarks at the Media Briefing on COVID-19 – 3 April 2020’, World Health Organization, 3 April. https://​www​.who​.int/​dg/​ speeches/​detail/​who​-director​-general​-s​-opening​-remarks​-at​-the​-media​-briefing​-on​-Covid​-19​-​-3​-april​ -2020. WHO [World Health Organization] (2020b) ‘Statement on the Third Meeting of the International Health Regulations (2005) Emergency Committee Regarding the Outbreak of Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19)’, 1 May. https://​www​.who​.int/​news/​item/​01​-05​-2020​-statement​-on​-the​-third​-meeting​ -of​-the​-international​-health​-regulations​-(2005)​-emergency​-committee​-regarding​-the​-outbreak​-of​ -coronavirus​-disease​-(Covid​-19). WHO [World Health Organization] (n.d.) ‘Gender’, World Health Organization. https://​www​.who​.int/​ health​-topics/​gender.

18. Feminist peacebuilding governance Maria Martin de Almagro

INTRODUCTION Since the early 2000s, United Nations (UN) peacebuilding architecture and feminist peace activists have constituted a unique alliance for the development of feminist peacebuilding governance. This alliance has made possible substantial changes in UN peacebuilding norms and practices in post-war states, including: the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) in 2000; subsequent resolutions; the creation of the Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund; and the systematic inclusion of women and the advancement of gender equality as foundational principles in UN peacebuilding architecture. Feminist peacebuilding governance strives for more than just halting direct violence. It seeks to address the specific insecurities and the continuum of violence experienced by women and sexual minorities in the aftermath of conflict and to eliminate gender hierarchies and other oppressive structures that existed prior to, and exacerbated, violent conflict – including poverty and inequality (hooks, 1984; WILPF, 2015). Feminist peacebuilding governance is based on a feminist vision of peace embedded in three core values and principles. First, because violence and insecurity take many forms and women and men experience conflict and peacebuilding differently, feminist peacebuilding governance values inclusivity and seeks to redistribute spaces, gender roles and power in a more equitable manner. Second, it recognises that binary understandings of war and peace erase the fact that violent conflict is experienced as a continuum and that women and gender minorities experience violence both before the war declaration and after the signature of a peace agreement during reconstruction processes, due to the domination of political, economic and societal positions of power by men and male ownership of most land and natural resources (True and Hewitt, 2019). Therefore, feminist peacebuilding governance takes a multidimensional and transformative approach to social justice by tackling structural, economic, environmental, symbolic and social insecurities together, in a comprehensive manner (True and Hewitt, 2018: 99). Third, it acknowledges that the state and formal institutions are not the only spaces where peace is built and that informal institutions and spaces such as self-help groups amongst residents in rural communities are essential to sustain peace (Autesserre, 2021). Thus, peacebuilding activities need to be expansive and ensure that local women’s peace and human rights organisations have the necessary power and resources to generate their own conflict-resolution and peace-making initiatives in formal and informal spaces, rather than to simply include them in state-centric formal processes of conflict resolution. While acknowledging the work that regional organisations such as the EU and non-governmental organisations such as Oxfam, Kvinna till Kvinna and ActionAid are doing, this chapter explores the evolution of UN feminist governance in peacebuilding from both a policy formation and a practice perspective. To that end, the chapter proceeds as follows. The first section examines the evolution of the UN feminist peacebuilding normative and legal framework. It suggests that there are two demands promoted by feminist activists and scholars 227

228  Handbook of feminist governance that are now well-established UN peacebuilding practices: partnership with local women’s organisations and the engagement of informal, localised spaces in the quest for multidimensional sustainable peace. The second section examines how these gender-sensitive practices in UN peacebuilding interventions are implemented and reveals their limitations. Ultimately, the chapter argues that peacebuilding interventions offer opportunities for the diffusion of feminist peacebuilding norms and values including the inclusion of marginalised perspectives. Nevertheless, the heteronormative and neoliberal rationality embedded in these interventions ends up reproducing patriarchal visions of social order and further conflicts around what feminist peacebuilding should be about, exposing the gendered, classed and racialised power relations within and between national, international and transnational, formal and informal institutions (Dobrowolsky and Findlay, Chapter 34 in this Handbook). Informed by feminist critiques of UN peacebuilding frameworks, the concluding remarks reflect on how the potential for feminist peacebuilding governance could be better developed.

FROM GENDER-BLIND TOWARDS FEMINIST PEACEBUILDING GOVERNANCE Gender-Blind Peacebuilding The end of the Cold War enabled an increase in the number, length and complexity of UN peacebuilding operations. The new emphasis on peacebuilding stems from the UN recognition that previous traditional peacekeeping operations did not tackle root causes of conflict and were not well suited to help countries achieve sustainable peace. Whereas the UN charter does not contain any language on peacebuilding, the UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali’s 1992 Agenda for Peace marks the beginning of a new multidimensional framework for action to reconstruct political institutions and infrastructure, promote the organisation of democratic elections and assist the post-conflict country in reintegration into the global market economy in the aftermath of war. However, although it distinguished itself from the previous simpler aims of physically separating and keeping the peace between two warring factions (Doyle and Sambanis, 2000), this new long-term approach to conflict prevention and peacebuilding was gender-blind in two ways. First, although it recognised that peacebuilding needs to be multidimensional, it still focused very much on militarisation and the deployment of soldiers to conflict-affected areas. This raised concerns about the ways in which military institutions promote norms of masculinity that value belligerence and use force to end violence (Higate and Henry, 2009; Whitworth, 2004). Second, it sought to reconstruct infrastructure and promote the reintegration of a post-war country into the global market economy through neoliberal economic structures which enable violence against conflict-affected women (Duncanson, 2019; True, 2012). International financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund promoted economic development strategies that prioritised austerity measures and the privatisation of public and social services, while investing mostly in large-scale infrastructure projects that provide traditionally male-oriented job opportunities in sectors largely controlled by pre-war political and military elites (True et al., 2017). These gender-blind policies not only reinforced a gendered order that pushed women back to their pre-war traditional roles and

Feminist peacebuilding governance  229 spaces, exacerbating women’s poverty and vulnerability to abuse and exploitation, but also reinforced structural inequalities and crystallised root causes of conflict (Goldstein, 2003). This only changed after a series of gender and sexual-based violence and abuse scandals authored by UN peacekeepers in Bosnia, Haiti and Cambodia in the early 1990s which ‘exacerbate[d] insecurity for vulnerable individuals as a consequence of gender power relations’ (Higate and Henry, 2009: 150). Following sustained transnational feminist advocacy and in light of previous UN peacebuilding failures, the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action included a series of commitments to address gendered power structures in peacebuilding and the United Nations Security Council recognised that gendered logics and practices shape and drive the political and socioeconomic dynamics of war and peace (Cockburn, 2012; Meintjes et al., 2001).

A FEMINIST GOVERNANCE OF PEACEBUILDING: NORMATIVE AND INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORKS For the past 20 years, the United Nations has outlined a normative and institutional framework that reforms its practices according to feminist values and principles. Although these initiatives were at first specifically directed at addressing women’s vulnerabilities during conflict, the expression of feminist values through the adoption and implementation of policies directed towards achieving gender equality has permeated broader UN peacebuilding institutional and legal frameworks. As a result, the increased participation of women in peacebuilding activities and the understanding of peace as multidimensional and multi-scale became core goals of UN peacebuilding governance. First, in October 2000, the United Nations Security Council passed UNSCR Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. The Resolution, considered the foundation stone of gender-sensitive policy formulation in peacebuilding (Moran, 2010: 262), called for ‘equal participation of women in peace and security decision-making, a gender approach to policy analysis, and sex-specific data and research on peacekeeping and peace-building operations’ (True, 2016: 308). A whole policy architecture numbering ten dedicated resolutions, as well as regional and national action plans, now constitute the Women, Peace and Security agenda. Its mandate is usually described as consisting of the three ‘Ps’: prevention of violent conflict and its related sexual and gender-based violence; protection of women and their rights in conflict contexts; and participation of women in all affairs related to peace and security. Importantly, this agenda has also sought to redistribute power and authority in international interventions, as well as to move away from liberal and state-centric perspectives, and towards bottom-up and inclusive initiatives in post-war relief and recovery activities. Second, the institutional creation of the Peacebuilding Commission and the Peacebuilding Fund1 at the UN in 2005 constituted a conscious effort to operate in accordance with non-hierarchical feminist values as it laid the groundwork for an integrated approach to post-conflict peacebuilding and reconciliation based on inclusiveness and conflict prevention. The Peacebuilding Commission was established as an intergovernmental advisory body to create and promote comprehensive strategies for peacebuilding in general terms and in specific country situations. The double UN Security Council and UN General Assembly resolutions that led to its establishment recognised the need to integrate a gender perspective in its operations and reaffirmed the key role women play in conflict prevention and peace-

230  Handbook of feminist governance building, as well as highlighting the need for their equal participation and full involvement in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security. Furthermore, the UN Secretary-General published a report entitled ‘Women’s Participation in Peacebuilding’ as part of the ten-year anniversary of the WPS agenda (UNSC, 2010). The report highlighted the need for gender-sensitive disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) programmes and Security Sector Reform (SSR) initiatives and expressed clear commitment to the protection of women’s rights throughout the peacebuilding process.2 Crucially, it outlined a ‘Seven-Point Action Plan’ for gender-responsive peacebuilding (UNSC 2010, para. 26) adopted as a response to critical voices that the participation of women was being neglected in favour of protection, and that has informed much of the policy work undertaken by the UN Peacebuilding Commission (Duncanson, 2016: 105). In 2016, the Peacebuilding Commission adopted its Gender Strategy to ensure a more structural and systematic integration of gender perspectives across its thematic work and its country-specific activities (UNGA, 2016). The Strategy makes a clear link between gender equality and sustainable peace, and identifies specific areas for gender-responsive peacebuilding, such as the inclusion of women and gender experts in mediation, conflict resolution and post-conflict reconstruction, and the upholding of women’s rights and needs during economic recovery.3 Furthermore, the Peacebuilding Fund has also used a gender marker system since 2009 to track its financial allocation and ranking of projects that promote gender equality and women’s empowerment. To provide financial means for the implementation of the Gender Strategy and the Seven-Point Action Plan, the UN created the Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund (WPHF) in 2016. The WPHF directly funds local expertise and women’s organisations working on gender-responsive peacebuilding without the intermediary of national administrations and through a highly consultative and de-centralised process of project selection. Third, the broader normative framings of the new UN Agenda on Sustaining Peace4 adopted in response to the findings of the 2015 high-level UN’s peace operations, peacebuilding architecture and Women, Peace and Security reviews have embraced and integrated feminist understandings of peace as an inclusive, multidimensional and multi-scale endeavour. Accordingly, the agenda emphasises first the need to prevent conflict by working within formal and informal spheres of governance at all stages of conflict and in all its dimensions, and second, the participation of as many women as possible as a central condition for the transition to advance sustainable solutions to peacebuilding (Klugman and Mukhtarova, 2020; UNSC, 2020; World Bank and United Nations, 2018). To be sure, at least discursively, gender is central to the constitutive logic of sustaining peace across ‘all policies and programmes’ (Krook and True, 2012: 118). Holistic and sustained engagement with local expertise, inclusive partnerships and authority-sharing all require leaving behind the state as the main referent of peacebuilding interventions as well as masculinised discourses about military threats and managerial practices of liberal peace. These are replaced by interventions at societal and community level, fostering capacity-building and grassroots participation at different scales of governance and involving a wide variety of actors (Hirblinger and Landau, 2018; Hunter, 2012; Rothe, 2017).

Feminist peacebuilding governance  231

GENDER-SENSITIVE PEACEBUILDING GOVERNANCE: PRACTICES AND LIMITATIONS This section conducts a gender analysis of the two main current practices to engender peacebuilding – women’s inclusion and partnership with local women’s organisations in conflict prevention, and the prioritisation of informal, everyday spaces in peace initiatives – in order to understand whether these practices take us closer to the feminist vision of peace as outlined in the introductory section of this chapter. It shows how, paradoxically, the gender-sensitive activities that result from the adoption of these practices are based on a set of assumptions about women’s agency and informal spaces that lead to important tensions and contradictions, limiting the impact of feminist peacebuilding governance. I will illustrate the argument through the analysis of peacebuilding interventions in Liberia. Women Organisations as Partners in Conflict Prevention There is now little chance that a peacebuilding initiative does not include women and women’s organisations. Whether as part of Track 1 peace negotiations, such as in Colombia in 2013, informal conflict resolution, such as the Bashingantahe, the circle of elders at community level in Burundi, or through the establishment of quotas for women’s representation in parliament and post-conflict governance, women now have a seat at the table. However, critics have pointed to the fact that it has proved difficult to translate women’s representation into substantive gains and a gender-sensitive peace (Byrne and McCulloch, 2012; Tripp et al., 2009). This could be because institutional layering initiatives, whereby new elements, such as adding women, are ‘attached to [the] existing institution’ (Mahoney and Thelen, 2010, cited in Van der Heijden, 2011: 11), can only bring small incremental changes while institutional barriers are sustained over time. Some of the most recent initiatives have tried to overcome these limitations by engaging women’s organisations as partners in community spaces where they have always been and by considering those spaces as key sites of peacebuilding. Based on the normative frameworks of the UN sustaining peace and Women, Peace and Security agendas, the joint EU–UN Spotlight Initiative (EU and UN, 2018) is the latest international project for gender equality and women’s participation in which women’s organisations have been invited to be partners. The Spotlight Initiative, a new multi-year multi-million dollar programme, promises to end gender-based violence around the world, increase community resilience and prevent conflict through a holistic approach that combines socioeconomic empowerment and capacity-building of women’s grassroots. Nevertheless, the programme has already shown limits to its capacity to achieve sustainable peace according to feminist values and principles. First, it is based on essentialist conflation of gender as sexual binary and women as particularly vulnerable to sexual and gender-based violence (Bargués-Pedreny and Martin de Almagro, 2020). Second, it is instrumentalist, as it builds a chain of assumptions whereby investing in women’s natural capacities as conflict preventers will not only reduce sexual and gender-based violence, but will also generate returns for community sustainable peace and resilience (Charlesworth, 2008). Third, it is highly racialised and racialising, as certain regional pathologies such as femicide in Latin America, or harmful traditional practices in sub-Saharan Africa, are identified as socio-cultural problems rather than considering how gender violence is related to the gendered structures of poverty or to the global dynamics of neoliberal accumulation and dispossession (Bargués-Pedreny and Martin de Almagro, 2020).

232  Handbook of feminist governance To illustrate, the Liberia Spotlight Initiative highlights ‘a number of sociocultural factors that pose a challenge to the eradication of GBV in Liberia’, including ‘patriarchal norms’, years of war or ‘a generalised cultural and societal acceptance of violence against women and children’ (EU and UN, 2018: 9). Spotlight finds that the most problematic issue in terms of gender violence are harmful traditional practices, such as Female Genital Mutilation or Cutting, ‘a deeply rooted practice that is a few thousand years old’ (Middleburg, 2018: 22). While Spotlight points to Liberian culture, customs and rituals preserved by traditional leaders as responsible for gender violence, it also locates the solution in the same informal rural settings such as bush schools, female secret societies and other informal authorities, legitimising a holistic approach to transforming cultural norms, whereby women are victims but also key agents in conflict and violence prevention. This also reproduces racialised representations of Black women as victims of their own culture, and gives legitimacy to the continuing ‘gender-sensitive’ mode of government on sustaining peace, while more political questions on recognition and on what kind of economic, social and political capital are necessary for meaningfully engaging in peacebuilding processes are not answered. Multidimensional and Multi-Scalar Peacebuilding: Informal Spaces and Socioeconomic Justice UN peacebuilding governance understands peace as multidimensional and encompassing physical, economic and environmental security. Accordingly, the UN Secretary-General has recognised that one of the major barriers to the inclusion of women in post-war recovery is that women’s pre-war economic activities are marginalised;5 immediate post-war reconstruction efforts focus on large-scale infrastructure projects that tend to provide employment opportunities primarily to men. These models of massive infrastructure investment prioritised by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund usually also involve savings and cuts in the public sectors and services where women work and on which women rely because of their assigned care roles, such as health and education. This results in the poverty that makes it virtually impossible for women to challenge unequal social relations and can also in part explain why gender-based violence tends to persist in post-war countries (Cohn and Duncanson, 2020). In order to correct this imbalance, the UN Peacebuilding Fund now supports projects that specifically target women’s socioeconomic rights through the provision of microfinance schemes or small-scale income generation projects directed at developing the entrepreneurial skills of women in cash crop production of, for example, cashews, cocoa and coffee, and at formalising their participation in the country’s economy through the formalising of traditionally female businesses such as beauty parlours, food stands and susus, women’s groups for money lending (Martin de Almagro and Ryan, 2019). Nevertheless, although these gender-sensitive peacebuilding practices seek to economically empower women, they rarely offer the opportunity for women to escape poverty and to safely and equally participate in post-conflict reconstruction. This is because these practices are based on neoliberal economic prescriptions that reproduce gendered hierarchies and put women into a subordinate position in the global economy. For example, small-scale income generation projects dichotomise formal and informal spaces by targeting informal ‘feminine’ activities that contribute to the economy of the household, without recognising how women’s informal economic activity always and already contributes to growth of formal markets. This, together with the idea that women have poten-

Feminist peacebuilding governance  233 tial as small-size entrepreneurs to bring more economic growth reproduces gendered power dynamics that on the one hand devalue the feminised ‘informal’ and that on the other result in an added burden for women. The devaluing of the informal sector in WPS implementation documents and the Peacebuilding Commission strategy is striking, all the more because of the predominant participation of women (90 per cent) in informal or agricultural economic activity in post-conflict countries, upon which most of the formal economic sector depends (UNDP, 2009: 7). Second, we find similar dynamics in post-conflict land reform, where the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund privilege land privatisation schemes. While in principle these reforms seek to ensure equal access to land, in practice it worsens the situation for women and other marginalised populations in post-war settings. This is because the private ownership of land reduces the land available for collective uses upon which women have relied. For example, in Liberia, the formalisation of land rights and land titles in the new Land Rights Act (2018) was supported by the Peacebuilding Commission and the Peacebuilding Fund. The Act gives rights to women to own land for the first time and integrates women into decision-making structures at community and national levels. In practice, however, a rural illiterate woman who has always cultivated collective plots of land will not be able to capitalise on registration opportunities and obtain a land title, but will suffer the consequences if somebody else registers as private land the land which she cultivates or where she finds firewood, or if the land is taken over by concession companies in the rubber, mining and forestry sectors where women rarely have employment opportunities. These projects treat women as individual smallholders with access to land, whereas the decisions about what to cultivate, where to cultivate and how the common plot of land will be distributed are taken by men, and women cultivate it as a collectivity (women share land with co-wives, for example). While the intention has been to balance power inequalities and redistribute resources, the solutions proposed to gender mainstream national economic recovery follow technocratic and neoliberal logics and do not account for how structural inequalities and gender power differentials play out in the proposed reforms.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have argued that feminist peacebuilding governance understands how war-making and peace are shaped by gendered power relations, and how these determine whose experiences of war count as legitimate knowledge and who can sit at the peace negotiation table. During the past two decades, UN peacebuilding architecture and feminist peace activists have constituted a unique alliance in global governance, making possible substantial changes in UN peacebuilding norms and practices in post-war states. First, a normative and legal framework has turned once gender-blind peacebuilding into a project where the inclusion of a diversity of women’s perspectives, experiences and expertise is regarded as essential to bring about social and political change. Second, a series of implementation practices have ensured that gender is integrated in UN peacebuilding policies on conflict prevention and economic recovery. In a second section, the chapter offered a gender analysis of gender-sensitive peacebuilding practices such as working alongside women’s organisations as partners and engaging in informal spaces. It exposed a mixed picture of slow wins and remaining challenges. Although

234  Handbook of feminist governance these practices represent opportunities for the diffusion of gender-sensitive, people-centred peacebuilding, they are also based on problematic gendered and racialised assumptions concerning women’s participation and on dichotomous understandings of formal and informal institutions that devalue and depoliticize the informal spaces where women are most present. As the Liberia example illustrated, UN gender-sensitive peacebuilding initiatives have selectively integrated feminist critique into their policy frameworks through incremental integration of women (Fraser, 2013) as peacebuilders and economic producers, while in practice reinforcing neoliberal policies that perpetuate hierarchical gendered, classed and racialised power structures rather than correcting them. In other words, the transformative claims of a new sustainable peace agenda based on feminist values and principles are not met because normative framework and policy practices are still based on a dominant neoliberal policy frame consisting in giving individual rights and formalising previously informal structures. This complexity and the contradictions need to be considered in order to better understand the material consequences gender-sensitive practices have for the everyday life of women and marginalised populations in post-war societies. For example, when facing the latest threat, Covid-19, what the UN highlights is ‘the importance of women’s full, equal and meaningful participation to an effective pandemic response and to peacemaking efforts’ (UNWOMEN and DPPA, 2020). Accordingly, the 2020 annual Secretary-General report on Women, Peace and Security affirmed that ‘[a]lthough the primary responsibility for handling public health emergencies lies with the State, women’s groups have demonstrated that they are essential leaders in emergencies and play a key role in maintaining social cohesion and preventing further conflict and instability’ (UNSC, 2020: 2). Crucially, because state structures are weak, ‘superhero(in)e’ women’s groups in post-conflict contexts are once again positioned as the solution (Shepherd, 2011), while the economic policies of international financial institutions that have undermined the revenue base of states and weakened public health services remain unquestioned. Ultimately, challenging neoliberal reconstruction policies that determine the distribution of post-war power and resources should be at the core of feminist peacebuilding governance. This involves careful gender analysis of care and reproduction economies and the role they play in post-war reconstruction, as well as feminist institution-building outside the UN peacebuilding architecture (Duncanson, 2019; Martin de Almagro and Ryan, 2019; True and Svedberg, 2019). Failing to do so will result in what the UN calls ‘feminist’ peacebuilding being antithetical to the needs of women and marginalised populations, not least because their presence and (re)productive work is only valued if it sustains neoliberal ideas of ‘good governance’ and economic growth. Alternative feminist visions that dismantle global political and economic power structures and masculine institutions, and that put women’s agency and needs at the centre, must become an integral part of UN peacebuilding frameworks and practices if these are to help build gender-sensitive, sustainable peace.

NOTES 1. UN Security Council S/RES/1645 (2005) and UN General Assembly A/RES/60/180 of 20 December 2015 on post-conflict peacebuilding led to the creation of the UN Peacebuilding architecture and its three main bodies: the Peacebuilding Commission, the Peacebuilding Fund and the Peacebuilding Support Office.

Feminist peacebuilding governance  235 2.

Countless toolkits and manuals have been developed that propose strategies to ensure gender training for staff responsible for SSR policy and planning and also for new recruits in police, military and private security forces. See, for example, OSCE (2019) ‘Inclusion of Women and Effective Peace Processes: A Toolkit’, available at https://​www​.osce​.org/​secretariat/​440735; Hunt Alternative Fund and International Alert (2004) ‘Inclusive Security, Sustainable Peace: A Toolkit for Advocacy and Action’; Megan Bastick and Kristin Valasek (eds) (2008) Gender and Security Sector Reform Toolkit, Geneva: DCAF, OSCE/ODIHR and UN-INSTRAW. 3. The Peacebuilding Commission’s Gender Strategy is available at https://​www​.un​.org/​peacebuilding/​ sites/​www​.un​.org​.peacebuilding/​files/​documents/​07092016​-​_pbc​_gender​_strategy​_final​_1​.pdf (accessed 29 April 2021). 4. UN General Assembly, Review of the United Nations peacebuilding architecture, A/RES/70/262, 27 April 2016; UN Security Council, S/RES/2282 (2016), Resolution 2282 adopted by the Security Council at its 7580 meeting. 5. Women, Peace and Security, Report of the Secretary-General (S/2019/800 and A/73/890-S/2019/448) (UNSC, 2019).

REFERENCES Autesserre, Sévérine (2021) The Frontlines of Peace, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bargués-Pedreny, Pol and Maria Martin de Almagro (2020) ‘Prevention From Afar: Gendering Resilience and Sustaining Hope in Post-UNMIL Liberia’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 14(3): 327–48. Byrne, Siobhan and Allison McCulloch (2012) ‘Gender, Representation and Power-Sharing in Post-Conflict Institutions’, International Peacekeeping 19(5): 565–80. Charlesworth, Hilary (2008) ‘Are Women Peaceful? Reflections on the Role of Women in Peacebuilding’, Feminist Legal Studies 16(3): 347–61. Cockburn, Cynthia (2012) ‘Snagged on the Contradiction: NATO, Resolution 1325, and Feminist Responses’, Women in Action 1: 48–57. Cohn, Carol and Claire Duncanson (2020) ‘Women, Peace and Security in a Changing Climate’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 22(5): 742–62. Doyle, Michael W. and Nicholas Sambanis (2000) ‘International Peacebuilding: A Theoretical and Quantitative Analysis’, American Political Science Review 94(4): 779–801. Duncanson, Claire (2016) Gender and Peacebuilding, Cambridge: Polity. Duncanson, Claire (2019) ‘Beyond Liberal vs Liberating: Women’s Economic Empowerment in the United Nations’ Women, Peace and Security Agenda’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 21(1): 111–30. EU and UN (2018) ‘Spotlight Initiative: Country Programme Document Liberia’, http://​mptf​.undp​.org/​ factsheet/​project/​00112285 (accessed 11 December 2020). Fraser, Nancy (2013) Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis, New York: Verso. Goldstein, Joshua S. (2003) War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Higate, Paul and Marsha Henry (2009) Insecure Spaces: Peacekeeping, Power and Performance in Haiti, Kosovo and Liberia, London: Zed Books. Hirblinger, Andreas and Dana M. Landau (2018) ‘Governing Conflict: The Politics of Scaling Difference’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 12(3): 385–404. hooks, bell (1984) Feminist Theory from the Margin to Center, Boston, MA: South End Press. Hunter, Lori (2012) ‘Environmental Change, Migration, and Gender’, Population Reference Bureau, https://​www​.prb​.org/​resources/​environmental​-change​-migration​-and​-gender/​ (accessed 5 December 2020). Klugman, Jeni and Turkan Mukhtarova (2020) ‘How Did Conflict Affect Women’s Economic Opportunities in Sub-Saharan Africa?’, Washington, DC: Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS).

236  Handbook of feminist governance Krook, Mona Lena and Jacqui True (2012) ‘Rethinking the Life Cycles of International Norms: The United Nations and the Global Promotion of Gender Equality’, European Journal of International Relations 18(1): 103–27. Mahoney, James and Kathleen Thelen (2010) ‘A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change’, in James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen (eds), Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1–37. Martin de Almagro, Maria and Caitlin Ryan (2019) ‘Subverting Economic Empowerment: Towards a Postcolonial-Feminist Framework on Gender (In)Securities in Post-War Settings’, European Journal of International Relations 25(4): 1059–79. Meintjes, Sheila, Meredeth Turshen and Anu Pillay (2001) The Aftermath: Women in Post-Conflict Transformation, London: Zed Books. Middelburg, M. J. (2018) Appraisal on FGM/C in Liberia: Suggestions for a Country Strategy Tackling FGM/C in the Spotlight Initiative, Maarsen: Middelburg Human Rights Law Consultancy. Moran, M. H. (2010) ‘Gender, Militarism, and Peace-Building: Projects of the Postconflict Moment’, Annual Review of Anthropology 39(1): 261–74. Rothe, Delf (2017) ‘Gendering Resilience: Myths and Stereotypes in the Discourse on Climate‐Induced Migration’, Global Policy 8(1): 40–47. Shepherd, Laura J. (2011) ‘Sex, Security and Superhero(in)es: From 1325 to 1820 and Beyond’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 13(4): 504–11. Tripp, Aili Mari, Isabel Casimiro, Joy Kwesiga and Alice Mungwa (2009) African Women’s Movements: Transforming Political Landscapes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. True, Jacqui (2012) The Political Economy of Violence against Women, Oxford: Oxford University Press. True, Jacqui (2016) ‘Explaining the Global Diffusion of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda’, International Political Science Review 37(3): 307–23. True, Jacqui and Sarah Hewitt (2018) ‘International Relations and the Gendered International’. In Andreas Gofas, Innani Hamati-Ataya and Nicholas Onuf (eds), The SAGE Handbook of the History, Philosophy and Sociology of International Relations, London: Sage, 90–105. True, Jacqui and Sarah Hewitt (2019) ‘What Works in Relief and Recovery?’ In Sarah Davies and Jacqui True (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Women, Peace and Security, New York: Oxford University Press, 178–92. True, Jacqui and Barbro Svedberg (2019) ‘WPS and International Financial Institutions’. In Sarah Davies and Jacqui True (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Women, Peace and Security, New York: Oxford University Press, 336–50. True, Jacqui et al. (2017) ‘A Feminist Perspective on Post-Conflict Restructuring and Recovery: The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina’, WILPF, http://​afakneswiah​.org/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2020/​06/​ Feminist​-political​-economy​-ENG​-FINAL​.pdf (accessed 29 April 2021). UNDP [United Nations Development Programme] (2009) ‘UNCT Joint Programme on Gender Equality and Women Empowerment: Republic of Liberia’, http://​mptf​.undp​.org/​factsheet/​project/​00067650 (accessed 11 December 2020). UNGA [United Nations General Assembly] (2016) ‘Review of the United Nations Peacebuilding Architecture, A/RES/70/262’, https://​www​.un​.org/​en/​development/​desa/​population/​migration/​ generalassembly/​docs/​globalcompact/​A​_RES​_70​_262​.pdf (accessed 5 December 2020). UNSC [United Nations Security Council] (2010) ‘Women’s Participation in Peacebuilding: Report of the Secretary-General, A/65/354-S/2010/466’, http://​undocs​.org/​en/​S/​2010/​466 (accessed 5 December 2020). UNSC [United Nations Security Council] (2019) ‘Women, Peace and Security: Report of the Secretary General (S/2019/800-A/73/890-S/2019/448)’, https://​undocs​.org/​en/​A/​73/​890 (accessed 5 December 2020). UNSC [United Nations Security Council] (2020) ‘Women and Peace and Security: Report of the Secretary General, S/2020/946, 25 September. UNWOMEN and DPPA (2020) ‘COVID-19 and Conflict: Advancing Women’s Meaningful Participation in Ceasefires and Peace Processes’, UN Women policy brief series, https://​www​.unwomen​.org/​en/​ digital​-library/​publications/​2020/​08/​policy​-brief​-covid​-19​-and​-conflict​#view (accessed 11 December 2020).

Feminist peacebuilding governance  237 Van der Heijden, Jeroen (2011) ‘Institutional Layering: A Review of the Concept’, Politics 31(1): 9–18. Whitworth, Sandra (2004) Men, Militarism and UN Peacekeeping: A Gendered Analysis, London: Lynne Rienner. WILPF (2015) ‘WILPF Manifesto 2015’, https://​www​.wilpf​.org/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2015/​07/​Manifesto​ -2e​-print​-bleed​.pdf (accessed 29 April 2021). World Bank and United Nations (2018) ‘Pathways for Peace: Inclusive Approaches to Preventing Violent Conflict’, Washington, DC: World Bank.

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

INTRODUCTION The concept of feminist governance – initiated by feminist peace activists protesting against the First World War – has been evolving for over a century. Already in 1915, feminists demanded national governments end war and the arms trade and focus on gender equality and social justice instead.1 Ever since, steps have been taken to transform traditional concepts of peace and security based on the absence of war and instead move towards a feminist understanding of peace and security. In this endeavour, the engagement of the feminist movement with the United Nations (UN) Security Council is critical. The Security Council – the intergovernmental body responsible for the maintenance of international peace and security – is one of the most powerful institutions in the UN system. It is not only a decision-making actor but also an arena for other stakeholders to interact with one another. As an actor, the Security Council has a strong influence on how conflicts or threats to peace and security are understood and dealt with due to its power to ‘determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression’ (UN Charter, 1945: Art. 39) and how these threats are addressed, via the deployment of a peacekeeping mission, imposing sanctions, and otherwise. Additionally, the Security Council provides an arena where policies, including on gender equality and women’s rights, are negotiated. Peace and security stakeholders, such as states, intergovernmental organisations, scholars and civil society, come together to advance norms and principles on peace and security in the periphery of this arena. As the engagement between the Security Council and feminist actors grows, it becomes crucial to understand how they influence each other in this process. To elaborate how feminist governance interacts with the Security Council and its peace and security mandate, this chapter discusses feminist peace and security governance and unpacks the framework for analysis. Subsequently, we map out where feminist efforts have carved out processes and actions to advance feminist norms and practices. Finally, we assess how these structures, policy and actions are at risk of being co-opted and used to sustain traditional peace and security governance. Overall, we argue that feminist peace and security governance and the Security Council – as an actor and an arena – influence each other in ways that shape the transformation of peace and security. At this point, we acknowledge our situatedness in the Global North and emphasise that the definitions in the article reflect our understanding of an inclusive and intersectional approach to feminism.

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Feminist peace and security governance and the UN Security Council  239

DEFINING FEMINIST PEACE AND SECURITY GOVERNANCE Feminist governance consists of a multitude of ‘feminist institutions, norms and ideas as well as the work that feminists have done within broader political institutions and knowledge and governance networks at national, subnational and transnational levels’, as defined elsewhere in this Handbook. Feminist institutions and policies function in accordance with feminist values, such as power-sharing, non-hierarchy and intersectional inclusiveness. Feminist governance, as such, is based on gender equality, applies an intersectional gender lens to policies, consults with diverse gender identities and seeks a transformation of traditional governance. Feminist governance in the context of the Security Council and its peace and security mandate requires an understanding of peace and security as gendered concepts. The understanding of concepts as gendered – including peace and security – rests on the premise that gender is the ordering principle of all aspects of social life (Connell, 1987). Gender structures the economic, cultural and political spheres and shapes society’s ideology, institutions and identities (True, 2012). Gender and its intersection with race, class and sexuality further form a system of dominance (Crenshaw, 1991). This system shapes how we understand peace and security, who is included and excluded in decision-making, and who is the target audience of policies or actions. It favours and reinforces ruling principles that are heteronormative and postcolonial and ‘hegemonic masculine’2 identities that are heterosexual, (context-specific) white, and wealthy (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005). Peace and security in traditional theory of international relations and governance evolved out of this system of dominance. Security is understood to serve the purposes of supporting the dominance of the ruling principles and people through militarism and national ownership (Hooper, 2001). Peace is understood as the absence of war and violence – neglecting state responsibility to deliver on social justice and gender equality as a goal, means or indicator of peace. Feminist peace research understands peace and security as normative, intersectional and transformational concepts (Wibben et al., 2019). In other words, feminist peace and security governance is based on ‘the promotion of social justice and the elimination of violence in all its manifestations and at all levels of society’ (Tickner, 2019). It serves to remove power hierarchies, foster gender equality from an intersectional perspective, engage in gender-sensitive human security and take a people-centred approach. From this perspective, the Security Council would seek to transfer and share power with other actors for more inclusive decision-making and with the focus on conflict prevention. To understand the extent to which the Security Council is able to pursue transformation, we assess the Security Council as an actor: its structure (e.g. veto power), the roles of member states (i.e. permanent and elected members), working methods (e.g. Informal Experts Groups (IEGs)) and its products (e.g. resolutions, presidential statements). Through examining the arena offered by the Security Council, we pay attention to processes that exist around it. The Security Council provides a platform through which policies on gender equality, peace and international women’s rights are negotiated by member states, UN actors (e.g. UN Women, the Peacebuilding Commission), intergovernmental organisations (e.g. the African Union) and civil society (e.g. NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security (WPS)). To understand the ways feminist peace and security governance interacts with the Security Council, we analyse it as an actor and an arena within feminist peace and security governance through its most critical processes: (1) the creation and operationalisation of feminist values in transnational networks engaging with peace and security policy; (2) feminist

240  Handbook of feminist governance institution-building within and around the Security Council; (3) the expression of feminist values through the adoption and implementation of policies by the Security Council; (4) the soft regulation involved in transnational monitoring, reporting and ranking of policy adopted by the Security Council.

STATUS QUO OF THE SECURITY COUNCIL The Security Council forms the powerful centre of the UN’s work on peace and security with traditional peace and security governance structures and practices at the core of the institution. Historical preconditions prevalent in 1945, at the time the UN was formed, integrated patriarchal and colonial principles of traditional peace and security governance and national ownership into the UN Charter and, specifically, into the mandate of the Security Council. While its hegemonic masculine structure is still the point of departure, without the Security Council, feminist peace and security governance would not be the same. The Security Council’s adoption of the WPS agenda, with Resolution 1325 and nine subsequent resolutions, has been a critical step in forming feminist peace and security governance, spearheading the global feminist transformation. The actions of no other body within the UN system can give the same visibility and political support to feminist values and feminist peace and security governance more broadly. After almost a century of constant lobbying and advocacy, feminist activists and a growing transnational movement, together with states, were able to carve out space in the Security Council to advocate for feminist values and institution-building and promote feminist peace and security governance (Caglar et al., 2016; Zürn, 2020). The action of feminist activists has played a significant role in what Prügl (2004: 75) calls the process of building ‘new rules of identity, expanding the scope of rights, new gender norms, and new means of enforcement’. As such, feminist transformation continues taking place across nations, sectors and institutions, including through the spaces created within and around the Security Council.

POSITIVE ENGAGEMENT BETWEEN THE SECURITY COUNCIL AND FEMINIST PEACE AND SECURITY GOVERNANCE The Security Council – both as an actor and as an arena – undoubtedly has influenced the adoption of feminist approaches to peace and security, while feminist peace and security governance has also changed the Security Council’s role and position in the fulfilment of gender equality and social justice at all levels and for all people. As an actor, the Security Council has used its political power to advance critical processes around women’s situations in conflict. Building on the work of the feminist movement, the Security Council has developed a solid normative feminist peace and security framework, which, as NGO Working Group on WPS (2020) reports, incorporates a broader range of issues than any other thematic area on the Security Council’s agenda. It includes, for example, gender-responsive peacebuilding, survivor-centred approaches to gender-based violence and women’s participation. The WPS agenda subsequently made the Security Council a relevant actor and a useful arena for the goals of feminist peace and security governance: it encouraged the international

Feminist peace and security governance and the UN Security Council  241 community to look beyond the securitised understanding of peace and security and inspired further development of feminist objectives in peace and security. First, the WPS agenda serves as a foundation and a critical tool for security experts, activists and policy professionals all over the world to advance peace and security in a way that looks at conflict comprehensively, takes into account different experiences and is rooted in dialogue, prevention and peace for everyone. While criticised for failing to achieve its full potential, the WPS agenda allows for transformative conversations about peace and security that extend beyond reproducing traditional security. Second, the WPS agenda has influenced the Security Council’s working methods and decision-making on matters such as referrals to the International Criminal Court, country-specific resolutions,3 donor conferences for conflict-affected countries and peace talks.4 In many of these processes, WPS is now a critical consideration. Finally, it contributed to the creation of what Aggestam and True (2020: 148) call ‘a community of practice’ that not only monitors but builds on existing developments and in which meanings and discourses of gender are negotiated and changed. Aggestam and True (2020) refer to progressive developments in the understanding of the categories of women and men. Instead of portraying those as homogeneous groups, an intersectional lens is increasingly applied (including, for example, girls, minority groups and disabled women, as well as recognizing men and boys as active allies and victims of gender-based violence themselves). Changes in discourses and meanings also lead to changes in international peace and security practice. As such, the WPS agenda not only protects women in conflict but also encourages the international community, including the Security Council, to reconsider the way they approach peace and security. The Security Council became a stronger actor in feminist peace and security governance by introducing relevant gender expertise into its internal workings. In 2011, it mandated new institutional offices, most notably the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict (S/RES/1988). It improved the gender capacity of peacekeeping missions and peace operations by enabling the deployment of gender advisors and women protection officers (Chinkin and Rees, 2019). Furthermore, the IEG on WPS – formed in 2016 – highlights gender dimensions of particular conflict-affected situations, assesses consultations between the Council and local experts, and thus strengthens the flow of information about women’s experiences in conflict (Chinkin and Rees, 2019). While the Security Council’s role in feminist peace and security governance is critical, the limitations of its structure necessitated the establishment of several processes. First, a member states-led collective to support the implementation of the WPS agenda – the Group of Friends – has been formed under the leadership of Canada. Second, the NGO Working Group on WPS (2020) reports that the increased use of ‘solidarity missions’ by senior UN leadership brought the WPS dimension into relevant Security Council meetings on country-specific situations. Finally, Spain, together with Canada, Chile, Japan, Namibia and the United Arab Emirates, launched the WPS Focal Points Network in 2016, which ‘serves as a cross-regional forum and provides space in which to share experiences and best practices so as to advance the implementation of all Security Council resolutions on women, peace and security and to improve the coordination of funding and assistance programmes’.5 The WPS agenda has transformed the work of the UN more broadly. Resolution 1325 inspired the establishment of the Inter-Agency Network on Women and Gender Equality

242  Handbook of feminist governance (IANWGE) and its Task Force on WPS to promote and coordinate the integration of gender perspectives into all the peace and security work of the UN (Otto, 2010). As an arena, the Security Council represents a driving force behind shifting the narrative and practice directed towards achieving gender equality at all levels, while strengthening its own awareness on the use of gender analysis in conflict. The Security Council hosts two important annual debates – one on sexual violence in conflict and another on WPS. On the decision of a presiding member state, additional meetings can be added.6 During these meetings, all states – not only those within the Security Council – and other WPS stakeholders can share their WPS priorities and goals. As such, the Security Council facilitates the exchange of ideas, provides space to articulate feminist principles in peace and security, creates incentives for the states to engage with WPS, and potentially bridges the divide between normative support for and implementation of the WPS agenda. Notably, the experiences of WPS practitioners have gained a more prominent space within these meetings. The NGO Working Group on WPS (2020) reports that briefings by women civil society representatives are increasing in number, growing from two women in 2016 to 26 women in 2019, providing greater opportunity for multi-stakeholder exchange. Outside of the formal meetings of the Security Council, member states active on WPS have been increasingly utilising the format of Arria Formula meetings. These meetings have become an important working method for allowing ‘outsiders’ to have an impact on the Security Council and other stakeholders. Ruane and Kumskova (2018) highlight a specific example – the 19 March 2018 Arria Formula Meeting on the human rights situation in Syria – where the findings from the Commission of Inquiry on Syria’s report on human rights violations, sexual violence and accountability were stressed. Following the meeting, the International Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM) on Syria affirmed it would not only include specialists in sexual and gender-based crimes in its work but also ensure it addresses the full range of gender-based crimes and properly hear the voices of women in the accountability process (Ruane and Kumskova, 2018). The platforms provided by the Security Council have resulted in impact at the international, regional, national and local levels. Internationally, the WPS agenda has served as a foundation for global policy frameworks and approaches to implement and monitor women’s rights in conflict. These include the Seven Action Points on Women’s Participation in Peacebuilding (2010 and 2020) and the 2016 Gender Strategy and 2021 Action Plan of the Peacebuilding Commission. In 2019, the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) adopted a policy on WPS to ensure that gender-relevant perspectives are integrated into all DPPA activities to promote inclusive conflict prevention. Feminist peace and security governance is now part of the policy within the UN Department of Peace Operations (DPO) and is a cross-cutting element in Security Sector Reform (SSR) and Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) efforts. Overall, True (2016) suggests that gender mainstreaming has become a regular practice in international organisations and UN agencies. The impact of evolving feminist peace and security governance is seen at the regional level. For instance, the European Union (EU) has adopted a Comprehensive Approach on WPS; the African Union has created an Office of the Special Envoy on WPS; the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) and Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) have also developed regional action plans on WPS. The WPS agenda has had a significant impact at the national level. First, Sonneveld (2015) reports that, for local civil society, the WPS agenda serves as a framing tool and source of legit-

Feminist peace and security governance and the UN Security Council  243 imacy to demand action from governments and the international community. Simultaneously, the WPS agenda demands implementation of national governments through WPS national action plans (NAPs). Currently, over 60 states have NAPs, including conflict-affected states (e.g. Ukraine, South Sudan), post-conflict states (e.g. Bosnia, Nepal, Liberia) and states not involved in conflict (e.g. Belgium, Austria) (Chinkin and Rees, 2019). Other states advance feminist values through feminist foreign policies, the appointment of dedicated ministerial positions and parliamentary committees, and WPS-informed defence strategies, among other avenues. The Security Council has played a unique role in feminist peace and security governance and one beyond the capacity of any other actor. Through the adoption of the WPS agenda the Security Council opened the door to the institutionalisation and operationalisation of new gender norms and gendered social relations internally but also everywhere in the world and for everyone. As such, the powerful position of the Security Council can be used to the benefit of feminist goals if properly orchestrated by member states. This process can produce a more inclusive understanding of security and has the potential to shift the relations of domination in institutions seemingly incapable of this shift – like the Security Council.

CO-OPTATION OF FEMINIST PEACE AND SECURITY GOVERNANCE Since its powerful position is rooted in traditional peace and security models, the Security Council often co-opts and limits the full capacity of feminist peace and security governance through its structure and its practice. As an actor, the Security Council’s structure creates intersectional inequalities by reproducing hierarchy, power and dominance through the division between permanent and non-permanent members, its lack of transparency, the use of veto (Ruane and Kumskova, 2018) and its legitimation of the use of force (Kronsell, 2012). The division between permanent and non-permanent members upholds the power differences and restricts the feminist principle of power-sharing. Boyle and Chinkin (2007: 346) argue that this exclusivity makes the Security Council a ‘deficient vehicle’ of fairness, transparency and accountability because of its unrepresentative nature and the power given to its permanent members. Hence, the permanent members – China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States – have built a ‘legalized hegemony’ of the most powerful, institutionalised in the system of the UN (Hurd, 2018). While Hurd fails to address gender, race or sexuality in his analysis, we argue that this system of dominance is crucial in understanding how the hegemony of the permanent members and the Security Council is upheld and inequality regimes are created. The most powerful states are at the centre, while others remain at the margin, ‘feminized’, ‘deviant’ and ‘weak’ (True, 2018) and do not get to make decisions. As such, the Security Council dramatically influences the trajectory of conflicts, countries’ relations and people’s lives, including those of women, LGBTQI, refugees, marginalised ethnicities, and all others. Feminist scholars and activists are noticing that the new feminist spaces in and around the Security Council are increasingly being co-opted for traditional security purposes (Pratt, 2013; Otto, 2010; Aggestam and True, 2020). Even after the adoption of Resolution 1325, the Security Council remains very much opposed to expanding its security practice towards a people-centred approach and reflecting the experiences of all genders. Instead, the Security

244  Handbook of feminist governance Council is devoted to what Cohn (2008) calls a ‘hardcore issue of military threats’, and it understands security as state-centred and therefore national security. The Security Council limits the WPS agenda from becoming a fully transformative vehicle in feminist peace and security governance. Limitations imposed by the Security Council on the WPS agenda include its securitised foundation; lack of meaningful and systematic implementation thereof; ongoing focus on ‘womenandchildren’7 as a single group of victims of conflict; lack of meaningful participation; and reinforcement of patriarchal power structures. Otto (2016: 3) recognises that the ‘WPS Agenda has come at some cost to feminist goals’. One of the costs is the inability to go beyond women’s inclusion in the discussion about conflict. This would enable the change of discourse and a shift from securitisation and war towards prevention and gender equality (Cohn, 2008; Pratt, 2013). Another cost is the way the WPS agenda is used to securitise conflict-related sexual violence (Chinkin and Rees, 2019). This securitisation means the reformulation of a political issue into a security threat that requires a militarised response, driving the legitimation of militarisation. Instead of responding to a political issue, securitisation serves to hide the underlying gendered, racialised and sexualised power relations (Meger, 2016). Another cost, according to Pratt (2013), is the neglect of colonial and imperialist hierarchies and the favouring of women’s experiences over broader notions of gender, sexuality, race and class. The Security Council’s approach to peace and security lacks an intersectional approach that addresses the experiences of diverse women, including LGBTQI or disabled women, and co-opts postcolonial, Black and intersectional feminism. The WPS agenda and Security Council’s engagement with it has been ‘watered down’ (Allen and Shepherd, 2019). The adoption of a new WPS resolution used to be a process of building on the language of Resolution 1325 and expanding on some of its aspects, without losing its critical messages. Today, tabling a resolution on WPS has become a tool for raising member states’ legitimacy and visibility in the international arena. The adoption of Resolution 2467 in 2019 is a good example where the German government ignored official statements by both transnational and German civil society8 against passage of a new resolution. The language on sexual health and reproductive rights was compromised because the United States threatened to veto this resolution otherwise (NGO Working Group on WPS, 2019). The Security Council’s practice of deploying militarised peacekeeping missions limits feminist peace and security governance and a different approach to peace. Peacekeeping with its militarised personnel is itself a highly masculinised practice as almost all soldiers are men – only 4.8 per cent of peacekeepers are women (UN Peacekeeping, 2020). Peacekeepers are trained for combat in their national contexts, protecting those that have been constructed as weak or ‘feminised’. It is through such military structures that peacekeepers commit sexual exploitation and abuse (in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti and Liberia) and add violence to countries already in conflict. While feminist peace and security governance has created a strong push for the establishment of gender advisor positions in peacekeeping missions, practical implementation often fails, and structures co-opt their purpose. Gender positions in peacekeeping are also more likely to be cut when funding becomes an issue (Allen, 2017); responsibility for women and gender issues is then outsourced to gender advisors, who do not always have the power or experience to advance meaningful change (Athie and Taylor, 2017). While the appointment of gender advisors and increase of women in peacekeeping are necessary steps towards transforming the field of peace and security, they are not sufficient to challenge security practices, militarised masculinities and peacekeeping practices in general.

Feminist peace and security governance and the UN Security Council  245 Progress towards the transformation of peace and security has often relied on individual initiatives of elective members and their national agendas and is not a result of the structure and practices of the Security Council. The power divide between the permanent five and the non-permanent members co-opts feminist institution-building and power sharing. Namibia, Bangladesh, Canada and Jamaica, for example, brought forward Resolution 1325; Canada and Uruguay are co-chairing the Focal Point Network of WPS; Sweden continually raised women and gender issues at the Security Council’s meetings during its tenure; and Peru and Bolivia have pushed for the root causes of conflicts to be addressed (Ruane and Kumskova, 2018). Also, in the IEG on WPS meetings, elected members usually express strong support, provide information and push for topics to be included in country-specific resolutions of the Security Council. For example, the protection of women human rights defenders in Libya has been raised several times in IEG meetings but still has not been addressed (NGO Working Group on WPS, 2020). In the negotiation process, other factors matter, and these factors go beyond the priorities and needs of people. Cohn (2008) suggests that motivation often rests on coincidence and personal relationships. Dependence on individual members means that when non-permanent members of the Security Council leave their seat, so too will the topic of WPS or feminist values. As an arena, the Security Council brings about limited concrete change in policy and action. While the Security Council has improved its engagement with feminist movements, the outcomes vary greatly from the input by civil society. The Security Council is a space where the feminist movement can express its concerns; however, this space is difficult to enter and has solid boundaries for feminist activism (Cook, 2009). The Security Council is hard to access for those who are geographically, politically and financially outside of the New York WPS ‘bubble’ and outside the Global North. It has been difficult for many local organisations, especially from the Global South, to be able to participate in the Security Council’s work, as member states who invite civil society briefers do not support their travel to New York. Therefore, many organisations rely on lobbying their governments in national capitals or have NGO representatives in New York to advocate on their behalf. Despite all warnings and suggestions, the Security Council has failed to respond to the gendered impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and instead has significantly decreased the number of civil society speakers. The resistance to WPS implementation in the Security Council arena is limiting transformation towards feminist peace and security governance. The NGO Working Group on WPS (2019) reports that women are often excluded from peace processes or have limited influence on their outcomes. At the 2019 Yemen Peace Talks, only one out of 12 delegates was a woman, and the Stockholm Agreement does not include any specific provisions for women or gender (NGO Working Group on WPS, 2019). The Secretary-General states in his 2019 report on WPS that implementation remains a challenge: only 41 per cent of member states have adopted national action plans on WPS; the world’s total military spending in 2018 reached US$1.8 trillion; only 24.3 per cent of parliamentary seats are held by women; and ‘the rise of misogynistic, sexist and homophobic speech by political leaders in recent years has contributed to increased violence against women, against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex individuals, and women human rights defenders’ (UN Secretary-General, 2019: 2). In regard to the implementation of the NAPs, feminist scholars and activists (Haastrup and Hagen, 2020; Achilleos-Sarll, 2018) highlight the process of reinforcing power structures. The divide is clear between NAPs in the Global North that are aimed at foreign aid rather than the

246  Handbook of feminist governance implementation of WPS commitments in their own countries, and NAPs in the Global South that are focused on the implementation of WPS in their own contexts. The Security Council – as an actor and as an arena – carries the risk of co-opting feminist peace and security governance and further reinforcing hegemonic masculine structures and practices, such as the securitisation of the WPS agenda, militarisation of peacekeeping missions in the name of saving and protecting women, integration of women in the military (under the mask of achieving greater gender equality), or lack of positive action to counter power structures, hierarchy and exclusion. It is evident that the Security Council only engages with selective topics on the feminist agenda and instrumentalises it for traditional security purposes.

THE FUTURE OF FEMINIST PEACE AND SECURITY GOVERNANCE IN THE SECURITY COUNCIL The Security Council would not be the same without feminist peace and security governance, and vice versa. However, the interaction between the Security Council and feminist peace and security governance is complex, with positive and negative outcomes. The Security Council is not simply countering feminist governance. Claiming this would be to ignore the hard-won gains that have been achieved by member states championing WPS and feminist movements fighting for gender equality, inclusion, dialogue and disarmament, and paving the way for the adoption of the WPS agenda. What is important is that the Security Council changes under the influence of feminist peace and security governance. The Security Council’s role in feminist peace and security governance shows that feminist governance can utilise the Council to advance its goals. However, governance actors must be very careful concerning the potential impact of their interaction with the Security Council in the long term. The Security Council needs to be analysed through the prism of the broader system of international politics, where patriarchal relations are constitutive of the global neoliberal world order (True, 2018). It remains a hegemonic masculine institution that upholds and reproduces gendered, racialised and sexualised social relations. While the Security Council is a meaningful actor that has helped move global peace and security governance towards a more feminist agenda, the Security Council needs to fulfil the feminist principle of transferring and sharing power – to empower other actors and encourage the use of other arenas for feminist peace and security governance.

NOTES 1.

Resolution of the first congress in the Hague in 1915 stands against war and militarism and demands inclusive peace (see WILPF, 1915). 2. Hegemonic masculinity posits a form of hegemony that is institutional, normative and cultural based on hierarchy and the oppression of not only femininities but also non-heterosexual forms of masculinities (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005). 3. NGO Working Group on WPS (2020) cites a considerable increase in WPS language in outcomes adopted by the Council. The 11 peace operations that did not have a mandate to engage with women’s civil society included little to no information on such activities. 4. NGO Working Group on WPS (2020) found that in 2019 only 1 per cent of the Security Council’s discussion of country-specific situations included mention of women’s participation in peace and security processes.

Feminist peace and security governance and the UN Security Council  247 5. See the ‘about’ section of the WPS Focal Points Network at http://​www​.​wpsfocalpo​intnetwork​.org. 6. In 2016, under the leadership of Angola, the Security Council hosted an additional open debate on Women, Peace and Security in Africa (S/PV.7658). 7. The term was first developed by Cynthia Enloe (1993) when she described the protectionist logic of saving women and children in war and conflict. 8. German civil society statement against new resolution initiated by Germany as a non-permanent member; see Anica Heinlein et al. (2019).

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Feminist peace and security governance and the UN Security Council  249 United Nations (1945) Charter of United Nations. https://​www​.un​.org/​en/​charter​-united​-nations/​. Wibben, Annick T. R., Catia Cecilia Confortini, Sanam Roohi, Sarai B. Aharoni, Leena Vastapuu and Tina Vaittinen (2019) ‘Collective Discussion: Piecing-Up Feminist Peace Research’, International Political Sociology 13(1): 86–107. WILPF [Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom] (1915) WILPF Resolutions – The Hague Congress 1915. https://​wilpf​.org/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2012/​08/​WILPF​_triennial​_congress​_1915​.pdf. Zürn, Anja (2020) ‘From Sex and Gender to Intersectional Approaches? UN-Written Identities of Local Women in Participation and Protection Discourses’. In Manuela Scheuermann and Anja Zürn (eds), Gender Roles in Peace and Security, Cham: Springer, 11–33.

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

INTRODUCTION While some institutions of global economic governance have long been interested in questions of gender equality, gender concerns have only recently started to gain traction within trade governance. A number of institutions started to engage in gender mainstreaming in trade in the 1990s, including the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, while gender-specific provisions were included in the Economic Community of Central African States, the Economic Community of West African States and the East African Community in the 1980s and 1990s. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) was also developing recommendations for how to mainstream gender in trade at the turn of the millennium. Yet, in the mid- to late 2010s, a notable change occurred in trade governance as gender concerns were integrated into more mainstream trade institutions and policymaking circles. Perhaps most notable was the signing, in 2017, of the ‘WTO Joint Declaration on Trade and Women’s Economic Empowerment’ by 118 members and observers. This marked a considerable departure for the World Trade Organization (WTO) which has long maintained that trade is a technical matter and gender neutral in its effects. It was also during this period that the first chapters dedicated to gender were integrated into Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) between countries. This change in trade governance occurred during a period where trade-related feminist activism was relatively subdued compared to other periods. Indeed, after more than a decade of lobbying on gender and trade with relatively little success, mainstream trade governance institutions are suddenly attentive to gender concerns. But their interest in gender and trade has come at a time when gender and trade activism has been weakened by falling support for women’s NGOs, among other factors (Williams, 2013: 95; Macdonald et al., 2018). Nonetheless, the adoption of certain feminist ideas by some leading actors in trade governance has served as a catalyst for the reformation of a global alliance. In 2018, largely in response to the WTO Declaration, the Gender and Trade Coalition (GTC) was established to bring together feminist and progressive activists to advance feminist trade analysis and advocacy in a way that does not instrumentalise the gender equality agenda as a means of furthering economic liberalisation, privatisation, deregulation and the deepening of corporate power in trade (Gender and Trade Coalition, n.d.). The GTC is echoing the concerns of feminist scholars that gender issues and feminist language are being integrated into governance frameworks in ways that empty feminism of its most radical elements – including its structural critique of neoliberalism – and leave the aims and operating procedures of institutions fundamentally intact (Chant and Sweetman, 2012; Coburn, 2019; Elias, 2013; Griffin, 2009; Perrons, 2005; Prügl, 2015; Roberts, 2015; Roberts and Soederberg, 2012; True, 2003; True and Parisi, 2013). This ‘neo-liberalism with a feminist face’ (Prügl, 2017) works to reinforce the hegemony of global capitalism and cement gender-based and other inequalities that underpin and are reproduced by its continued expansion (Roberts, 2015; Fraser, 2009). 250

Feminist interventions in trade governance  251 In this context, the first part of this chapter examines two trade governance mechanisms recently adopted by states and mainstream trade institutions. We assess to what extent these mechanisms reflect the feminist values espoused by feminist scholars and activists. The second part of the chapter elaborates on what feminist values look like more broadly in trade governance. We use this framework to critically analyse (1) gender chapters in FTAs, and (2) gender-based impact assessment frameworks. In conclusion, we reflect on the possibilities for feminist transformations of trade governance.

FEMINIST VALUES IN GLOBAL TRADE GOVERNANCE What constitutes a ‘feminist value’ in trade governance is highly contestable and contested. To make gender mainstreaming in trade transformative, civil society actors and academics have outlined practical and specific (Gender and Trade Coalition, n.d.; Harrison and Stephenson, 2018; Macdonald and Ibrahim, 2019; Price, 2019; Williams, 2013), as well as broad-based (i.e. epistemological) moves (Hannah et al., 2021; Roberts et al., 2019; True, 2008a, 2008b; True and Parisi, 2013). Drawing on this literature, as well as literatures in feminist International Political Economy (IPE) and the critical IPE of trade, we have identified four key feminist values that should inform trade governance. These are attentiveness to (1) structural inequality; (2) impacts of trade on different groups of people in multiple roles; (3) benefits for the social reproduction of people and communities; and (4) inclusivity and democracy. Regarding the first value, it is necessary to acknowledge and challenge the operation of structural inequalities in the global political economy that shape one’s participation in the economy and society at multiple sites and scales (Bedford and Rai, 2010; Elson and Çağatay, 2000; Marchand and Parpart, 1995). Gender research on trade shows that simply integrating women into existing relations of production and trade may reinforce the feminisation of labour and gender-based pay gaps (Busse and Spielmann, 2006; Sauvé and Hosny, 2014). At the same time, when trade policymaking ignores the gender-based division of unpaid labour, policies may work to deepen this division and increase the amount of unpaid labour performed overall. This occurs, for example, as the privatisation of social and health services increases the amount of care done by women and others in response to increased costs and/or lower quality services (Fontana, 2007; Jarman and Greer, 2010). Second, the focus of many gender and trade initiatives adopted by states and international institutions is on women as business owners and entrepreneurs. This is problematic not least because it omits workers and consumers, but also because of the expansion of the trade agenda. While traditionally, international trade rules targeted duties and regulations pertaining to imports and exports of goods, since the 1980s, behind the border rules that affect trade, such as product and production standards, domestic legislation affecting service trade and intellectual property rights are also included in trade agreements (Young and Peterson, 2006). Today, the agenda has further expanded to areas such as procurement, competition, investment protection, labour rights, consumer protection, e-commerce, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), state-trading enterprises, sustainable development, human rights, environmental commitments, and more. This means that trade policy affects almost every area of public policy today. Critical feminist research on trade governance reveals that trade, broadly conceived, impacts people in their multiple roles as business owners as well as workers, consumers, users of public services, paid and unpaid carers, citizens, and more (Fontana, 2007;

252  Handbook of feminist governance Roberts et al., 2019; van Staveren et al., 2007). Given that these roles are shaped not only by gender norms and power relations, but also by relations of class, caste, race, ethnicity, nationality, citizenship status, sexuality, age, ability, and so on, there is a need to adopt an explicitly intersectional approach to redressing gender inequality in trade (True and Parisi, 2013). Third, feminist scholars have long insisted that ‘the production of people, meeting human needs, and fostering well-being should be the driving force of economics’, rather than economic growth and capital accumulation (Luxton, 2018: 37; see also Bakker, 2003; Rai and Waylen, 2013). A feminist approach to trade should therefore acknowledge and seek to support the relations of social reproduction that constitute the global political economy (Pflaeger Young, 2018). By social reproduction, we mean processes involved in reproducing, both biologically and socially, the people and communities upon which exchange rests (Bakker, 2003; Luxton, 2018). A crucial part of reproducing people and fostering well-being further involves a commitment to environmental sustainability, so a progressive feminist trade governance strategy would recognise and protect broader environmental conditions. None of this is possible if trade liberalisation and economic growth are positioned as the primary goals of trade governance mechanisms (Jarman and Greer, 2010; Trommer, 2022). Finally, critical research in trade has long suggested that in order to make trade more equitable, it must be much more inclusive and democratic, and disrupt the ‘expert’-driven nature of trade governance (De Ville and Siles-Brügge, 2016; Hannah, 2016; Trommer, 2014b). The feminist literature on trade policymaking, and macroeconomic policymaking more broadly, similarly argues that a transformative approach needs to democratise the policymaking process itself (Elson and Çağatay, 2000; Walby, 2005; Williams, 2013). Feminist research and activism related to trade governance often begins from an epistemological starting point that seeks to disturb the orthodox, androcentric and masculinist knowledge that underpins trade governance (Elson et al., 2007) and seeks to incorporate the views of people affected by trade by involving civil society organisations that represent those most impacted (Gabriel and Macdonald, 2005; Gender and Trade Coalition, n.d.; Hannah et al., 2022a). Because women are not a homogeneous group, there is a need to provide opportunities for the participation and representation of a diversity of women (True and Parisi, 2013; Leibowitz, 2008). In sum, the feminist and trade literatures elucidate how more equitable, just and sustainable trade governance involves attentiveness to structural inequalities, the differential and widespread impacts of trade, social reproduction, and improved inclusivity and democracy. We would consider such attentiveness to reflect feminist values in trade. We now turn to explore the extent to which these values are reflected in two trade governance initiatives: (1) gender chapters, and (2) gender-based impact assessments.

GENDER CHAPTERS Over the past 20 years, global trade governance has abandoned its predominantly multilateral character, whereby the agreements and negotiations of the WTO set a singular rule book for global trade flows and practices, in favour of a hybrid governance model in which states negotiate commercial rights and obligations via increasingly complex networks of multilateral, regional and bilateral deals (Trommer, 2017). Alongside the above-mentioned expansion of the trade agenda, gender provisions have also become more mainstream in trade agreements. They were first included in the founding treaties of regional integration organisations, often

Feminist interventions in trade governance  253 via a reference to equal pay or to women in development. Over the past 30 years, the percentage of trade agreements including gender-related provisions has steadily increased; 243 of 556 agreements signed and notified to the WTO (up to 2018) contained gender-related provisions (Monteiro, 2018). In recent years, FTAs have started to dedicate stand-alone chapters to gender and trade, rather than including gender-related provisions in other chapters. Our analysis focuses on five FTAs with dedicated gender chapters: the Chile–Canada FTA (modernised version, entered into force 5 February 2019), the Chile–Argentina FTA (entered into force 8 November 2018), the Uruguay–Chile FTA (entered into force 13 December 2018), the Canada–Israel FTA (modernised version, entered into force 1 September 2019), and the UK–Japan agreement (entered into force 1 January 2021). Although their contents vary, all existing gender chapters follow a similar structure. They set out general principles, areas of cooperation, set up a gender and trade committee or working group, and specify the relationship between the gender chapter and the dispute settlement mechanism of the agreement. Their number is likely to increase over the coming years, as there is proposed text for a gender chapter in the EU–Chile FTA and several governments, such as the UK and Canada, are committed to including gender chapters in future FTAs. From a feminist perspective, dedicated gender chapters in FTAs are welcome as they provide institutional mechanisms that bring gender issues to the attention of trade policymakers. All existing gender chapters are, however, constrained in their ability to advance feminist values in trade governance due to structural barriers arising from the complex network of agreements and the nature of the agreements themselves. First, gender chapters are explicitly excluded from dispute settlement mechanisms of the agreements (Art. 15.6 Argentina–Chile; Art. 14.6 Uruguay–Chile; Art. N bis-06 Canada–Chile; Art. 21.4 UK–Japan) or require both parties’ consent to launch proceedings (Art. 19 Canada–Israel), making the provision mostly diplomatic in nature. Second, all gender chapters are stand-alone chapters that do not interfere with commitments made elsewhere in the agreements, although all commitments of the agreement, including the core commercial clauses, produce gender-differential impacts. Third, the growing number of FTAs poses an obstacle to women’s organisations that are monitoring trade governance. While small organisations are able to follow WTO negotiations, where everything is decided in one place, only well-resourced, typically corporate and state interests are able to remain on top of policy developments across the ever-increasing network of FTA (Trommer, 2017). 1.

Attentiveness to Structural Inequalities

Latin American and Canadian gender chapters provide a broad picture of the multiple ways in which women carrying social reproductive responsibilities are structurally disadvantaged in trade. They highlight differential access to economic resources, finance, public and private decision-making bodies and the need to foster ‘gender equality policies and practices’ (Art. 15.1.2 Argentina–Chile; Art. 14.1.2 Uruguay–Chile; Art. N bis-01.3 Canada–Chile; Art. 13.1.2 Canada–Israel). Latin American gender chapters also acknowledge structural inequalities along intersectional lines. They highlight the need to eliminate ‘all forms of discrimination against women for reasons of sex, ethnicity, race, colour, national or social origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, religion, political opinion or any other convictions, economic position or any other social, family or personal circumstance’ (Art. 15.1.2 Argentina–Chile;

254  Handbook of feminist governance Art. 14.1.2 Uruguay–Chile). The UK–Japan chapter, on the other hand, works at the most superficial level. It only explicitly mentions access to markets, technology and finance, leadership and workplace flexibility as relevant dimensions (Art. 21.2 UK–Japan) and does not contain the phrase ‘gender equality’. No existing gender chapter challenges structural inequalities in the global political economy due to a lack of meaningful and tangible obligations that could work to offset them. There are no rights and obligations in existing gender chapters beyond states’ responsibility to set up Gender and Trade Committees or Working Groups and engaging in cooperation activities on gender and trade. There are no obligations for cooperation activities to lead to any material results. 2.

Differential Impacts of Trade on People in Multiple Roles

Women entrepreneurs and/or business owners and women workers are mentioned in all existing gender chapters which acknowledge that structural inequalities often disadvantage women in these roles (Art. 15 Argentina–Chile; Art. 14 Uruguay–Chile; Art. N bis Canada–Chile; Art. 13 Canada–Israel; Art. 21 UK–Japan). Where gender chapters envisage solutions for women entrepreneurs and business owners, some are thematic (e.g. a simple mention of workplace flexibility in Art. 21.2 UK–Japan), while others are concrete (e.g. confirming adherence to ILO Conventions number 100 on equal pay, number 111 on discrimination in the workplace and number 156 on workers with family responsibilities in Art. 15.2 Argentina–Chile). All existing gender chapters in FTAs to which Chile is a party further consider certain impacts of trade on women and other persons as carers, and as informal and unpaid workers, which is omitted in Canada–Israel and UK–Japan. There is generally little to no acknowledgement that the roles of entrepreneur/business owner, worker and carer can and often do overlap in practice and that structural disadvantages in trade may arise from the resulting double or triple burden. What is more, gender chapters do not acknowledge that other chapters of the agreement might undermine the conditions of care and unpaid domestic work, or might affect people in their roles as bearers of broader political, civil and human rights. There is no acknowledgement in gender chapters of criticisms that trade and investment agreements negatively impact ‘the rights to life, food, water and sanitation, health, housing, education, science and culture, improved labour standards, an independent judiciary, a clean environment and the right not to be subjected to forced resettlement’ (OHCHR, 2015). 3.

Social Reproduction

Via the recognition of differential impacts of trade on people in multiple roles, the gender chapters in FTAs that involve Chile show some awareness of the need to support relations of social reproduction. Canada–Israel and UK–Japan gender chapters do not explicitly acknowledge social reproduction but focus on the productive economy. They reproduce standard conceptualisations in which ‘the economy’ and trade are decoupled from activities taking place in the ostensibly ‘private’ sphere and thus fail to recognise that social reproduction is essential for trade to exist and function. What is more, there is no recognition in any gender chapter that other clauses in the agreement affect social reproduction. For example, shifts in income distribution and economic insecurity and inequality resulting from economic adjustments under goods and services liberalisation are linked to negative public health outcomes among certain populations, thus provoking a crisis of social reproduction for affected groups (Trommer,

Feminist interventions in trade governance  255 2022; Blouin et al., 2009). At the same time, many standard clauses in trade agreements undermine the wider conditions in which social reproduction takes place, that is, when health and social services liberalisation hollows out equitable and universally accessible health care systems (Jarman and Greer, 2010) or intellectual property clauses affect the availability and affordability of medical and care products (Gleeson and Labonté, 2020). Trade agreements benefit and politically empower corporate actors providing products and services relating to social reproduction, but curtail government policy autonomy, public spending and civil society campaigns in these areas (Trommer, 2022; McNamara et al., 2021). These are intersectional issues, because the negative effects of trade adjustments tend to play out among women and other marginalised populations, while the benefits of trade adjustments tend to reach wealthy, well-educated and already well-resourced societal groups. 4.

More Inclusive and Democratic Trade Governance

In terms of expanding the range of societal groups invited into trade policymaking processes, most gender chapters provide for cooperation among government institutions, business associations, trade unions, educational and research institutions, and civil society representatives (Art. 15.3.3 Argentina–Chile; Art. 14.3.3 Uruguay–Chile; Art. N bis-03.3 Canada–Chile; Art. 13.3.3 Canada–Israel). This open language constitutes a double-edged sword in terms of advancing inclusive and democratic trade policymaking, because well-resourced and well-connected interest groups and political actors are better equipped to create, identify and use political opportunities provided by legal language (Trommer, 2014a). In particular, no existing gender chapter seeks input from gender experts, leaving it up to policymakers to decide which types of expertise to seek on gender and trade matters. In terms of transparency, most Gender and Trade Committees (with the exception of UK–Japan) are mandated to facilitate exchange of information, discuss joint proposals and any matters relating to the interpretation, operation and application of the gender chapters. Yet, the wording of these chapters does not compel parties to meaningfully engage stakeholders in the processes of information sharing, discussion and monitoring. In particular, there are no obligations to make public information on the activities carried out under any of the gender chapters, nor to make public information on the gender-related aspects of the entire agreement.

GENDER-BASED IMPACT ASSESSMENTS Assessing and monitoring the gendered impacts of trade policy is another way that policymakers mainstream gender into global trade governance. This is key to ensuring that trade policies can be used to improve gender equality and that they produce no harm. They are also useful for identifying how trade policy can be combined with appropriate social policy so that it works to reduce gender inequality. While significant progress has been made in this area, existing gender-based impact assessments only partially align with the four feminist values outlined above. The most widely used models for monitoring the gendered impacts of trade policy have been made by national governments such as Canada and organisations such as UNCTAD. In partial fulfilment of its ratification of the United Nations (UN) Beijing Platform for Action, Canada committed to using Gender-based Analysis Plus (GBA+) to advance gender equality. This promise was made actionable in 2018 when Canada committed to applying

256  Handbook of feminist governance GBA+ to all federal budget items, including new FTAs. GBA+ is an analytical process to examine potential impacts of FTAs on gender and a range of other intersectional identity characteristics including race, religion, mental and physical ability, Indigenous heritage and socioeconomic status. GBA+ has no prescribed methodology. It is described, rather, as a ‘way of thinking’ that draws on a range of methods and approaches including computer-generated equilibrium (CGE) modelling, descriptive statistics, interviews and community forums.1 It is conducted alongside, and is informed by, environmental impact assessments and economic impact assessments. In 2019, Canada became the first country to conduct a comprehensive, chapter by chapter GBA+ of its ongoing negotiations with Mercosur (Global Affairs Canada, 2019). Since then, it has conducted a GBA+ of the recently concluded Canada–United States– Mexico Agreement (CUSMA), and has begun a GBA+ of ongoing negotiations with Ukraine (Canada–Ukraine FTA (CUFTA)) and Indonesia (Comprehensive Economic Partnership (CEPA) agreement). The UNCTAD gender and trade toolbox also offers a comprehensive framework for gender-based impact assessment (UNCTAD, 2017). It consists of four main components: (1) descriptive analysis of gender inequalities and the economic context of the country at stake; (2) quantitative analysis of the expected consequences of trade policies on the economy (i.e. in terms of exports, GDP, sectoral labour demand) and particularly on women’s participation in the economy; (3) a checklist for gender-sensitive accompanying measures and monitoring indicators; and (4) a ‘Trade and Gender Index’ (which uses female employment and gender gaps as an indicator of gender inequalities in the workplace that can be used for in-country analysis over time). 1.

Attentiveness to Structural Inequalities

In line with feminist values, the UNCTAD toolbox provides detailed assessments of how gender norms impact women’s economic participation (Hannah et al., 2018). It also goes some distance towards challenging structural gender inequalities by providing a ‘checklist’ to assist policymakers in developing ‘accompanying policies’ aimed at ‘achieving greater gender equality or reducing the risk of exacerbating gender disparities’ under the FTA (UNCTAD, 2017). Particular attention is paid to mitigating the adverse impacts of the FTA on gender disparities in welfare including reductions in public expenditures, increases in taxation, changes in working conditions and unpaid care work. The inclusion of unpaid and caring labour in the checklist, in particular, points to the need to assess, for instance, whether export promotion policies include support for child care and whether reductions in public expenditures (i.e. due to tariff revenue loss) and increases in taxation affect access to public services and the burden of care work (UNCTAD, 2017: 28). By contrast, while Canada recognises that ‘trade affects people differently, based on a wide range of factors, including gender’,2 the focus is on integrating ‘traditionally underrepresented groups’ (Global Affairs Canada, 2019) – women, SMEs and Indigenous peoples – into the global economy. This reflects the desire to expand trade to include more people by addressing non-trade or behind the border barriers, but it does not address the negative impacts of trade liberalisation on some economic sectors or groups. Moreover, neither the Canadian GBA+ nor the UNCTAD toolbox provides mechanisms for monitoring or revising FTAs once they are implemented. In these respects, both governance mechanisms fall short of aligning with feminist values.

Feminist interventions in trade governance  257 2.

Differential Impacts of Trade on People in Multiple Roles

One of the main shortcomings of Canada’s GBA+ and the UNCTAD toolbox is that neither fully recognises the multiple and overlapping roles of women and other vulnerable communities, particularly as they pertain to patterns of consumption and the use of public services. The emphasis tends to be on the potential effects of an FTA on workers, producers, business owners and entrepreneurs. Canada’s GBA+ of CUSMA goes somewhat further by considering unpaid care work, particularly in its assessment of the labour and environment chapters, where it considers the impact of the FTA on job-protected leave for childbirth, adoption and family caregiving responsibilities, and takes stock of the impacts of the FTA on economic, social and cultural well-being of Indigenous peoples. It is also attuned to the vulnerabilities of migrant women, particularly those working outside of formally regulated markets (Government of Canada, 2020). However, no attention is paid in Canada’s GBA+ to the impacts of FTAs on access to public services. Similarly, UNCTAD’s toolbox considers the impacts of FTAs on gender disparities in welfare, but consideration of the FTAs’ impact on consumption is minimal and no attention is paid to the impacts on access to public services. This is significant because women are often responsible for consumption decisions (particularly on food and household essentials) and are the main providers and users of care services. 3.

Social Reproduction

The predominant emphasis of Canada’s GBA+ and the UNCTAD toolbox is on removing obstacles and barriers to market entry and social goals tend to be subordinated to economic growth. Nevertheless, they make progress in aligning with feminist values where they include provisions aimed at supporting rather than undermining relations of social reproduction. For example, while Canada’s gender chapters take a quite narrow approach to care work and focus mainly on the productive economy, Canada’s GBA+ takes a broader lens in assessing the impacts of FTAs on unpaid care work and various dimensions of family caregiving responsibilities (see e.g. Canada’s GBA+ of CUSMA). The distinct vulnerabilities of migrant women, those working in the informal economy and/or with irregular status are also prioritised. The need to support and protect human rights and labour rights is evident in the GBA+ of the labour chapters in the Canada–Mercosur and CUSMA FTAs. The scope of GBA+ goes furthest in terms of supporting social reproduction and prioritising social goals above economic growth where it puts into view protections for the environment and for Indigenous communities. Much of the focus of the UNCTAD toolbox is on the economic impacts of the FTA on employment using the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) CGE model. However, as discussed above, the UNCTAD toolbox identifies those trade policies that may either support or undermine social reproduction in its checklist for gender-sensitive accompanying measures and monitoring indicators. It provides guidance to policymakers for introducing social policies that could mitigate the adverse impacts of the FTA on women. In this respect, the toolbox aligns with feminist values. 4.

More Inclusive and Democratic Trade Governance

Canada’s GBA+ is increasingly coming into line with feminist values that call for regular and iterative consultations with stakeholders such as business (particularly representatives

258  Handbook of feminist governance of women-owned SMEs), organised labour and civil society actors (particularly women’s groups), academics (particularly gender experts) and representatives from related policy areas (including social service providers). Canada’s approach to GBA+ involves consultations with the general public and a range of stakeholders that has been widened over time. There is still much work to be done, particularly with respect to the monitoring of FTAs and tracing the input of stakeholders, but Canada has made significant progress in including those with specialised gender knowledge in GBA+ (see Hannah et al., 2022b). While the UNCTAD toolkit is intended to assist government officials, particularly those with limited capacity or resources to conduct gender-based impact assessments, and development practitioners working on gender equality issues to understand the potentially adverse impacts of a proposed trade agreement, there is no mention of stakeholder consultations in the toolkit itself. If the process of gender-based impact assessment is to be democratic and inclusive, policymakers should build upon Canada’s lead in seeking wide-ranging input from relevant experts and those most affected by the FTA.

CONCLUSION This chapter has evaluated the extent to which two gender and trade governance mechanisms reflect key feminist values, namely attentiveness to structural inequality; the impacts of trade on different groups of people in multiple roles; the benefits for the social reproduction of people and communities; and inclusivity and democracy. With regard to the first value, we find that there has been a fundamental shift in thinking within trade policymaking communities about the ways in which trade policy intersects with gender equality and structural inequalities more broadly. Nevertheless, existing governance mechanisms risk reproducing structural gender inequalities because the gendered norms and power relations underlying and constituting global trade are, for the most part, left unaddressed. Second, existing gender chapters in FTAs consider some impacts of trade and people in certain roles but retain a narrow focus on entrepreneurs/business owners and workers, and pay limited to no attention to how trade impacts those who provide care and unpaid work, or who are bearers of broader political, civil and human rights. Gender-based impact assessments perform somewhat better where they consider the impacts of FTAs on a broader range of care work, migrant and informal labour. Nevertheless, they tend to focus on integrating underrepresented groups into existing structures rather than mitigating the potentially adverse impacts of trade liberalisation on vulnerable communities or advocating alternative trade practices. Third, insofar as gender and trade governance mechanisms consider certain areas of social reproduction, they remain largely wedded to the goal of improving the position of women business owners and/or underrepresented groups in the global economy, which itself remains unchallenged. Gender chapters in particular show little recognition of the fact that trade agreements may undermine social reproduction, whereas impact assessments are more likely to show how trade policies may support or undermine social reproductive labour, and to propose remedies. Finally, gender chapters in FTAs seek to consult with stakeholders but do little to specifically support the involvement of non-elite groups, a diversity of voices and/or gender experts. By contrast, some progress has been made in gender-based trade impact assessments in establishing regular and iterative consultations with a broad range of domestic stakeholders,

Feminist interventions in trade governance  259 including women’s groups and gender experts. In both cases, more work needs to be done to integrate the voices of those most adversely affected by FTAs in partnering countries (especially developing countries), including those working in households and informal sectors of the economy. Mechanisms for ex post monitoring and assessment are also needed if the promise of democratic and inclusive governance is to be realised. Our analysis suggests that insofar as some of the trade governance initiatives adopted by states and international organisations are putting a rather superficial ‘feminist face’ (Prügl, 2017) on existing commitments to trade liberalisation and market expansion, some aspects of trade governance are shifting in ways that reflect more critical and transformatory feminist values. It is unclear whether or not gender mainstreaming in trade will challenge the distribution of power and resources in the realm of trade governance, or in the global political economy more broadly. What is clear, however, is that new spaces have opened for discussion, debate and activism centred on the relationship between gender and trade, and that there is a need for critical researchers, activists and policymakers to play a role in shaping the emerging landscape of gender and trade governance.

NOTES 1. For an overview of GBA+ in Canada, see https://​www​.canada​.ca/​en/​impact​-assessment​-agency/​ services/​policy​-guidance/​practitioners​-guide​-impact​-assessment​-act/​gender​-based​-analysis​-plus​ .html and https://​women​-gender​-equality​.canada​.ca/​en/​gender​-based​-analysis​-plus​.html. 2. https://​www​.international​.gc​.ca/​trade​-commerce/​gender​_equality​-egalite​_genres/​trade​_gender​ -commerce​_genre​.aspx​?lang​=​eng.

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Feminist interventions in trade governance  261 OHCHR (2015) ‘UN Experts Voice Concern over Adverse Impacts of Free Trade and Investment Agreements on Human Rights’. https://​www​.ohchr​.org/​EN/​NewsEvents/​Pages/​DisplayNews​.aspx​ ?NewsID​=​16031. Perrons, Diane (2005) ‘Gender Mainstreaming and Gender Equality in the New (Market) Economy: An Analysis of Contradictions’, Social Politics 12(3): 389–411. Pflaeger Young, Zoe (2018) ‘The Gender Dynamics of Trade’. In Juanita Elias and Adrienne Roberts (eds), Handbook on the International Political Economy of Gender, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 456–69. Price, Sophia (2019). ‘Gender Rights and Trade Agreements’. In Robert E. Looney (ed.), Handbook of International Trade Agreements, London: Routledge, 112–21. Prügl, Elisabeth (2015) ‘Neoliberalising Feminism’, New Political Economy 20(4): 614–31. Prügl, Elisabeth (2017) ‘Neo-Liberalism with a Feminist Face: Crafting a New Hegemony at the World Bank’, Feminist Economics 23(1): 30–53. Rai, Shirin M. and Georgina Waylen (2013) New Frontiers in Feminist Political Economy, London and New York: Routledge. Roberts, Adrienne (2015) ‘The Political Economy of “Transnational Business Feminism”: Problematizing the Corporate-Led Gender Equality Agenda’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 17(2): 209–31. Roberts, Adrienne and Susanne Soederberg (2012) ‘Gender Equality as “Smart Economics”? A Critique of the 2012 World Development Report’, Third World Quarterly 33(5): 949–68. Roberts, Adrienne, Silke Trommer and Erin Hannah (2019) ‘Gender Impacts of Trade and Investment Agreements’, London: UK Women’s Budget Group. https://​wbg​.org​.uk/​analysis/​uk​-policy​-briefings/​ gender​-impacts​-of​-trade​-and​-investment​-agreements/​. Sauvé, Philip and Zoabi Hosny (2014) ‘International Trade, the Gender Wage Gap and Female Labor Force Participation’, Journal of Development Economics 111(C): 17–33. Trommer, Silke (2014a) ‘Legal Opportunity in Trade Negotiations: International Law, Opportunity Structures and the Political Economy of Trade Agreements’, New Political Economy 19(1): 1–20. Trommer, Silke (2014b) Transformations in Trade Politics: Participatory Trade Politics in West Africa, Abingdon: Routledge. Trommer, Silke (2017) ‘The WTO in an Era of Preferential Trade Agreements: Thick and Thin Institutions in Global Trade Governance’, World Trade Review 16(3): 501–26. Trommer, Silke (2022) ‘Trade, Health and Social Reproduction in a COVID World’, Globalizations 19(3): 397–407. True, Jacqui (2003) ‘Mainstreaming Gender in Global Public Policy’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 5(3): 368–96. True, Jacqui (2008a) ‘Gender Mainstreaming and Regional Trade Governance in Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)’. In Shirin Rai and Georgina Waylen (eds), Global Governance: Feminist Perspectives, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 129–59. True, Jacqui (2008b) ‘Global Accountability and Transnational Networks: The Women Leaders’ Network and Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation’, The Pacific Review 21(1): 1–26. True, Jacqui and Laura Parisi (2013) ‘Gender Mainstreaming Strategies in International Governance’. In Gülay Caglar, Elisabeth Prügl and Susanne Zwingel (eds), Feminist Strategies in International Governance, Abingdon: Routledge, 37–56. UNCTAD (2017) ‘Trade and Gender Toolbox: How Will the Economic Partnership Agreement between the European Union and the East African Community Affect Kenyan Women?’ Geneva: United Nations. https://​unctad​.org/​system/​files/​official​-document/​ditc2017d1​_en​.pdf. van Staveren, Irene, Diane Elson, Caren Grown and Nilüfer Çağatay (eds) (2007) The Feminist Economics of Trade, London: Routledge. Walby, Sylvia (2005) ‘Gender Mainstreaming: Productive Tensions in Theory and Practice’, Social Politics 12(3): 321–43. Williams, Mariama (2013) ‘A Perspective on Feminist International Organizing from the Bottom Up: The Case of the ITGN and the WTO’. In Gülay Caglar, Elisabeth Prügl and Susanne Zwingel (eds), Feminist Strategies in International Governance, Abingdon: Routledge, 92–108. Young, Alasdair R. and John Peterson (2006) ‘The EU and the New Trade Politics’, Journal of European Public Policy 13(6): 795–814.

21. Feminist governance and climate change Maria Tanyag

INTRODUCTION The importance of gender in environmental research and policymaking is more widely accepted than ever before. The inclusion of gender in climate change governance has resulted in the proliferation of national and local action plans, development of gender-responsive climate financing and new technologies that explicitly target women.1 The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was signed on 9 May 1992 and entered into force on 21 March 1994. Since then, the Convention has generated complex global governance processes institutions, and actors with gender equality now widely recognised as a core ambition. Indeed, at the 25th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP25) held in Madrid in 2019, state parties agreed to strengthen efforts towards gender-responsive climate action by committing to the Enhanced Lima Work Programme on Gender and Gender Action Plan.2 The promotion of feminist and gender-responsive governance in the global climate change agenda has come a long way since the first reference to gender balance in COP processes appeared in the outcome document of COP7 in 2001 in Marrakesh, Morocco (Prebble et al., 2015: 3). Yet, mainstreaming efforts have not translated to transformations in social, political and economic relations, especially for rural women. This chapter examines feminist governance in climate change with particular attention to the problem of why more ‘gender’ does not necessarily equate to more gender equality. By focusing on climate governance, I show that feminist governance is about ensuring feminist knowledge production – asking who are recognised as ‘knowers’ and which sources of knowledge and truth claims inform governance. Drawing on diverse feminist scholarship on gender, environment and climate change, I theorise and empirically demonstrate the importance of feminist epistemologies as vital attributes and distinctive outcomes of feminist governance. Feminist governance does not only concern institutions and institution-building even as institutions are broadly defined to encompass both formal and informal rules that are leveraged in addressing collective problems across different scales. Feminist governance, above all, pierces through and defies epistemological foundations that inform, enclose and sustain specific modes of governing and governance. It involves challenging how and which issues get to be defined as ‘problems’ and whose and what forms of expertise are deemed necessary to solve them. Affirming what Enarson argued in the context of gender and disaster, this means governance ‘through women’s eyes’ and understanding climate change not as disembodied set of phenomena but rather their relationship to ‘the material conditions of women’s everyday lives, focusing on the situated knowledge of those outside the dominant power structures but assuming no unified identity or set of experiences’ (1998: 157). Feminist standpoint theory recognises the situatedness and embodied nature of knowledges (Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1991; Hartsock, 2003). The epistemological assumptions of standpoint theory matters for climate governance because they directly engage with how climate change is both ‘scientised’ and ‘securitised’ (MacGregor, 2010, 2017). Climate change remains predominantly represented both as a scientific problem 262

Feminist governance and climate change  263 and as a threat to national and international security (MacGregor, 2010: 127). From a feminist epistemological standpoint, the framing of climate change both as a security and scientific issue has concentrated knowledge production and validation within a very narrow and still male-centric model, despite positive attempts at creating a more gender-responsive climate governance. As I examine in this chapter, the double privileging of technical and scientific expertise as the authoritative lens through which to frame problems and solutions has been exclusionary, especially at the global and national levels. It has hindered the substantive inclusion of varieties in expertise, including from different groups of women. At the same time, while we now have unprecedented availability and access to scientific evidence, the global climate change agenda has been matched not only by political inaction but worse, by resistance in the form of populist denialism and anti-science backlash threatening to derail or undo existing efforts. In countries whose political systems vary greatly, such as the United States (US) and Norway, similar patterns have emerged in terms of the rise and intensification of climate change denialism. Research on the ‘conservative white male’ in the US (McCright and Dunlap, 2011, 2015) and Norway (Krange et al., 2019) has made visible the links between climate change denialism, patriarchal beliefs and right-wing nationalism. Compared to the broader population, these so-called ‘cool dudes’ tend to endorse climate change denialist views, particularly those with self-reported confidence in their own understanding of global warming (McCright and Dunlap, 2011, 2015). Rather than an aberration, former President Trump’s withdrawal in 2020 from the Paris Agreement, a major international treaty on climate change, is arguably the conservative white male effect writ large. Research in the US also suggests gender differences in how environmental problems are discursively framed such that men are more likely to use business or science frames while women are more likely to view climate change in the stereotypically feminine ethical-justice frame. The findings from this geographically specific research reflect a global trend demonstrating that scientific and business frames are articulated more in economically wealthy countries; whereas justice and ethical frames by those in poorer countries already on the frontlines of the climate crisis (Swim et al., 2018: 224). As other scholars point out, framing matters because it influences the prioritisation of issues as well as who is included in the decision-making and where (McDonald, 2018; Swim et al., 2018). The challenges facing feminist governance in climate change are deeply enmeshed with gendered knowledge production and validation concerning the nature of climate change and the solutions needed to address it. Climate governance must involve learning and serious engagement with the feminist analytical and methodological tools necessary to bridge multiple perspectives and situatedness of diverse groups of men and women for a truly transformative and feminist climate governance. As an alternative to the adversarial connotation of feminist insider/outsiders in governance, I use visions or vantage points from ‘above’ and ‘below’ in order to more accurately capture how different groups of women and men are positioned and acquire distinct insights to how climate governance operates. I argue that because of the profound epistemic and expertise-based challenges in climate governance, we need to pay attention to the ways the views from ‘above’ and ‘below’ have different causal explanations of why feminist perspectives have had contradictory outcomes and siloed implementation within the global climate change agenda. Crucially, it is the coming together of these distinct and different standpoints that enables us to get a fuller, less distorted understanding of patriarchy in global governance. I develop this analysis in the four main parts of this chapter. First, I discuss feminist governance within the UNFCCC agenda in relation to existing global feminist and

264  Handbook of feminist governance environmental scholarship and activisms. In the second and third sections, I disaggregate levels and modalities of governance according to a view from ‘above’ or governance at national and global levels and from ‘below’ or more localised and everyday forms of governance. These levels and modalities are not discrete and there is clear permeability and cross-fertilisation among them. However, in the fourth section, I warn of the increasing disconnect between ‘technical expertise’ reproduced at national and global levels, and the compartmentalisation of women’s everyday knowledge within community or localised levels, which in turn leads to piecemeal improvements that fail to reach the most vulnerable and climate-risk exposed populations. I conclude by reiterating the importance for climate change solutions that embody feminist governance in the form of recognising and cultivating diversity in expertise.

GENDER IN AND GENDER OF CLIMATE CHANGE AGENDA Five decades of sustained analytical and normative contributions from feminist and environmental scholarship and activism have played a major role in shaping the UNFCCC and the global climate change agenda. Material and ideational linkages between women, gender and environment have been historically pivotal in the evolution of a global climate and environmental governance (Arora-Jonsson, 2014; Resurreccion, 2013). Arora-Jonsson (2014) observes that since gender and feminist research gained ground in the 1970s in international development and environmental research and policymaking, its importance has never been more widely accepted. There is now broad-based political support and far better financial resources dedicated to promoting participation by diverse groups of women and men in all areas and levels of climate and/or environmental governance. As I mentioned above, COP has committed to a Gender Action Plan which sets five global priority areas: (1) capacity-building, knowledge management and communication; (2) gender balance, participation and women’s leadership; (3) coherence; (4) gender-responsive implementation and means of implementation; and (5) monitoring and reporting. Similar commitments to gender equality are found in disaster risk reduction (DRR) agendas such as the global Hyogo Framework for Action (2005–15) and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, (2015–30). In 2018, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women issued General Recommendation No. 37 to thematically address states’ obligations concerning the gender-related dimensions of disaster risks and climate change. The Committee stated that ‘[S]tates parties should ensure that all policies, legislation, plans, programmes, budgets and other activities related to disaster risk reduction and climate change are gender responsive and grounded in human-rights based principles’ (CEDAW, 2018: 7). While gender can be said to be in the mainstream of climate governance now, efforts have not translated into transformations in social, political and economic relations especially for rural women. Paradoxically, there is even a widening disconnect between stated goals and ambitions on the one hand, and actual opportunities and outcomes on the other. According to the Gender Climate Tracker analysis of UNFCCC decisions (as of 2021), the most robust gender-sensitive language has been in relation to climate change adaptation. Adaptation relates to people’s abilities to respond to the consequences of climate change as well as their vulnerabilities. That gender is most present in the context of decisions relating to adaptation attests to the strong awareness at the global level that climate change impacts men and women differently based on established research that women tend to face pre-existing

Feminist governance and climate change  265 inequalities that render them more vulnerable than men to the impacts of climate change. However, the word ‘gender’ first appeared in the UNFCCC decisions as ‘gender balance’ in recognition of underrepresentation of women in national and global decision-making processes.3 Since then, the Gender Climate Tracker notes that the majority of UNFCCC decisions now use ‘gender mainstreaming’ defined as the ‘integration of gender norms, roles, and relations in the development of actions and policies and implementation’.4 This, to me, reveals an important disconnect between the ‘comfortable’ representation of women as vulnerable but virtuous victims of climate change (Arora-Jonsson, 2014), and concrete measures to allow women to wield power over political decision-making that can materially affect climate change policies. Based on longitudinal data from 2009 to 2019 mapping trends in women’s participation, gender parity among heads of delegation at COP will not be achieved until 2068 (WEDO, 2020; see also Kruse, 2014 for similar quantitative findings). Feminist scholars critical of the growing co-optation of feminist language and activism in the service of neoliberal governance have drawn a distinction between gender in governance and the gender of governance, even as the two are interrelated. Gender in governance refers to the descriptive and empirical incorporation of gender, while the gender of governance refers to foundational gendered assumptions and logics. First, across major global agendas including climate governance, the neoliberalisation of feminism particularly as ‘smart economics’ has tended to mask the persistent and complex dynamics of gendered privileges and burdens. Valorised ideals of the entrepreneurial, altruistic, environmental-savvy and crisis-resilient woman have replaced improvements in women’s status and well-being through genuine redistribution of political and economic resources in state and society (Arora-Jonsson, 2014; Mukhopadhyay and Prügl, 2019; Tanyag, 2018). These contradictions emerge ‘when women are regarded as a collective but addressed as individuals in programs and when the focus is on the governance of gender with little attention to the gender of neoliberal governance’ (Arora-Jonsson, 2017: 296–7; 2014). According to this critique, gender mainstreaming has been successful in institution building but less so in terms of institutional reform. Hence, unsurprisingly, projects that address both climate change and women’s rights comprise only 0.01 per cent of all worldwide climate funding; and on average, women constituted only 22 per cent of the governing bodies of the major climate funds (UNDP, 2016). Relatedly, feminist scholars have warned of an overconfidence and belief in technological fixes as a masculinised and male-dominated feature of neoliberal governance. In both climate change and gender equality agendas, this has reproduced assumptions that socio-cultural, political, economic and climate injustices can be addressed by technology and that technology is immune to power and politics. Second, the overemphasis on the ‘best available science’ and on the expertise of scientists and engineers found in climate and environmental governance is located in a neoliberal continuum with the growth and proliferation of ‘gender-lite’ approaches. Gender-lite is not the same as ‘gender-blind’ in that there are steps taken to promote ‘gender’ but without the weight of material and ideational transformations. This occurs, for example, in ways that co-opt or misuse concepts such as ‘empowerment’, making them into bureaucratic and technocratic exercises marked by a preference for discrete or measurable indicators as outcomes. A shift towards technologies is evident in that ‘[C]ontrary to the 1990s when questions of participation and decentralization occupied environmental studies and policy, discussions have now moved to high level meetings between governments, international organizations, companies and scientists’ laboratories especially in relation to climate change’ (Arora-Jonsson, 2014: 295). This

266  Handbook of feminist governance problem is intensified in the governance of gender within climate change agendas precisely because climate governance is becoming even more ‘science-driven and expert-oriented’ in response to and as a result of ongoing contestations over the role of science in policymaking (Backstrand, 2003). Building on the long and historical feminist critique of technology, Mukhopadhyay and Prügl (2019: 709) examine the use of technologies in agricultural research and how these technologies themselves enact, reconstruct and perform gender relations and expertise. For example, they observed that the development of agricultural technology sought to make rural women more ‘productive’ but in a way that mirrored the pre-existing gendered division of labour and further cemented certain agricultural activities as feminine. Technologies for fish cages, horticulture and seed preservation were taken as doing good gender work because these promoted women’s existing area of ‘expertise’ or responsibility and were developed for use within or adjacent to the homestead. They argue that ‘[P]art of the problem is the failure of scientists to recognize that gender relations are power relations. Instead they tend to extract what men and women do in agriculture from the relations in which they are embedded’ (2019: 709). Extrapolating more broadly to climate governance, there is a clear impetus to understand why the institutionalisation of feminism has not necessarily translated into more definitive results for gender equality, and what this means for the role of feminist governance for peace and security in the context of climate change. Focusing on the global governance of climate change acutely reveals underlying epistemological tensions that are hidden or ‘bracketed off’ amid the proliferation of gender platforms and institutions. Revealing dominant interpretations of security and scientific expertise across different levels of decision-making has crucial implications if we are to explain and address prevailing challenges to enabling a truly feminist governance of climate change. As I demonstrate in the next sections, the challenge is how to effectively create, collaborate and cultivate diverse forms of feminist-informed authority and expertise. I suggest that this begins with taking stock of the multiple views of climate governance women and men acquire from above and below.

VIEW FROM ‘ABOVE’: FEMINIST GOVERNANCE AT NATIONAL AND GLOBAL LEVELS The context and experiences of women’s participation at national and global levels offer a distinct view of the gendered dynamics in the construction of expertise and decision-making in climate governance. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Environment and Gender Information (EGI) platform provides regular monitoring and up-to-date data on women’s participation, incorporation of gender-equality considerations in reports and agreements, and gender-responsive policies and programming. IUCN pioneered the development of the Environment and Gender Index (EGI) in response to the lack of mechanisms to monitor and ensure the implementation of established international mandates requiring women’s participation to be central to environmental decision-making. EGI seeks to measure and understand a country’s performance in relation to gender, environment and sustainable development. International agreements and standards that the EGI monitors include the three ‘Rio Conventions’: UNFCCC, United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The EGI also draws on the

Feminist governance and climate change  267 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.5 The pilot study on EGI reported that: Scientific measurements are and should be part of gender mainstreaming policies and programs in all spheres. Measuring and collecting gender data in the realm of environment and sustainable development would significantly bolster monitoring and evaluation efforts, promote efficiency and effectiveness, and contribute to enhanced decision-making and performance, and accountability. (IUCN, 2013: 12)

Based on the EGI research, countries working towards gender equality are more likely to achieve climate justice because of more gender equal decision-making that can enable more inclusive, sustainable and integrated environmental solutions. The index showed that ‘countries which take seriously their commitments to advancing gender equality in environmental arenas are also making strides well beyond survival toward long-term wellbeing for all their citizens’ (Prebble et al., 2015: 1). However, a crucial finding from the EGI is that ‘gender balance in the environmental realm is so far out of reach’ particularly because even at its highest at 36 per cent, the global average for women’s participation in intergovernmental negotiations on climate change, biodiversity and desertification remains low (IUCN, 2013: 32). For example, according to the same report, direct participation from women leaders in global negotiations such as in the UNFCCC COP have slowly increased over time but are still consistently low. In 2014 at the COP20 in Lima, Peru, 36 per cent of government delegates from 186 countries were women. Within the delegations, women were underrepresented as government chief negotiators, comprising only 25 per cent. Women’s underrepresentation is also reflected at regional and national levels of environmental decision-making because most negotiators are also leaders of environmental ministries in their home countries (Prebble et al., 2015: 10). There is thus a clear preference or standard-making in these negotiations that privilege scientific or technical expertise, as evidenced by the institutions training negotiators must represent. It is therefore not surprising that women scientists have had low participation in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments and leadership as well (Huyer et al., 2020). The IPCC is the authoritative international body that undertakes assessment on all scientific information relating to climate change. In its most recent Special Report on 1.5°C, only 27 per cent of author nominations were female (Huyer et al., 2020: 573). Scientific expertise is the final arbiter of global climate policymaking yet the sciences as a discipline has remained deeply hostile to women’s participation as scientists let alone from other fields of expertise. The EGI report concluded that in order to enhance women’s participation at the global decision-making level, it is crucial that national governments target reforms not only within domestic environmental sectors and decision-making processes but foundationally, in examining women’s representation and technical training in the fields of environmental science and management (Prebble et al., 2015: 11). Importantly, the barriers to direct participation appear more intractable than for indirect forms of participation in COP negotiations. The same research found that COP participant lists show near equal representation of men and women among NGO delegations. As a result, ‘women occupy a larger share of NGO representatives to each COP than their government delegate counterparts’ (Prebble et al., 2015: 15). This represents important progress and the greater gender balance within NGO delegations suggests broader recourse to forms of expertise and disciplinary or professional training. However, at

268  Handbook of feminist governance the highest levels of decision-making, where crucial and actual decisions are made via government delegations, women do not have equal numbers of seats at the table and therefore are less able to affect the outcomes. Drawing on feminist standpoint epistemology, the ‘view from above’ of climate governance lays bare the need to challenge the gendered constructions of scientific and technical expertise. Relevant national ministries can serve as important gatekeepers or gateways for promoting gender-equal global representation in climate and security negotiations, but gender balance alone cannot transform barriers in the production and interpretation of expertise. For example, in the pilot EGI report, it was noted that ‘[S]ectors that fall under the environmental and sustainable development arena, and that are distinct from the traditional “women’s rights” areas of health and education, are good entry points for these countries to make progress on gender equality’ (IUCN, 2013: 38). Yet, ‘[I]nformation about women’s role and access in environment-related sectors is not comprehensively collected and reported’ (IUCN, 2013: 32). The report also suggests the problem of ‘glass ceilings’ in terms of women’s participation and education in sectors most relevant to climate change. The report cited 2009 data from several European countries where it was found that ‘[W]hile the majority of students graduating in life science disciplines are women, representation in technological fields is much lower at 27 percent’. That is, in disciplines such as engineering and engineering trades and life sciences, women constituted the minority. This low representation within educational training then cascades to governance through similar patterns of underrepresentation in actual decision-making positions within environment, transport and energy sectors among these European countries (IUCN, 2013: 67–8). Examining case studies of women in environmental decision-making in Ecuador, Liberia and the Philippines, researchers found that ‘empowering women in the environmental sector will require a cultural shift for all countries’ (IUCN Global Gender Office, 2015: 8). Challenging these traditionally male-centric and male-dominated fields and reframing what constitutes climate expertise is crucial to feminist climate governance. Promoting diversity and inclusion within academic disciplines is necessary to broaden who are seen as legitimate ‘knowers’ and ‘negotiators’ in climate governance. Based on available evidence, women’s participation does make a difference. For example, female representation in national parliaments is found to correlate with more stringent climate change policies and, consequently, with lower carbon emissions (Mavisakalyan and Tarverdi, 2019). Ultimately, women’s presence is not enough when prevailing norms and codes in climate governance continue to privilege masculinised forms of activities, behaviours and solutions. Part and parcel of achieving gender-responsive alternatives is to re-think the very ideological and material structures that underpin climate governance (Kronsell, 2013).

VIEW FROM ‘BELOW’: LOCAL AND EVERYDAY FEMINIST GOVERNANCE International agreements and frameworks on gender and environment have been undergoing localisation via national gender and climate change action plans at community and village levels. Since the enactment of the Rio Conventions, there has been a proliferation of climate change and Gender Action Plans (ccGAPs) worldwide (IUCN, 2013). According to IUCN (2013: 70), ‘[t]he development of a ccGAP is a key moment in a country’s acknowledgement

Feminist governance and climate change  269 that gender equality is central to effective climate change decision-making, implementation and, ultimately, resilience’. At localised levels of governance, efforts have been made to incorporate traditional and Indigenous governance mechanisms around agriculture, land management and disaster preparedness and response. Gender-responsiveness in climate decision-making becomes more possible through the incorporation of ‘gender expertise’ via national machineries on women or gender equality. For example, research in three countries – Cambodia, Kenya and Vanuatu – found that all three countries have the necessary laws, policies and action plans relating to gender and climate change. Furthermore, there have been efforts to include women via community or village-wide networks in identifying climate risks and responses (Tanyag and True, 2019). Women’s representation in community decision-making is supported by national-level policy or action plans. Indeed, everyday life and more localised forms of governance are typically where women’s participation and expertise have been relatively well-established in research and, to some degree, have had specific influence (MacGregor, 2010). At its best, women’s participation through collective action and networks can signal how, where and why different climate-related risks are intersecting and how to address them with long-term security in mind (Ortiz, 2016; Sen and Grown, 1987; Tanyag, 2020). Still, at these local levels, where there have been spaces for gender inclusion, these have been under departments traditionally viewed as dealing with ‘soft issues’ such as social welfare and culture. For local programmes under departments and ministries relating to energy, meteorology, land and natural resources, gender is seen as relevant only in meeting inclusion requirements, thus treating women as beneficiaries rather than decision-makers, implementers and technical experts. In country projects under the Climate Investment Fund, the EGI project found women were represented in three main ways: ‘vulnerable group’, ‘stakeholder or agent of change’ and as ‘beneficiaries’ (IUCN, 2013: 47). Similarly, ‘[W]ith respect to how women and women’s participation are characterized in NBSAPs [National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans], the most countries (37% of the 174 Parties included in this analysis) indicate inclusion of women as stakeholders; 27% include reference to women as beneficiaries; 17% refer to women as vulnerable; and the fewest, 4% (seven countries) characterize women as agents of change’ (Clabots and Gilligan, 2017: iv). The view from ‘below’ of climate governance illuminates that while greater participation of women has been possible, it is circumscribed within and reproduces prevailing structures and values relating to knowledge production. Women are included in so far as their roles and contributions confine them to being ‘receivers’ of existing knowledge. Women’s participation in effect rubber stamps the decision-making process even if the outcome ultimately sidelines their insights. Participation can often be reduced simply to consultation where the women are taught or ‘given’ information rather than enabled to set agendas and define outcomes. Even when they are framed as ‘agents of change’, the ‘change’ in question has been pre-defined and envisioned from the ‘objective’ standpoint of technical expertise and therefore engenders limited or no agency at all. This ‘view from below’ cascades to and affirms the ‘view from above’ with the underrepresentation of women in global and national climate decision-making. Barriers to women’s contributions to knowledge accumulate and compound at local or community levels. In another important example, George’s (2019) research on Pacific women and how they have been visible in global and national climate processes reveals a complex ‘architecture of entitlements’. Drawing on insights from feminist institutionalism and political geography, George argues that women’s agency is ultimately mediated by political and material entitle-

270  Handbook of feminist governance ments that are themselves socially constructed and contested. Architectures of entitlement structure what constitutes legitimate authority and what is owed to whom, where, when, how and why. This architecture is a gendered ‘enclosure’ – materially and ideationally – in that it sets the rules for what forms of women’s participation and authority are deemed appropriate. According to George (2019: 106), women who challenge this architecture by making claims to different sorts of authority, or who voice aspirations of leadership not as mothers, not in ways that reflect women’s caring or nurturing obligations, but in ways that may be in more direct competition with established spheres of male authority, are subject to a very different and sometimes hostile response because they are perceived to flout established norms of gendered entitlement.

Pacific women have been valued and valorised for the distinct expertise they bring to climate governance but only in ways that conform to maternalist narratives and identities. Similar dynamics were reported in Kenya, Cambodia and Vanuatu where community-level governance institutions such as Community Disaster and Climate Change Committees (CDCCCs) have been set up to include locally appointed women’s representatives. However, there were reportedly cases where the purpose or mandate of the women’s representative was unclear even to the appointee (Tanyag and True, 2019). Moreover, there were concerns over ‘a growing tendency to relegate women’s leadership only within and up to community “DRR [disaster risk reduction] and CC only issues” rather than capacity for leadership in national security and development concerns including improving women’s political participation within the national parliament’ (Tanyag and True, 2019: 17–18). Here we see that both women’s expertise and climate change knowledge are depoliticised by feminising these community-based leadership roles. The limits to women’s everyday participation are also ironically environmental. Globally, we need more women to participate in climate governance but the most vulnerable and most affected, and therefore those with the clearest vision of the urgent need to address climate change, are prevented from participating by the very impacts of climate change. This affects promising and progressive projects such as the development of Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR), which is championed as a tool for climate justice by the non-government organisation Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD). FPAR is about cultivating and promoting women’s leadership and participation in climate policymaking across all levels but particularly beginning from and with the ‘grassroots’. It does so by seeking to break down traditional barriers between ‘researcher’ and ‘subject’ and moving towards co-ownership of knowledge and action (Godden et al., 2020: 597). APWLD believes that it is through meaningful, rather than tokenistic, participation that truly feminist and climate justice-oriented outcomes can be achieved. However, and perhaps sadly, evaluation of FPAR projects revealed that the quality of participation was impacted by women’s mobility within their immediate surrounds, which in turn was increasingly hampered due to weather, distance and transport needs (Godden et al., 2020: 608). Building on the argument by George regarding ‘architectures of entitlement’, women’s varied expertise is being allowed but confined to community levels where they face everyday material and ideological constraints that prevent them transforming local climate change agendas, let alone those at the global level.

Feminist governance and climate change  271

CONCLUSION: LIMITS AND POTENTIAL OF FEMINIST GOVERNANCE FOR CLIMATE CHANGE Feminist governance in climate change does not relate only to ‘women’s issues’ and nor are its contributions limited to understanding women’s different experiences of climate risks and impacts. Rather, a truly feminist governance entails actively integrating different types of information, celebrating a plurality of expertise and the valuing of diverse knowledge sources. What counts as climate risk is ultimately shaped by the realities and relationships of those who do the counting. Drawing on feminist epistemology and the concept of ‘situated knowledges’, this chapter concludes that it is in the coming together of partial perspectives through collaboration and intersectional knowledge production that we arrive at a fuller, more objective account of the climate crisis on which to anchor feminist governance. Feminist governance in climate change has the potential to bridge the growing disconnect between rhetorical commitments to gender equality and tangible outcomes by recognising women’s critical role in helping solve the climate crisis. However, at present, examination of the view from ‘above’ and ‘below’ of women’s experiences and situatedness in climate governance reveals paradoxical outcomes that ultimately hinder transformative reforms. First, at global and national levels, broader groups of women and men are kept out of climate negotiations because of the privileging of scientific and environmental expertise. Second, when women’s forms of leadership or ‘expertise’ do get recognised, these tend to be confined narrowly within and reinforce traditional gender roles. As a result, these stereotypes structure women’s entitlements and participation. They also indicate a lack of serious engagement with the potential of everyday and traditional knowledge as a form of expertise required to make science and technology studies more robust. Echoing existing recommendations from IUCN, it is therefore vital that the necessary resources are mobilised across all national agendas and programmes to sustain women’s networks and professional mobility within the sciences and related government ministries. Overreliance on narrow interpretations of scientific and security expertise makes us all inadequate. Instead, ‘[W]e need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meanings and bodies, but in order to build meanings and bodies that have a chance for life’ (Haraway, 1988: 580). As this chapter underscores, feminist governance is multiscalar and emerges on multiple fronts and from multiple viewpoints. It potentially provides alternative models and ethics for integrating diverse knowledge systems. If feminist governance is to transform environmental and climate decision-making, there is an urgent need to reshape and reformulate new vantage points and world views. This involves challenging narrow constructions of ‘merit’ and what counts as ‘technical’ towards more open and deliberative decision-making processes. Addressing the macro-level political economy that underpins gendered distribution of political authority and resources – all conduits in valorisations of particular forms of expertise – is also needed. Here, further studies of the political ecology and economy of femininities and masculinities as they inform legitimate forms of expertise in climate governance will yield important pathways for reform. Feminist researchers, scientists and engineers all have a role to play in the critical scrutiny and brokerage of existing ‘high-level’, ‘scientific knowledge’ and ‘knowledge from the ground’ in the service of developing more just and effective climate solutions.

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NOTES 1. See, for example, the Gender Climate Tracker developed by WEDO in partnership with the Global Gender and Climate Alliance (GGCA), https://​www​.​genderclim​atetracker​.org/​. 2. See COP25 final report for the text on Enhanced Lima Work Programme and Gender Action Plan, https://​unfccc​.int/​sites/​default/​files/​resource/​cp2019​_13a01E​.pdf. The Lima work programme on gender was adopted at COP20 (2014), https://​unfccc​.int/​sites/​default/​files/​resource/​docs/​2014/​ cop20/​eng/​10a03​.pdf. The gender action plan was first established at COP23 (2017). 3. ‘Gender mandates in Climate Policy’, https://​www​.​genderclim​atetracker​.org/​gender​-mandates/​ introduction. 4. See also ‘Quick Analysis’, https://​www​.​genderclim​atetracker​.org/​gender​-mandates/​quick​-analysis. 5. The EGI is based on six categories with weighted averages and scaled from 0 to 100, where 100 represents the most favourable condition for gender equality and women’s empowerment. The six categories are livelihood, ecosystem, gender-based rights and participation, governance, gender-based education and assets, and country-reported activities. See IUCN (2013) for a detailed description of the methodology.

REFERENCES Arora-Jonsson, Seema (2014) ‘Forty Years of Gender Research and Environmental Policy: Where Do We Stand?’, Women’s Studies International Forum 47: 295–308. Arora-Jonsson, Seema (2017) ‘Gender and Environmental Policy’. In Sherilyn MacGregor (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment, London and New York: Routledge, 289–303. Backstrand, Karin (2003) ‘Civic Science for Sustainability: Reframing the Role of Experts, Policy Makers and Citizens in Environmental Governance’, Global Environmental Politics 3(4): 24–41. CEDAW [Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women] (2018) ‘General Recommendation No. 37 on Gender-Related Dimensions of Disaster Risk Reduction in the Context of Climate Change’, CEDAW/C/GC/37. http://​tbinternet​.ohchr​.org/​Treaties/​CEDAW/​Shared​ %20Documents/​1​_Global/​CEDAW​_C​_GC​_37​_8642​_E​.pdf. Clabots, Barbara and Molly Gilligan (2017) Gender and Biodiversity: Analysis of Women and Gender Equality Considerations in National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs). Washington, DC: IUCN. Enarson, Elaine (1998) ‘Through Women’s Eyes: A Gendered Research Agenda for Disaster Social Science’, Disasters 22(2): 157–73. George, Nicole (2019) ‘Climate Change and “Architectures of Entitlement”: Beyond Gendered Virtue and Vulnerability in the Pacific Islands?’ In Catarina Kinnvall and Helle Rydstrom (eds), Climate Hazards, Disasters, and Gender Ramifications, Abingdon: Routledge, 101–21. Godden, Naomi Joy, Pam Macnish, Trimita Chakma and Kavita Naidu (2020) ‘Feminist Participatory Action Research as a Tool for Climate Justice’, Gender & Development 28(3): 593–615. Haraway, Donna (1988) ‘Situated Knowledge: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–99. Harding, Sandra (1991) Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hartsock, Nancy (2003) ‘The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism’. In Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (eds), Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, 2nd edition, Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 283–310. Huyer, Sophia, Mariola Acosta, Tatiana Gumucio and Jasmin Irisha Jim Ilham (2020) ‘Can We Turn the Tide? Confronting Gender Inequality in Climate Policy’, Gender & Development 28(3): 571–91. IUCN [International Union for Conservation of Nature] (2013) The Environment and Gender Index (EGI) 2013 Pilot, Washington, DC: IUCN.

Feminist governance and climate change  273 IUCN Global Gender Office [IUCN GGO] (2015) Women in Environmental Decision Making: Case Studies in Ecuador, Liberia, and the Philippines, Washington, DC: IUCN. https://​portals​.iucn​.org/​ library/​node/​45102. Krange, Olve, Bjørn P. Kaltenborn and Martin Hultman (2019) ‘Cool Dudes in Norway: Climate Change Denial among Conservative Norwegian Men’, Environmental Sociology 5(1): 1–11. Kronsell, Annica (2013) ‘Gender and Transition in Climate Governance’, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 7: 1–15. Kruse, Johannes (2014) ‘Women’s Representation in the UN Climate Change Negotiations: A Quantitative Analysis of State Delegations, 1995–2011’, International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics 14(4): 349–70. MacGregor, Sherilyn (2010) ‘A Stranger Silence Still: The Need for Feminist Social Research on Climate Change’, The Sociological Review 57(2): 124–40. MacGregor, Sherilyn (ed.) (2017) Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment, New York: Routledge. Mavisakalyan, Astghik and Yashar Tarverdi (2019) ‘Gender and Climate Change: Do Female Parliamentarians Make a Difference?’ European Journal of Political Economy 56: 151–64. McCright, Aaron and Riley Dunlap (2011) ‘Cool Dudes: The Denial of Climate Change Among Conservative White Males in the United States’, Global Environmental Change 21(4): 1163–72. McCright, Aaron and Riley Dunlap (2015) ‘Bringing Ideology In: The Conservative White Male Effect on Worry About Environmental Problems in the USA’, Journal of Risk Research, 16(2): 211–26. McDonald, Matt (2018) ‘Climate Change and Security: Towards Ecological Security?’ International Theory 10(2): 153–80. Mukhopadhyay, Maitrayee and Elisabeth Prügl (2019) ‘Performative Technologies: Agricultural Research for Development and Gender’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 21(5): 702–23. Ortiz, Alejandra Santillana (ed.) (2016) Linking Gender, Economic and Ecological Justice: Feminist Perspectives from Latin America, Suva: DAWN. http://​dawnnet​.org/​sites/​default/​files/​articles/​ 20170117​_geej​_ebook​_0​.pdf. Prebble, Maria, Molly Gilligan and Barbara Clabots (2015) Women’s Participation in Global Environmental Decision Making: An EGI Supplemental Report, Washington, DC: IUCN. https://​ portals​.iucn​.org/​union/​sites/​union/​files/​doc/​egi​_datasetdm​.pdf. Resurreccion, Bernadette (2013) ‘Persistent Women and Environment Linkages in Climate Change and Sustainable Development Agendas’, Women’s Studies International Forum 40: 33–43. Sen, Gita and Caren Grown (1987) Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives, New York: Monthly Review Press. Swim, Janet K., Theresa K. Vescio, Julia L. Dahl and Stephanie J. Zawadzki (2018) ‘Gendered Discourse About Climate Change Policies’, Global Environmental Change 48: 216–25. Tanyag, Maria (2018) ‘Resilience, Female Altruism and Bodily Autonomy: Disaster-Induced Displacement in post-Haiyan Philippines’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43(3): 563–85. Tanyag, Maria (2020) ‘From Alarm Bells to Background Noise? The Role of Gender in Risk Mapping, Analysis and Response in the Asia Pacific Region’. In UNEP, UN Women, UN DPPA and UNDP, Gender, Climate and Security: Sustaining Inclusive Peace on the Frontlines of Climate Change, 34. https://​www​.gender​-nr​-peace​.org/​gender​-climate​-security/​. Tanyag, Maria and Jacqui True (2019) ‘Gender-Responsive Alternatives to Climate Change: A Global Research Report’, ActionAid Australia. https://​actionaid​.org​.au/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2019/​11/​Monash​ -GRACC​-Report​-Global​-​.pdf. UNDP (2016) ‘Gender and Climate Finance’, Gender and Climate Change Issue Brief. https://​www​.undp​ .org/​content/​undp/​en/​home/​librarypage/​womens​-empowerment/​gender​-and​-climate​-change​.html. WEDO (2020) ‘FactSheet: UNFCCC Progress on Achieving Gender Balance (COP25)’. https://​wedo​ .org/​factsheet​-unfccc​-progress​-achieving​-gender​-balance​-dec2019​-2/​.

22. Transnational feminism and global governance Valentine M. Moghadam

INTRODUCTION Transnational feminist networks (TFNs) have a long history, starting with organisations such as the International Council of Women (ICW), formed in 1888, the International Alliance of Women (IAW), founded in 1904 as the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), formed in 1919, all of which continue to thrive. Socialist and labour activists developed their own networks across borders, promoting social justice for working women within and outside the International Labour Organization. The late 20th century saw an expanded field with TFNs mobilising around structural adjustment policies, religious fundamentalisms and civil conflicts. Most recently, TFNs have met Covid-19 with statements that criticise the root causes of the pandemic, such as social and gender inequalities and misguided state policies and priorities. From caring economies, demilitarisation and a more robust social democracy to eco-socialism and degrowth, TFN proposals challenge institutions of national and global governance to implement transformative policies while critiquing existing institutions. What are TFNs and what do they do? Situated within the field of global feminist social-movement activism, TFNs are groups of women’s rights advocates from three or more countries who mobilise and coalesce around a common set of grievances and goals (Moghadam, 1996, 2005, 2013). Their mobilisation strategies occur at global, regional and local levels, and broadly entail research and analysis; lobbying, public advocacy and education; coalition building; and humanitarian action, international solidarity and public protests. As non-governmental organisations (NGOs), they take part in UN NGO forums and many are accredited to the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), enabling them to attend the annual meetings of the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women. TFNs create, activate or join global networks and coalitions to mobilise pressure outside states, doing so via e-petitions, action alerts and appeals, and through public protests and acts of civil disobedience. They act and agitate within states, at both local and national levels, to enhance public awareness and participation, often using innovative digital platforms for training and advocacy and to reach diverse constituencies. As ‘outsiders’, TFNs work with ‘insiders’ to make meaningful interventions on key national and international issues. At a minimum, and like women’s NGOs in general, TFNs seek recognition and representation for women, along with redistributive measures such as gender budgets (see Chapter 11 in this Handbook).1 Some also offer wide-ranging critiques of neoliberal policies and masculinist practices, issuing proposals for social equality, economic justice and peace. Such critiques and proposals evince efforts to advance an alternative, feminist mode of governance. The UN and its specialised agencies, programmes and funds have offered space for TFN lobbying, advocacy and resource mobilisation, which in turn has enabled adoption and diffusion of gender equality norms and mechanisms such as gender mainstreaming (True and Mintrom, 2001). TFN expertise has not escaped the notice of governments and intergovern274

Transnational feminism and global governance  275 mental organisations (IGOs), including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).2 In turn, those bodies have called on TFNs for consultations or echoed their narratives – if not adopted entirely the values and norms that TFNs represent and promote. In the wake of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, IGO attention to care sectors reflected years of feminist research and advocacy (e.g. Georgieva, 2020). Framed by feminist institutionalism (Krook and Mackay, 2011) and world-systems theory (Chase-Dunn, 1998; Wallerstein, 2000), this chapter addresses feminist governance through a focus on TFNs, their opportunities, achievements and constraints. Although concerted collective action by social movements and civil society organisations – including TFNs – may influence practices and outcomes, favourable outcomes may be prevented, undermined or overturned by the broader ‘rules of the game’ of the capitalist world system, including the prerogatives of the hegemon and the system’s central logic of endless accumulation and growth. The world system’s wars, economic crises, ecological disasters and pandemics continue to preoccupy TFNs.

FROM THE DEMAND FOR PEACE TO THE CRITIQUE OF STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT Forty years after the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention in New York that called for women’s rights, 53 women’s organisations from nine countries gathered in Washington, DC (Rupp, 1994). Ten years later, the ICW formed an International Standing Committee on Peace and International Arbitration; other standing committees were soon established on issues from suffrage to health.3 In the wake of a devastating world war, and after a 1915 meeting of over 1,100 women at The Hague seeking to develop a vision of peace, WILPF formed in 1919 to take a stand against war. Much of WILPF’s language in the interwar period emphasised the importance of economic, social and physical security in guarding against future wars (McCarthy et al., 2015). Both the ICW and WILPF engaged with the new multilateral organisation, the League of Nations, as did the IAW, and they promoted peace, equality of men and women, and women’s involvement across all domains.4 Given the logic of the world system, the first generation of TFNs could not prevent the Second World War. They were, however, prepared to take part in the new, post-World War II institutions of global governance, notably the United Nations, the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) and specialised UN agencies such as UNESCO, whose mission at its founding was to ‘build peace in the minds of men’. WILPF became a distinctive voice within the international peace movement and a major player in histories of 20th-century global feminism (Confortini, 2012). The Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), founded in 1945 in France and later headquartered in East Berlin, was affiliated to the socialist/communist movement; its main areas of concern were world peace, anti-fascism, child welfare and improving the status of women (Armstrong, 2016; de Haan, 2010a, 2010b). The IAW, ICW and WILPF developed as federations, with national units as well as an international secretariat, and gradually assumed feminism as an overarching frame. Politically, they diverged, with IAW and ICW choosing to be neutral while WILPF adopted radical positions on militarism, war and peace. Meanwhile, women’s groups expanded across the globe. All four federations – IAW, ICW, WILPF and WIDF – sent representatives to the UN’s CSW meetings.

276  Handbook of feminist governance In mid-century, the Cold War cast a shadow on feminist solidarity, in the form of the East–West and North–South divides. Antipathy existed between women’s groups aligned with the communist movement and liberal feminist groups aligned with the so-called Free World. WIDF enjoyed consultative status with the UN’s ECOSOC), but there was hardly any connection between WIDF and non-communist Western women’s groups, although links with WILPF did exist.5 Moreover, WIDF faced intense anti-communist denunciations from US officials (de Haan, 2010a). Recent studies have uncovered an important, previously hidden, part of the history of the global women’s rights movement. Through her focus on two activists, from Bulgaria and Zambia, Ghodsee (2019) uncovers the important role of women from the Second World, and socialist women from the Third World, in championing women’s rights. De Haan (2010a) writes that WIDF representatives attending a CSW meeting, led by the WIDF President Hertta Kuusinen from Finland, proposed that the UN declare 1975 as International Women’s Year; this launched the Decade for Women (1976–85) and a new wave of global feminist governance. At the start of the decade, autonomous feminist groups were emerging within national borders, encompassing liberal, radical, Marxist and socialist ideologies, and those political differences constituted one form of division within feminism. The other division, as noted, took the form of North–South, or First World–Third World, differences in priorities and strategies; many First World feminists saw legal equality and reproductive rights as key feminist demands and goals, while many Third World feminists emphasised underdevelopment, colonialism and imperialism as obstacles to women’s advancement. Disagreements over what constituted priority feminist issues – legal equality and personal choice versus global economic and political hierarchies – came to the fore at the beginning of the decade’s First and Second World Conferences (in Mexico City in 1975 and Copenhagen in 1980). In the mid-1980s, during preparations for the 1985 World Conference in Nairobi, bridge-building across regional and ideological divides was made possible by three critical world-systemic developments: the transition from Keynesian to neoliberal economics, along with a new international division of labour that relied heavily on (cheap) female labour; cuts to the welfare state in the core countries and the decline of the developmental state in the Third World; and the emergence of fundamentalist and politicised religious movements. Activist women in developing and developed countries responded by building the second generation of women’s transnational networks, now with explicitly feminist framings: MADRE, DAWN, WEDO, WIDE, Women Living Under Muslim Laws and, in 1995, the World March of Women (Moghadam, 1996, 2020).6 The UN system continued activities around women’s participation and rights, creating space for the first- and second-generation transnational networks. The emerging feminist agenda included a critique of neoliberalism and structural adjustment policies (SAPs), as well as an insistence on women’s full citizenship, reproductive rights, bodily integrity, and autonomy, no matter what the cultural context. Scholar-activists noted that SAPs affected women in distinctive ways, especially in social reproduction and care activities (Elson, 1991; Sen and Grown, 1987).7 Consensus culminated in the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. Along the road to Beijing, other UN venues enabled consensus-building and advocacy: the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the Human Rights Conference in Vienna in 1993, the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo in 1994, and the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen in 1995. There, women declared that environmental issues were women’s

Transnational feminism and global governance  277 issues, that women’s rights were human rights, that governments should guarantee women’s reproductive health and rights, that women’s access to productive employment and social protection had to be expanded, and that cutbacks in public services were not acceptable. New resonant frames emerged – women’s human rights, gender justice, gender equality, ending the feminisation of poverty, ending violence against women – frames that came to be adopted not only by women’s groups across the globe but also, increasingly, by governments and IGOs (Moghadam, 2020: 143–4). In the 1990s, TFNs worked with UN agencies, notably the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), to establish and diffuse the new frames and policy norms. They attended the annual CSW meetings and helped write Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) shadow reports, and they were consulted by various IGOs. As a result, TFN activities and partnerships resulted in some successes at the UN conferences of the 1990s and afterward. One was the favourable outcome document of the 1994 ICPD, which included references to women’s right to reproductive health and services. TFNs insisted on the need for sex-disaggregated data; endorsed and helped secure support for the establishment of ‘national machinery for women’, or women’s policy agencies; pushed for gender mainstreaming across international organisations and governments; and promoted adoption of gender budgets. Drawing on Reanda (1999) and others, Hafner-Burton and Pollack (2002) describe the influence of the ‘international women’s movement’ in the adoption of gender mainstreaming at the World Bank and the UNDP. Several TFNs joined the ‘Fifty Years is Enough’ campaign that criticised the World Bank and IMF for the economic policies they promoted; in response, World Bank President Wolfensohn created an ‘external gender consultative group’, inviting several feminist critics to join (Moghadam, 2005: 122). A major achievement was Security Council Resolution 1325, adopted in October 2000 and focused on Women, Peace, and Security (WPS). The precursor was TFN lobbying at the 1993 Conference on Human Rights; the final Vienna Declaration included the assertion that violence against women was an abuse of human rights, and a critique of the harmful effects of certain traditional or customary practices, cultural prejudices and religious extremism. The declaration stated that abuses of women during armed conflict – including systematic rape, sexual slavery and forced pregnancy – are violations of the fundamental principles of international human rights and humanitarian law. Gender experts at UNIFEM, working with several TFNs, held informal meetings with members of the UN’s Security Council to advocate for a resolution on WPS (Hill et al., 2003). This paved the way for UNSCR 1325 (see Chapter 18 in this Handbook), calling on governments, as well as the UN Security Council itself, to include women in negotiations and settlements with respect to conflict resolution and peacebuilding, and to mainstream gender in peacekeeping, training and other operations. At the same time, the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (ICC), was influenced by the lobbying efforts of the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice (Cohn, 2008). By strategising with each other and engaging with allies in international organisations, TFNs influenced the crafting, adoption and diffusion of the global women’s rights agenda, thus helping to advance feminist governance. In that sense, the 1990s were a period of tremendous growth for TFNs. At the same time, the post-Cold War world order was characterised by harsh UN sanctions against Iraq; civil conflicts in sub-Saharan African, Yugoslavia and former Soviet republics; the growth of al-Qaeda in the wake of the US support for Islamist rebels in Afghanistan; the worldwide expansion of a neoliberal and financialised model of capitalist

278  Handbook of feminist governance globalisation; and the beginning of reform and restructuring (including downsizing) of the UN. These and subsequent world-systemic developments in the new century affected TFN opportunities and prospects. One response was to join the World Social Forum – the left-wing counterpart to the World Economic Forum – after its first convergence in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001.

CRISES IN THE NEW CENTURY AND FEMINIST RESPONSES The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession, the 2010–11 Arab Spring and its meltdown, and a weakened UN affected transnational feminist partnerships, financing and strategies, including the dissolution of at least one TFN and the dissipation of the funding base of another. A 2011 study by the Association for Women’s Rights in Development found that post-2008 budget cuts from donors compelled staff and programme downsizing at many women’s rights organisations (AWID, 2011). UN Women, launched in 2010 from the merger of four entities, established programmes on women’s economic empowerment, peace and security, and other issues, and continued UNIFEM’s practice of inviting TFN scholar-activists to contribute to its flagship report, Progress of the World’s Women. But conflicts, sanctions, and heightened inter-state tensions and rivalries threatened women’s empowerment, leadership and physical security. In early 2020, UN Women warned that ‘unprecedented global challenges’ hindered progress towards gender equality and that gains were under attack.8 These crises may have pushed TFNs in a more radical direction. Code Pink: Women for Peace, which emerged in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, was radical at its inception and continues to engage in public protest as well as advocacy. In autumn 2019 it formed an initiative called the Feminist Foreign Policy Project, bringing together scholar-activists and launching working groups and webinars. Women Cross DMZ was created in 2016 to mobilise women globally for peace in Korea, and regularly holds peace marches along the demilitarised zone separating North and South Korea. MADRE, formed in the mid-1980s, partners with Code Pink, Women Cross DMZ and other grassroots and transnational feminist groups to critique war, inter-state rivalries and economic injustices. WILPF has retained its feminist anti-militarist vision for peace with women’s equality and rights; its secretariat in Geneva and UN liaison office in New York focus on SCR 1325. Even so, Rees and Chinkin (2020) of WILPF called for an end to ‘predatory capitalism and patriarchal society’ and its replacement with ‘equal access to basic resources and valuing care’. The Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance (FaDA), launched in September 2016 at the 5th International Degrowth Conference in Budapest, aims at dialogue among feminists and degrowth proponents ‘to make feminist reasoning an integral part of degrowth activism and scholarship’.9 Facing Covid-19 When Covid-19 struck in early 2020, most governments were ill-prepared to tackle it effectively, and high rates of infection and deaths were experienced in Italy, France, Spain, the UK and the US. Paradoxically, the pandemic coincided with several international anniversaries: 75 years of the UN, 25 years since the Beijing Platform for Action, 20 years since SCR 1325, five years since the Paris Climate agreement. Yet there was little to cheer about, given the per-

Transnational feminism and global governance  279 sistence of conflicts and wars, income inequalities and violence against women. The pandemic emerged and expanded at a time of increased global tensions that the UN seemed unable to alleviate – the internationalised conflict in Syria and subsequent refugee crisis of 2015, the collapse of the Libyan state following the 2011 NATO assault to dislodge Ghaddafi, the trade wars between the US and China, the war of words between the US and Russia, Brexit and other challenges within the European Union, the denial of climate change by right-wing populist leaders, the assault on Yemen by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the US recognition of Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights (Syria) and of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal as well as from UNESCO, the assassinations of two top Iranian officials, and the harsh US sanctions on Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and 25 other countries. TFNs were quick to understand the links among the economic, political, environmental and health crises. In diagnosing the underlying causes, their critiques echoed earlier ones focused on inter-state rivalries, structural adjustments and neoliberal capitalism. TFN analyses and proposals were based on reason, the ethics of care and a critique of militarism and endless accumulation and growth. FaDA (2020) connected the pandemic to the pursuit of profit and growth, noting that ‘deforestation from agro-industry incurs into forestlands and viruses jump from displaced wildlife to livestock and then to humans’. WEDO (2020) stressed the problem of food insecurity and called for both a Green New Deal and a Universal Basic Income. MADRE (2020) argued that the lack of funding for public water supplies, sanitation, housing and health services – along with deforestation and the destruction of ecosystems – had helped spread Covid-19; it also called for universal health care, child care, and paid sick leave in the US and other countries lacking such provisioning. All TFNs stressed that gender-based violence was likely to increase during lockdowns, as it had during periods of economic recession, hence the need to educate publics and protect women by ensuring the availability of shelters. Recognising that ‘essential workers’ were not hedge-fund managers but rather those in economic sectors providing care and basic services, TFNs reiterated long-standing demands for valorisation of ‘care, well-being, equality, human flourishing, and meeting basic needs’. In a WILPF statement, Rees and Chinkin (2020) noted that caregivers worldwide were more than 70 per cent female and ‘are thanked for their sacrifice but aren’t given a seat at the table to make decisions’. As in earlier critiques of structural adjustments and neoliberal capitalist growth, TFNs analysed the pandemic as a reflection of the crisis of reproduction and care, calling for people- and community-oriented sustainable economies, in part through a Global Green New Deal. WEDO (2020) stressed the need to re-evaluate what kind of work is ‘essential’, recognise those who are working at the front lines and understand the gendered nature of the crisis. The FaDA collective saw the pandemic as ‘an opening for a careful radical transformation’. Endorsing the call for a ‘care income’ by the Global Women’s Strike (GWS) and its Women of Color section, the Collective demanded social recognition for the ‘unpaid and gendered care work that we all perform to sustain the life and wellbeing of households and communities’ (FaDA, 2020). Other specific proposals included ‘support for community-supported organic agriculture to increase local resilience, regenerate soil nutrients, and reduce dependency on global supply chains’; the socialisation of health care and utilities; the ‘decommodification of food, housing, medicines, education, etc.’. Women’s NGOs affiliated with the CSW meet monthly in New York, and in April and May 2020 discussions revolved around the pandemic, its gendered effects and the need for new economic and humanitarian policies. A WEDO representative worried that there would

280  Handbook of feminist governance be ‘long-term impacts on democratic governance and human rights’ as well as on women’s employment and economic security.10 Echoing UN Women’s Shadow Pandemic Campaign, the Women’s Learning Partnership (WLP) called gender-based violence (GBV) ‘the shadow pandemic during COVID-19 and beyond’. To mitigate the economic and health impact of Covid-19 and build women’s resilience, women’s CSW NGOs recommended sex- and age-disaggregated data analysis; leveraging networks and connections with women’s NGOs, gender specialists within IGOs, and faith communities for a coordinated socioeconomic response; using social media and other computer technologies to exchange and distribute information; and providing expertise and resources for community engagement to reach women with disabilities and those living in marginalised communities. There was consensus on the need for government investment in women’s health care facilities, domestic violence hotlines and shelters for GBV victims. TFNs and women’s NGOs also agreed on holding multilateral organisations and governments accountable and – as Bridget Burns of WEDO stated – ensuring ‘solutions that are framed in the context of global justice’.11 A May 2020 joint statement by MADRE, Women Cross DMZ and Grassroots Global Justice Alliance asserted that this public health crisis has only amplified the need to redistribute resources, restructure society, and create long-term solutions that prioritize the true needs of all people. … [It] calls for us to challenge our militarized notion of security.

Code Pink’s Feminist Foreign Policy Project similarly argued that the pandemic had revealed … the shortcomings of healthcare systems across the globe and the huge social costs of an economic model that prioritizes markets and profits over people’s health and wellbeing. COVID-19 is exactly the kind of crisis that our neoliberal capitalist economy is ill-equipped to solve.12

The US section of WILPF later endorsed the ‘Marshall Plan for Moms’ – a young coder’s initiative which in February 2021 received the support of a Congresswoman from New York – and distributed a petition to be submitted to President Biden.13 TFNs on Peace, Economic Security and Feminist Humanitarianism In addressing the spread of Covid-19 and ways to mitigate its effects across countries, TFNs emphasised the value of achieving sustainable peace, given the number of conflicts and US-initiated sanctions, and endorsed UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ call for a global ceasefire in late March 2020. WILPF then proposed ‘five principles for a meaningful ceasefire’, including the full participation of women and civil society groups, and reallocating military expenditure to fund local civil society-led efforts towards ‘recovery, reconciliation, and reconstruction’ (WILPF, 2020). The statement was issued on behalf of the consortium FIRE, the acronym for Feminist Impact for Rights and Equality, consisting of MADRE, WILPF, the Nobel Women’s Initiative and Kvinna till Kvinna Foundation. In May, Women Cross DMZ joined Code Pink and others to promote a ‘feminist foreign policy’ to confront the pandemic through a global ceasefire, an end to ‘US militarism at home and abroad’ and to redefine national security. The statement called on the US ‘to prioritize interdependence, connection and cooperation, justice, valuing people and the planet over profit, and protecting the most vulnerable among us’.14 In a separate statement, Code Pink demanded ‘a new social

Transnational feminism and global governance  281 contract’ that would include ‘the immediate and permanent end to all sanctions against nations levied by the United States’, as these are ‘a death sentence for many of the most marginalized people in the countries they target’. This should be accompanied by ‘an immediate and permanent ceasefire of all global conflicts so that we can prioritize peacemaking, diplomacy and cooperation in this time of global crisis’ (Code Pink, 2020). In late March 2021, Code Pink, MADRE, Women Cross DMZ and WILPF joined 51 US-based civil society organisations in asking that President Biden lift sanctions to ‘allow the peoples of sanctioned countries and locations to respond to the devastating human and economic fallout of COVID-19’.15 In previous work, I identified ‘feminist humanitarianism’ as a strategy of transnational feminism, and pointed to activities – by Code Pink, MADRE, WEDO, the Women’s Learning Partnership for Rights, Development, and Peace (WLP) and other TFNs – to reach across borders and provide financial and technical assistance to partners. MADRE works with women’s groups in Yemen, Nicaragua and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), among other countries. In the context of the pandemic, MADRE stressed the poor quality of Yemen’s health and water infrastructure due to the internationalised civil war; described its work supporting access to potable water stations; and demanded a ceasefire. In its work with Indigenous peoples in Nicaragua, MADRE provides supplies to midwives to promote maternal health care while also supporting local initiatives around seed preservation and organic agriculture. In the DRC it runs awareness campaigns focused on displaced persons and community violence-prevention and provides sanitation and medical supplies (MADRE, 2020). WEDO (2020) called for ‘migrant justice’ along with a ‘focus on the well-being, health, and safety of all people in an intersectional manner that protects sexual and reproductive health’ and is ‘based on democratic values that use cooperation and global justice to protect the planet’. WLP (2020) described its partners’ increased use of messaging apps and social media to disseminate information, ‘sensitizing journalists about the pandemic’s particular threats to women in the home and outside, raising funds for populations most at-risk, and even broadcasting messages by megaphone in communities where there is limited technology infrastructure and access to the web’. Examples followed of initiatives in Jordan, Indonesia, Lebanon, Brazil, Malaysia, Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria and Mozambique. The more recently formed Feminist Humanitarian Network ‘actively shifts power to women-led organisations working in humanitarian contexts in the Global South’ and thus ‘promotes a feminist humanitarian agenda’.16

CONCLUSIONS: TOWARDS FEMINIST GOVERNANCE A year after the establishment of UN Women, a coalition of women’s groups – WIDE, AWID, the Center for Women’s Global Leadership and the Feminist Alliance for International Action – distributed a joint statement asking that the agency ‘design its policy and program on women’s economic empowerment from an economic, cultural, and social rights framework’.17 WILPF issued ‘Towards a Feminist Security Council: A Guidance Note for Security Council Members’ with recommendations for more meaningful SCR 1325 outcomes (WILPF, 2018). By taking part in IGO meetings and preparing background papers, briefing papers and reports, TFNs help set agendas and increase expertise on issues. By lobbying delegates, they raise awareness and cultivate supporters.

282  Handbook of feminist governance At the same time, TFNs help strengthen the international women’s movement through mutual support and solidarity. Arguably more so than the first generation of international women’s groups, contemporary TFNs evince considerable narrative, institutional and mobilisational capacity. Across the globe, they have joined local women’s groups in the UN’s annual ‘16 Days against GBV’. Many participate in the meetings of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) or of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE).18 During the Arab Spring, TFNs extended solidarity to Arab women while also disseminating the concerns raised by Arab feminists about the place of women’s participation and rights in the new polities. They joined or supported coalitions to challenge the growth of right-wing populism across the globe. In May 2019, DAWN held a meeting in Addis Ababa on public–private partnerships and corporate accountability in African countries.19 In the US, Code Pink and WILPF-US joined with other US-based groups to underscore the lawlessness of the January 2020 US assassination of a prominent Iranian general and his Iraqi counterpart, and the late November Israeli assassination of a prominent Iranian nuclear scientist. Working with civil society and movement partners and with allies in IGOs, TFN activism spans local, national, regional and global terrains and addresses some of the most critical international issues. If the immediate goal is to set agenda for policy reform and shift it in a feminist direction, many of the TFNs discussed in this chapter ultimately seek wider systemic transformation. From the early 20th century to the present, TFNs have addressed militarism, war and violence against women; economic crisis; environmental degradation; and social injustices. They have drawn attention to the gendered nature of the institutions that generate such inequalities and crises, and they have sought partnerships and allies to diffuse and instil feminist governance principles of care, equality, cooperation and sustainability. They note that a post-pandemic future with policies for gender equality and environmental protection requires debt cancellation. Decades of feminist knowledge-building has enabled TFNs to show the links between the worldwide spread of Covid-19 and systemic inequalities and injustices. By connecting the pandemic to the neoliberal capitalist model and militarism, TFNs put the spotlight on the deficiencies of hegemonic states and institutions of global governance. The women within TFNs are keenly aware of the structural and institutional obstacles to societal and global transformation, and the depth and extent of the present century’s crises. Yet, as a MADRE statement noted, crisis also brings about possibilities for agency, especially through collective action. The goal of a peace- and care-based economy within and across borders may not be realised soon, but it will remain a key component of transnational feminist governance.

NOTES 1. The relationship of redistribution, recognition and representation (or ‘parity of participation’) to social movement activism and goals is adapted from Nancy Fraser, in Fraser and Honneth (2003). See also ‘Interview with Nancy Fraser: Justice as Redistribution, Recognition and Representation’, MRonline. https://​mronline​.org/​2009/​05/​16/​interview​-with​-nancy​-fraser​-justice​-as​-redistribution​ -recognition​-and​-representation/​. 2. See e.g. IMF (2015); World Bank (2012). 3. http://​www​.icw​-cif​.com/​01/​03​.php. 4. On the IAW and Middle Eastern women’s groups in the early 20th century, see Weber (2001). 5. Joan Ecklein, WILPF-Boston, personal communication, 19 August 2019.

Transnational feminism and global governance  283 6. DAWN: Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era; WIDE: Women in Development Europe; WEDO: Women’s Environment and Development Organization. There is some overlap between TFNs and what some call women’s international NGOs, or WINGOs (Paxton and Hughes, 2014), but a WINGO such as the International Federation of Business and Professional Women does not necessarily share the TFNs’ political and economic critiques. 7. ‘We want a world where inequality based on class, gender and race is absent from every country, and from the relationships among countries. … In such a world, women’s reproductive role will be redefined: … Childcare will be shared by men, women and society as a whole’ (Sen and Grown, 1987: 80). 8. https://​www​.unwomen​.org/​en/​news/​stories/​2020/​3/​press​-release​-ahead​-of​-international​-womens​ -day​-report​-warns​-that​-progress​-is​-lagging (accessed 8 April 2021). 9. https:// ​ w ww ​ . degrowth ​ . info/ ​ e n/ ​ f eminisms ​ - and ​ - degrowth​ - alliance​ - fada/​ c ollective​ - research​ -notebook/​(accessed 8 April 2021). 10. https://​ngocsw​.org/​ngo​-csw​-ny​-may​-2020​-monthly​-meeting/​ (accessed December 2020). 11. https://​ngocsw​.org/​ngocsw64/​ (accessed December 2020). 12. Feminist Foreign Policy Project: https://​www​.codepink​.org/​feminist​_response​_to​_covid​_19 (accessed 8 April 2021). 13. https://​www​.marshallplanformoms​.com/​ (accessed 9 April 2021). 14. https://​portside​.org/​2020​-05​-09/​statement​-feminist​-foreign​-policy​-confront​-coronavirus​-pandemic (accessed 9 April 2021). 15. https://​www​.afsc​.org/​newsroom/​civil​-society​-groups​-call​-biden​-to​-provide​-immediate​-sanctions​ -relief​-and​-legal​-reform (accessed 10 April 2021). 16. https://​www​.feminis​thumanitar​iannetwork​.org/​our​-vision​-and​-goal (accessed 9 April 2021). 17. https://​www​.escr​-net​.org/​docs/​i/​1509856 (accessed April 2021). 18. Personal observations. 19. https://​dawnnet​.org/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2019/​07/​DAWN​-PPPs​-Africa​-Workshop​-​.pdf (accessed 12 April 2021).

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Transnational feminism and global governance  285 WILPF (2020). ‘Feminist Consortium Releases Five Principles for a Meaningful Ceasefire’ (April). https://​www​.wilpf​.org/​feminist​-consortium​-releases​-five​-feminist​-principles​-for​-a​-meaningful​ -ceasefire/​. WLP (2020) ‘The Women’s Partnership Is Empowering Vulnerable Populations during the Corona Virus’. https://​learningpartnership​.org/​index​.php/​blog/​wlp​-partnership​-empowering​-vulnerable​ -populations​-during​-coronavirus​-crisis. World Bank (2012) World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development, Washington, DC: World Bank.

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

INTRODUCTION UN Women, or the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, was established by General Assembly resolution 64/289 in July 2010 to coordinate the work of the United Nations system in advancing gender equality, and to promote gender equality globally and within the UN system. The new agency was intended to bring institutional and system-wide coherence to the disparate and therefore relatively weak gender architecture, which had developed in the wake of the United Nations Decade for Women, under one umbrella and transform the normative achievements of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing 1995 into tangible results for gender equality (see Charlesworth and Chinkin, 2013). After a decade of working as the ‘global champion for gender equality’, has UN Women fulfilled the promise to focus UN activity on gender equality, and provide a stronger platform for normative development and advocacy? Does and can UN Women fulfil the promise of feminist global governance by operationalising feminist values and practices, while challenging patriarchal institutions, values and practices? Or does UN Women represent a bureaucratisation of feminism and the emptying of feminist values? In this chapter we analyse UN Women as an example of feminist governance, focusing 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, its engagement with feminist civil society actors, its success in monitoring gender equality data, policies and processes, and its ability to frame issues from a gender perspective. In doing so we frame the goals of feminist governance as a radical feminist agenda that challenges patriarchal power structures, focusing on gender equality, women’s rights, and women’s empowerment and agency. This radical agenda stands in contrast to liberal feminist agendas focused on gender parity and women’s participation in various domains of public life without recognition of women’s specific roles and needs. Differences between radical feminist governance and liberal feminist governance are further exemplified by goals to achieve change through meaningful participation and engagement, versus the limitation of organisational activity to bureaucratic exercises and technical measurements of gender equality. Secondly, differences can be found in a move beyond the definition of gender as women towards a recognition of the role of men in the first instance, and, more recently, towards a recognition of the non-binary nature of gender. The end-of-decade 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. The question of whether the radical ideals of feminism are hollowed out or whether UN institutions help advance feminist ideals continues to preoccupy commentators and practitioners alike. While its central location in the UN system provides it with an opportunity to 286

UN Women: a case of feminist global governance?  287 influence normative development and promote gender equality among UN agency leaders, and potentially member states, UN Women’s relative size and limited resources pose a challenge in shaping substantive change on the ground.

THE UN GENDER ARCHITECTURE 1945–2010 The conferences of the UN Decade for Women had seen the creation of a range of institutions and mechanisms to support the normative and operational development of gender equality. The Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), established in 1946 to promote women’s rights, set standards and monitor the status of women around the world, had functioned as the main institution of feminist governance. In its early work it focused on legal dimensions of women’s status, including women’s rights at work, nationality rights and marriage, and was supported by the Section on the Status of Women in the Human Rights Division of the Department for Economic and Social Affairs, renamed in 1988 as the Division for the Advancement of Women. These institutions remained the only agencies specifically concerned with gender issues until the passing of the Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women in 1967, which marked a starting point for broader engagement with gender equality at the United Nations. In the 1960s and 1970s, women’s movements, which had played an important role in shaping women’s role in international organisations, in international law and policy since the late nineteenth century, from the League of Nations to the UN (Garner, 2010; Stienstra, 1994), began to critique UN development policies. The changing understanding of women’s role in development led to increased calls for a recognition of gender equality in the UN system, both in programmatic areas as well as for UN staff. Following the World Conference on Women in Mexico City, the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and the Advancement of Women (OSAGI) was established in 1977, followed by the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW) in 1979. CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, was adopted in 1979, which heralded the beginning of close collaboration between women’s rights experts at the UN and women’s rights movements around the world (Zwingel, 2016). The Voluntary Fund for Women, established in 1976 to support the Decade for Women, became the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) in 1985. The 1985 Nairobi Women’s Conference also led to the introduction of gender mainstreaming as a system-wide strategy, including the establishment of gender units, focal points and gender networks. This was reinforced by the Fourth World Conference of Women in Beijing in 1995, which influenced the reconfiguration of the UN system’s gender architecture in the new millennium to address the limitations in the sprawling system of gender institutions and their relative lack of influence and authority. While individual organisations were not entirely unsuccessful in fulfilling parts of their mandate, feminists at UNIFEM specifically noted the limitations of its framework, leading Sandler and Rao (2012: 12) to conclude that UNIFEM was in a position of ‘structured inequality’ and subject to ‘systematic institutional sabotage’ throughout its lifetime. Located within the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), UNIFEM was unable to sign its own cheques or undertake its own recruitment, while the professional ranking of its staff was too low to have a seat at the table. This multi-institutional gender architecture was geographically spread, fragmented, lacking in authority, leadership

288  Handbook of feminist governance and voice, and indeed resources (Sandler and Rao, 2012), requiring institutional reform to strengthen the gender equality agenda.

A NEW FEMINIST GOVERNANCE FRAMEWORK? The new millennium, along with Millennium Development Goal 5 ‘gender equality’, marked the beginning of a move towards a new framework for feminist governance informed by the political goals of the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action and the organisational goals of a system-wide drive to achieve greater institutional coherence and efficiency. In 1997, the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) called for a gender mainstreaming accountability mechanism, which informed the decision of the Chief Executives Board in 2006 to institute a System-wide Policy on Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women and the System-wide Action Plan (UN-SWAP). These system-wide plans ensured that gender equality was at last institutionalised in all agencies of the UN system. Moreover, they also assigned clear responsibility for the implementation of gender equality to agency leaders and departmental decision-makers, who had previously obstructed gender mainstreaming (Daes, 1995). While the UN-SWAP created a clear institutional strategy to strengthen feminist governance internally (programmatic policy outcomes were excluded), the High-level Panel on System Wide Coherence in 2006, instituted by Secretary-General, did not feature gender. Gender equality was only included after successful lobbying from the Gender Equality Architecture Reform campaign, composed of over 300 civil society organisations (CSOs) led by the Women’s Environment & Development Organization. The panel recognised that the UN’s contribution to gender equality was ‘incoherent, under-resourced and fragmented’, and recommended that a new institution bring together existing agencies in order to focus, streamline and empower the UN’s work (Rao, 2006). Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Comprehensive Proposal for the Composite Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women1 and General Assembly resolution 64/289, 21 July 2010, established UN Women. The Beijing Platform for Action and the Sustainable Development Goals form the platform for the agency’s action. The institutional framework of UN Women is marked by complexity compared to other UN agencies. It is organised in a multi-tiered intergovernmental structure in which the General Assembly, ECOSOC and the Commission on the Status of Women provide the normative framework, and the General Assembly, ECOSOC and an Executive Board provide the operational framework. UN Women is tasked to work with each of these organisations to ensure coordinated action across the system, and to support normative and policy development. It is governed by a 41-member board based on a distribution of seats that is intended to strengthen the role of developing countries and recognise voluntary contributors (Rosche, 2011). In addition to the standard regional distribution (here: ten seats for Africa, ten Asia-Pacific, four Eastern Europe, six Latin American and the Caribbean, five Western Europe and Others), four seats are allocated to contributing countries and two seats to contributing countries that are not members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee. The institutional space occupied by UN Women within the UN system facilitates the mainstreaming and coordination of gender through the coordination and monitoring of

UN Women: a case of feminist global governance?  289 UN-SWAP, through institutional norm entrepreneurship (i.e. the ability of institutional actors to influence norms, ideas and agendas across the UN system) and through the creation and support of networks and institutions. For example, UN Women supports the drafting of the Secretary-General’s report on the Improvement of the Status of Women in the UN system, and serves as CSW’s Secretariat, supporting annual meetings and the coordination of final resolutions. The agency is led by an Executive Director at the level of Under-Secretary-General, who reports directly to the UN Secretary-General, advising on all issues of gender equality across the UN system. Located in New York, the Executive Director is well placed to influence other UN agencies as a member of the Senior Management Group, which brings together heads of various UN agencies and regional commissions, departmental heads and envoys, as well as members of the UN Sustainable Development Group (UNSDG) and the Chief Executive Board for Coordination (CEB), gaining a voice that predecessor institutions did not have. From an organisational perspective, this new institutional framework has remedied a number of the shortcomings of the former gender architecture, specifically the question of fragmentation, voice, access and, to some extent, resources, allowing for stronger leadership on gender equality (Bloch, 2019). However, the merging of different agendas and staff identities, as well as the emergence of new issues and roles, have created new conflicts, while the backlash against gender equality since the Fourth World Conference has affected the functioning of UN Women. This has left feminist commentators and practitioners to note the hollowing out of radical feminist content. With its move to New York City, UN Women has gained access to decision-making, yet this has resulted in an increased focus on normative development over effective field activity, which had been UNIFEM’s strength (Dersnah, 2016, 2019; Sandler and Rao, 2012). Yet, despite this apparent focus on normative development, Dersnah (2016) notes that the merging of organisations and staff, as well as the leadership of Michele Bachelet, led to a move away from human rights work as an expression of radical feminism towards development and technical-bureaucratic approaches, and thus more muted gender equality, or liberal feminist, work. Following Anderfuhren-Biget et al.’s (2013) finding that UN staff self-select based on cosmopolitan values and eagerness to create social change, Dersnah (2016) finds that the merging of staff from different organisations, as well as the influx of new staff, has led to internal conflicts. While UNIFEM staff were committed to radical feminist goals of gender equality and structural change, with a focus on serving the people, OSAGI staff (as well as new staff joining from UNDP) were focused on technical issues, the proper functioning of the bureaucracy and individual careers. According to Dersnah, this group sees itself in service to member states, rather than to people, thus reducing the radical feminist promise of gender equality to bureaucratic strategies and technical measurements. Second, the disproportionately large Executive Board, larger than the much bigger organisations of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and UNDP, has proven to be a hindrance in achieving goals of feminist governance. While it is well placed to support effective coordination of gender mainstreaming in development programming, given its presence in the joint meeting of the executive boards of UNICEF, UNDP, UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) and the World Food Programme (WFP), its membership includes member states not sympathetic to, or indeed actively working against, gender equality. Given the Board’s task to supervise UN Women’s activities, to monitor the performance of UN funds and programmes in their achievement of gender equality, to recommend new programme initiatives, and, importantly, to decide on administrative and financial plans and budgets, this has

290  Handbook of feminist governance led to micro-management by the Board (Dersnah, 2016), and created opportunities for Board members to frustrate feminist policymaking and institution-building. Indeed, the concerted efforts of the Holy See, together with conservative and religious member states and other organisations, have frustrated the development of gender equality by reframing resolutions towards traditional frames of mothers and the family, while also ensuring the defunding of activities in the area such as reproductive health and family planning. The content and language – particularly the use of women rather than gender – found in UN Women’s strategy and other core documents are evidence of the watering down of feminist content that occurs as texts are rewritten to reach consensus among member states. Feminists have thus sought alternative spaces to advocate and build coalitions, accessing new spaces to advance gender equality (Goetz, 2020), while relying (again) on alliances between feminist UN insiders and outsiders (Çağlar et al., 2013; Jauk, 2014; Stienstra, 1994). Although UN Women’s work on gender equality focuses solely on women, it champions the rights of the LBGTI community through its Executive Director blogs, country events and campaigns, and by hosting the UN’s first high-level event on ‘gender diversity and non-binary identities’ in 2019. The institutional space occupied by UN Women in the global architecture of feminist governance is also characterised by its unique relationship with civil society. Feminist civil society organisations were instrumental in the creation of UN Women and have played a significant role as advisors (particularly in the newly established Civil Society Advisory Group), co-producers of knowledge, co-partners and coordinators for UN country projects, and supporters of UN strategies. Civil society organisations had high expectations for the role they could play in the newly established UN Women – in 2010, the Gender and Development Network called on UN Women to push from the outset for mandated, formalised and truly-participatory structures for civil society organisations – from the local and country levels, right up to full participation in the Executive Board. It is vital that UN Women is accountable, accessible and responsive to the needs, not just of the governments of the world, but of the women and girls of the world and the organisations that represent them. (Quoted in Chong, 2011: 559–60)

However, despite the promise of an institutionalised relationship that would give civil society a voice, Sandler and Goetz (2020) note that civil society actors have been denied formal representation in the decision-making bodies of feminist governance, such as on UN Women’s Executive Board and the Bureau for the CSW. Since 2012, UN Women has regularly engaged with civil society actors through its global, regional and country-based Civil Society Advisory Groups, comprised of members drawn from women’s movements and organisations, think tanks and other researchers. UN Women’s dialogues with civil society create opportunities for UN Women to pursue feminist governance goals of adopting intersectional approaches to policymaking to incorporate age, race, religion, nationality and sexual orientation, among other characteristics. For example, in 2018 UN Women met with civil society activists from rural areas, including Indigenous women, women with disabilities, refugees, migrants, youth and members of the LGBTI community, to discuss strategies for empowering all women (UN Women, 2018b). In addition to the advisory groups, UN Women holds Expert Group Meetings, which provide an opportunity for UN Women to discuss priority themes with academics, practitioners and other external experts to identify good practices and inform UN approaches and

UN Women: a case of feminist global governance?  291 policies. Recent meetings have addressed issues such as violence against women in politics, women’s participation in peace negotiations and peace agreements, Beijing +25, and women’s participation and decision-making in public life. Working with civil society and women’s movements and organisations, as well as with feminist experts and researchers, demonstrates UN Women’s commitment to key principles of feminist governance, but there is room for improvement – a recent external assessment of UN Women’s work stated that while UN Women is open to engagement with civil society organisations at the global, regional and country level, the entity lacks resources to focus on civil society work and ‘does not have a clear organisational approach to civil society strengthening’ (MOPAN, 2019: 25). UN Women’s achievements in mainstreaming gender throughout the UN, norm setting and policymaking are also the result of the powerful women who have acted as UN Women’s Director, first Michelle Bachelet and currently Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. Under-Secretary-General Mlambo-Ngcuka has pursued a radical approach to gender equality, seeking to dismantle patriarchy and promoting interventions at all stages of the lives of girls and women to bring about women’s empowerment and gender equality. Under her leadership, UN Women appointed its first LGBTIQ+ Policy Specialist (Sophie Browne) to bring a multi-gendered lens to UN Women’s work and assist the entity in addressing all forms of gender inequalities (UN Women, 2020e).

UN WOMEN’S EFFORTS TO PROMOTE GENDER EQUALITY Given the challenges that UN Women faces promoting gender equality within the UN bureaucracy, to what extent is the entity able to embody feminist principles in its work in terms of influencing state political and social practices to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment? At its creation in 2010, UN Women established four priority areas around which its activities are organised: women’s role in governance (including leadership, participation and gender-responsive budgets), women’s economic empowerment, violence against women, and Women, Peace and Security (including women’s role in preventing natural disasters and humanitarian action) (UN Women, 2011).2 In this part of the chapter, we take a closer look at UN Women’s work pertaining to women’s economic empowerment (WEE) to showcase some of its successes and challenges in promoting feminist principles through its work with CSOs as well as state and international institutions. At the global level, UN Women has contributed to the establishment of norms and policies in the area of WEE through UN General Assembly resolutions (pertaining to, for example, women migrant workers, rural women, women in development and unpaid care work), ECOSOC resolutions (through integrating a gender perspective in the work of the Council), as well as other intergovernmental bodies (such as Financing for Development), in addition to its numerous discussion papers, position papers and policy briefs which promote and synthesise UN Women’s normative work. UN discussion papers, such as ‘Macroeconomic Policy and Women’s Economic Empowerment’ (2017a) which was co-authored with numerous civil society actors, demonstrate one of UN Women’s successes in collaborating with feminist CSOs to generate knowledge and understanding around gendered processes pertaining to women’s economic empowerment. In the Rio +20 process, UN Women ensured that gender equality was recognised as central to sustainable development (UN Women, 2015: 67). In cooperation with numerous other feminist activists and CSOs, UN Women played a significant role in

292  Handbook of feminist governance ensuring that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) incorporated a gender perspective (Taylor, 2020), resulting in a gender-focus for 11 of the 17 goals (including a stand-alone goal on gender equality goal in SDG 5), for a total of 54 (out of 232) gender-specific indicators. To assist in the collection of gender disaggregated country-level data to monitor progress on the SDGs, UN Women launched the Women Count programme and data hub.3 Women Count funds research and training to improve data collection and serves as a repository for gender data to aid country-level monitoring and policy formation that go beyond the SDG indicators (including Covid-19 related data for gender-responsive planning).4 While UN Women is the only UN entity whose sole focus is gender equality, it shares the work of women’s economic empowerment – particularly in terms of achieving the SDGs – with other UN actors, including the World Bank, the UNDP and the International Labour Organization (ILO). UN Women has had difficulties establishing itself as a global leader in an area that has been dominated by others, but with fewer resources: UNDP’s budget for 2018 ($5.1 billion), for example, was 13.4 times that of UN Women’s ($380 million) (UNSCEBC, 2018). UN Women’s 2015 evaluation of its economic empowerment efforts revealed that while the UNFPA, UNDP and UNICEF ‘have made space for UN Women to establish its presence’, the report noted that ‘donors are impatiently seeking strong technical and strategic leadership on WEE’ (UN Women, 2015: 54). UN Women’s lack of resources and weak country presence (UN Women has 55 country offices and six regional offices compared to UNDP’s 170 country offices) has affected its abilities to engage with state institutions and CSOs to exercise leadership and effect structural change. Although having overlap across issues can help to ensure that strategic goals are met, reports suggest that UN Women has been frequently side-lined by UNDP due to their larger budget and lead role on projects, or by CSOs who might view UNDP as a more powerful partner for influencing governments (UN Women, 2018a). Other problems arise concerning ‘duplication and even competition for funding with other UN partners’ (MOPAN, 2019: 50). Recognising these problems of duplication, competition and uneven power relationships across agencies, UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF and UN Women (2020) have agreed to collaborate on achieving some of the SDGs, which in fact helps UN Women to fulfil its mission of mainstreaming gender throughout the UN. Within this overall collaboration, UNDP and UN Women have signed a partnership to work towards common goals for women’s economic empowerment, among other priority areas, which in 2019 included an agreement to collaborate in 102 country offices (UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF and UN Women, 2020). Whether this collaboration enhances or further dwarfs UN Women’s influence remains to be seen. UN Women’s feminist aims to empower women are further hampered by an organisational focus on targets and indicators. UN Women’s Strategic Plan for 2018–21 outlines five priority outcomes, each of which has a corresponding set of measurable outputs (UN Women, 2017c). The five outcomes include strengthening and implementing gender norms and policies; ensuring that women benefit equally with men from governance; supporting policies and creating conditions for women’s income security, decent work and economic autonomy; preventing violence against women; and creating sustainable peace and security, including better response and prevention concerning conflicts and disasters. In the area of women’s empowerment, the strategy has three areas of focus: decent work and social protection (which overlaps with SDG 5.4.1 on the time spent on unpaid domestic and care work and SDG 1.3.1 regarding social protection systems); women’s ownership and management of businesses; and rural women’s land rights (which overlaps with SDG 5.a.1). UN

UN Women: a case of feminist global governance?  293 Women’s specific plans to achieve these outputs are outlined in a ‘Theories of Change’ document (UN Women, 2017b); rural women’s land rights and access to resources, for example, includes actions such as ‘engendering climate-smart agricultural policies and increasing women’s land tenure security and access to productive resources’ and ‘climate-smart information’, in addition to further actions around ‘women’s capacity to invest in climate-smart and time- and labour-saving technologies and tools’ and increased access to markets (UN Women, 2017b: 18). The ‘Theories of Change’ background paper acknowledges that in addition to legal barriers to women’s land ownership, social and cultural norms also lead to discrimination against women in practice (UN Women, 2017b: 18), yet the actions proposed in this thematic priority do not address the need to first ensure that women have legal entitlement to own and inherit land and other resources. Instead, sustainability and climate-smart practices appear to be prioritised over resource ownership. This is surprising given that land rights are a particular interest of UN Women; in 2013, UN Women published a paper titled ‘Realizing Women’s Rights to Land and Other Productive Resources’, which was further updated in 2020 (UN Women, 2020c). The document is comprehensive and offers examples of the multiple ways in which women can be discriminated against in the area of access to, and control over, land and other resources, recognising the problems of religious and customary practices and laws that prevent women – whether single, married, widowed or in polygynous unions – from exercising full land rights. UN Women’s research demonstrates their awareness of the complexities surrounding women’s land rights and the need to tackle both laws and social norms and practices around land ownership and inheritance, yet this is not reflected in the simple targets found in UN Women’s Strategy, and which are echoed in the SDGs. UN Women’s 2020 report on progress in achieving these outcome targets states that UN Women has exceeded their targets regarding women’s access to resources – since 2018, the entity has ‘supported the development, reform and/or implementation of 59 policies on women’s land rights and tenure security’ and further ‘assisted 167,269 rural women’ to access land or other resources (UN Women, 2020d). The report does not explain whether the 59 policies pertain to 59 states or a smaller subset of states with multiple policies, nor is it clear where the 167,269 women are located and whether they represent particular ethnic, religious or other groups of women likely to have been ‘left behind’ without UN intervention. UN Women has been criticised for concentrating too heavily on micro-level projects, with 70 per cent of country offices indicating that their work was focused on interventions for individual women and was not addressing structural changes necessary to impact on women in society as a whole, suggesting a gap between UN Women’s knowledge and implementation (UN Women, 2015: 45). UN Women’s 2015 evaluation reported that country offices claimed they could not ‘abandon micro-level interventions because their key government counterparts (as well as donors and CSOs) demand to see “practical action” as a prequalification for having credibility at the policy table’ (UN Women, 2015: 46). UN Women thus has difficulties establishing itself as a credible global leader in the area of women’s economic empowerment due to its weaker country presence, which arises from its newness as an entity, underfunding, as well as legacy issues: its predecessor in this area – UNIFEM – while seen as an entity with strong feminist values, was perceived by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) in 2013 as ‘poor value for money’ due to problems with impact, performance and weak transparency and accountability (DFID, 2013). DFID adjusted its review slightly in 2016, deeming UN Women to be a good match with UK

294  Handbook of feminist governance development objectives, but rated their organisational strength as ‘adequate’, explaining that the entity had not yet demonstrated leadership or shown how it could add value to the work already being done by other development agencies (DFID, 2016). If UN Women seeks to establish itself as an entity relevant for all women, then it may need to reduce its heavy focus on development and rural women, but at the moment its budget does not permit a widening of its priorities. The exclusive focus on achieving land rights for rural women, for example, is driven by the sustainable development agenda, but means that UN Women’s work may not focus on the structural and social changes necessary to ensure that all women have access to, and control over, resources, including land and other assets. UN Women’s work to promote women’s economic empowerment needs to do more to shift social and political attitudes regarding women’s employment, unpaid care work, land rights and other issues affecting women’s empowerment. One evaluation suggested that the HeForShe campaign,5 which has raised UN Women’s profile, could be used more specifically to support women’s economic empowerment (UN Women, 2015). UN Women in fact launched a #HeForSheAtHome campaign in April 2020 to ‘highlight this unfair burden on women and encourage men to do their equal share’ (UN Women, 2020a), but the campaign has attracted little interest to date. Not all feminists believe that the HeForShe campaign, or similar efforts to work with men and boys on gender equality, alters power relationships between men and women; rather, they argue that the campaign gives more space to men and draws much needed funding and attention away from women and girls (Leek, 2019). The lack of interest may also be explained by the timing of the campaign and the global focus on the Covid-19 pandemic. UN Women was quick to respond – on 19 March 2020, just one week after the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 to be a pandemic, UN Women published an article outlining the gendered implications of the virus and state responses to the virus, including the increased risks to women’s health in health care jobs, the loss of jobs for women in the informal economy, the impact of home working on women’s share of unpaid care work, as well as the potential for increased violence against women (UN Women, 2020b). UN Women has continued to work closely with states to monitor and record sex-disaggregated data concerning the economic impact, rates of infection, the unequal care burden and domestic violence, as well as to encourage states to involve women in decision-making concerning Covid-19 interventions and recovery planning. In addition to advising states on their responses to the pandemic, UN Women has assisted with and carried out rapid assessments of the violence against women in states, launched the Shadow Pandemic public awareness campaign to educate the wider public of the increase in domestic violence, offered virtual courses to assist women in businesses and offered social protection to mitigate the effects of unpaid care (UN Women, n.d.). In this way, UN Women demonstrates its relevance as a feminist global governance actor by assisting states with collecting sex-disaggregated data to achieve greater gender equality in economic planning and policies, and promote women’s decision-making and leadership in these processes while also supporting women’s civil society groups and women-owned enterprises.

UN Women: a case of feminist global governance?  295  

CONCLUSION UN Women has consolidated the previously fragmented gender architecture and has gained a prominent seat at the table of system-wide decision-making. Its normative work has been visible globally through a variety of campaigns, yet its fieldwork appears dwarfed by the larger UN agencies it collaborates with. Is UN Women an example of feminist governance? UN Women contributes to feminist institution-building through its role in coordinating UN-SWAP, its programmatic activity and norm entrepreneurship, yet these institutions largely reflect more liberal feminist values. In other words, UN Women enables the creation of spaces for women and institutions to ensure that gender equality is pursued, yet this takes place within existing hierarchical, non-feminist institutions. Feminists have criticised the dilution of feminist values through its limited interpretation of gender; the translation of gender equality and women’s empowerment into tick-box exercises; and its need to adapt to wider institutional demands (Charlesworth and Chinkin, 2013; Dersnah, 2016). However, its impact – or leadership – can be found in the processes of policymaking6 and the continuation of efforts to move the UN system, its programmatic and institutional domains, towards greater parity and gender equality. UN Women marks a feminist intervention in a patriarchal organisational system, yet it works within rather than against this system.

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4.

A/64/588, 6 January 2010. UN Women, ‘About UN Women’, https://​www​.unwomen​.org/​en/​about​-us/​about​-un​-women. UN Women Count, https://​data​.unwomen​.org/​women​-count. UN Women, ‘COVID-19 and Gender Monitor’, Women Count, at https://​ data​ .unwomen​ .org/​ resources/​covid​-19​-and​-gender​-monitor. 5. The UN Women initiative of the HeForShe campaign commenced in September 2014 with an inaugural address by UN Women Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson. The campaign has become a global movement in support of gender equality that has attracted significant social media attention, particularly from celebrities, as well as male leaders from around the world. 6. We thank Khushi Singh Rathore for this observation.

REFERENCES Anderfuhren-Biget, Simon, Ursula Häfliger and Simon Hug (2013) ‘The Values of Staff in International Organizations’. In Bob Reinalda (ed.), Handbook of International Organization, London: Routledge, 270–83. Bloch, Yanina (2019) UN-Women: Ein Neues Kapitel für Frauen in den Vereinten Nationen, Baden-Baden: Nomos. Çağlar, Gülay, Elisabeth Prügl and Susanne Zwingel (eds) (2013) Feminist Strategies in International Governance, London: Routledge. Charlesworth, Hilary and Christine Chinkin (2013) ‘The New United Nations “Gender Architecture”: A Room with a View?’ Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law 17: 1–60. Chong, Jinn Winn (2011) ‘The Politics of the Empowerment of Women: Mapping Enabling Environments Within Narratives of Femininity and Power’, William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law 18(3): 523–64.

296  Handbook of feminist governance Daes, Erica-Irene (1995) ‘The Advancement of Women Through and in the Programmes of the United Nations System: What Happens After the Fourth World Conference of Women?’ JIU/REP/95/5, Geneva: United Nations Joint Inspection Unit. Dersnah, Megan Alexandra (2016) ‘Feminist Practice in an International Bureaucracy: Contestation Over the Field of Peace and Security at the United Nations’, PhD thesis, University of Toronto. Dersnah, Megan (2019) ‘WPS inside the United Nations’. In Sara E. Davies and Jacqui True (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Women, Peace, and Security, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 293–301. DFID [Department for International Development] (2013) ‘UN Women: Multilateral Aid Review Update (MAR) 2013 Progress Rating’. https://​assets​.publishing​.service​.gov​.uk/​government/​uploads/​ system/​uploads/​attachment​_data/​file/​264696/​UN​-Women​-2013​-summary​-assessment​.pdf. DFID [Department for International Development] (2016) Raising the Standard: The Multilateral Development Review 2016. https://​assets​.publishing​.service​.gov​.uk/​government/​uploads/​system/​ uploads/​attachment​_data/​file/​573884/​Multilateral​-Development​-Review​-Dec2016​.pdf. Garner, Karen (2010) Shaping a Global Women’s Agenda: Women’s NGOs and Global Governance, 1925–85, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Goetz, Anne Marie (2020) ‘The New Competition in Multilateral Norm-Setting: Transnational Feminists & the Illiberal Backlash’, Daedalus 149(1): 161–79. Jauk, Daniela (2014) ‘Insiderness, Outsiderness, and Situated Accessibility: How Women Activists Navigate the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women’, Societies Without Borders, 9(1): 69–95. Leek, Cliff (2019) ‘Understanding Feminist Resistance to “Men-Streaming”’, Global Social Welfare 6(4): 219–29. MOPAN [Multilateral Organisation Performance Assessment Network] (2019) ‘MOPAN 2017–18 Assessments: UN Women’. http://​www​.mopanonline​.org/​assessments/​unwomen2017​-18/​Final​ _assessment​_UN​_Women​_2019​_02​_14​.pdf. Rao, Aruna (2006) ‘Gender Equality and Architecture and UN Reforms’, Women’s Environment & Development Organization (WEDO). https://​wedo​.org/​gender​-equality​-architecture​-and​-un​-reforms/​. Rosche, Daniela (2011) ‘A New UN Agency for Women: Time for Impact’, Gender & Development 19(1): 144–6. Sandler, Joanne and Anne Marie Goetz (2020) ‘Can the United Nations Deliver a Feminist Future?’ Gender & Development 28(2): 239–63. Sandler, Joanne and Aruna Rao (2012) ‘Strategies of Feminist Bureaucrats: United Nations Experiences’, IDS Working Paper No. 397: Institute of Development Studies. Stienstra, Deborah (1994) Women’s Movements and International Organizations, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Taylor, Sara Rose (2020) ‘UN Women’s Feminist Engagement with Governance by Indicators in the Millennium and Sustainable Development Goals’, Global Social Policy 20(3): 352–66. UN Women (n.d.) ‘In Focus: Gender Equality Matters in COVID-19 Response’. https://​ www​ .unwomen​.org/​en/​news/​in​-focus/​in​-focus​-gender​-equality​-in​-covid​-19​-response​?gclid​=​Cj0KCQ​ jwsqmEBhDi​ARIsANV8H3​ZLYYBEMrV5​_V​22ULUNupup​ZL9LFsLvZJ​L9vLxWrlWG​ NarKLIFT81gaAid5EALw​_wcB. UN Women (2011) Annual Report 2010–2011, New York: UN Women. UN Women (2015) ‘An Empowered Future: Corporate Evaluation of UN Women’s Contribution to Women’s Economic Empowerment’, New York: UN Women Independent Evaluation Office. UN Women (2017a) ‘Discussion Paper: Macroeconomic Policy and Women’s Economic Empowerment’, New York: UN Women. UN Women (2017b) ‘Theories of Change for UN Women’s Thematic Priorities: Achieving Transformative Results for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment’, New York: UN Women. UN Women (2017c) ‘United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN-Women) Strategic Plan 2018–2021’, 20 August, UNW/2017/6/Rev.1. UN Women (2018a) ‘Corporate Evaluation of UN Women’s Contribution to Women’s Political Participation and Leadership: Synthesis Report’, New York: UN Women. UN Women (2018b) ‘UN Women Engages Civil Society Organizations on the Road Ahead’, 20 October. https://​www​.unwomen​.org/​en/​news/​stories/​2020/​10/​news​-un​-women​-hosts​-civil​-society​-town​-hall. UN Women (2020a) ‘HeForShe launches #HeForSheAtHome campaign’, UN Women, 15 April. https://​ www​.unwomen​.org/​en/​news/​stories/​2020/​4/​news​-heforshe​-launches​-heforsheathome​-campaign.

UN Women: a case of feminist global governance?  297 UN Women (2020b) ‘Paying Attention to Women’s Needs and Leadership Will Strengthen COVID-19 Response’, 19 March. https://​www​.unwomen​.org/​en/​news/​stories/​2020/​3/​news​-womens​-needs​-and​ -leadership​-in​-covid​-19​-response. UN Women (2020c) ‘Realizing Women’s Rights to Land and Other Productive Resources’, in conjunction with the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, New York and Geneva. UN Women (2020d) ‘Report of the Under-Secretary-General/Executive Director of the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women on Progress Made on the Strategic Plan 2018–2021, Including the Midterm Review of the Strategic Plan’, UNW/2020/2, 20 April. UN Women (2020e) ‘Take Five: “This Year’s Pride Is Marked by a Critical Need to not Just Stand but Act in Solidarity in Seeking Racial Justice and Equality”’, 23 June. https://​www​.unwomen​.org/​en/​ news/​stories/​2020/​6/​take​-five​-sophie​-browne​-pride​-2020). UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF and UN Women (2020) ‘Working Together to Support Implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: Joint Annex on the Common Chapter of the Strategic Plan 2018–2021 of UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF and UN-Women’, New York: UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF and UN Women. UNSCEBC [United Nations System Chief Executives Board for Coordination] (2018) ‘Expenditure by Agency’. https://​www​.unsystem​.org/​content/​FS​-F00​-03. Zwingel, Susanne (2016) Translating International Women’s Rights: The CEDAW Convention in Context, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

PART IV THE EUROPEAN UNION AND FEMINIST GOVERNANCE

24. The European Parliament as a gender equality actor: a contradictory forerunner Johanna Kantola and Emanuela Lombardo

INTRODUCTION The European Parliament is considered to be the European Union (EU) institution that is most democratic and most supportive of gender equality of the EU institutions. In terms of democracy, it is the only directly elected decision-making body of the EU and it is an arena of deliberation and contestation. In terms of gender equality, women’s representation has steadily increased (15 per cent in 1979, 20 per cent in 1989, 27.5 per cent in 1999, 35.5 in 2009 and 40 per cent in 2019) and the Gender Equality and Women’s Rights Committee (FEMM Committee) has been an active supporter of gender equality policy initiatives within the European Parliament. This chapter addresses the question: to what extent are the European Parliament’s political practices supportive of gender equality and feminist governance? The chapter maps the formal institutional arrangements, which support gender equality within the institution and constitute important facets of feminist governance. This includes not just the FEMM Committee but also different gender mainstreaming initiatives in all parliamentary committees as well as gender action plans and sexual harassment policies for parliamentary staff. The chapter briefly looks at some key measures at the level of political groups too, including gender equality provisions for gender-balanced representation in political group statutes as well as key gender equality networks addressing the extent to which the European Parliament has been an arena for feminist agency and feminist alliances. The wide array of formal institutional arrangements for the advancement of gender equality provides a positive picture of the European Parliament as a gender equality actor and a success story for feminist governance. The parliament has also had some successes in inserting a gender perspective into EU policy. At the same time, there are a number of informal practices in the parliament that have the potential to undermine the good formal practices and institutions for feminist governance. The chapter draws on research findings on opposition to gender equality in the European Parliament which slows down the good feminist governance practices and gender equality policies. These include, for example, opposition to sexual harassment policies (Berthet and Kantola, 2020); radical right populist groups and MEPs that directly and indirectly oppose gender equality and related policies in the plenary debates (Kantola and Lombardo, 2021a); and institutional resistance to gender equality among the parliament as a whole and among established mainstream political groups. Exploring both formal and informal institutions for gender equality within the parliament reveals the multiple struggles for feminist governance in the European Parliament and how making progress requires feminist actors to have the capacity to advance gender equality at the formal level as well as to develop informal strategies and broader alliances. 299

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FORMAL INSTITUTIONS FOR FEMINIST GOVERNANCE IN THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT The formal institutional arrangements, which support gender equality within the European Parliament and advance gender equality policies, include the FEMM Committee and different gender-mainstreaming initiatives in all committees. Feminist governance practices extend to parliamentary staff in the form of sexual harassment policies and to the political groups of the parliament. Committee for Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) The FEMM Committee is the focal point of the European Parliament’s feminist governance in line with extant literature which suggests that gender-focused parliamentary bodies are important in ensuring that gender equality is included in parliaments’ work (Grace and Sawer, 2016; see also Sawer, Chapter 12 in this Handbook). The committee was fully established in 1984, building on earlier ad hoc committees initiated as early as 1979. FEMM has had a rocky history, which includes successes in strengthening the position of gender equality in the European Parliament’s work. It has also faced threats to its existence and funding. It has been chaired by a conservative and anti-feminist MEP and has attracted the interest of radical right populist MEPs opposed to gender equality in the 2010s and 2020s (see Ahrens and Rolandsen Agustín, 2021). FEMM is in charge of gender equality issues and functions as a supervisory body for gender mainstreaming in the parliament (Ahrens, 2016, 2019). It has 35 members from all of the parliament’s political groups – including the radical right populist groups European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR) and Identity and Democracy Group (ID) – and each of the political groups has a FEMM coordinator who acts as a focal point between the political group and the committee. Unlike other committees, FEMM has a status as a ‘neutralised committee’, which means that being a member of FEMM is voluntary and it is taken by the MEPs on top of other responsibilities (Ahrens, 2016; Nugent, 2019). FEMM issues opinions and statements on legislative proposals and puts forward own-initiative reports. Its impact is increased by the ways in which its members have been able to network across committees and pressure other committees to integrate gender perspectives in their work (Ahrens, 2016: 786–90). Unlike in the plenary debates and votes, in the FEMM committee, it is the gender progressive groups Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance (Greens/EFA) and the Left Group in the European Parliament (GUE/NGL) that are able to punch above their political weight and ally with the Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament (S&D) and liberals Renew Europe Group (ALDE/Renew), whilst the biggest group in the parliament, the conservative Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) (EPP), is more divided (Warasin et al., 2019: 150). This results in progressive reports, which, on the downside, are not always adopted in the plenary as a majority in the FEMM committee does not necessarily reflect a majority in the plenary (Warasin et al., 2019: 153). Despite its formal position, FEMM has fewer powers and less prestige than other committees and its work is hampered in many ways. It is rarely allocated legislative proposals to work on and hence mainly issues less significant own-initiative reports. In policy terms, too, the work that FEMM does is often bypassed by other committees. A recent example is

The European Parliament as a gender equality actor  301 the economic crisis of 2008, where FEMM committee proposals on the gendered impacts of the economic crisis were largely ignored and failed to gender mainstream the EU crisis response (Kantola and Lombardo, 2017b). The FEMM Committee is also disregarded in the parliament’s organisation, for instance in the planning of the parliamentary calendar where the lead committee’s meetings often conflict with FEMM meetings, hindering participation of FEMM members (Ahrens, 2016: 784–5). This can explain the low mean attendance of MEPs in committee meetings (see Nugent, 2019: 125). The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed some of these vulnerabilities and provided an important test case for feminist governance in the European Parliament. FEMM was one of the seven committees whose work was completely suspended initially and then the committee met less frequently than most other committees (Elomäki and Kantola, 2021). The result was that during the critical time, when the gendered impacts of the Covid-19 crisis became evident and the European Parliament began to formulate its stance on the EU’s recovery measures, the FEMM committee hardly met (Elomäki and Kantola, 2021). The suspension measures thereby silenced a strong voice for women’s rights and gender equality and the parliament’s main site of gender expertise at a very moment of a crisis, with immense implications for gender equality in Europe. The economic crisis of 2008 and the failure of the gender response to it in the EU (Kantola and Lombardo, 2017b) provides important background to the current crisis. The FEMM committee was determined to avoid some of the pitfalls and early on started to work on an own-initiative report on the effects of the Covid-19 crisis (Elomäki and Kantola, 2021). The report had strong sections on measures to combat the gendered impact of the crisis in health, gender-based violence, sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), economic response, and recovery. It put forward an intersectional approach focusing on the impact of the crisis on LGBTQI+ rights, homeless women, migrants, disabled and other vulnerable groups (FEMM, 2020). Most significantly, the committee members – in a coordinated effort – were able to insert the gender-mainstreaming provisions in the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) and Committee on Budgets (BUDG) proposals on the EU’s Recovery Fund (Elomäki and Kantola, 2021).

GENDER MAINSTREAMING Gender mainstreaming became an important feminist governance tool in EU policymaking towards the end of the 1990s and in the 2000s, travelling from one policy field to another and eventually becoming enshrined in EU treaties (Kantola, 2010; see also Guido et al., Chapter 3 in this Handbook). Its promise was to break deeply entrenched gendered structures by requiring all policies to be assessed from the perspective of their impacts on women and men. Since then, it has been critiqued in the EU context for the fact that it was adopted in a soft form, not implemented properly and not reaching beyond a technical exercise, hence not resulting in any meaningful change (Hafner-Burton and Pollack, 2009). In this context, it becomes significant that the European Parliament has remained a strong supporter of gender mainstreaming and has institutionalised gender mainstreaming in its structures. As Petra Ahrens notes: the European Parliament ‘is one of the few parliaments worldwide that committed to implementing gender mainstreaming and can therefore be characterised as a vanguard’ (2019: 85). Between 2003 and 2019, the parliament adopted no

302  Handbook of feminist governance less than six resolutions and several reports on gender mainstreaming, representing significant efforts by the FEMM committee to institutionalise gender mainstreaming in parliamentary procedures (Ahrens, 2019: 85, 88). Ahrens shows how different framings of gender mainstreaming are put forward in the debates on the reports, and gender mainstreaming is argued to solve issues ranging from the parliament’s internal organisation (committees, delegations, human-resources, administration) to various policy fields (Ahrens, 2019: 95). Important measures to achieve these goals include establishment of the gender-mainstreaming network across the parliamentary committees to ensure coordination of gender equality issues. A Standing Rapporteur on Gender Mainstreaming was nominated in 2016 and a second gender-mainstreaming network of administrators for each committee was set up. Nineteen of the 23 committees prepared a gender action plan following the 2019 resolution (Ahrens, 2019: 99). In addition to gender mainstreaming, the FEMM committee and other gender equality advocates within the parliament have started to argue for gender budgeting, namely the need to take gender equality into account in the EU budgetary process (Cengiz, 2019; see also Costa and Sharp, Chapter 11 in this Handbook). Gender budgeting can be an important tool for feminist governance. In the European Parliament, however, its implementation suffers from the parliament’s lack of powers in relation to the EU budgetary process (Cengiz, 2019). Other Formal Institutional Structures The European Parliament has developed a network of other actors in addition to the FEMM committee and the gender-mainstreaming network across committees. These include the High Level Group on Gender Equality and Diversity, the Group of Equality and Diversity Coordinators, and the Equality and Diversity Unit in the European Parliament administration. The precise impact and role of these is yet to be explored in feminist scholarship. The MEPs can also organise themselves in so-called intergroups according to the European Parliament’s Rules of Procedure (Rule 35), which state that these may be formed for the purpose of holding informal exchanges of views on specific issues across different political groups, drawing on members of different parliamentary committees, and of promoting contact between members and civil society. The intergroups can be important as they focus on specific political topics not directly covered by committees (Landorff, 2019). One of the longest-standing informal groups is the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Rights – LGBT Intergroup, established in 1997, which has an important role in mobilising support for LGBTQI+ rights (Ahrens and Rolandsen Agustín, 2021). Other intergroups, such as those on ‘Anti-Racism & Diversity’ (ARDI), ‘Disability’, and ‘Ageing and Intergenerational Solidarity’, also draw attention to intersectional equality (Ahrens and Rolandsen Agustín, 2021). Whilst dependent on the commitment of individual members, they can push equality issues on to the political agenda through organising events, gathering and disseminating information and data, and providing an access point for civil society organisations. Parliament as a Workplace: Gender Equality for Staff Like all parliaments, the European Parliament employs a wide range of staff for its administration, maintenance and catering. Structures, actors and actions for feminist governance in parliaments can also be established and studied at the level of parliaments as workplace. On

The European Parliament as a gender equality actor  303 the one hand, parliamentary staff can advance gender equality. For instance, the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) publishes fact sheets and reports on gender equality, often commissioned by the FEMM committee (Ahrens and Rolandsen Agustín, 2021). On the other hand, gender equality action plans for staff can help to pinpoint lack of gender equality and gendered power structures, and actions to overcome them. In the parliament, an important action on gender equality in relation to parliamentary staff was the adoption of the report ‘Gender Equality in the European Parliament Secretariat – state of play and the way forward 2017–2019’ in 2017 (Ahrens, 2019: 99). Institutional practices for tackling sexual harassment within parliaments are a crucial test for feminist governance. In the European Parliament, as in most parliaments, sexual harassment is prevalent and attempts to tackle it predate the international #MeToo campaigns which made sexual harassment a massive topic. Yet, there too, the #MeToo movement – translated into the #MeTooEP campaign – exposed both the problem itself and the weakness of existing institutional responses (Berthet and Kantola, 2021). The European Parliament had had an Anti-Harassment Committee since 2014 which had jurisdiction over both ‘psychological’ and sexual harassment and was responsible for complaints against MEPs. It had not investigated a single case of sexual harassment prior to 2019 when #MeTooEP was at a peak (Berthet and Kantola, 2021). Both MEPs and staff were represented on the committee and a gender balance was respected; there was, however, no indication that members were trained to review sensitive cases. The Committee reported to the parliament’s president, who made the final decision (Bureau decision 2018: article 11). The #MeTooEP campaign resulted in some institutional changes in the parliament. They included a voluntary pilot programme for training MEPs and a new institutionalised code of good conduct which included an explicit reference to sexual harassment (paragraph 5) (Berthet and Kantola, 2021). Using soft language, it specified that MEPs ‘may not be elected’ to certain positions if they do not abide by it, and ‘should take part in specialized training’ (paragraphs 5 and 7). Each MEP’s declaration appeared on the parliament’s website, along with their declaration of financial interests, in the 9th legislature (2019–24) (Berthet and Kantola, 2021). Some new rules were created in political groups too, including training, the appointment of confidential counsellors and new anti-harassment guidelines (Berthet and Kantola, 2021). Advancing Gender Equality in Political Groups The European Parliament’s political groups are critical decision-making actors in the parliament. MEPs from member state political parties form political groups: for example, in the so-called 9th Parliament (2019–24), there were seven political groups. The biggest political group, the conservative EPP, had 187 MEPs (2020, after Brexit), followed by the social democratic S&D (147 MEPs), and the liberal Renew Europe (98 MEPs). The departure of the UK MEPs made the radical right populist ID (Identity and Democracy) group the fourth biggest in the parliament (75 MEPs) ahead of the Greens/EFA (69 MEPs). There is also another radical right populist group called the ECR (62 MEPs) and a group left of the social democrats called GUE/NGL (39 MEPs). Although much of parliamentary work in the European Parliament happens in committees discussed above, the political groups exert power in setting the policy lines, negotiations for joint policy positions of the parliament, deciding on the leadership of the parliament, the committee chairs and members, and so on. From the point of view of gender equality, they

304  Handbook of feminist governance provide an important focus for feminist governance structures – just like national political parties. In many of the mainstream groups, advancing gender equality in policymaking is the responsibility of dedicated individual MEPs and staff, who are often members of the FEMM committee. The Greens/EFA group has advanced the furthest in formally institutionalising gender mainstreaming practices within the group (Kantola, 2022). The political groups are indeed very differently positioned in relation to advancing gender equality. The green/left groups have the highest numbers of women MEPs and most women in key positions, whilst the conservative EPP has a more contradictory record, and the radical right groups may have women in their ranks but oppose gender equality (Kantola, 2022; Kantola and Rolandsen Agustín, 2019). The green/left groups have developed a number of practices to advance equality. These include the co-chair structure in Greens/EFA and left/ green GUE/NGL, with leadership shared by a woman and a man. The Greens/EFA have explicit provisions for gender balance in their statutes, and the S&D has a quota provision for its bureau, which is implemented (Kantola, 2022). In contrast, the EPP has a quota provision for its presidency, which is not implemented. The green/left groups have developed other practices too. For example, in GUE/NGL, speaking time in group meetings is divided equally between genders, and women and men speakers are alternated on the list. The Greens/EFA has developed internal measures for ensuring gender mainstreaming of all policies, which includes training, and is looking into developing a gender action plan for the group. The radical right populist groups, by contrast, oppose gender equality, gender quotas and any ‘programming’ for gender equality, an issue we discuss in more detail in the next section.

INFORMAL POLITICAL PRACTICES IN THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT: GENDERED NORMS, OPPOSITION TO GENDER EQUALITY The feminist governance of actors and gender equality institutions is affected by existing informal gendered political practices, which can undermine gender equality progress achieved in formal political practices and institutions. We analyse such practices from a discursive feminist approach (Kantola and Lombardo, 2017a), asking the questions: to what extent are European Parliament political discourses and practices supportive of gender equality and feminist governance? And how does feminist agency counteract opposition that practices and discourses present to gender equality? In this section we address gendered discourses and practices that occur in the parliamentary ‘workplace’ (Erikson and Verge, 2022; Miller, 2021), as well as opposition to gender equality (Verloo, 2018), both of which slow down good feminist governance practices and gender equality policies. We also mention practices of feminist counter-resistance to informal gendered practices and opposition to gender equality in the European Parliament. Gendered Practices as Informal Institutions in the European Parliament Observed from the perspective of informal gendered norms developed by feminist institutionalism, the European Parliament enacts a variety of informal gendered political practices in the institution as a whole and in European Parliament’s political parties and political groups (Berthet and Kantola, 2021; Kantola and Miller, 2021; Kantola and Rolandsen Agustín,

The European Parliament as a gender equality actor  305 2019). Parliaments are gendered institutions. This genderedness is analysed by approaching parliaments not only as sites of democratic representation, but also as workplaces, whose organisational inequalities have gendered effects on descriptive, substantive and symbolic political representation. A number of scholarly works have studied the genderedness of parliaments by combining feminist institutionalism and Joan Acker’s (1990) theory of gendered organisations that includes the dimensions of gendered division of labour, gendered interaction, gendered symbols and gendered subjectivities. This combination enables researchers to capture the production and reproduction of gendered norms and hierarchies in parliaments (see Erikson and Verge, 2022; Kantola and Rolandsen Agustín, 2019; Miller 2021). This involves enquiring into parliamentary practices such as those concerning recruitment and promotion of staff, work–family arrangements and anti-harassment policies, as well as observing gendered practices such as long-working-hours culture, hyper-masculine political performance, surveillance of women MEPs and ‘burden of doubt’ about their competencies, and prescription of behaviours considered acceptable for women and men or sanctioned for being inappropriate. Research on the European Parliament shows that – despite the formal institutional structures for feminist governance outlined above – this institution is no exception among parliaments as regards the gendered division of labour based on seniority and gender stereotypes that symbolically associate women with less valued issues (that tend to include equality and ‘soft’ policies) and men with more important ones. The distribution of MEPs across committees shows that policy areas like economy and finance are still considered to belong to the competency of men, while women dominate in committees such as FEMM (Ahrens and Rolandsen Agustín, 2019; Kantola and Rolandsen Agustín, 2019; Nugent, 2019). This reveals the existence of informal norms of appropriateness in which gender marks the assignment of more prestigious and important committees to men, and less socially valued ones to women (Erikson and Verge, 2022). Similarly, informal norms about politics as a full-time occupation and the lack of work–life balance structures and practices reward MEPs without care responsibilities – mostly men – and create hurdles for MEPs with caring responsibilities – mostly women – who find it difficult to attend late-hours meeting and participate in social events and thus be included in networking spaces that are important for political career, alliances and being perceived as legitimate ‘insiders’ (Erikson and Josefsson, 2022; Miller, 2021). Bodily performance and style of debate associated with hegemonic masculinity, including adversarial and aggressive style of speaking and loud voice, is another informal practice that rewards hyper-masculine men and tends to alienate women in parliaments (Erikson and Verge, 2022), creating affective atmospheres and ‘tone of the office’ that symbolically indicate women do not belong to the institution (Miller, 2021). In the European Parliament, this is the case especially for some committees related to economic policy (Elomäki, 2021; Kantola and Rolandsen Agustín, 2019). We have discussed in the previous section how sexual harassment is formally addressed by the European Parliament’s structures. Here we focus on the informal gendered structures which sustain it, despite the formal institutions. A number of factors make the European Parliament a workplace context exposed to sexual harassment. Gendered hierarchical distribution of power is a key factor in this respect. As Ahrens and Rolandsen Agustín (2019) state, men are overrepresented in top and middle management positions, while women are overrepresented in lower staff positions of the European Parliament; while data on intersections of gender with race, age and disability are lacking. Berthet and Kantola (2021) argue that the following elements create fertile ground for sexual harassment practices in the EP: existing inequalities,

306  Handbook of feminist governance hierarchy between staff and MEPs, the fact that MEPs enjoy parliamentary immunity that is interpreted in different ways in the European Parliament according to the different legislation and culture of the member states, the daily closeness of parliamentary assistants to their MEPs, and their dependence on MEPs for their job. In their analysis of sexual harassment in the European Parliament, Berthet and Kantola (2021) find that, while the issue is discursively contested in the institution, some actors resist sexual harassment policies by rejecting the fact that sexual harassment is an abuse of gender power and by framing it instead as a private and a cultural problem. They defend the European Parliament as a good institution and are more worried about the prestige of the parliament than the safety and well-being of harassed workers. Polarisation Around and Opposition to Gender Equality If the aforementioned informal practices manifest long-term resistance to gender equality policies not only typical of the European Parliament, the rise of populist and Eurosceptic MEPs and political groups in the European elections of 2014 has led to polarisation of debate and active opposition to gender equality and feminist governance. One such oppositional practice that has gendered dimensions and effects is the antagonistic norm of debate that is particularly employed by MEPs from radical right populist groups. A typical illustration is the radical right populist MEPs’ use of hate speech against women and minorities in plenary debates. Hate speech – for example using racist or sexist stereotypes of women and minoritised people – seeks the silencing of political opponents by conveying a message of intimidation, discrimination and subordination of women and minorities to impose the domination of one social group over another (Mackinnon, 1979). In the European Parliament, the practice of hate speech is often conducted through the antagonistic use of ‘blue-card questions’ in plenary debates. This practice, which allows MEPs to ask direct questions of the speaker, has been employed by radical right populists to attack women and minorities through misogynistic, homophobic and racist speech and to make gender issues contentious (Kantola and Lombardo, 2021a; Kantola and Miller, 2021). Antagonism implies treating opponents as enemies to be destroyed rather than as legitimate adversaries to argue with in agonistic ways (Mouffe, 2005). It is a key ingredient of populist ideology that opposes ‘the elites’ and defends ‘the common people’ (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2013: 151). In addition, the populist political style tends not only to be adversarial, but also to be based on a performance and rhetoric of ‘bad manners’ that includes ‘use of slang, swearing, political incorrectness’ (Moffitt, 2019: 52). Scholarly works on gendering parliaments have shown that this adversarial norm of debate mimics and favours hegemonic masculinity and tends to ‘alienate women MPs’ (Erikson and Verge, 2022: 5). Research on gender and populism further exposes that antagonistic practices are detrimental to feminist politics, which rather privileges agonistic forms of political conflict based on the recognition of diversity and the questioning of power hierarchies (Caravantes, 2021; Kantola and Lombardo, 2019). Opposition to gender equality and feminist governance in the European Parliament is also manifested through discursive strategies against gender equality and related policies expressed by radical right populist groups and MEPs in the plenary debates (Kantola and Lombardo, 2021a). These strategies can be both of direct opposition and indirect discursive opposition to gender equality and sexuality policies. However, they rarely have a specific impact on actual

The European Parliament as a gender equality actor  307 legislative processes and rather serve to create a hostile atmosphere for gender equality. Direct opposition manifests itself through outright rejection of gender equality: questioning policy issues that are still controversial in the EU arena such as gender quotas and LGBTQI+ rights, as well as issues that have long been accepted in the EU (though not effectively implemented) such as equal pay and policies against gender-based violence. Direct opposition is also performed by denouncing gender equality policies and gender knowledge as ‘gender ideology’, that is, a form of indoctrination. This is part of anti-gender actors’ process of resignification of the progressive concepts they oppose, with the aim of endowing them with negative meanings (see Kuhar and Paternotte, 2017). Radical right populist strategy of direct opposition discursively frames the EU and international actors as ‘corrupt elites’ supposedly seeking to impose a harmful ‘gender ideology’ on national politics, through policies such as sex education in schools or LGBTQI+ rights, interpreted as contrary to the supposedly natural categories of women, men and families (Kantola and Lombardo, 2021a). Indirect opposition takes many forms. For example, Kantola and Lombardo’s (2021a) study of opposition to gender equality in the European Parliament shows how it is embedded in Euroscepticism, with gender quotas and LGBTQI+ rights framed as being in the competency of national governments, not the EU. Another typical form of indirect opposition is the instrumental use of gender equality, bending it towards issues and goals other than gender equality. This is evident in ethnocentric and Islamophobic discourses that frame migrant people, especially Muslims, as a threat to national gender equality policies and native women. Other discourses of indirect opposition to gender equality in the European Parliament include the depoliticisation of gender by referring to biology – arguing, for example, that LGBTQI+ issues are a matter of biology rather than a matter of human rights. Taken together, these practices of direct and indirect opposition to gender equality enacted by radical right populists in the European Parliament have consequences for feminist governance. The main effect is to make gender equality and feminist politics more contentious, as we have argued elsewhere (Kantola and Lombardo, 2021a). This polarisation shapes the meaning and borders of gender equality and gender equality policies and commitments in restrictive ways. Hate speech, misogynistic comments and ‘bad manners’ also contribute to create an aggressive and intimidating atmosphere that is not friendly to women MEPs and creates obstacles to feminist governance. Formal norms were introduced in the European Parliament to address long-term gender inequalities as well as opposition to gender equality in the context of a more polarised European Parliament since 2014. This is the case of the amended Corbett report on the European Parliament’s Rules of Procedure (P8 TA(2019)0046), prepared by an S&D MEP and adopted in plenary in 2019 (Kantola and Lombardo, 2021b). To address long-lasting inequalities, the Corbett report introduced gender-mainstreaming measures, parity democracy (‘the diversity of Parliament must be reflected in the composition of the bureau of each committee; it shall not be permissible to have an all-male or all-female bureau’ 204.1) and gender action plans for the parliament. In response to problems that have been put on the European Parliament’s agenda in recent years, the report adopted provisions on hate speech (MEPs ‘shall not resort to offensive language’ such as ‘defamatory language, “hate speech” and incitement to discrimination based, in particular, on any ground referred to in Article 21’ 11.3c) and against sexual harassment (MEPs ‘shall refrain from any type of psychological or sexual harassment’ and ‘respect the Code of appropriate behaviour for Members of the European Parliament’ 11.3e).

308  Handbook of feminist governance Individual and collective feminist agency has developed to address informal gendered practices in the parliament. A good example of such feminist counter-resistance is the #MeTooEP movement that organised to demand policies against sexual harassment in the European Parliament. In their analysis of the #MeTooEP movement, Berthet and Kantola (2021) find that, although they did not achieve the transformation and policies they demanded, the #MeTooEP actors were effective in putting the issue on the agenda and articulating a ‘harassed workers discourse’. Rather than employing the framing of sexual harassment more common in feminist circles as an abuse of gendered power, the #MeTooEP actors framed sexual harassment as a work problem, offering concrete and practical solutions to the problem based on the experience of the European Parliament’s harassed workers. Also, transnational civil society organisations have readapted their feminist strategies to cope with the changed parliamentary context after the rise of radical right populist parties. Ahrens and Woodward (2020) find that, to bypass the decrease in their formal access to policymakers and funding, these organisations have devised new informal ways of accessing these resources, including the expansion of their network of alliances with civil society actors working on equality issues beyond gender, in an effort to promote gender equality policies in the European Parliament.

CONCLUSIONS The European Parliament has created a series of formal institutions that support gender equality and feminist governance. The catalyst of feminist governance is the FEMM Committee, whose activity is essential to the integration of gender equality in parliament’s work. Not only is FEMM the expert committee in charge of promoting gender equality issues, it also monitors gender mainstreaming in the EP, a practice that is uncommon among global parliaments. While the FEMM committee has been active in producing gender equality and gender-mainstreaming reports, effective implementation of its policies is hampered by its restricted formal powers and informal gendered norms about the limited importance of a gender equality committee as compared to other committees. The latter is shown both in routine activities such as the lack of consideration of FEMM meeting schedules in the organisation of the plenary calendar, and in moments of crisis, as the disregard of FEMM’s recommendations on gender equality during the economic and Covid-19 crises. Feminist governance is also present in institutions to promote gender equality for staff, such as the Anti-Harassment Committee. In particular, the experience of #MeTooEP showed that collective mobilisation of staff is needed to activate and update existing institutions. Political groups of the parliament are important institutions for gender equality, as the difference in implementation of measures to advance gender equality between green/left and radical right groups shows. Informal gendered political practices in the European Parliament are as important for feminist governance as the formal ones. Daily informal norms of parliamentary work tend to reward MEPs without care responsibilities, who tend to be men, or political performances associated with hegemonic masculinity, while generating resistance to consideration of women MEPs as legitimate ‘insiders’. The rise of radical right populist parties in the European Parliament has intensified discourses and practices of opposition to gender equality, with the effect of making gender equality more contested and the environment more hostile to women MEPs, due to hate speech and other de-democratisation practices. Counter-resistance to such opposition has emerged, for instance through the #MeTooEP movement and the Corbett report’s reform of

The European Parliament as a gender equality actor  309 the EP rules of procedure, showing that the struggle for feminist governance in the European Parliament is ongoing and requires feminist actors to have the capacity to advance gender equality at the formal level as well as to develop informal strategies and broader alliances.1

NOTE 1. Funding statement: this chapter has received funding from the Horizon 2020 European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator grant project (771676).

REFERENCES Acker, Joan (1990) ‘Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations’, Gender & Society 4(2): 139–58. Ahrens, Petra (2016) ‘The Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality in the European Parliament: Taking Advantage of Institutional Power Play’, Parliamentary Affairs, 69(4): 778–93. Ahrens, Petra (2019) ‘Working against the Tide? Institutionalizing Gender Mainstreaming in the European Parliament’. In Petra Ahrens and Lise Rolandsen Agustín (eds), Gendering the European Parliament: Structures, Policies, and Practices, London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 85–101. Ahrens, Petra and Lise Rolandsen Agustín (eds) (2019) Gendering the European Parliament: Structures, Policies, and Practices, London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Ahrens, Petra and Lise Rolandsen Agustín (2021) ‘The European Parliament’. In Gabriele Abels, Andrea Krizsan, Heather MacRae and Anna van der Vleuten (eds), Routledge Handbook on Gender and EU Politics, London: Routledge, 107–19. Ahrens, Petra and Alison Woodward (2020) ‘Adjusting Venues and Voices: Populist and Right-Wing Parties, The European Parliament and Civil Society Equality Organizations 2014–2019’, European Politics and Society 22(4): 486–502. Berthet, Valentine and Johanna Kantola (2021) ‘Gender, Violence, and Political Institutions: Struggles Over Sexual Harassment in the European Parliament’, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society 28(1): 143–67. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​sp/​jxaa015. Caravantes, Paloma (2021) ‘Tensions Between Populist and Feminist Politics: The Case of the Spanish Left Populist Party Podemos’, International Political Science Review 42(5): 596–612. Cengiz, Firat (2019) ‘Gendering the EU Budget: Can European Parliament Play the Role of a Gender Budgeting Advocate?’ In Petra Ahrens and Lise Rolandsen Agustín (eds), Gendering the European Parliament: Structures, Policies, and Practices, London: Rowman & Littlefield, 103–20. Elomäki, Anna (2021) ‘“It’s a Total No-No”: The Strategic Silence About Gender in the European Parliament’s Economic Governance Policies’, International Political Science Review. https://​journals​ .sagepub​.com/​doi/​10​.1177/​0192512120978329. Elomäki, Anna and Johanna Kantola (2021) ‘Covid-19, Democracy and Gender in the European Parliament: Practices and Policy Responses’, paper presented in the A Gendered Pandemic: Covid-19 and Questions of Gender (in)equalities Symposium, London, 15 January 2021. Erikson, Josefina and Cecilia Josefsson (2022) ‘The Parliament as a Gendered Workplace: How to Research Legislators’ (UN)Equal Opportunities to Represent’, Parliamentary Affairs 75(1): 20–38. http://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​pa/​gsaa049. Erikson, Josefina and Tània Verge (2022) ‘Gender, Power and Privilege in the Parliamentary Workplace’, Parliamentary Affairs 75(1): 1–19. http://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​pa/​gsaa048. FEMM [Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, European Parliament] (2020) ‘Report on the Gender Perspective in the COVID-19 Crisis and Post-Crisis Period’, 20 November. https://​www​ .europarl​.europa​.eu/​doceo/​document/​A​-9​-2020​-0229​_EN​.pdf. Grace, Joan and Marian Sawer (2016) ‘Representing Gender Equality: Specialised Parliamentary Bodies’, Parliamentary Affairs 69(4): 745–7.

310  Handbook of feminist governance Hafner-Burton, Emilie and Mark Pollack (2009) ‘Mainstreaming Gender in the European Union: Getting the Incentives Right’, Comparative European Politics 7(1): 114–38. Kantola, Johanna (2010) Gender and the European Union, New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kantola, Johanna (2022) ‘Parliamentary Politics and Polarisation Around Gender: Tackling Gendered Inequalities in European Parliament’s Political Groups’. In Petra Ahrens, Anna Elomäki and Johanna Kantola (eds), European Parliament’s Political Groups in Turbulent Times, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 221–44. Kantola, Johanna and Emanuela Lombardo (2017a) Gender and Political Analysis, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kantola, Johanna and Emanuela Lombardo (eds) (2017b) Gender and the Economic Crisis: Politics, Institutions and Intersectionality, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kantola, Johanna and Emanuela Lombardo (2019) ‘Populism and feminist politics: The cases of Finland and Spain’, European Journal of Political Research 58(4): 1108–28. Kantola, Johanna and Emanuela Lombardo (2021a) ‘Opposition Strategies of Right Populists Against Gender Equality in a Polarized European Parliament’, International Political Science Review 42(5): 565–79. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​0192512120963953. Kantola, Johanna and Emanuela Lombardo (2021b) ‘Challenges to Democratic Practices and Discourses in the European Parliament: Feminist Perspectives on the Politics of Political Groups’, Social Politics, 28(3): 579–602. Kantola, Johanna and Cherry Miller (2021) ‘Party Politics and Radical Right Populism in the European Parliament: Analysing Political Groups as Democratic Actors’, Journal of Common Market Studies 59(4): 782–801. Kantola Johanna and Lise Rolandsen Agustín (2019) ‘Gendering the Representative Work of the European Parliament: A Political Analysis of Women MEP’s Perceptions of Gender Equality in Party Groups’, Journal of Common Market Studies 57(4): 768–86. Kuhar, Roman and David Paternotte (eds) (2017) Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing Against Equality, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Landorff, Laura (2019) Inside European Politics: Informality, Information and Intergroups, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mackinnon, Catherine (1979) Sexual Harassment of Working Women, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Miller, Cherry (2021) Gendering the Everyday in the UK House of Commons: Beneath the Spectacle, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Moffitt, Benjamin (2019) ‘Populism vs Technocracy: Performance, Passions and Aesthetics’. In Paolo Cossarini and Fernando Vallespin (eds), Populism and Passions: Democratic Legitimacy after Austerity, London: Routledge, 45–64. Mouffe, Chantal (2005) The Return of the Political, London: Verso. Mudde, Cas and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser (2013) ‘Exclusionary vs. Inclusionary Populism: Comparing Contemporary Europe and Latin America’, Government and Opposition 48(2): 147–74. Nugent, Mary (2019) ‘“Feminist to Its Fingertips”? Gendered Divisions of Labour and the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality’. In Petra Ahrens and Lise Rolandsen Agustín (eds), Gendering the European Parliament: Structures, Policies, and Practices, London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 123–40. Verloo, Mieke (ed.) (2018) Varieties of Opposition to Gender Equality in Europe, New York: Routledge. Warasin, Markus, Johanna Kantola, Lise Rolandsen Agustín and Ciara Coughlan (2019) ‘Politicisation of Gender Equality in the European Parliament: Cohesion and Inter-Group Coalitions in Plenary and Committees’. In Petra Ahrens and Lise Rolandsen Agustín (eds), Gendering the European Parliament: Structures, Policies, and Practices, London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 141–58.

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

The European Union (EU) is often considered a progressive political arena with regard to the promotion of gender equality. Since the 1970s, the EU has promoted a series of norms and values higher than those in effect in most member states, and gender equality is one of the rare policy domains in which the EU has gone beyond the mere fluidification of the market. This has been made possible by the existence of a specific system of governance which fits the criteria for feminist governance stated in Chapter 1 of this Handbook: feminist institutions and institution-building, feminist networks, public policy explicitly aimed at achieving gender equality through hard and soft regulation, and transversal integration of gender equality within public action from elaboration to implementation. This de facto system of feminist governance was originally established in a non-feminist environment and nevertheless managed to overcome various political, legal and institutional barriers in order to create an alternative space of re-regulation favourable to gender equality at the European level. This complex and intertwined system of feminist governance enabled the promotion of gender equality as a legitimate goal and autonomous field of competence of the European Economic Community (EEC) and later the EU. Today, the evolution of this system brings into question the nature of the EU gender regime and its ‘gender equality project’ (Walby, 2018). Conflicting trends are at play, including populist opposition to gender equality (Siim and Fiig, 2021), but also an ambitious discourse and positioning of the European Parliament (EP) and the European Commission which came into power in 2019, advocating for a ‘Union of equality’. The first part of this chapter retraces the trajectory of the emergence and consolidation of this system of feminist governance, exploring the extension of gender equality promotion at the European level, the development of policy instruments in this domain, as well as progressive institutionalisation and setting up of its policy community, from the signing of the Treaty of Rome to the beginning of the 21st century. The second part reviews the transformation of the different elements of this system since the mid-2000s. The analysis shows that even if some positive initiatives have recently appeared, the EU system of feminist governance is undergoing a process of dismantling and can be considered under threat.

FROM NON-FEMINIST REGULATION TO FEMINIST GOVERNANCE IN THE EU In 1957, the newly signed Treaty of Rome included an article 119, now article 157 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU), which guaranteed equal pay to male and female workers for equal work. However, this article was certainly not conceived as a feminist stand by the ‘founding fathers’ of the new EEC. The negotiators of the Treaty believed that European integration would foster economic progress, which in turn would naturally bring about social 311

312  Handbook of feminist governance progress. Additionally, member states sought to retain their competences in social matters. The primary aim was to harmonise national social systems, in order to avoid distortions in competition among the member states within the context of the gradual elimination of customs and trade barriers. It is under this light that the content of article 119 can be understood: it was not a matter of asserting the principle of gender equality, or even of demonstrating a desire for social justice, but rather of avoiding any risk of social dumping in sectors that relied heavily on female labour, such as the textile industry (Hoskyns, 1996). Nevertheless, out of this non-feminist beginning, progressively emerged a fully-fledged public policy, including instruments, institutions, representations and a policy community that can be considered as constituting feminist governance at the EU level. Progressive Extension of the Perimeter of Gender Equality Policy Theoretically, the principle of gender equality covers a diversity of possible understandings, which, in turn, can each be translated into different policy strategies (Squires, 2007). The three main conceptions of gender equality are: equal treatment, which is based on the concept of equal rights and implemented through the law; equal opportunities, which is based on the concept of difference and translated into the policy process through positive action or positive discrimination measures; and equal impact, which is based on the concept of gender and primarily operates through instruments such as gender mainstreaming. Most feminist analyses agree that like a ‘three-legged stool’ (Booth and Bennett, 2002), gender equality policy can only pursue its objectives if it is stable on its feet and if it achieves a balance between these three main policy strategies. At the level of the EEC, and then the EU, a political strategy for the promotion of gender equality based on equal treatment was established from the mid-1970s, and then complemented from the 1980s by the recognition of equal opportunities. This alliance was in turn extended by the implementation of gender mainstreaming from the mid-1990s, allowing a progressive definition and extension of the remit of gender equality public policy, however imperfect (see MacRae, 2010). The principle of equal treatment was contained in article 119 of the Treaty of Rome on equal pay for equal work. In the 1970s, this general principle was extended by the Court of Justice of the EU to access to employment and to social security. Since then, equal treatment in the labour market covers equal pay, access to employment and matters of social security, but also training, professional advancement and working conditions. The definition of equal treatment has again been widened with the signing of the Amsterdam Treaty: its article 13 (now article 19 TFEU) referred to the limits of action in the fight against discrimination as being the same as the ‘limits of the powers conferred by [the treaty] upon the Community’, opening the way for radical extension. The new definition allowed the adoption of a 2004 directive (2004/113/ EC) extending equal treatment to access to and provision of goods and services. The economic domain remains nevertheless the main limit to the definition of equal treatment between women and men at the EU level. When it comes to equal opportunities, this concept was introduced at the European level with the 1976 directive on equal treatment (76/207/EEC), evoking the possibility of equal opportunities through positive action. The development of equal opportunities as a complement to equal treatment only emerged at the beginning of the 1980s, however: funding programmes aimed at removing obstacles to the participation of women in the labour market

EU gender equality policy  313 were established from 1982. As part of the European Social Fund, these programmes allowed the EEC to intervene in the promotion of equal opportunities in the supply and demand of employment (training, combating professional segregation, enabling professional requalification). But they also allowed the European Commission to finance projects linked to issues such as home-based work, child care, political representation, women’s health and sexual harassment, which were all beyond the legal scope of article 119. However, the regulatory frame for equal opportunities remained extremely limited in the 1980s, especially because of the lack of legal basis. It was only in 1992 that equal opportunities started to become firmly established with the directive on the health and safety of pregnant workers (92/95/EEC). It was the first hard law that embraced the logic of equal opportunities, considering women as a group benefiting from differentiated treatment in order to compensate for existing disadvantages. A disposition on equal opportunities on the labour market was finally integrated into the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997: member states have the possibility to set up positive action measures in relation with the functioning of the labour market in favour of what is called the ‘underrepresented sex’. This step was important because it ran contrary to the liberal definition of gender equality as only equal treatment. Positive actions have benefited from renewed interest at the EU level with a proposed Commission directive on improving gender balance among non-executive directors of companies listed on stock exchanges, commonly known as the ‘Women on Boards’ proposal, which sets the aim of a minimum of 40 per cent of non-executive members of the underrepresented sex on company boards. Presented in 2012, the text was blocked by the Council until 2020, when the EP and the Commission resolved to relaunch the negotiations with renewed impetus. The new Directive was formally adopted by the EP and the Council in November 2022. The principle of equal impact appeared for the first time in a European text in 1991, but it was only really endorsed as a policy strategy for the EU after the UN Beijing Conference on Women in 1995 and it was finally integrated into primary law in the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997. Article 3.2 proposed a description of gender mainstreaming (although it did not use the phrase itself) and validated the generalisation of this principle to all EU policies. The turn of the 1990s was a crisis period for social policy at the European level due to the lack of political will in national governments, the general drop in social spending and the resistance of employers’ unions to any kind of social regulation. In this context, gender mainstreaming was part of the first soft law measures that were able to get around the legislative restrictions imposed by the member states. After Amsterdam, gender mainstreaming has been implemented across policy domains at the EU level, at least formally. This implementation has not been developed consistently across policy fields, but it has allowed a significant extension of the field of intervention of gender equality policy, enabling the legitimate tackling of subjects such as decision-making, economic and social cohesion, development cooperation, gender budgeting, publicity and media, scientific research, and human trafficking and violence, both in internal and external policy areas. Since the signing of the Treaty of Rome, the restrictive definition of the limits of the legitimate action of the EU (i.e. employment, paid work and the labour market) has been questioned and outstripped, and the EU’s jurisdiction and possibilities for action with regard to gender equality promotion have been progressively and substantially increased. The next sections will show how the other components of the EU system of feminist governance have also progressively developed.

314  Handbook of feminist governance Progressive Diversification of Policy Instruments The progressive extension of the field of action of gender equality policy at the EU level has been matched by a parallel extension and diversification of the instruments used in order to implement this public policy. These include legal but also budgetary and transversal policy instruments. As mentioned above, the inclusion of article 119 in the Treaty of Rome was decisive: it made public action promoting gender equality possible by providing the European Commission with the legal and political legitimacy to make proposals and develop strategies that would gradually constitute a feminist public policy in a constrained environment. Starting in the mid-1970s, secondary law started to be developed and by the turn of 2000, the legal instruments of the European gender equality policy composed a solid corpus. In 2022, ten directives on gender equality are in force, including both a recast directive on equal treatment and equal opportunities in matters of employment and occupation, and legislative texts against trafficking in human beings, in particular women and children, adopted under articles 79 and 83 TFEU.1 Starting from the mid-1980s, the directives have been complemented by numerous non-binding legal instruments, which are part of the EU acquis. Initially, these soft law instruments mainly remained restricted to the sphere of employment (such as dignity at work) and were tools aimed at monitoring legislation. From the 1990s and the development of gender mainstreaming, there has been an increase in the number of soft law instruments (resolutions, recommendations, communications) and a diversification of their content (decision-making, development cooperation, publicity and media, scientific research, violence against women, etc.). European gender equality policy is not only a regulatory policy and from the late 1970s it has included distributive instruments. This development can be seen as the result of compensation by member states for the blockage of proposed directives in the Council. It can also be seen as a strategic reaction by the Commission, which took the initiative to propose the first multiannual ‘action programmes’ and to use them to create new margins of manoeuvre for itself, to extend the range of its actions and to ground its image as an active institution in the field of gender equality (Ahrens, 2019). Starting from the mid-1990s, a new category of policy instruments has flourished. It includes incorporating concerns linked to gender inequalities into the EU multiannual programmes in the field of social policy (European Employment Strategy from 1997, Lisbon Strategy from 2000), as well as the development and implementation of gender mainstreaming. These new sets of transversal instruments display the two major trends which characterised EU gender equality policy up to the Lisbon Treaty: a reinforcement of non-binding measures and an extension of boundaries. Indeed, the transversal approach represented by gender mainstreaming means questioning the foundations of a gender equality policy solely concerned with matters of employment and occupation. The flexibility and malleability of these transversal instruments accelerate this process still further, since the integration of gender equality into new areas is neither exceptional nor legislative. Instead, it becomes a daily process, part of the routine of administrative activities (Schmidt, 2005). In sum, European gender equality policy can be seen as an accumulation of different types of policy instruments aggregating around initial primary law. These elements don’t really

EU gender equality policy  315 follow a unique objective, nor do they constitute a coherent and organised ensemble, yet they form the material basis of feminist governance at the European level. Progressive Institutional Structuring and Networking Defining gender equality policy as an accumulation of instruments is not sufficient, however, to gain a precise understanding of the entire system of feminist governance in the EU, which goes beyond this material basis. It is important to examine the environment of the policy, especially its institutions and policy community which have gradually come to constitute a distinct policy sector with a high level of internal coherence, and which are essential to the formation of feminist alliances (see Chapter 28 of this Handbook). The first embryonic structure for the gender equality sector emerged at the beginning of the 1970s with the creation of a working group on women’s employment with representatives from the member states. On the basis of this group, the Advisory Committee on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men was established, and it inaugurated a singular form of functioning, combining informal relationships and official structures, promoting engagement for the women’s movement and for European integration. Within the European Commission, the institutionalisation of the gender equality policy began to take shape after the adoption of the first directives on equal pay and equal treatment (Mazey, 1995). Two structures were set up in 1976: the Bureau for Problems Concerning Women’s Employment in the DG in charge of employment and social affairs; and the Women’s Information Service in DG Information. The first structure was in charge of supervising the implementation of the legislation and developing policy instruments, the second structure aimed at ensuring awareness of women regarding this policy and to maintain dialogue with women’s and feminist organisations. From the beginning of the 1980s, the Women’s Bureau developed thematic networks of experts, in order to support and legitimise its action in the field of gender equality. Members of these groups were chosen for their specific expertise but also for their engagement with the cause of gender equality. Another important pillar for feminist alliances within the EP (see Chapter 26 of this Handbook) was an Ad Hoc Committee on Women’s Rights, created as early as 1979, and becoming permanent in 1984. From outside the gender equality sector, the ‘FEMM Committee’ was seen as a feminist bastion, before being a deliberative or legislative arena. When it comes to civil society groups and movements (see Chapters 27 and 28 of this Handbook), the European Women’s Lobby (EWL) was ‘only’ created in 1990, some 15 years after the adoption of the first directive on equal pay. Before the creation of this umbrella organisation, small groups existed but the representation of women’s interests at the European level was largely based on individual activities and resources rather than on structured and professionalised collective action. These informal networks were, however, important pieces and active elements in the setting up of the EU system of feminist governance as early as the 1970s and 1980s in a non-feminist general environment.

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THE MECHANISMS OF THE DISMANTLING OF EU FEMINIST GOVERNANCE On the eve of the 21st century, the EU was considered by some authors as ‘one of the most progressive political systems in the world regarding the promotion of gender equality’ (e.g. Hafner-Burton and Pollack, 2000: 452). However, in the following years, under the combined influence of the 2004 enlargement and the political fragmentation it entailed; budgetary restrictions, especially after 2008; and transformation of the interinstitutional balance and administrative reforms, the EU system of feminist governance has started to be destabilised, inducing a process of policy dismantling. This second part presents the characteristics of these changes, with regard to gender equality policy instruments, structures, networks and cognitive frameworks (for a detailed view of today’s gender politics in the EU, see Abels et al., 2021). Weakening Policy Instruments Since the 2000s, EU gender equality policy has evolved into what can be defined as a rights policy framework. That is a policy framework that primarily focuses on the promotion and enforcement of rights, including the fight against discrimination. One of the main characteristics of rights policies is to emphasise an individual approach to discrimination and to favour modes of public action based on the judicialisation of the treatment of inequalities. Legislation and regulatory action have always been at the heart of the EU’s action in the gender equality field. However, its specificity has been to be built on a threefold equilibrium combining law, funding for positive action programmes and integration of gender equality transversally. Beginning with the 2008 crisis, managerial reforms and financial pressures have increased, while political focus has decreased. As a consequence, budgetary instruments have started to be undermined, coordination instruments have been considerably weakened and the centre of gravity has shifted, with legal instruments becoming its main component. This shift can be considered detrimental to the EU system of feminist governance, since the legislative function of the gender equality policy has not given birth to much progress. Indeed, although the revised Lisbon Treaty provides a reminder of the place of gender equality in the values and missions of the EU, the modifications brought to the European normative framework remain very limited (Ellis, 2010). When it comes to secondary law, legislative developments since Lisbon have encountered many obstacles. The revision of existing directives (on parental leave and on equal treatment of self-employed and assisting spouses in 2010) included only minimal requirements. Some proposals have been blocked in the European Council (gender balance on boards of listed companies and horizontal anti-discrimination) or abandoned because of absence of compromise (revision of the directive on the protection of maternity). The proposals that have been adopted have either experienced very conflictual negotiations (2019 directive on work–life balance for parents and carers) or resulted in the side-lining of the gender equality focus (2011 and 2012 directives on human trafficking and the victims of crime).2 With regard to soft law, the Council has not renewed its European Pact for gender equality which ended in 2020 and was not associated with any precise objective. The Commission has replaced the five medium-term action programmes which covered the period between 1982 and 2006 with a series of programming documents,3 including the latest one, the Gender Equality Strategy 2020–25. However, they are no longer attached to funding instruments and

EU gender equality policy  317 therefore remain primarily declaratory (Ahrens, 2019). Budgetary instruments have necessarily been impacted by reduction in funding which began to hit gender equality policy in the 2007–13 multiannual financial framework. Since then, the budget allocated to gender equality as a proportion of the overall EU budget has regularly decreased (Jacquot, 2015: 147–53). An equivalent dismantling of the third pillar of EU gender equality policy – coordination instruments – has taken place. First, there has been a near-total evaporation of concern with the fight against gender-based inequalities in the major multiannual action plans of the EU. In the Europe 2020 strategy, the European Semester and the European Pillar of Social Rights, the integration of gender inequalities has been in significant decline, with only a few mentions of specific discrimination faced by women in the labour market and no acknowledgements in the accompanying objectives or indicators (Elomäki and Kantola, 2020; O’Dwyer, 2018). Second, the impact of gender mainstreaming on the transformation of gender relations and on the nature and degrees of gender inequalities has been extremely limited (Guerrina, 2020). Even more, recent analyses have shown that resistance to the deconstruction of gender norms and the transformation of power structures has started to emerge, even in policy domains which used to be considered as receptive, such as scientific research (Cavaghan, 2017; Vida, 2020). Rationalising Institutional Structures and Dissolving the Networks of Feminist Governance Two main trends have characterised the evolution of EU gender equality structures and networks of actors over the last decades: first, a phenomenon of professionalisation of actors, which led to the marginalisation of activist and feminist involvement in the development of gender equality policy, and second, a phenomenon of normalisation of its institutional and administrative specificities, which are increasingly seen as inappropriate for the standards of EU ‘good governance’. As a consequence, the cause-based coalition traditionally supporting European gender equality policy has undergone a process of erosion and the interconnectedness of the different types of actors (administrative, political, academic, activist) specific to feminist alliances, and key to feminist governance, has been weakened. In 2010, there was a transfer of portfolio within the European Commission and in 2011, the Directorate for Equality and the Fight against Discrimination (home of the Gender Equality Unit), formerly part of DG Employment and Social Affairs, started reporting to DG Justice. Far from being a merely organisational matter, this administrative transfer was consequential for EU gender equality policy. First, it signalled the fact that gender equality was (only) one ground of discrimination among other fundamental rights and tackled from a primarily legal perspective. Second, it implied a loosening of the ties between gender equality and social policy. This has a particular significance in times of economic crisis. It is all the more difficult to infuse employment and social inclusion initiatives with a gender perspective, even if the consequences of the crisis are deeply gendered. Recently, social initiatives have had a hard time including a transformative gender perspective, as exemplified by the European Pillar of Social Rights (Plomien, 2018). This situation has (partly) evolved since 2019 with the von der Leyen Commission and the introduction of an Equality Commissioner. This new portfolio is responsible for all matters linked to inclusion and equality; however, on the organisational front, it does not have its own administrative services and only has authority over ‘relevant units’ which remain part of DG Justice and DG Employment. Commissioner Dalli also chairs a ‘Task Force for Equality composed of experts from the Commission services’.4 This new

318  Handbook of feminist governance integrated organisation has not proven efficient in mainstreaming gender equality concerns, as shown by the gender-blind content of the 2020 EU recovery plan (Recovery and Resilience Facility). Following administrative reforms within the European Commission, the number of expert groups has also been drastically reduced. In this new approach to the role of scientific knowledge in European governance, expertise is mainly outsourced, but this outsourcing is not seen and used as a possibility of creating partnerships or coalitions of cause, but rather as mere service provision (Jacquot, 2020). As a consequence, the strong cross-network cohesion that characterised these groups is gradually weakening, diminishing their driving force in support of the policy and also the sense of community which used to unite the members of the EU system of feminist governance. Another major change was the creation of the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE, inaugurated in 2010). Even though it was initially conceived as a tool aimed at producing gender expertise along with liaising with a variety of gender equality actors, in practice EIGE produces technical knowledge rather than alternatives or a political vision (Hubert and Stratigaki, 2011). The creation of EIGE can be linked to a general trend towards de-politicisation affecting all organisations responsible for gender equality, as well as some feminist organisations. EU policymakers are increasingly expected to draw on specialised and technical information in order to elaborate and formulate ‘evidence-based’ proposals. In this context, EIGE is characteristic of the transformation of feminist activism and knowledge into ‘gender expertise’ (Prügl, 2015), and the emergence of ‘market feminism’ (Kantola and Squires, 2012). Some authors have underlined how such an exclusive technocratic approach to gender equality policymaking contributes to gender expertise being emptied of political perspectives, and feminist governance being weakened for bureaucratic purposes (Jacquot and Krizsán, 2021). Another important change in the structure of EU gender equality policy has to do with the evolution of the institutional balance of power, especially between the three poles of the legislative triangle (European Commission, EP, Council of the EU). In line with analyses considering that European integration is undergoing a phase of ‘new intergovernmentalism’ (Hodson and Puetter, 2019), member states have increased their presence and dominance in EU gender equality policy. They play a stronger role in the policy process via the enhanced role of the presidency trios in the agenda-setting sequence and the design and monitoring of the policy. This stronger role induces a relative marginalisation of the Commission and of the EP (including the FEMM Committee), which have generally been in the lead in terms of feminist governance at the EU level. Finally, there have been important transformations within the system of representation of interests in the gender equality sector, concerning both civil society (particularly women’s and feminist organisations) and social partners (in particular women’s committees). The development of a broad rights policy that gathers gender equality, the fight against discrimination and the promotion of fundamental rights leads to a thematic competition, whereby civil society organisations (CSOs) working in each of these areas seek recognition of their demands. This is doubled by financial competition for funding and subsidies, competition that is intensified in periods of budgetary crisis. Within this new environment, the EWL has to manage the tension between providing efficient technical expertise to policymakers and acting as a critical voice advocating for women’s interests (Seibicke, 2019). Thus, the influence of feminist mobilisa-

EU gender equality policy  319 tion is clearly limited (Cullen, 2014). Moreover, for a few years, gender equality as a policy issue has taken a back seat in the social partners’ agenda (Elomäki and Kantola, 2020). All these changes taken together contribute to the deterioration of relations between key actors in the gender equality policy sector, whether public (femocrats, MEPs) or private (activists, academics, experts). Previously close and frequent exchanges and collaborative relationships have loosened, contributing to the upheaval of the system of EU feminist governance. Adopting a Minimalist View of Gender Equality Policy Since the second half of the 2000s, European gender equality policy has undergone a period of crisis affecting its instruments, its institutions and its policy community, thereby shrinking its legitimacy. Dominant beliefs and discursive representations of the place and role of EU action with regard to gender equality have also been impacted. Consensus on ends and means has been more difficult to reach with the increase in the number of member states and the multiplication of national gender regimes (Walby, 2004). Also, some member state governments like Poland or Hungary have started directly attacking EU gender equality policy for ideological reasons (Roggeband and Krizsán, 2018) and this overt opposition is used as political cover by other member states whose opposition is mainly budgetary. Moreover, the extension of the perimeter of gender equality policy to include new issues (such as trafficking, development), as well as the challenge of taking multiple discriminations into account, have contributed both to a fragmentation of policy instruments and actors, and to a fragmentation of ideas and representations. Confronted with this increased diversity of meanings and the difficulty in agreeing on objectives and strategies for action, the cognitive framework of EU gender equality policy has become more unstable and consequently more vulnerable. Beyond the fragmentation of the principle of equality, the context of the economic and budgetary crisis has also contributed to destabilising the cognitive framework of EU gender equality policy. Since 2008, the EU’s policy agenda has been reorganised and the norm of gender equality has become subordinate to other objectives higher up in the list of political priorities, particularly economic ones (see Chapter 27 of this Handbook). The configuration of ‘equality for the market’ (Jacquot, 2015) has been accentuated again, and even when subordinated to economic objectives, initiatives in favour of promoting gender equality have a hard time finding legitimacy. Gender equality has become an objective which is not only subordinate but genuinely secondary. In this configuration, gender equality can only exist ‘despite the market’, with only minimalist ambitions and restricting its focus to issues that can aggregate the widest possible interests. This minimalist conception of EU gender equality policy can be seen when examining the flagship initiative of the Commission. In March 2021, it tabled a proposal for a directive on pay transparency to strengthen the principle of equal pay. Constrained by the shrinkage of political and budgetary opportunities, this proposal addresses the issue of equal pay through a minimalist lens. Tackling the gender pay gap, and even more, pay transparency, has become the single issue to which gender equality in employment and occupation is reduced. Issues such as the quality of employment (including part-time work), working conditions or the structural discrimination embedded in the gendered classification of occupations are left unaddressed. So, if feminist governance includes the existence of public policy which explicitly promotes gender equality, then this minimalist conception of gender equality signals that the EU system of feminist governance is still in place but in a muffled tone and with reduced ambitions.

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CONCLUSION In their famous book on policy implementation published in 1973, Pressman and Wildavsky aimed to explain implementation failures in the US federal system and more precisely How Great Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oakland. More recently, Abels and Mushaben have analysed how the Great Expectations with regard to advancing gender equality raised by the election in 2019 of Ursula von der Leyen as the European Commission’s first woman president run the risks of being constrained by Structural Limitations (Abels and Mushaben, 2020). In this chapter we have seen the role and importance of these institutional limitations in recent years: the reinforcement of the Council and the marginalisation of the Commission and the EP, the stronger polarisation over gender issues which make consensus more difficult. We have also seen that other elements, such as economic restrictions, administrative upheavals and ideational changes, have to be taken into account in order to understand the transformation with regard to gender equality. Beyond the formal provisions related to the status of gender equality as a fundamental right and a common value of the EU, these combined limitations have weighed on the EU system of feminist governance since the mid-2000s. The Covid-19 crisis has shown that these constraints weigh heavily on existing gender leadership. Indeed, after the presentation in March 2020 of the much-awaited Gender Equality Strategy for 2020–25, the European Commission in its April work programme suggested postponing any binding measures until 2021 to ‘avoid increasing the administrative burden for those companies affected by COVID 19’,5 even though the pervasiveness and critical level of gender inequalities have been brought to the fore by the pandemic. Paraphrasing both Pressman and Wildavsky, and Abels and Mushaben, we could thus consider that ‘Great Expectations’ in March 2020 ‘Have Already Been Dashed’ in April 2020. When in competition with other saillant issues, gender equality initiatives tend to be sidelined, raising the question of the EU gender equality policy as only a ‘good weather’ policy and its ability to withstand backlash and obstacles. This finding is all the more critical since the damaged EU system of feminist governance will have difficulty supporting any renewed political will in this field.

NOTES 1.

This count does not include the new ‘Women on Boards’ Directive which will be added to this series of texts at the end of 2022 or beginning of 2023 after its publication in the EU Official Journal. 2. Only since 2021 has this legislative framework started to be revivified with the adoption of the Directive on gender balance on corporate boards in November 2022, the proposal on pay transparency in March 2021, and the proposal on combating violence against women and domestic violence in March 2022. 3. Roadmap for Equality between Men and Women (2006–10), Women’s Charter (2010), Strategy for Equality between Women and Men (2010–15), Strategic Engagement for Gender Equality (2016–19). 4. See https://​ec​.europa​.eu/​commission/​commissioners/​2019​-2024/​dalli/​announcements/​union​ -equality​-first​-year​-actions​-and​-achievements​_en. 5. Europe Daily Bulletin, ‘Trade unions regret Commission’s postponement of gender pay equality measures’, no. 12471, 22 April 2020.

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REFERENCES Abels, Gabriele, Andrea Krizsán, Heather MacRae and Anna Van der Vleuten (eds) (2021) The Routledge Handbook of Gender and EU Politics, London: Routledge. Abels, Gabriele and Joyce M. Mushaben (2020) ‘Great Expectations, Structural Limitations: Ursula von der Leyen and the Commission’s New Equality Agenda’, Journal of Common Market Studies 58(1): 121–32. Ahrens, Petra (2019) ‘The Birth, Life, and Death of Policy Instruments: 35 Years of EU Gender Equality Policy Programmes’, West European Politics 42(1): 45–66. Booth, Christine and Cinnamon Bennett (2002) ‘Gender Mainstreaming in the European Union: Toward a New Conception and Practice of Equal Opportunities?’ European Journal of Women’s Studies 9(4): 430–46. Cavaghan, Rosalind (2017) Making Gender Equality Happen: Knowledge, Change and Resistance in EU Gender Mainstreaming, London: Routledge. Cullen, Pauline (2014) ‘Feminist NGOs and the European Union: Contracting Opportunities and Strategic Responses’, Social Movement Studies 14(4): 410–26. Ellis, Evelyn (2010) ‘The Impact of the Lisbon Treaty on Gender Equality’, European Gender Equality Review 1: 7–13. Elomäki, Anna and Johanna Kantola (2020) ‘European Social Partners as Gender Equality Actors in EU Social and Economic Governance’, Journal of Common Market Studies 58(4): 999–1015. Guerrina, Roberta (2020) ‘From Amsterdam to Lisbon and Beyond: Reflections on Twenty Years of Gender Mainstreaming in the EU’. In Bart Vanhercke, Dalila Ghailani, Slavina Spasova and Philippe Pochet (eds), Social Policy in the European Union 1999–2019: The Long and Winding Road, Brussels: OSE and ETUI, 125–42. Hafner-Burton, Emily and Mark Pollack (2000) ‘Mainstreaming Gender in the European Union’, Journal of European Public Policy 7(3): 432–56. Hodson, Dermot and Uwe Puetter (2019) ‘The European Union in Disequilibrium: New Intergovernmentalism, Postfunctionalism and Integration Theory in the Post-Maastricht Period’, Journal of European Public Policy 26(8): 1153–71. Hoskyns, Catherine (1996) Integrating Gender: Women, Law and Politics in the European Union, London: Verso. Hubert, Agnès and Maria Stratigaki (2011) ‘The European Institute for Gender Equality: A Window of Opportunity for Gender Equality Policies?’ European Journal of Women’s Studies 18(2): 169–81. Jacquot, Sophie (2015) Transformations in EU Gender Equality: From Emergence to Dismantling, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jacquot, Sophie (2020) ‘Small Decisions? The European Commission and the Transformation of the Role of Legal Expert Groups: The Case of Gender Equality and Non-Discrimination’, Journal of Common Market Studies 58(3): 545–61. Jacquot, Sophie and Andrea Krizsán (2021) ‘The Politics of Gender in the Field of European Agencies’. In Gabriele Abels, Andrea Krizsán, Heather MacRae and Anna Van der Vleuten (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Gender and EU Politics, London: Routledge, 158–69. Kantola, Johanna and Judith Squires (2012) ‘From State Feminism to Market Feminism’, International Political Science Review 33(4): 382–400. MacRae, Heather (2010) ‘The EU as a Gender Equal Polity: Myths and Realities’, Journal of Common Market Studies 48(1): 155–74. Mazey, Sonia (1995) ‘The Development of EU Equality Policies: Bureaucratic Expansion on Behalf of Women?’ Public Administration 73(4): 591–610. O’Dwyer, Muireann (2018) ‘Making Sense of Austerity: The Gendered Ideas of European Economic Policy’, Comparative European Politics 16(5): 745–61. Plomien, Ania (2018) ‘EU Social and Gender Policy Beyond Brexit: Towards the European Pillar of Social Rights’, Social Policy and Society 17(2): 281–96. Pressman, Jeffrey and Aaron Wildavsky (1973) Implementation: How Great Expectations in Washington are Dashed in Oakland, Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Prügl, Elizabeth (2015) ‘Neoliberalising Feminism’, New Political Economy 20(4): 614–31.

322  Handbook of feminist governance Roggeband, Connie and Andrea Krizsán (2018) ‘Reversing Gender Policy Progress: Patterns of Backsliding in Central and Eastern European New Democracies’, European Journal of Politics and Gender 1(3): 367–85. Schmidt, Verena (2005) Gender Mainstreaming, an Innovation in Europe? The Institutionalisation of Gender Mainstreaming in the European Commission, Opladen: Barbara Budrich Publishers. Seibicke, Helena (2019) ‘Gender Expertise in Public Policymaking: The European Women’s Lobby and the EU Maternity Leave Directive’, Social Politics 27(2): 385–408. Siim, Birte and Christina Fiig (2021) ‘The Populist Challenge to Gender Equality’. In Gabriele Abels, Andrea Krizsán, Heather MacRae and Anna Van der Vleuten (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Gender and EU Politics, London: Routledge, 367–78. Squires, Judith (2007) The New Politics of Gender Equality, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Vida, Bianka (2020) ‘Policy Framing and Resistance: Gender Mainstreaming in Horizon 2020’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 28(1): 26–41. Walby, Sylvia (2004) ‘The European Union and Gender Equality: Emergent Varieties of Gender Regime’, Social Politics 11(1): 4–29. Walby, Sylvia (2018) ‘Gender in the Crisis and Remaking of Europe: Re-Gendering Subsidiarity’, European Journal of Politics and Gender 1(3): 307–24.

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

INTRODUCTION International institutions and organisations, governments, corporate actors and civil society actors are increasingly relying on gender equality discourses focused on economic growth, human capital, efficiency and corporate productivity. At the same time, neoliberal governance practices, such as cost–benefit calculations and good practices, increasingly shape gender equality policy measures (e.g. Cullen and Murphy, 2018; Kantola and Squires, 2012; Prügl, 2015; Roberts, 2015). It has been argued that such discourses and practices have co-opted feminist governance while, at the same time, providing strategic openings in institutions otherwise hostile to gender equality (Ferguson, 2015; Kunz et al., 2019). Such developments have been typical of the European Union’s (EU) gender equality policy. In comparison to other international institutions, the EU has been seen as a progressive gender equality actor. The EU fulfils the criteria of feminist governance set in this Handbook, and it has brought about important changes in member states in terms of equal pay, maternity and parental leave, and anti-discrimination policy (Kantola, 2010; Jacquot, Chapter 25 of this Handbook). Yet the EU’s gender equality policy has since its inception been tied to the EU’s economic priorities (Jacquot, 2015). More recently, EU institutions have explicitly promoted a discourse focused on the macroeconomic benefits of gender equality (Elomäki, 2015), and the focus of policy measures has shifted from legislation to gender mainstreaming, exchange of good practice and other tools of neoliberal governance (Jacquot, 2015). Simultaneously, the EU’s economic policies and economic governance practices have become increasingly hostile to gender equality (Kantola and Lombardo, 2017). This chapter discusses the actors, processes, tools and knowledge that have contributed to the neoliberalisation – or economisation – of the EU’s gender equality policy and addresses the effects on feminist governance. Neoliberalisation of feminism has different facets connected to the different understandings of neoliberalism as a political project, ideology and governance (Prügl, 2015). In this chapter, I understand neoliberalism as a political rationality or a form of governance that extends market values and practices to all spheres of life (Brown, 2015; Oksala, 2013). Wendy Brown (2015) has described this process as economisation. I use this term, too, to emphasise my focus on an economic logic that shapes understandings, practices and subjectivities rather than on neoliberalism as an economic policy project. I understand neoliberal economisation of gender equality policy as a process whereby the values, ideals, goals and practices related to economic policy and the corporate sector begin to shape this field. I am particularly interested in the role of knowledge in this process. Economists and economics are often given special authority in policymaking (Fourcade, 2009; Hirschman and Berman, 2014), and this has been the case in EU gender equality policy too (Elomäki, 2020). 323

324  Handbook of feminist governance I will first map the actors and processes in the neoliberal economisation of the EU's gender equality policy. I then turn to two key challenges that economisation poses for feminist governance: shifts in the meaning of gender equality, and legitimisation of gendered economic policies and narrow notions of the economy. Finally, I discuss the increased reliance on mainstream economics in EU gender equality policy. The chapter brings together gender and EU literature and feminist political economy perspectives. It argues that economisation limits the possibilities of the institutions and actors of feminist governance to challenge the EU’s economic priorities, ideas and policies.

ECONOMISATION OF EU GENDER EQUALITY POLICY: PROCESSES, ACTORS AND TOOLS The EU’s gender policies have from the very beginning been linked as much to the pursuit of market-making as to social justice, or even subsumed under the logic of the market (e.g. Jacquot, 2015; Lewis, 2006; van der Vleuten, 2007). The relationship between the market principle and the gender equality principle has taken different forms over time, depending on developments in the EU’s economic policy and its economic situation. This section sheds light on the processes, actors and tools that have shaped this relationship and eventually intensified the neoliberal economisation of the EU’s gender equality policy. It is important to note that the EU is not a unitary actor and that policy developments, such as economisation, are always contested within and between the EU institutions and the actors that aim to influence them. From Treaty of Rome to Lisbon Strategy The manner in which equality between women and men entered the European agenda in 1957, when the principle of ‘equal pay for equal work’ was included in the Treaty of Rome, is indicative of the economic rationale that has guided the EU’s gender equality policies. Article 119 on equal pay was adopted because the French government, which had already introduced legislation on equal pay, was afraid that countries using low-wage female labour might undermine the competitiveness of French industry (Jacquot, 2015: 21–2). The main concern was thus to ensure ‘fair competition’ rather than to promote gender equality as a value in itself (Lewis, 2006: 420). The scope of gender equality policy soon expanded from equal pay to increasing women’s labour market participation (Ostner, 2000). In this early period, gender equality eventually came to be seen as an object to be pursued in itself, but it took the specific form of ‘equality within the market’ (Jacquot, 2015: 20). Whilst this labour-market-centred approach has had a significant impact in countries where women’s paid work was constrained by traditional family norms, it also reflects the way EU gender equality policy has focused on themes that support economic integration and goals. The focus on market-related issues was complemented with discursive economisation, namely, the framing of gender equality as a contribution to economic growth, competitiveness and other economic goals. The idea that gender equality had economic benefits in the sense of women’s labour market participation and a better use of human resources appeared in the European Commission’s and Council’s policy documents in the 1980s. Economic framing of gender equality strengthened in the 1990s, coinciding with the introduction of gender

Challenges to feminist knowledge?  325 mainstreaming and the integration of equal opportunities in the EU’s employment policy, in particular in the European Employment Strategy (EES) (Elomäki, 2015; see also Repo, 2016.) The EES can be seen as a key moment in the economisation of EU gender equality policy. It intensified the reduction of gender equality to a question of economic integration and connected gender equality to neoliberal discourses of individual responsibility, entrepreneurship and employability (Rubery, 2017; Wöhl, 2011). Moreover, the EES intensified the framing of gender equality issues through employment rather than gender equality objectives. A prime example is the way the concept of reconciliation of work and family life, introduced into EU gender policy in the late 1980s, shifted meaning after it was incorporated in the EES. Feminist actors within the Commission had originally used the concept to advance the redistribution of domestic and care work between women and men. This feminist goal was overridden by the market-oriented objective of encouraging flexible forms of employment for women, an objective advanced by employment policy actors (Lewis, 2006; Stratigaki, 2004). The case of the EES indicates the role of gender mainstreaming in the neoliberal economisation of EU gender equality policy. Whilst gender mainstreaming has extended the scope of this policy to areas like development, trade and education, it has further subsumed gender equality under economic objectives and rationales. This is because gender mainstreaming has focused on integrating gender into existing macroeconomic frameworks rather than assessing whether the EU’s employment, economic or trade policies are in the interests of gender equality (Hoskyns, 2008; Rubery, 2017; True, 2009). When macroeconomic fundamentals conflict with gender equality objectives, these objectives are dropped from the policy discourse. For instance, the concern for care and unpaid work as well as women’s job quality were omitted from the EES focused on increasing the employment rate (Hoskyns, 2008: 118). In the early 2000s, following the adoption of the Lisbon Strategy with its goals of sustainable economic growth, more and better jobs, and greater social cohesion, the Commission and the Council increasingly framed gender equality as a contribution to economic growth. The reorganisation of the Lisbon Strategy in 2005 around the goals of growth and jobs had the effect of further prioritising economic framing (Elomäki, 2015). Jacquot has argued that in this period (1990s–2000s) gender equality was no longer an objective in its own right but became an instrument for other economic policy priorities (Jacquot, 2015: 177). Similarly, Rubery (2017) has characterised the 1990s and the 2000s as an era of ‘instrumental policy’ where gender equality was considered instrumental to achieving other objectives. Economic Case for Gender Equality in the Context of Economic Crisis The end of the first decade of the 2000s signalled a shift from merely subordinating gender equality to economic goals to the explicit development and promotion of a market-oriented gender equality discourse (Elomäki, 2015). This discourse, referred to by the Commission as the ‘economic case’, turned the long-standing yet sporadic arguments about women as labour market reserve, women’s unused human capital and women’s labour market participation as a solution to the demographic challenge into a consistent approach that emphasised the macroeconomic benefits of gender equality. The economic case was developed during the financial and economic crisis, and coincided with the further subsuming of the EU’s social goals under economic priorities – the strengthening of the EU’s austerity-focused economic governance (Crespy and Menz, 2015).

326  Handbook of feminist governance The institutions and actors of feminist governance had a key role in the development of the economic case. Key actors included the European Commission’s gender equality bodies and gender experts, the gender equality-friendly Swedish government during its presidency of the European Council in 2009 and the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE). These actors saw the economic case as a way to increase the visibility of gender equality at the highest political level and advance gender equality in a time of crisis (Elomäki, 2015, 2020). That emphasising economic benefits was seen as the most effective way to promote gender equality can be seen as a way to counter resistance in hostile institutional settings (Ferguson, 2015; Kunz et al., 2019). It can also be interpreted as a result of processes of economisation: gender equality must demonstrate its usefulness for the economy (Brown, 2015). Empirical studies of the impact of gender equality on economic growth and the costs of inequality, commissioned by the above-mentioned actors, were a key tool in the development and dissemination of the economic case. As part of its gender equality agenda, the 2009 Swedish presidency published a study that estimated that gender equality could increase gross domestic product (GDP) by up to 45 per cent in the EU member states. EIGE’s more recent study estimated that gender equality could increase EU GDP per capita by almost 10 per cent by 2050 (see Elomäki, 2020). The emphasis on empirical knowledge indicates that it was no longer sufficient to discursively frame gender equality in economic terms as had been done in the 1990s and early 2000s. In line with ideas of evidence-based policymaking (e.g. Triantafillou, 2015), one also had to provide empirical evidence of economic benefits. The economic case quickly became the backbone of EU gender equality policy, and the range of gender equality issues justified in economic terms broadened. The draft directive on gender balance in corporate boards proposed by the Commission in 2012 was the culmination of this development. In the policy debate that paved the way to the directive, the Commission turned women’s underrepresentation in economic decision-making, which earlier was mainly seen as an issue of democracy and the sharing of power, into an economic problem related to competitiveness and the use of women’s human capital. The debate was so thoroughly economised that some policy documents did not even mention gender equality as a goal (Elomäki, 2018). More recently, Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission (see Abels and Mushaben, 2020) has been more inclined to talk about gender equality as a core value of the EU and a fundamental right. Whilst references to values and rights are still complemented by economised framing, the latter are somewhat less prominent than in the early 2010s. The emphasis on economic arguments for gender equality has also had repercussions at the national level, for instance, through EU programmes that are often a significant source of gender equality funding at national level. For example, in Ireland, the need to rely on EU project funding brought gender balance initiatives that relied on economic arguments into the main women’s organisation’s work programme (Cullen and Murphy, 2018: 120). Economic actors and processes have also contributed to the intensification of economisation. The EU’s economic governance processes, which were strengthened after the economic crisis, have taken over the role played by the EES two decades earlier. The annual cycle of economic policy coordination, called the European Semester, has subsumed social concerns to economic goals both in terms of policies and understandings (Dawson, 2018), and has done this for gender equality, too. During the European Semester, EU institutions set key reform priorities for the EU: review national performance and policies, and issue policy recommendations for member states. Although the standing of social issues, including gender equality, within the European Semester has increased over the years, only a restricted number of social

Challenges to feminist knowledge?  327 issues have been included, and economic goals and ideas shape understandings of social policies and goals (Dawson, 2018). In terms of gender equality this has meant a focus on employment-related issues, mainly women’s labour market participation (Chieregato, 2020). Moreover, the economic knowledge and expertise underpinning the Semester sideline crucial gender equality issues such as unpaid work, and misrepresent others, such as the provision of affordable care services, as a cost (Cavaghan and Elomäki, 2020). Economisation is not a uniform (and not necessarily even a hegemonic) process. Economic discourses have existed side-by-side with other frames, and the discourses of different EU institutions and actors have competed with one another. Parallel to the development of the economic case in the 2010s, the EU gender equality policy has been increasingly engaged with rights and justice, partly due to the move of the Commission’s gender equality unit from DG Employment to DG Justice and the consequent distancing of gender equality policy from social policy (Jacquot, 2015; see also Jacquot, Chapter 25 in this Handbook). Moreover, alternative conceptualisations of the relationship between gender equality and the economy have existed all along. Already in the late 1990s the Commission’s gender experts called for new, more gender-equal systems of economic organisation and for the abandoning of the narrow focus on growth (Elomäki, 2015). In the 2010s, many EU-level gender equality bodies and networks, such as the European Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM Committee) and the European Women’s Lobby (EWL), produced knowledge about the gendered impacts of crisis and austerity (Guerrina, 2017). There are tensions between the different EU institutions too: the Commission has tended to use both economic and rights-based framing; the Council has almost exclusively framed gender equality in economic terms; and the European Parliament has championed human rights frames (Elomäki, 2015; Stratigaki, 2004: 50; True, 2009: 126–7).

THE EFFECTS OF ECONOMISATION ON FEMINIST GOVERNANCE The economised approach to gender equality in EU policymaking has delivered some benefits, for instance, increased awareness of care issues in the 1990s and early 2000s (Rubery, 2017: 576–7). However, the intensification of economic justifications in the 2010s did not improve the visibility of gender equality in the context of economic crisis and austerity. In fact, gender equality goals disappeared from the EU’s long-term economic strategies (Villa and Smith, 2014), and the crisis intensified the ongoing dismantling of the EU’s gender equality policy (Ahrens, 2018; Jacquot, 2015). Furthermore, arguments about economic benefits did not change member states’ views of gender equality policies as too expensive (van der Vleuten, 2007). For example, the improved maternity leave directive proposed by the Commission in 2008 was blocked by member states who considered it too costly. At the same time, the economisation of EU gender equality policy has negatively impacted the transformative potential of feminist governance. Existing research has pointed out how economisation, on the one hand, ‘shrinks’ and ‘bends’ (Lombardo et al., 2009) the meaning of gender equality in depoliticising ways and constructs neoliberal gendered subjectivities for the purposes of capitalism. On the other hand, economised gender equality discourses legitimise and reproduce neoliberal values, gendered economic policies and gendered understandings of

328  Handbook of feminist governance the economy in ways that circumvent the possibilities of feminist institutions and networks countering gendered policies. Narrow Understandings of Gender (In)Equality and Economised Subjectivities Research on EU gender equality policy has drawn attention to the narrow way in which gender equality is conceptualised as equality in the market (Jacquot, 2015). Gender equality issues such as unequal distribution of unpaid work, which do not fit with economic priorities, have often been either sidelined or reframed to fit with the dominant narrative (Lewis, 2006; Stratigaki, 2004). In addition to reconciliation, already discussed above, such reframing took place in the discussion on women’s representation in economic decision-making. Here earlier framings related to the equal sharing of power between women and men and women’s participation in the making of decisions that affect them and the society gave way to discussions about equality in career advancement (Elomäki, 2018). These narrow understandings of gender equality are depolicitised. Research on gender policies of internal institutions and multinational corporations has shown how constructions of gender equality in terms of economic growth or business benefits are mainly silent about the structural and historical dimensions of inequality and how problem representations and solutions tend to focus on individuals (Elias, 2013; Prügl, 2015; Roberts, 2015). Although EU policymaking has also sought system-level solutions in the form of legislation and increased child care provision, the discourses and knowledge backing these solutions have tended to sideline gendered structures and focus on individual behaviour. For instance, the debate on women on corporate boards took the perspective of well-educated and skilled individuals and their right to compete for board positions in equal terms with men (Elomäki, 2018). These co-opted understandings provide limited tools for EU-level feminist governance to transform gender relations. For instance, the economised reconciliation discourses and policies left the gendered division of labour within families out of consideration and failed to challenge it (Stratigaki, 2004: 50). Economised understandings of gender equality are connected to the construction of specific kinds of economic subjects. Whether located within the EU or outside of its borders, these subjects mainly operate within the market economy, freed from the social and gendered power relations rendered invisible by policy discourses (True, 2009: 131). These subjects are responsible for the European economy as a whole through being employable and acting as self-responsible entrepreneurs (Wöhl, 2011). They tirelessly climb the career ladder and thereby enhance the EU’s competitiveness and ensure that governments get return on their investments in education (Elomäki, 2018). Importantly, their responsibility extends to meeting the EU’s biopolitical needs through producing the next generation of wage workers. These subjects self-regulate their reproductive and productive behaviour to find an optimal work–life balance for the benefit of the EU as a whole (Repo, 2016: 319–20). These depoliticised understandings of gender equality that suit the needs of neoliberal capitalism and that reproduce neoliberal rationales and values are embedded in the empirical knowledge that underpins economised discourses. The economic theories, methods and models used by EU institutions to estimate the economic benefits of gender equality have reduced gender equality to equal amounts of paid work and equal productivity. Furthermore, when issues such as unequal division of unpaid work or gender pay gap have been translated into the macroeconomic language of labour supply and productivity, their meaning has been

Challenges to feminist knowledge?  329 radically transformed and power relations and structural inequalities have been legitimised or rendered invisible (Elomäki, 2020). Legitimisation of Gendered Economic Policies and Narrow Understandings of the Economy One of the key concerns in the literature on neoliberal gender equality policies and discourses is that they rarely criticise the dominant economic policies and corporate practices that have been shown to uphold gender inequalities at global, national and local levels. Therefore, these policies and discourses legitimise gendered policies and capitalist accumulation (Ferguson, 2015; Roberts, 2015). At the EU-level, the integration of a gender perspective into the EES in the late 1990s supported policies that flexibilised labour markets and promoted non-standard forms of work (Rubery, 2017: 578; Stratigaki, 2004; Wöhl, 2011). The economic case for gender equality in the 2010s, in turn, legitimised economic growth as the EU’s main goal and gave silent agreement to budget discipline and fiscal consolidation as the key means to achieve economic growth (Elomäki, 2015). The EU’s post-crisis austerity policies had manifold gendered impacts in member states. These ranged from increased gendered economic inequalities, shifting of responsibility for care from the state to households and the intensification of the crisis of social reproduction, to increased violence against women and the dismantling of gender equality institutions and policies (Bassel and Emejulu, 2017; Bruff and Wöhl, 2016; Kantola and Lombardo, 2017; Karamessini and Rubery, 2014). EU gender equality policy documents of the 2010s that emphasised gender equality as a factor of economic growth were silent about the gendered impacts of the EU’s crisis response policies. This illustrates the one-way approach to the relationship between economy and gender equality that is characteristic of economised discourses. The contribution of gender equality to the economy is acknowledged, but the causal arrow is not reversed to see how economic policies impact gender equality (Elomäki, 2015). Moreover, economised gender equality discourses reproduce gendered and narrow assumptions of what the economy is and how it functions that are typical of neoclassical economics (see e.g. Folbre, 2009). Mainstream economic thinking and economic policies often neglect the interrelationships between the ‘productive’ market economy and the ‘reproductive’ economy constituted of the paid and unpaid activities needed to reproduce life. Yet, as feminist political economists have shown, social reproduction is necessary for the functioning of the economy (e.g. Elson, 1994; Hoskyns and Rai, 2007). This neglect is also visible in EU policymaking. The EU’s economic governance ignores unpaid work and those who provide it, often at high personal cost, undervalues monetised care work and sees public care as a cost, rather than as an investment (Cavaghan and Elomäki, 2021). Similarly, the EU-level studies on the economic benefits of gender equality that form the evidence-base for the economic case ignore unpaid care and its contribution to the economy and reinforce the undervaluation of care work within the monetised economy (Elomäki, 2020). The way unpaid and monetised reproductive work disappears from view is particularly worrying in a situation where austerity politics and neoliberal governance shift care work to households and intensify the crisis of care and social reproduction across the EU (e.g. Bruff and Wöhl, 2016).

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ECONOMISATION OF EXPERT KNOWLEDGE ABOUT GENDER EQUALITY The economisation of EU gender equality policy and the related demand for empirical evidence of the economic benefits of gender equality has implications for the kind of expert knowledge about gender equality that is valued in EU policymaking. In line with the prioritisation of economists and economics in policymaking (Fourcade, 2009; Hirschman and Berman, 2014), gender experts working in global governance structures, such as the World Bank, have increasingly sought authority by drawing on economics and other quantitative knowledge that employs positivist methodologies (Kunz et al., 2019). At the EU-level, expert knowledge about gender equality has traditionally drawn on a wider range of disciplines and methods. However, the interest in the economic benefits of gender equality has engaged mainstream economists – for instance, consultancy companies with little experience in gender equality – and tools of knowledge production typical of the economics discipline. Thus it is not only EU gender equality policy that is being economised. As I have argued elsewhere (Elomäki, 2020), we are also witnessing economisation of expert knowledge about gender equality in EU policymaking. This shift towards economic modes of knowledge production is a shift towards more positivist, technical and quantitative knowledge about gender equality that emphasises mathematical proofs and causalities (Ylöstalo, 2020). The emphasis on quantifiable, monetised evidence runs counter to the way feminist theories and methodologies have expanded what counts as evidence. Whilst there is no conclusive evidence that EU institutions see economised knowledge as a more desirable basis for gender equality policy than other forms of gender expertise, the institutions have represented such knowledge as objective, indisputable and particularly relevant (Elomäki, 2020). This common strategy to give economics a higher status than other social sciences (Fourcade, 2009) implicitly casts other forms of knowledge as more subjective and ideological. Yet this economised expert knowledge and its modes of knowledge production rely on specific theories about what the economy is, how it works and how people make choices, which are not value-free but involve gendered biases and background assumptions (e.g. Folbre, 2009). A key challenge posed by the economisation of gender equality expertise is a shift in which aspects of gender equality and human activities are analytically visible and intelligible to us. The EU institutions’ reliance on mainstream economics to support gender equality claims restricts the range of issues from which knowledge can be produced and has an impact on the kind of truth claims that can be made about the gendered structures of the economy and gender equality. Importantly, through sidelining issues related to social reproduction, the economised knowledge about gender equality financed and promoted by EU institutions may make it harder to account for the gendered effects of austerity and neoliberal governance reforms, such as the increasing strain that cuts in public spending and the marketisation and privatisation of public services put on social reproduction and care.

CONCLUSIONS This chapter has shed light on the neoliberal economisation of the EU’s gender equality policy – the expansion of market goals, values, practices and knowledge to this field – as well

Challenges to feminist knowledge?  331 as reflected on the challenges this poses for feminist governance. I have shown how the economised framings promoted by some EU institutions, including actors of feminist governance therein, have ‘bent’ and ‘shrunk’ the meaning of gender equality in individualising and depoliticising ways. I have also illustrated how economised gender equality discourses legitimise the EU’s gendered economic policies and reproduce narrow understandings of the economy. Finally, I have suggested that the discursive economisation of gender equality policy is closely connected to the economisation of expert knowledge about gender equality, that is, increased reliance on mainstream economic knowledge in gender equality policymaking. I will conclude with a reflection on the implications of economisation for feminist knowledge and its capacity to influence EU policymaking in the crucial area of economic policy. The actors of feminist governance are facing major challenges in this policy field. For instance, knowledge about the gender impacts of austerity produced by feminist actors was not included in the EU’s response to the 2008 economic crisis (Guerrina, 2017), and integrating gender perspectives in economic governance processes, like the European Semester, has been difficult. Scholars have identified several reasons for the neglect of feminist knowledge in this field. First, the male-dominated character of key economic decision-making spaces has implications for their working culture and the possibilities of moving gender equality forward (Guerrina, 2017; Walby, 2015). Second, the narrow constructions of economic expertise and ‘objective’ knowledge in these spaces sideline feminist knowledge, which is often seen as political and ideological. Finally, gender equality actors have found it difficult to communicate using the abstract and mathematical vocabulary that has become a key ‘legitimacy requirement’ for participation in economic policy debates (Cavaghan, 2017; O’Dwyer, 2019). Could economised knowledge, although different from knowledge about economic benefits that has been prominent in EU gender equality policy, provide a solution to these problems? In some contexts, feminist actors have successfully mobilised quantified knowledge based on economic modes of knowledge production – for example, calculations of distributive gender impacts – to criticise dominant economic policies and advocate for feminist alternatives (Cavaghan, 2020; Ylöstalo, 2020). Even if critical of existing economic policies, however, this knowledge comes with drawbacks similar to those related to the evidence about economic benefits. It reduces gender impacts to monetised distributive impacts, reproduces the (gendered) methodologies and assumptions of mainstream economic thinking, and prioritises economists as the main producers of policy-relevant knowledge, sidelining other feminist voices and other types of feminist knowledge (Ylöstalo, 2020). Eventually, the kind of feminist knowledge needed to re-think the macroeconomic objectives of the EU and change the course of its economic policies would have to break the false distinction between productive and the reproductive sectors of the economy that underpins the EU’s policies. Acknowledging the role of social reproduction would extend our understanding of what the economy is and how it functions and lead to more gender equal economies where gender equality is not subsumed under economic goals.1

NOTE 1. Funding statement: this chapter has received funding from the Horizon 2020 European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator grant project (771676).

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REFERENCES Abels, Gabriele and Joyce Mushaben (2020) ‘Great Expectations, Structural Limitations: Ursula von der Leyen and the Commission’s New Equality Agenda’, Journal of Common Market Studies 58 (Annual Review): 121–32. Ahrens, Petra (2018) Actors, Institutions and the Making of EU Gender Equality Programmes, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bassel, Leah and Akwugo Emejulu (2017) Minority Women and Austerity: Survival and Resistance in France and Britain, Bristol: Policy Press. Brown, Wendy (2015) Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, New York: Zone Books. Bruff, Ian and Stefanie Wöhl (2016) ‘Constitutionalizing Austerity, Disciplining the Household— Masculine Norms of Competitiveness and the Crisis of Social Reproduction in the Eurozone’. In Aida A. Hozic and Jacqui True (eds), Scandalous Economics: Gender and the Politics of Financial Crisis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 92–108. Cavaghan, Rosalind (2017) ‘The Gender Politics of EU Economic Policy: Policy Shifts and Contestations before and after the Crisis’. In Johanna Kantola and Emanuala Lombardo (eds), Gender and the Economic Crisis in Europe: Politics, Institutions and Intersectionality, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 49–71. Cavaghan, Rosalind (2020) ‘The Possibilities and Constraints for Intersectional Practice in Gender Budgeting Activism’, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society 27(4): 670–93. Cavaghan Rosalind and Anna Elomäki (2020) ‘Explaining the Limited Socialization of the European Semester: Hidden Assumptions about the Economy’, paper presented at Maynooth University conference Back to the Future? European Progressions and Retrogressions, 28–30 October 2020. Cavaghan, Rosalind and Anna Elomäki (2021) ‘Dead Ends and Blind Spots in the European Semester: The Epistemological Foundation of the Crisis of Social Reproduction’, Journal of Common Market Studies 60(4): 885–902. Chieregato, Elisa (2020) ‘Gender Equality and the EU’s Economic Governance: The Strategic Use of Women’s Employment Within Labor Market Reforms in Italy’, Social Politics (online first). https://​ doi​.org/​10​.1093/​sp/​jxaa012. Crespy, Amandine and Georg Menz (2015) ‘Commission Entrepreneurship and the Debasing of Social Europe before and after the Eurocrisis’, Journal of Common Market Studies 53(4): 753–68. Cullen, Pauline and Theresa M. Murphy (2018) ‘Leading the Debate for the Business Case for Gender Equality: Perilous for Whom?’, Gender Work and Organization 25(2): 110–26. Dawson, M. (2018) ‘New Governance and the Displacement of Social Europe: The Case of the European Semester’, European Constitutional Law Review 14: 191–209. Elias, Juanita (2013) ‘Davos Woman to the Rescue of Global Capitalism: Postfeminist Politics and Competitiveness Promotion at the World Economic Forum’, International Political Sociology 7(2): 152–69. Elomäki, Anna (2015) ‘The Economic Case for Gender Equality in the European Union: Selling Gender Equality to Decision-Makers or Neoliberalism to Feminist Organizations’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 22(3): 288–302. Elomäki, Anna (2018) ‘Gender Quotas for Corporate Boards: Depoliticizing Gender and the Economy’, NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 26(1): 53–68. Elomäki, Anna (2020) ‘Economization of Expert Knowledge about Gender Equality in the European Union’, Social Politics (online first). https://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​sp/​jxaa005. Elson, Diane (1994) ‘Micro, Meso, Macro: Gender and Economic Analysis in the Context of Policy Reform’. In Isabella Bakker (ed.), The Strategic Silence: Gender and Economic Policy, London: Zed Books, 33–44. Ferguson, Lucy (2015) ‘“This is Our Gender Person”: The Messy Business of Working as a Gender Expert in International Development’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 17(3): 380–97. Folbre, Nancy (2009) Greed, Lust & Gender: A History of Economic Ideas, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fourcade, Marion (2009) Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain and France, 1890s–1990s, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Challenges to feminist knowledge?  333 Guerrina, Roberta (2017) ‘Gendering European Economic Narratives: Assessing the Costs of the Crisis to Gender Equality’. In Johanna Kantola and Emanuela Lombardo (eds), Gender and the Economic Crisis in Europe: Politics, Institutions and Intersectionality, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 95–115. Hirschman, Daniel and Elizabeth P. Berman (2014) ‘Do Economists Make Policies? On the Political Effects of Economics’, Socio-Economic Review 12(4): 779–811. Hoskyns, Catherine (2008) ‘Governing the EU: Gender and Macroeconomics’. In Shirin Rai and Georgina Waylen (eds), Global Governance: Feminist Perspectives, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 107–28. Hoskyns, Catherine and Shirin M. Rai (2007) ‘Recasting the Global Political Economy: Counting Women’s Unpaid Work’, New Political Economy 12(3): 297–317. Jacquot, Sophie (2015) Transformations in EU Gender Equality: From Emergence to Dismantling, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kantola, Johanna (2010) Gender and the European Union, New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kantola, Johanna and Emanuela Lombardo (2017) ‘Gender and the Politics of the Economic Crisis in Europe’. In Johanna Kantola and Emanuela Lombardo (eds), Gender and the Economic Crisis in Europe: Politics, Institutions and Intersectionality, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–25. Kantola, Johanna and Judith Squires (2012) ‘From State Feminism to Market Feminism?’ International Political Science Review 33(4): 382–400. Karamessini, Maria and Jill Rubery (eds) (2014) Women and Austerity: The Economic Crisis and the Future of Gender Equality, London: Routledge. Kunz, Rahel, Elisabeth Prügl and Helen Thompson (2019) ‘Gender Expertise in Global Governance: Contesting the Boundaries of a Field’, European Journal of Politics and Gender 2(1): 23–40. Lewis, Jane (2006) ‘Work/family Reconciliation, Equal Opportunities and Social Policies: The Interpretation of Policy Trajectories at the EU Level and the Meaning of Gender Equality’, Journal of European Public Policy 13(3): 420–37. Lombardo, Emanuela, Petra Meier and Mieke Verloo (2009) ‘Stretching and Bending Gender Equality: A Discursive Politics Approach?’. In Emanuela Lombardo, Petra Meier and Mieke Verloo (eds), The Discursive Politics of Gender Equality: Stretching, Bending, and Policymaking, London: Routledge, 1–18. O’Dwyer, Muireann (2019) ‘Expertise in European Economic Governance—A Feminist Analysis’, Journal of Contemporary European Research 15(2): 162–78. Oksala, Johanna (2013) ‘Feminism and Neoliberal Governmentality’, Foucault Studies 16: 32–53. Ostner, Ilona (2000) ‘From Equal Pay to Equal Employability: Four Decades of European Gender Policies’. In Mariagrazia Rossilli (ed.), Gender Policies in the European Union, Frankfurt & New York: Peter Lang, 25–42. Prügl, Elisabeth (2015) ‘Neoliberalising Feminism’, New Political Economy 20(4): 614–31. Repo, Jemima (2016) ‘Gender Equality as Biopolitical Governmentality in a Neoliberal European Union’, Social Politics 23(2): 307–28. Roberts, Adrienne (2015) ‘The Political Economy of “Transnational Business Feminism”’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 17(2): 209–31. Rubery, Jill (2017) ‘The Triumph of Instrumental over Equality Policy in European Employment Policy’, Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue canadienne d’études du développement 38(4): 576–81. Stratigaki, Maria (2004) ‘The Co-Optation of Gender Concepts in EU Policies: The Case of “Reconciliation of Work and Family”’, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society 11(1): 30–56. Triantafillou, Peter (2015) ‘The Political Implications of Performance Management and Evidence-Based Policymaking’, American Review of Public Administration 45(2): 167–81. True, Jacqui (2009) ‘Trading-In Gender Equality: Gendered Meanings in EU Trade Policy’. In Emanuela Lombardo, Petra Meier and Mieke Verloo (eds), The Discursive Politics of Gender Equality, London: Routledge, 121–37. Van der Vleuten, Anna (2007) The Price of Gender Equality: Member States and Governance in the European Union, Aldershot: Ashgate.

334  Handbook of feminist governance Villa Paola and Mark Smith (2014) ‘Policy in the Time of Crisis: Employment Policy and Gender Equality in Europe’. In Maria Karamessini and Jill Rubery (eds), Women and Austerity: The Economic Crisis and the Future for Gender Equality, London: Routledge, 273–94. Walby, Sylvia (2015) Crisis, London: Routledge. Wöhl, Stefanie (2011) ‘Gender Mainstreaming in European Employment Policies’, Critical Policy Studies 5(1): 32–46. Ylöstalo, Hanna (2020) ‘Depoliticisation and Repoliticisation of Feminist Knowledge in a Nordic Knowledge Regime: The Case of Gender Budgeting in Finland’, NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 28(2): 126–39.

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

INTRODUCTION The European Union (EU) has often been accused of suffering from a democratic deficit and historical changes such as direct elections to the European Parliament since 1979 were intended to overcome this allegation. Engaging better with EU citizens meant interacting more directly with social movements, (academic) experts and civil society organisations (CSOs), among them feminist actors. Likewise, the EU also offered an opportunity for women’s movements promoting gender equality norms to develop specific features of supranational feminist governance and to create formal and informal alliances beyond the nation state. The EU provides a complex multilevel governance system with reciprocal, though asymmetrical power relationships between CSOs and core EU institutions like the European Commission and the European Parliament (Lang, 2021). Herein, feminist alliances contributed to feminist governance as categorised in this Handbook by (1) networking to influence EU gender equality policy, particularly regarding employment and gender-based violence; (2) working within EU institutions to making them more gender-aware internally and externally; (3) fostering the adoption of gender equality strategies such as gender mainstreaming; (4) monitoring and benchmarking EU and member states’ implementation of gender equality policies. The rules steering the relationship between various (feminist) gender equality actors changed with new treaties, thereby impacting feminist governance within EU institutions (Jacquot, Chapter 25 in this Handbook). Civic engagement occurred via diverse channels ranging from EU advisory bodies, expert groups and protesting on the streets, to specific participatory elements such as the European Citizens’ Initiative1 and public online consultations by the European Commission. In recent times, feminist and gender equality actors increasingly face opposition from anti-feminist and anti-gender actors opposing progressive gender equality policies and aiming to influence EU institutions accordingly. Furthermore, transnational institutions steer strategic choices and agency of CSOs regarding their political actions and the scope of intersectional engagement (Irvine et al., 2019). This chapter contributes to feminist governance research by taking stock of the core features of today’s landscape of civil society actors and EU institutions. First, it recapitulates the history and formal rules of EU–civil society relationships. Next, it provides examples of how supranational alliances in gender equality policy have deepened, broadened and changed. Finally, it addresses intersectional mobilisation, opposition to gender equality and national trajectories in multilevel governance as important challenges to EU feminist governance.

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HISTORY AND FORMAL RULES OF EU–CIVIL SOCIETY RELATIONSHIPS Feminist governance research has highlighted women’s and feminist movements and CSOs as powerful political actors extending the traditional arena of politics and opening up EU spaces for feminist agendas (Halsaa et al., 2012; Johansson and Kalm, 2015). In manifold political actions they mobilised at all levels, from the supranational to the local (Bee and Guerrina, 2015; Evans and Lépinard, 2019; Irvine et al., 2019). Scholars have produced different concepts to capture the relationship between feminist actors and transnational institutions. Prominent conceptualisations include Keck and Sikkink’s (1998) ‘boomerang’ concept, Woodward’s (2004) ‘velvet triangle’, van der Vleuten’s (2007) ‘pincer model’, and ‘Transnational Advocacy Networks’ (TANs) (Lang, 2014; Montoya, 2013). As well as investigating feminist actors’ impact on policymaking, scholars have examined how the Commission and the European Parliament, particularly its Women’s Rights and Gender Equality Committee (FEMM), utilised CSOs as a source of expertise for policymaking and a tool to tackle its democratic deficit. The Commission, the EP and the Council design the institutional structures and access points for CSOs and other stakeholders; they invite them to expert groups, hearings and consultations, and thereby partly exploit civil society for legitimation purposes. CSOs have to consider this when making choices about where to invest their resources and it often leaves them without much room for manoeuvre. Opportunities to mobilise for gender equality are heavily reliant on the scope of the EU treaties. Until the mid-1970s, gender equality was merely declamatory and limited to labour market issues, with only article 119 (now 157) on equal pay referring to equal rights for women and men (Jacquot, 2015). Nevertheless, feminist actors utilised article 119 to put gender equality on the EU agenda, with Belgian lawyer Eliane Vogel-Polsky taking cases to the European Court of Justice for violating the principle of equal pay. Committed feminists within the European Commission used the rulings to initiate a first series of directives on equal opportunities in employment matters, establishing a ‘pincer’ pressuring member states top-down and bottom-up to make costly changes to their national legislation (van der Vleuten, 2007). From the 1980s onwards, gender equality policy programmes designed by the Commission proactively connected gender equality actors beyond the national level and resulted in transnational projects (Ahrens, 2018). Subsequently, the Commission supported both the creation of supranational umbrella CSOs such as the European Disability Forum, the Social Platform and the European Network Against Racism, and their participation in EU policymaking (Johansson and Kalm, 2015; Sanchez Salgado, 2014). The most prominent example in gender equality is the European Women’s Lobby (EWL) established in 1990 (Strid, 2014; Schrama, 2019). Concurrently, feminist activists entered EU institutions such as the Commission and the European Parliament, establishing what Woodward (2004) labelled a ‘velvet triangle’. The velvet triangle aimed to advance EU gender equality policy and consisted of a feminist network inside and outside EU institutions, covering femocrats in the Commission, women Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), women’s movement activists and academic gender experts (Woodward, 2004). Scrutinising this specific mode of feminist EU governance, scholars challenged the implicit assumption of stability, highlighted the risk of feminist claims being co-opted by neoliberal governance and pointed to how the undemocratic lack of access

Velvet triangles and more  337 and transparency made intersectional mobilisation unlikely (Elomäki et al., 2021; Jacquot, 2015; Lang, 2014). In terms of policy change, the velvet triangle mobilised massively around the 1995 Beijing Women’s World Conference and forced the EU and member state governments to adopt the Beijing Platform for Action – including the strategy of gender mainstreaming, eventually included in article 3.2 of the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997 (Hubert and Stratigaki, 2016). This success was a major leap forward in supranational gender equality policy, extending its scope beyond employment and opening doors for CSOs and feminist networks to include new policy fields (Jacquot, 2015). Alongside treaty changes, however, the velvet triangle proved not to be stable over time and its specific mode of policymaking slowly disappeared after the Amsterdam Treaty. Today’s actors generally conform to EU system rules and routines (Ahrens, 2018; Jacquot, 2015). In particular, the process leading to the policy programme ‘Roadmap for Equality between Women and Men 2006–2010’ fostered dissolution: the institution-transcending network incrementally ‘shifted from close collaboration to sceptical observation’ (Ahrens, 2018: 6). In 2010, this development was further accelerated when the Commission moved responsibilities for designing, steering and coordinating gender-equality and anti-discrimination policy from Directorate General (DG) Employment to DG Justice (Jacquot, 2015). In addition to gender mainstreaming, the Amsterdam Treaty introduced article 13 on anti-discrimination, covering sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age and sexual orientation, and thereby improved its coverage of essential human rights and CSOs’ legal basis for claiming rights vis-à-vis European institutions (Ahrens, 2019; Verloo, 2006). Yet, the directives originating from the article created new hierarchies among discrimination grounds with, for instance, the Race Equality Directive broader in scope than previous gender equality directives and other grounds only protected in employment (Kantola and Nousiainen, 2009: 466). Likewise, the Commission’s favouring of single-axis umbrella CSOs caused problematic exclusions for those not following this logic (Cullen, 2010; Rolandsen Agustín, 2013b). The EU’s Formal Setting Inclusive forms of consultation are important to innovatory feminist governance. EU institutions designed different forms and rules to engage with citizens and CSOs, although mainly recognising them as tools to legitimise their activities (Sanchez Salgado, 2014) and as sources of expertise, information and policy implementation (Jacquot and Vitale, 2014). The Commission engages directly with EU citizens through public online consultations over laws and policies (since the early 2000s) and through the European Citizens’ Initiative, enacted with article 11.4 of the Lisbon Treaty. The former, however, resulted in ‘echo chambers’ rather than transparent and inclusive exchange (Lang, 2020). Moreover, putting CSOs’ expert knowledge on the same footing as that of any citizen potentially makes it harder for feminist voices to foster progressive gender equality policies. Similarly, the European Citizens’ Initiative is mainly utilised by well-resourced EU groups, (supra)national political actors and also anti-gender actors rather than CSOs or small movements (García, 2015; Kuhar and Paternotte, 2017). EU institutions also directly partner with CSOs. The Commission’s DG Employment established and funded close and exclusive relationships with selected CSOs through social and

338  Handbook of feminist governance civil dialogues (Sanchez Salgado, 2014: 86). In the inter-institutional Advisory Committee on Equal Opportunities, committed femocrats established networks with feminist member state experts and with women’s groups through the EWL, which has advisory status on the committee (Jacquot, 2015; Strid, 2014). Moving gender-equality and anti-discrimination policy to DG Justice in 2010, which had no history with expert networks, funding or consultation, resulted in lost feminist expertise, ties cut and funding scaled down (Ahrens, 2019; Hubert and Stratigaki, 2016; Jacquot, 2015). The Council and the European Parliament also transformed their relationships with civil society. The Social Platform, with the EWL as a founding member, has, for instance, been invited to attend meetings of the EU presidency trios2 since 2000 and informal meetings of the Council of Ministers of Social Affairs since 2007; however, the EWL or other women’s organisations have never been directly invited. Overall, the Council is usually considered closed to CSOs and scholars have found that it is best accessed through lobbying at the national level (Sanchez Salgado, 2014). The European Parliament has established formal spaces through the European Citizens’ Initiative, public hearings and so-called parliamentary intergroups where members of parliament organise informally around specific issues across political groups and – if wanted – with civil society representatives. As for public hearings, it has become common practice to invite CSOs, interest group representatives and (academic) experts to committee hearings (Crespy and Parks, 2019). For gender equality actors, such hearings play an important role in forming the policy agenda and positioning them vis-à-vis the Commission and the Council (Pristed Nielsen, 2013; Rolandsen Agustín, 2013b). Kluger Dionigi (2017) shows how parliamentary committees maintain close relationships with interest groups – often with business groups at the forefront, even if they are not generally more successful than CSOs. Despite the crucial work of European Parliament committees for the EU policy process, their relationship with less well-resourced interest groups – among them gender equality actors – receive considerably less attention.

DEEPENING, BROADENING AND CHANGING SUPRANATIONAL ALLIANCES IN GENDER EQUALITY POLICY The EU functioned for a long time as an ally for women’s movements and its main institutions were open to supporting policy change. The growing number of expert groups, committees and semi-elected bodies designed by various institutions shaped strategies and activities of the burgeoning supranational equality CSOs (Ahrens, 2019; Sanchez Salgado, 2014). With treaty revisions extending EU competencies, CSOs with limited resources needed to decide with whom to engage and which EU institutions to lobby (Cullen, 2015; Lang, 2021; Rolandsen Agustín, 2013a, 2013b). The changing nature and scope of EU policies made the (dissolving) velvet triangle adapt their organisational strategies to maintain involvement in EU governance (Lang, 2014). An increasingly professionalised ‘networked fabric of issue-specific alliances’ succeeded the velvet triangle (Lang, 2021: 226). Even if policy tools such as gender mainstreaming or gender budgeting stipulate participatory processes and the involvement of civil society, the recent EU implementation of these strategies reveals an alarming disregard of participatory elements (Cengiz, 2019). Moreover, with weakened insider positions, equality CSOs act increasingly as external watchdogs from the margins of the political system, and

Velvet triangles and more  339 simultaneously need to take up the challenge to overcome exclusionary single-axis mobilisation (Irvine et al., 2019; Lang, 2021). The EWL, its activities, involvement in EU policymaking and internal organisational logic have received ample attention in feminist governance research. While the EWL has been acknowledged as a creation of dedicated femocrats, others have raised concerns about it representing mainly interests of white, middle-aged, professional women, pointing to a lack of intersectionality (Bygnes, 2013; Jacquot and Vitale, 2014), and about its gatekeeper role in policymaking (Ahrens, 2018; Schrama, 2019). This role stands out compared to the more limited roles of, for instance, the European Network of Migrant Women and the European Forum of Muslim Women, both of which directly address gender and ethnicity-related intersectional issues. The former evolved with support from the EWL, which still represents it in the Social Platform, thereby creating new dependencies (Lang, 2021; Stubbergaard, 2015). Interestingly, the EWL successfully lobbied for the inclusion of gender mainstreaming in the Treaty of Amsterdam, but afterwards marginalised it on its website and thus in its own work (Lang, 2013); the same applies to intersectional approaches (Pristed Nielsen, 2013; Stubbergaard, 2015). Crucial for feminist governance debates is investigating whether alliances can push through policy change. An instructive example of the velvet triangle losing its power is the failure to reform the Maternity Leave Directive in 2015, seven years after the European Commission proposed its revision (Ahrens and Abels, 2017; Kluger Dionigi, 2017; Seibicke, 2019). The EWL and trade unions successfully lobbied the FEMM committee to extend the Commission proposal, but this increased member states’ resistance in the Council (Kluger Dionigi, 2017). Concomitantly, employer associations and member states lobbied centre-right MEPs to vote against the FEMM committee position, leading to a stalemate with voting postponed three times. In the end, the European Parliament adopted a joint position with a slim majority in 2010, but the proposal was then blocked in the Council and withdrawn by the Commission (Ahrens and Abels, 2017; Kluger Dionigi, 2017). This case suggests that the weakening of the velvet triangle provides the Council with sufficient power to block legislative proposals on gender equality policy (Ahrens and Abels, 2017). Similarly, proposals for directives on board quotas and anti-discrimination beyond the workplace were halted under both the Barroso and Juncker Commissions and only the revised Work–Life Balance Directive was passed in 2019. Whether the new Commission under Ursula von der Leyen will be able to reactivate the proposals and push through additional ones on equal pay and gender-based violence remains to be seen. Another policy combatting violence against women and gender-based violence arrived on the supranational agenda in the 1980s, with the FEMM Committee playing an important agenda-setting role, well ahead of many member states (Montoya, 2013). Towards the end of the 1990s the issue became a policy field where the Commission supported the creation of transnational multilevel networks (Montoya, 2013; Roggeband, 2021). Furthermore, through strategic framing of violence against women as a public health problem, the European Parliament maximised its influence and took advantage of the fact that the issue fell under the co-decision procedure, giving the body more power than it may have otherwise had (Roggeband, 2021; Rolandsen Agustín, 2013a). Krizsán and Roggeband (2019a) illuminate that similar framings occurred in the new EU member states in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and led to regionally specific patterns of coalition-building between women’s organi-

340  Handbook of feminist governance sations and state actors. As a result, many gender-sensitive domestic violence policy reforms were adopted, before becoming again contested in EU member states from 2015 onwards. Recent crises have also impacted gender equality alliances. The austerity responses between 2007 and 2014 primarily hit grassroots and member state-level CSOs and had a less direct impact on the transnational CSOs dependent on EU funding (Woodward, 2016). Yet, in light of austerity measures, the EWL changed its strategy to focus on policy issues where the EU still provided funding and simultaneously tried to secure support for organisational survival through other intergovernmental arenas (Cullen, 2015). Elomäki (2015) highlights that reorganising was prompted by the Commission and the Council shifting to a market-oriented gender equality discourse, making it harder to maintain policy issues not framed as an economic case. Despite these harsh winds, the EWL has maintained its presence in the EU arena and has used growing informal access – particularly to the European Parliament – to widen its scope of action (Ahrens and Woodward, 2020). In sum, the European Parliament and its FEMM committee has become an evermore important contact for networking around equality issues, while the potential of the 2019 Commission under von der Leyen to adopt a more nuanced and progressive approach to gender equality remains to be seen.

CURRENT CHALLENGES TO GENDER EQUALITY ALLIANCES IN EU GOVERNANCE In addition to challenges originating from changes in the EU institutional system, formal rules, access options and the settings for civil society, three additional challenges stand out, together with how gender equality actors respond to them. These are: intersectional aspects, opposition to gender equality and different national trajectories in multilevel governance. As the following subsections show, each of the three requires adaptation of strategies and networking. Intersectionality: Alliances Between Feminist and Other Civil Society Groups Intersectional issues were disregarded by EU institutions for a long time (Kantola and Nousiainen, 2009; Lombardo and Rolandsen Agustín, 2016) and research related to them focused on the national arena and less on supranational EU politics (Bee and Guerrina, 2015; Evans and Lépinard, 2019; Irvine et al., 2019). In particular, the Commission supported umbrella CSOs representing one ground of discrimination and at best considered multiple discrimination, not intersectional aspects, with problematic consequences for those not following this logic (Cullen, 2010; Rolandsen Agustín, 2013a). The new Commission under von der Leyen, however, included intersectionality in the new vision of a ‘Union of Equality’ and the accompanying five core strategies on gender equality, anti-racism, LGBTQI rights, Roma people, and disabilities.3 Each of the strategies emphasises the intention to pay attention to intersectional aspects throughout, yet how to operationalise and implement this remains vague. When examining whether intersectionality played a bigger role for major supranational gender equality actors, the picture is ambivalent (D’Agostino, Chapter 28 in this Handbook). At first, the concentration imposed by the Commission on one ground of discrimination was tolerated, if not welcomed, by umbrella organisations (Rolandsen Agustín, 2013b: 168). Moreover, the long history and specific national context of women’s organisations make it likely that some intersectional aspects are picked up more than others, often privileging the

Velvet triangles and more  341 needs of majority groups over those of minority groups (Bygnes, 2013; Nyhagen Predelli and Halsaa, 2012). Yet, without an intersectional approach, CSOs, among them women’s organisations, may lose impact due to their limited scope, and in the long run become untrustworthy in representing equality issues (Ahrens and Meier, 2019; Irvine et al., 2019). The EWL is often criticised as being exclusionary and solely representing the interests of white, middle-class, well-educated heterosexual women, which makes receiving public funding, having a gatekeeper role in policymaking and access to EU committees, expert groups and hearings appear as privilege (Ahrens, 2019; Jacquot and Vitale, 2014; Strid, 2014). Stubbergaard (2015) emphasises recent changes towards more intersectionality, for instance, with the EWL creating the European Network of Migrant Women and maintaining strong ties with it (D’Agostino, Chapter 28 in this Handbook). Overall, insufficient resources do not necessarily lead to competition and conflict and satisfactory resources do not automatically lead to intersectionality being adopted; whether intersectional mobilisation happens depends on EU institutions positively sanctioning it (Ahrens, 2019). As a consequence, the current linkages between equality CSOs and EU institutions resemble more a mountain skyline with a clear hierarchy of class – gender – race as descending levels (Ahrens, 2019). Opposition: Networks Mobilizing Against Gender Equality A growing feminist governance literature explores the multiple facets of opposition to gender equality and which actors mobilise and network nationally and supranationally against women’s, LGBTI and minority rights (Köttig et al., 2017; Kuhar and Paternotte, 2017; Verloo, 2018). Anti-gender activists have developed the frame of ‘gender ideology’, seen as a threat to the traditional division of roles between women and men in society, in order to devaluate gender equality policy and its actors (Korolczuk, 2020; Korolczuk and Graff, 2018). Thus, challenging gender equality and its activists has become a ‘symbolic glue’ (Kováts and Põim, 2015) for a counter-movement whose exact actors are hard to nail down, but, among others, comprise the Catholic Church, radical right and right-wing parties, and movements against marriage equality. The counter-movements have become particularly successful in the context of the crisis of liberal democracy and democratic backsliding (Kováts, 2017; Krizsán and Roggeband, 2019b). These actors have been attentive to new avenues for action. After the invention of the European Citizens’ Initiative, the campaign ‘One of Us’ managed to collect the required one million signatures to force public hearings and a Commission response. The initiative officially claimed to organise around human embryonic stem cells but actually consisted of anti-choice actors strongly supported by the Catholic Church.4 The campaign caused open conflicts ahead of public hearings in the European Parliament, with ‘One of Us’ organisers trying to prevent opponents also being invited and outspoken conservative MEPs undermining coalition-building with progressive women’s movements (Crespy and Parks, 2019). After the public hearings, the Commission refused to take action as all the ethical requirements proposed by the initiative would already have been in place (Hedling and Meeuwise, 2015). Nevertheless, anti-gender mobilisation by conservative, religious and nationalist actors has become increasingly visible as they shower progressive MEPs with threatening emails. As a consequence of this changing political environment and the weak gender equality profile of the Commission under Barroso and Juncker, gender equality actors have moved towards more

342  Handbook of feminist governance informal channels of participation, particularly in the European Parliament, thereby avoiding polarisation and conflict (Ahrens and Woodward, 2020). Another arena where opposition to gender equality has become outspoken over recent years is that of combatting violence against women and gender-based violence (Roggeband, 2021). This arena, which previously had been promising, became contested not only by the EU merging and cutting back specific funding programmes, but also by new, more conservative, governments in member states, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe (Krizsán and Roggeband, 2019a). While the political rhetoric often remained the same, implementation and accountability were challenged, thereby undermining legislation. More recently, the Istanbul Convention on Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence (signed in 2011) has become a focal point of controversies in gender-based violence policies (Krizsán and Roggeband, Chapter 29 in this Handbook). Opposition to the Istanbul Convention is characterised by a strong anti-gender rhetoric aiming at delegitimising the norm and undermining its ratification by the EU (Berthet, 2022). Multilevel Governance and National Trajectories Important for feminist governance are challenges originating from the EU system of multilevel governance as such (Kenny and Verge, Chapter 6 in this Handbook). Lang and Sauer (2016: 217) labelled this as ‘politics of scale’ characterised by ‘a messy set of multi-scalar and inter-scalar policy processes in a plurality of spaces with many more entry and resistance points’ than in member states. Engaging with the politics of scale allows us to decipher different elements of agency and voice and informal spaces. The EU level allows domestic feminist actors to counteract conservative gender regimes or to increase their parliamentary representation. For instance, Irish women MEPs, refused FEMM committee membership due to national debates around abortion and party discipline, were able to promote gender equality in other policy fields such as agriculture (Cullen, 2019). For women MEPs from South-Eastern Europe, gender equality was less contested in the European Parliament, thereby ‘socialising’ them to act in favour of women’s interests rather than influencing the parliament in a conservative direction (Chiva, 2019). Likewise, LGBT movements in different European regions forged a unified voice by deliberately utilising the notion of ‘Europe’ and related rights (Ayoub and Paternotte, 2014). Equally important to feminist governance is addressing how supranational women’s organisations manage multilevel governance (Lang, 2014). The EWL is a potential bottleneck between domestic and supranational levels: whether domestic women’s organisations adapt or influence EWL positions often depends on matching frames, individual leadership connections and simply geographic proximity (Ahrens and Meier, 2019; Lafon, 2018). Furthermore, Schrama (2019) illustrates severe imbalances between Western and Eastern EWL members, with the former rich in human, financial and social capital, while the latter aim to compensate for their lack of resources by linking up directly with the Commission. Recently, as an effect of Brexit, British women’s organisations would have been excluded from the EWL; this was prevented by changing the internal rules and emphasising supranational ‘sticky networks’ (Minto, 2020). The change of rule potentially indicates ‘a more systematic broadening of the EWL’s reach beyond the EU’ by allowing for non-EU members, with Icelandic women’s organisations joining first (Minto, 2020: 1599).

Velvet triangles and more  343 Simultaneously, conservative and anti-gender governments – particularly but not only – in CEE member states started actively supporting and even creating so-called GONGOs (government operated non-governmental organisations) (Krizsán and Roggeband, 2019b). Such GONGOs have started to side-line feminist and progressive women’s movements and have become powerful counter-movements in coalition with their governments. The effects of conservative government-led national organisations have also become visible in the conflicts around the Istanbul Convention (Berthet, 2022), and the long-term effects for supranational feminist alliances are still unknown.

CONCLUSION Feminist EU governance is characterised by promoting women’s community-based participation in policymaking, with transnational women’s CSOs and institution-transcending feminist alliances as core features. Feminist actors have covered a wealth of issues and managed to put their footprint on EU treaties, legislation and policies. Confronted with anti-gender mobilisation, the growing importance of intersectional aspects and managing multilevel governance, it remains to be seen how alliances will change and whether they can be maintained to promote progressive gender equality policies. Future feminist governance research would benefit from closer examination of certain inter-institutional constellations. Previous alliances such as the velvet triangle have been shaken up, with gender equality currently institutionalised in different places (van der Vleuten, 2019). Whether this leads to new multi-layered velvet triangles deserves attention. Furthermore, there is a research gap regarding the relationship of the European Parliament and the Council to feminist and intersectional CSOs. Despite the European Parliament gaining power vis-à-vis the Council, exploring linkages between CSOs and parliamentary groups or the impact of anti-gender mobilisation on Council positions is in its infancy. Unquestionably, the history of supranational EU gender equality alliances illustrates the liveliness of feminist actors inside and outside institutions and their fascinating ability to adjust to new settings.5

NOTES 1. Initiatives collecting more than one million signatures in at least seven member states require the European Parliament and the Commission to hold public hearings; the latter must adopt a formal response. 2. The Council presidency rotates among EU member states every six months. The current, outgoing and incoming presidency together form the so-called EU presidency trio which prepares a common rolling agenda for an 18-month period. 3. Cf. https://​e c​.europa​. eu/​commission/​commissioners/​2019​-2024/​dalli/​a nnouncements/​union​ -equality​-first​-year​-actions​-and​-achievements​_en. 4. This informal coalition is also closely linked to the World Congress of Families (WCF), an international event using the frame of the ‘natural family’ to hide radically conservative views on gender and sexual equality (Pavan, 2020). 5. Funding statement: this chapter has received funding from the Horizon 2020 European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator grant project (771676).

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346  Handbook of feminist governance Lang, Sabine and Birgit Sauer (2016) ‘European Integration and the Politics of Scale: A Gender Perspective’. In Gabriele Abels and Heather Macrae (eds), Gendering European Integration Theory, Opladen: Barbara Budrich, 217–36. Lombardo, Emanuela and Lise Rolandsen Agustín (2016) ‘Intersectionality in European Union Policymaking: The Case of Gender-Based Violence’, Politics 36(4): 364–73. Minto, Rachel (2020) ‘Sticky Networks in Times of Change: The Case of the European Women’s Lobby and Brexit’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 58(6): 1587–604. Montoya, Celeste (2013) From Global to Grassroots: The European Union, Transnational Advocacy, and Combating Violence against Women, New York: Oxford University Press. Nyhagen Predelli, Line and Beatrice Halsaa (2012) Majority-Minority Relations in Contemporary Women’s Movements: Strategic Sisterhood, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pavan, Elena (2020) ‘“We are family”: The Conflict Between Conservative Movements and Feminists’, Contemporary Italian Politics 12(2): 243–57. Pristed Nielsen, Helene (2013) ‘Collaborating on Combating Anti-Discrimination? Anti-Racist and Gender Equality Organisations in Europe’. In Birte Siim and Monika Mokre (eds), Negotiating Gender and Diversity in an Emergent European Public Sphere, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 179–200. Roggeband, Conny (2021) ‘Violence Against Women and Gender-Based Violence’. In Gabriele Abels, Andrea Krizsán, Heather MacRae and Anna van der Vleuten (eds), Routledge Handbook of Gender and EU Politics, New York: Routledge, 352–63. Rolandsen Agustín, Lise (2013a) Gender Equality, Intersectionality and Diversity in Europe, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rolandsen Agustín, Lise (2013b) ‘Transnational Collective Mobilisation: Challenges for Women’s Movements in Europe’. In Birte Siim and Monika Mokre (eds), Negotiating Gender and Diversity in an Emergent European Public Sphere, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 161–78. Sanchez Salgado, Rosa (2014) Europeanizing Civil Society: How the EU shapes Civil Society Organizations, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Schrama, Reini (2019) ‘The Monitoring Capacity of Civil Society Networks: A Social Network Analysis in the Case of Gender Equality Policy’, Journal of Civil Society 15(2): 123–42. Seibicke, Helena (2019) ‘Gender Expertise in Public Policymaking: The European Women’s Lobby and the EU Maternity Leave Directive’, Social Politics 27(2): 385–408. Strid, Sofia (2014) Gendered Interests in the EU: The European Women’s Lobby and the Organization and Representation of Women’s Interests, Saarbrücken: GlobeEdit. Stubbergaard, Ylva (2015) ‘Conflict and Cooperation: Interactions among EU-Level Civil Society Organisations in the Field of Gender Equality’. In Hakan Johansson and Sara Kalm (eds), EU Civil Society: Patterns of Cooperation, Competition and Conflict, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 119–36. Van der Vleuten, Anna (2007) The Price of Gender Equality: Member States and Governance in the European Union, Aldershot: Ashgate. Van der Vleuten, Anna (2019) ‘The European Parliament as a Constant Promoter of Gender Equality: Another European Myth?’ In Petra Ahrens and Lise Rolandsen Agustín (eds), Gendering the European Parliament: Structures, Policies, and Practices, London: Rowman & Littlefield/ECPR Press, 35–49. Verloo, Mieke (2006) ‘Multiple Inequalities, Intersectionality and the European Union’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 13(3): 211–28. Verloo, Mieke (ed.) (2018) Varieties of Opposition to Gender Equality in Europe: Theory, Evidence and Practice, New York: Routledge. Woodward, Alison E. (2004) ‘Building Velvet Triangles: Gender and Informal Governance’. In Thomas Christiansen and Simona Piattoni (eds), Informal Governance and the European Union, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 76–93. Woodward, Alison E. (2016) ‘EU Civil Society and the Crisis: Changing Channels and Organizational Patterns in European Transnational Civil Society’. In Pablo I. Roudrigues, Anna Triandafyllidour and Ruby Gropas (eds), Shifting Paradigms after the Crisis: Legal, Economic and Political Perspectives, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 241–68.

28. Intersectional feminist activisms in Europe: invisibility, inclusivity and affirmation Serena D’Agostino

INTRODUCTION Race-only and gender-only approaches are a particular form of violence that excludes black women’s voices from the discussion of power and politics. Whether out of neglect or deliberate omission, it is a form of silencing when others do not pay attention to their specific cries for justice and equality. (Beaman and Brown, 2019: 230)

Intersectional feminist groups in Europe are not new to mobilising and organising themselves politically. European Black-feminist and Afrofeminist political actions have been, for instance, crucial in the anti-slavery, anti-colonial and socialist politics on the continent (Emejulu and Sobande, 2019: 6). Yet, intersectional feminist activisms – of which Black- and Afro-feminisms are key, although not sole, expressions – have been mostly invisible in, and invisibilised by, both European politics and academia. In this chapter, I engage with broader debates on feminist governance, its ‘immense emancipatory achievements’ and ‘terrible mistakes’ (Halley et al., 2018) from an intersectional activisms perspective. Focusing on the activist roots of the concept, which arose from the women’s movements of the 1970s, I critically reflect on the role of intersectional feminist activisms – such as Black feminism, Afrofeminism and Romani feminism – in contemporary European multi-layered politics and power structures. In particular, I discuss whether and to what extent intersectional feminist groups are actually part of those ‘feminists [who] now walk the halls of power’ (Halley et al., 2018) and how they participate in governance, knowledge production and diffusion processes. As illustrated by Emejulu and Sobande in one of the very few works on Black feminism in contemporary Europe, ‘[l]ocating Black feminist and Afrofeminist politics in Europe is provocative because it is radical counter-storytelling about whose knowledge counts, whose politics matter and who gets to be part of the “European story”’ (Emejulu and Sobande, 2019: 6, emphasis added). Understanding how feminism participates in European governance and who are the feminists that are actually incorporated into state, state-like and state-affiliated power (see Halley et al., 2018) thus requires further exploration of this ‘radical counter-storytelling’ and the invisibilisation of intersectional activisms. On the one hand, a single-strand approach to marginalisation, oppression and inferiorisation has been predominant in both mainstream mobilisations and policymaking in Europe. Namely, social justice movements, civil society organisations and equality bodies have traditionally emerged and developed around one specific form of discrimination – such as racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and so on. On the other hand, European social movement and political intersectionality scholars have only recently started engaging with intersectional activisms. Social movement scholars have conventionally focused on movements mobilising around a single category of oppression and promoting a unified collective identity, such as women’s and anti-racist movements (see, for 347

348  Handbook of feminist governance instance, Fella and Ruzza, 2012). Intersectionality scholars, predominantly within the field of gender studies, have mostly examined intersectionality institutionalisation – namely, how and to what extent intersectionality is integrated into political structures, such as (equality) policies and institutions (see, among others, Krizsán et al., 2012; Lombardo and Rolandsen Agustín, 2011; Lombardo and Verloo, 2009; Rolandsen Agustín, 2013; Verloo, 2006). Academic attention to collective action located at the intersection of several oppressions and minoritisations in Europe has increased in recent years. Among the many factors that have contributed to this shift in focus, two are particularly relevant for the scope of this chapter. First, the re-appropriation of intersectionality by activists positioned at the crossroads of multiple marginalities and movements. This re-appropriation has resulted in the ‘proliferation and dissemination of intersectionality in activists’ and organisations’ discourses’ (Evans and Lépinard, 2020: 2), as well as their increased visibility and participation in European politics, both nationally and transnationally; second, the growing recognition, resonance and articulation of intersectionality as a normative goal and mode of mobilisations (Irvine et al., 2019: 2). Such recognition has brought new challenges in conceptualisation and definitions, as well as new tensions and confrontations between intersectionality as collective identity, self-organising and self-representation, and intersectionality as a strategy and repertoire for inclusivity (Evans and Lépinard, 2020: 291). In this chapter, I define intersectional (feminist) activisms as those forms of mobilisations organising around multiple intersecting oppressions and minoritisations that seek social justice through (radical) transformative change in social and political structures. In particular, I discuss intersectional feminist movements in Europe by focusing on two key issues. First, I address the invisibility of intersectional activisms in European society, politics and academia. I do so by bringing in examples from contemporary European Black feminism, Afrofeminism and Romani feminism. For the sake of clarity, the distinction between Black feminism and Afrofeminism in Europe is not clear-cut. The similarities between the two are indeed manifold and specific characteristics depend on historical legacies and the sociopolitical contexts in which they emerged and developed. Whilst European Black feminism is usually associated with Black feminist movements in the UK, Afrofeminism mostly concerns Black women’s activisms in Continental Europe, whose action is predominantly grounded ‘in the particular and specific histories of colonialism, racial formation and gender hierarchy of the various European nation-states in which Black women live’ (Emejulu and Sobande, 2019: 5). In this chapter, I use Afrofeminism to refer to Black women and women of colour in francophone Europe – namely, France and Belgium. Although intersectional feminist organising in Europe includes a much broader variety of mobilisation actors – such as Muslim feminists, queers of colour, disabled feminists, and so on – I only focus here on intersectional activisms particularly mobilising around issues of race, gender and class. Second, I engage in critical reflection about the ongoing (academic and activist) debate on identity-based intersectionality and inclusionary intersectionality, and ask ‘how intersectionality is and should be deployed’ (Bilge, 2013: 420) when approaching social movements from a critical perspective. In order to push such a discussion forward, I identify some common patterns among the three kinds of intersectional feminisms mentioned above (i.e. Black, Afro- and Romani feminism) – such as, interstitial politics, contestation from within, intersectional resistance, agency and affirmation. This pattern exercise has mostly an analytical scope and is not meant to create a monolithic bloc where all intersectional activisms converge. Likewise, I do not intend in any manner to nullify the specificities of each activist group, nor to essentialise

Intersectional feminist activisms in Europe  349 activists’ identities and intersectional claims. As I have clarified elsewhere (D’Agostino, 2021), contemporary intersectional activisms are a highly heterogeneous form of mobilisations, which differs significantly depending on the context where it emerges and operates, its mission, strategies and repertoires, and activists’ lived experiences and social locations. By way of example, divergent political views exist among Romani women activists engaging in self-organising and mobilisations. Such divergences can be attributed to multiple factors, such as the so-called ‘generational gap’ (see Izsák, 2009) and the tensions between more or less progressive ideologies (see, among others, Corradi, 2018; Jovanović et al., 2015). In order to avoid any essentialised understanding of European Black, Afro- and Romani feminism, I build on Emejulu and Sobande (2019) to broadly define them as radical praxes for liberation and affirmation that identify racialised women (e.g. women of both African and Romani descent, as well as European citizens or migrants) as agents of change. In the next section, I address the first of the two key issues I have referred to in the previous paragraphs – namely, the invisibility of intersectional activisms in European society, politics and academia. I then delve into more critical reflections about intersectionality as collective identity and intersectionality as a repertoire for inclusivity. I end this chapter with some concluding remarks about intersectional agency and affirmation and the need for re-politicising intersectionality in Europe by bringing it back to its activist roots.

INTERSECTIONAL INVISIBILITY AND ACTIVISMS ‘IN THE CRACKS’ Established in 2014 by Romanian Roma actresses Mihaela Drăgan and Zita Moldovan, Giuvlipen is the first independent Roma feminist theatre company in Romania.1 Combining the Romani word for woman, giuvli, and the suffix -ipen, which stands for crowd, the term Giuvlipen is ‘the closest Romani language gets to “feminism”’ (Erizanu, 2017). Giuvlipen is one of the many examples of activists’ use of art as an act of political resistance and affirmation. It was conceived by Romnja2 feminist activists as their ‘main weapon to fight for feminist and anti-racist goals’ (Kokoladze, 2016), as well as to make their art and activisms visible and strive for self-representation. Although Romania has been one of the pioneers of Romani gender politics and Romani feminism in Europe, Romanian Romani women’s intersectional activisms is still disregarded by many. In an interview to Hysteria Magazine a few years after the creation of Giuvlipen, Mihaela Drăgan declared: […] it was quite a surprise to observe through our audiences how invisible Roma women actually were and how the simple fact of our existence was a novelty. (Kokoladze, 2016; emphasis added)

The year 2014 also marked an important time for the visibility of Afrofeminism in France, with the creation of the feminist collective Mwasi.3 Mwasi emerged in a moment when French Afrofeminists were receiving high media attention. The renowned documentary Ouvrir La Voix by Amandine Gay on francophone Black women and their experiences of discrimination in France and Belgium was – for instance – also produced in this year (released in 2017). Some white feminist scholars celebrate the creation of the Mwasi collective as ‘the event mark[ing] the first time, in France, that the term intersectionality was appropriated as a feminist identity’ and stress the key role of intersectionality ‘in the emergence and development of new forms

350  Handbook of feminist governance of feminist activisms which aim to represent the needs and interests of multiply-marginalised women, especially with respect to race’ (Evans and Lépinard, 2020: 1). Interestingly, Mwasi’s activists insist on emphasising that Afrofeminism has been building resistance against patriarchal, racist, capitalist, ableist and colonial French society since the beginning of the 20th century (Awori Othieno and Davis, 2019). By doing so, they contest the idea that the movement is ‘new’, as they see it as a way for invisibilising and erasing ‘Black women’s long history of activisms and theorizing in France’, as well as ‘insult[ing] the intellectual labour of [their] foremothers’ (Awori Othieno and Davis, 2019: 51). These examples concern two different forms of contemporary intersectional feminist activisms in Europe, namely Romani feminism in Romania and Afrofeminism in France. Despite the very different social and political contexts in which these activisms occur, as well as their distinctive characteristics, political views, strategies and repertoires of action, both struggle with ‘intersectional invisibility’ (Purdie-Vaughns and Eibach, 2008). There has been a lack of recognition as political subjects and agents of change by both civil society actors (such as mainstream movements and single-strand organisations) and national and supranational institutions.4 Intersectional invisibility catches multiply-minoritised activists ‘in between’ – namely, in the ‘empty space’ (Kruckenberg, 2010) emerging from the division between distinct movements (e.g. feminist and anti-racist movements), policy fields (e.g. gender equality and anti-discrimination) and human rights regimes (e.g. women’s and minority rights). Single-strand movements in Europe – such as those advocating for (majority) women’s rights and those fighting against racial discrimination – have traditionally disregarded the specific demands of intersectional activist groups.5 As I have observed elsewhere (see D’Agostino, 2015, 2018, 2021), the case of Romani women’s activisms in some Central and Eastern European countries is emblematic. In Romania, for instance, women’s and feminist movements emerging after the fall of the communist regime did not include in their missions and strategies the peculiar intersectional condition of minority women, such as the Romnja (see also Oprea, 2004). Similarly, the Roma rights movement and related non-governmental organisations (NGOs) mushrooming in the region6 in the aftermath of the so-called EU Eastern enlargement (Kóczé, 2012; Ram, 2011) were marked by the invisibility of gender politics and lack of intersectional thinking. In particular, the broader Roma movement considered Romnja activists, especially those declaring themselves as feminists, as both divisive and contentious (see Jovanović et al., 2015; Schultz, 2012). On the one hand, Romani women activists were suspected of causing an internal breach within an already fragmented movement. On the other hand, they were blamed for diffusing a negative image of the Roma vis-à-vis the majority society both at the national and international levels (D’Agostino, 2018). Thus, Romani feminism emerged from and developed within the space between the women’s and Roma rights movements. In doing so, Romani feminists made a creative usage of intersectionality, which allowed them to transform negative into positive (Braidotti, 2010). Namely, they used their intersectional position to translate intersectional invisibility into intersectional resistance and affirmation (particularly interesting in this respect is the case of Romanian Romnja – see D’Agostino, 2018, 2021). Similar analyses have been conducted by scholars of Black feminism worldwide. In her work on US-based Black feminist organisations, Springer (2001: 155, emphasis added) observes that ‘Black feminists’ voices and visions fell between the cracks of the civil rights and women’s movements.’ From the ‘fissures’ that developed within the two movements, Black feminists then crafted their ‘collective identity and basis for organizing that reflected

Intersectional feminist activisms in Europe  351 the intersecting nature of Black womanhood. Black feminists were the first activists to theorize and act upon the intersections of race, gender, and class’ (Springer, 2001: 156). Springer refers to social movement intersectionality operating in the cracks between oppression and the spaces between movements as ‘interstitial politics’ or a ‘politics in the cracks’ (as cited in Broad-Wright, 2017: 45). Such an interstitial politics applies to European Black- and Afrofeminist activisms as well. Black- and Afrofeminists in Europe have indeed engaged with ‘revolutionary political action’ so as to translate their intersectional invisibilisation and silencing into ‘creative and dynamic production of thinking and living otherwise’ (Emejulu and Sobande, 2019: 3). In this respect, the case of contemporary Afrofeminism in Belgium is illustrative.7 Although some believe that Belgium is currently witnessing ‘an Afrofeminist resurgence’ (Grégoire and Ntambwe, 2019: 65), the young Belgian Afrofeminist movement is still contested at different political levels, both in terms of relevance and legitimacy. On the one hand, the movement experiences some contestation from within – namely, from those Afro-women activists who do not identify as feminists (mostly because they associate the term with white female domination) and/or do not connect with the ‘new subversive vocabulary [used] to articulate Afro-women’s daily lived experiences of gendered racism’ – such as, negrophobia, misogynoir, whitemensplaining, male privilege, and so on (Grégoire and Ntambwe, 2019: 70). On the other hand, both the mainstream (predominantly white) Belgian feminist movement and the male-led Afro-Belgian organisations tend to engage with a sort of ‘soft resistance’ towards the growing Afrofeminist movement. While the former considers it a danger to the universality of the broader feminist movement, the latter tends not to take its political agenda seriously. As for Romani feminists, accused by some members of the Roma rights movement of being gadje-ised8 (D’Agostino, 2021: 182), Belgian Afrofeminists are labelled by some Afro-Belgian male activists as ‘black women contaminated by white feminism’ (Grégoire and Ntambwe, 2019: 71). For clarity, the aforesaid analogy between American and European Black- and Afrofeminisms is limited to this specific discussion about the ‘politics in the cracks’ and does not intend in any manner to universalise the Black American experience nor to contribute to importing American race politics to Europe. As observed by Emejulu and Sobande (2019: 4–5), by applying the dominant discourses of racial, gender and intersectional politics of North American Black feminists to Europe, we would risk further silencing the particular experiences of oppression and histories of resistance and liberation of European Black- and Afrofeminists. This is obviously not the intention of this chapter. On the contrary, by focusing on Black, Afro- and Romani feminist movements in Europe through the experiences of activists, it aims to foster reflection about (re)positioning intersectional activisms from the margins to the very centre of European politics and academia. Intersectional activisms need to be recentred in intersectional studies (Broad-Wright, 2017: 41), especially in (Continental) Europe, where ‘there is a certain propensity … to discuss intersectionality without much empirical grounding’ (Bilge, 2013: 411). European feminist scholarship on intersectionality is indeed criticised for contributing to de-politicising and whitening intersectionality (Bilge, 2013, 2014). In particular, it is blamed for detaching intersectionality from its activist roots and ‘confining [it] to an academic exercise of metatheoretical contemplation’ (Bilge, 2013: 405). Thus, it contributes to neutralising the critical potential of intersectionality as a tool for attaining social justice. European intersectionality scholars are also criticised for diffusing a ‘narrative [that] puts gender at the core of the

352  Handbook of feminist governance intersectional project and leaves out the constitutive role of race’ (Bilge, 2014: 1), thereby erasing the origins of intersectionality in Black feminist thought and activisms. Such a ‘whitening of intersectionality’ reinforces a Eurocentric model of knowledge production, where the contributions of those who have multiple minority identities and are marginalised social actors are overlooked or excluded from debate (Bilge, 2013: 412). In order to overcome such invisibility in knowledge production, intersectional feminist scholars in Europe have had ‘to create [them]selves from scratch in environments that usually construe [them] exclusively as activists and/or research subjects and never imagine them as scholars who inhabit a space where knowledge is produced’ (Kóczé, 2018: 112, emphasis added). In doing so, they have had to engage with a (radical) ‘creativity of resistance’ (Emejulu and Sobande, 2019: 6) by transgressing the constructed binaries between racism and sexism, and between activisms and scholarship (Kóczé, 2018).

INTERSECTIONAL MOBILISATIONS BETWEEN INCLUSIVITY AND AFFIRMATION Discussions over intersectional invisibility and activisms ‘in the cracks’ show how intersectionality can actually act as a ‘double-edged sword’ (Rolandsen Agustín, 2013) for those activists positioned at the crossroads of multiple marginalities. On the one hand, it can contribute to making them invisible as significant interlocutors in the political arena. On the other hand, it can serve as a tool for affirming new visions and strategies and crafting new mobilisations spaces (on this point, see Beaman and Brown, 2019). Intersectionality moulds social and political mobilisations in diverse ways. Existing European research on the role of intersectionality in social movements has mostly addressed the issue in terms of politics of inclusivity. Gender and sexuality scholars (Laperrière and Lépinard, 2016; Lépinard, 2014) have asked whether and to what extent traditional social movements are inclusive of marginalised minority groups, and have developed concepts such as ‘intersectional recognition’ and ‘intersectional solidarity’ (Lépinard, 2014) to define the interaction between the former and the latter. Evans and Lépinard’s recent work, Intersectionality in Feminist and Queer Movements: Confronting Privileges (2020), actually originates from scholarly conversations around inclusivity.9 Extending this initial scope to broader discussions around the concept of privilege, Evans and Lépinard explore three ways in which intersectionality operates within contemporary feminist and queer movements, namely as a collective identity, as a strategy for forming coalitions, and as a repertoire for inclusivity. The first way in which intersectionality is practised relates to the need of multiply minoritised groups to self-organise around a specific intersectional identity in order to represent oneself. Claiming intersectionality as an identity and collective action strategy brings us back to the very origins of the concept, namely its activist roots (Bilge, 2013, 2014; Broad-Wright, 2017; Evans and Lépinard, 2020). The second approach addresses intersectionality as a coalition-building strategy among different mobilisations actors and at different political levels. On the one hand, coalitional intersectionality has the potential to foster descriptive and substantive representation of multiply minoritised groups. By way of example, Romani women activists have often emphasised the importance of having alliances ‘on different levels’ and in ‘multiple arenas’ (Jovanović et al., 2015) – that is, both within the wider Romani movement and with other advocacy groups, such as non-Romani women/feminist constellations – for

Intersectional feminist activisms in Europe  353 their own recognition as relevant political interlocutors.10 On the other hand, it implies the risk of co-optation and asymmetric relations of power amongst those taking part in coalitions (Evans and Lépinard, 2020: 8–9). The third kind refers to intersectionality as a strategy and repertoire for inclusivity and solidarity used by activists to transform their organisations. In particular, the focus here is on the composition of (mainstream) movement organisations – namely, whether and to what extent they are inclusive and representative of multiply marginalised activist groups. The logic of inclusivity significantly builds on the dichotomy between established (mainstream) organisations and grassroots (minority) ‘constituencies’. It suggests that the more embedded a minority ‘constituency’ is within the wider mobilisations framework, the stronger is its agency and substantive representation. The predominance of the inclusivity-based approach among intersectional mobilisations scholars in Europe – where intersectionality is mostly used ‘as a proxy for being inclusive’ (Evans and Lépinard, 2020: 289) – fosters reflection on ‘how intersectionality is and should be deployed’ (Bilge, 2013: 420) when approaching social movements from a critical perspective. In particular, it opens up the debate about activisms which centre on intersectionality as a collective identity and tool for resistance and affirmation, and inclusionary intersectionality. On the one hand, the logic of inclusivity contributes to furthering empirical and theoretical research on how contemporary mobilisations for social justice address difference. On the other hand, it entails two main limitations. First, by assuming that the more inclusive a traditional (single-strand) movement is, the better represented are its minority ‘constituencies’, it risks fostering asymmetric relations of power between the two – as it is up to the former ‘to decide’ how and/or to what extent the latter should be ‘included’ (D’Agostino, 2021). Second, by centring the analysis on mainstream movements, it positions intersectional minority voices at a subordinate level of investigation. It thus risks ‘encourag[ing] research on intersectional mobilizations which reproduces the same hegemonic discourses and dynamics of power that intersectionality aims to challenge’ (D’Agostino, 2021: 173). Intersectional feminist (minority) activists and scholars in Europe have often opposed this approach and proposed a distinct narrative and logic of analysis focused on intersectional agency and intersectional resistance. The recently published work The Romani Women’s Movement: Struggles and Debates in Central and Eastern Europe (Kóczé et al., 2018) is, for instance, a collaborative project through which a group of Romani and non-Romani activists and scholars reveal how gender-related inequalities have informed and shaped the agenda and strategies of the broader Roma rights movement, and how Romani women and queer activists have actually contributed to gendering Romani politics. As I have observed elsewhere, the emphasis here is on the fact that ‘intersectional minority activists have agency, irrespective of their belonging (or not) to a broader consolidated movement. As agents of change, they are able to translate their experiences of structural inequalities into political battles and to challenge mainstreamed agendas’ (D’Agostino, 2021: 173). Intersectional activisms can then arise as political phenomena per se – thus entailing a multitude of ‘new’ power dynamics, alliances, voices, issues and sites. Previous empirical studies have already confirmed such an observation. In her research on Black and Chicana feminisms in America’s second wave, Benita Roth (2004) shows, for instance, how social movement intersectionality does not only happen within one movement, or ‘in the cracks’ between movements, but in certain circumstances manifests as multiple stand-alone movements and finally translates into distinct feminisms (Broad-Wright, 2017: 45). As elucidated by Beaman and Brown (2019: 227) in their recent work on Black women’s activism and #BlackLivesMatter

354  Handbook of feminist governance in the United States and France, ‘it is black women’s identities and experiences that motivate their advocacy and activism [and] how they enact intersectionality.’ Building on their own intersectional lived experiences and unique ways of understanding the world (Collins, 1990), Black women activists thus shape their political behaviour – in both formal and informal politics – and become agents of change and capable political actors. In doing so, they ‘impact the system and social structures that seek to oppress and marginalize them at every turn’ (Beaman and Brown, 2019: 228). Understanding Black women’s experiences, subjectivities and social positionings is then key to understanding their intersectional activisms as well. This brings us back to our initial reflection on the tensions and confrontations between intersectionality as collective identity and inclusionary intersectionality. Namely, it emphasises how crucial such confrontations are for ‘ensur[ing] that intersectionality retains its critical potential to challenge privileges’ (Evans and Lépinard, 2020: 291) – thus leading to (radically) transformative politics and social justice. Intersectional minority activists – such as Black, Afro- and Romani feminists – employ identity-based intersectionality and self-organising as tools for claiming their agency and affirming themselves as political actors. Their practices of intersectionality are marked by everyday resistance, self-representation and the creation of ‘safe spaces’ that often consist of non-mixed working environments, as well as slogans such as ‘nothing about us without us’ (see Bogdán et al., 2015) and ‘those who fight for us, without us, are against us’ (see Awori Othieno and Davis, 2019). These practices show that some of the key concepts related to intersectional activisms – like ‘inclusivity’, ‘coalitions’ and ‘alliances’ – are not necessarily acknowledged by intersectional feminists as elements of ‘good activisms’ per se (see Evans and Lépinard, 2020: 289). In a recent interview for the magazine Médor, Belgian Afrofeminist activist Betel Mabille has, for instance, made a clear distinction between allié (ally) and complice (accomplice). In Mabille’s words, while the former designates an individual who is not directly discriminated against but nonetheless supports somebody else’s fight against discrimination, the latter implies a step forward. Mere solidarity is not enough; it is necessary to actively participate in such a fight by putting oneself in danger when injustices occur and building bridges with others (Traub and Engels, 2020: 57).11 This serves as an example to further emphasise how crucial the voices, experiences and positionalities of intersectional (minority) activists and scholars actually are in the process of knowledge production concerning contemporary intersectional feminist activisms in Europe and beyond.

CONCLUDING REMARKS In this chapter, I have discussed intersectional feminist activisms in contemporary Europe. In particular, I have focused on two key debates. The first concerns the invisibility of intersectional activisms in European society, politics and academia. The second refers to the tensions and confrontations between intersectionality as collective identity and intersectionality as a repertoire for inclusivity. In doing so, I have used examples from intersectional forms of mobilisations that politically organise around issues of race, gender and class – namely, European Black, Afro- and Romani feminisms. The discussions presented in this chapter have shown that despite the growing political and scholarly attention to intersectional mobilising, intersectionality ‘is still far from the norm in social movements or in social movement scholarship’ (Irvine et al., 2019: 2). Whilst in contexts

Intersectional feminist activisms in Europe  355 such as the USA, Canada and the UK, the ‘normalisation’ of intersectionality is ongoing and ‘good activist practices are … assessed in relation to this norm’, in most continental European countries – such as Belgium, Germany and France – ‘it does not seem to constitute yet a shared norm’ (Evans and Lépinard, 2020: 290, emphasis added). In order for a substantial normalisation to occur, both scholars and activists should engage with a process of re-politicisation of intersectionality. Namely, they should contribute to refocusing intersectionality on its activist roots and relocating race and racism at the core of contemporary feminist intersectional politics in Europe. To do so, activists positioned at the crossroads of multiple marginalities and movements should be recognised and valued as political subjects and agents of change who confront and combat the interlocking systems of power shaping their lives (Bilge, 2013: 410). Recentring intersectional activisms in intersectionality studies (Broad-Wright, 2017) thus implies a significant reappraisal of intersectional agency, whereby the focus should move to activists’ identities, lived experiences and social locations. As observed by Beaman and Brown (2019: 231), ‘as intersectionality has become more mainstream and theoretical, it has moved away from the black feminist standpoint tradition of highlighting experiences.’ Going back to such a tradition is thus essential. Through the reappropriation of intersectionality, contemporary European Black, Afro- and Romani feminists have been engaging with a creative process of transformation (Braidotti, 2010) that denotes a radical repositioning of the social and political actors facing multiple forms of minoritisation. In this chapter, I have explored the possibilities of a shift in the analytical focus from the predominant emphasis on inclusivity towards a new politics of affirmation, whereby intersectional minority activists move from the periphery to the very centre of the enquiry. In order to foster a ‘critical turn’ to the study of contemporary intersectional mobilisations in Europe and to contribute to a ‘radical’ change in the way knowledge is currently produced, ‘further research should therefore explore intersectional activism as a new activist repertoire’ (Evans and Lépinard, 2020: 291) and the contributions of scholars with multiple minority identities should become central to academic and political debates around intersectionality.

NOTES 1. See https://​giuvlipen​.com. 2. The term ‘Romnja’ stands for ‘Romani women’ (pl.) in Romanes, i.e. the Romani language. 3. Mwasi means ‘woman’ in Lingala, a Bantu language mostly spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. More information on the Mwasi Afrofeminist Collective is available at https://​www​ .mwasicollectif​.org/​en/​. 4. As for the case of Romani feminism in Romania, concrete examples of single-strand institutional and non-institutional political actors and their interactions with intersectional feminist activists are illustrated in D’Agostino (2015, 2018). 5. For instance, previous studies on Romani women’s activism (see D’Agostino, 2018) have shown that Brussels-based Roma and women’s advocacy groups and organisations, such as the European Roma Information Office (ERIO), the European Roma Grassroots Organizations Network (ERGO), the European Network Against Racism (ENAR) and the European Women Lobby (EWL), have mostly addressed the rights of Romani women and their socioeconomic empowerment as minor questions, subordinated to the core issue of their advocacy work, i.e. Roma inclusion, anti-racism and gender equality. 6. The use of terms such as Central and Eastern European ‘region’ and the identification of common ‘regional patterns’ has a practical purpose and does not aim to foster any regional homogeneity

356  Handbook of feminist governance discourse on gender politics in former European socialist states. To fully understand the emergence and development of particular forms of feminist collective action across different countries, as well as (context-specific) challenges to intersectional feminisms, the focus on domestic specificities is indeed essential in the study of European politics in general, and Central and Eastern European politics in particular (on this point, see D’Agostino, 2021: 183–4). 7. The Belgian Afrofeminist movement is mainly francophone and has recently (its landmark year being 2017) become visible in the wider cultural and activist arenas in Belgium thanks to a new generation of Afro-women activists particularly engaged with issues of postcoloniality, intersectionality and self-determination. For a more in-depth analysis, see Grégoire and Ntambwe (2019). 8. The term gadje is used by Romani people to indicate those who do not belong to the Roma communities, such as (but not exclusively) majority group members. This chapter refers to gadje-isation as the process of influence and/or the transfer of cultural norms, values and behaviours from the gadje to the Roma (see D’Agostino 2021, endnote 18). 9. This edited volume results from the workshop ‘Addressing Intersectionality: Social Movements and the Politics of Inclusivity’, organised by Evans and Lépinard in 2018 in the framework of the ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops (Nicosia, 10–14 April 2018). 10. Specific examples of the political advantages for Romanian Romnja activism deriving from intersectional coalitions and alliances are discussed in D’Agostino (2018). 11. Own translation into English of original text in French reads: Allié est un mot militant désignant des personnes non discriminées qui décident de soutenir une cause. Sauf que ce terme est devenu tellement superficiel qu’on utilise le mot complice pour insister: ce n’est pas juste se montrer solidaire et puis ne rien faire. C’est se mettre en danger face aux injustices et faire le relais avec les autres.

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358  Handbook of feminist governance Roth, Benita (2004) Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schultz, Debra L. (2012) ‘Translating Intersectionality Theory into Practice: A Tale of Romani-Gadže Feminist Alliance’, Signs 38(1): 37–43. Springer, Kimberly (2001) ‘The Interstitial Politics of Black Feminist Organizations’, Meridians 1(2): 155–91. Traub, Muna and Philippe Engels (2020) ‘Laissez-nous parler!’, Médor 20: 55–61. Verloo, Mieke (2006) ‘Multiple Inequalities, Intersectionality and the European Union’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 13(3): 211–28.

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

INTRODUCTION Gender-based violence against women is a fundamental gender equality problem that is seen both as a cause and as an effect of gender inequality. While violence against women (VAW) is a relatively late addition to the spectrum of gender equality policies, it is nevertheless a fascinating field to look at from the point of view of feminist governance. On the one hand, it is interesting because of the logics of the issue, the ways in which it challenges mainstream policy thinking and becomes a prominent part of a feminist transformative agenda. On the other hand, it is interesting because of the innovations in governance which it has facilitated, and the central role of feminist activism in developing these. While the governance of VAW is thus a critical issue for feminist governance, given its transformative proposals it can also become a field of contestation. In this chapter, we discuss the governance of violence against women in three parts. First, we discuss the specificity of the issue in terms of governance and the governance responses to it developed by feminists in local and national contexts. Second, we discuss it as a specific transnational governance issue. Finally, we show how and why the feminist governance of VAW has become a major terrain for recent ‘anti-gender’ mobilisations in Europe. In particular, we examine the resistance to the 2011 Council of Europe Convention on Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (the Istanbul Convention). The Convention is currently the most comprehensive international legal and policy instrument addressing VAW. It builds extensively on previous international norms as well as lessons from policy pioneers in the field and as such it embodies the most up-to-date feminist knowledge on combatting VAW.

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AS A SPECIFIC FEMINIST GOVERNANCE CHALLENGE Protection from VAW is a relative latecomer to the feminist agenda and to human rights. However, once it reached the international human rights agenda, the issue spread at a remarkable pace and scale (Htun and Weldon, 2012). Feminist advocacy has been the driver of this change (Htun and Weldon, 2018; Mazur, 2002) and also the main protagonist in developing and putting in place policy interventions to combat VAW both at the national and the international level. This section looks at a few of the most prominent feminist innovations introduced in the process aiming to improve responses to VAW and the consequences of these innovations for meeting feminist objectives. 359

360  Handbook of feminist governance Feminist activists located in different domains and policy levels have been instrumental in reforming criminal law and codifying a variety of new crimes that capture forms of VAW and gender discrimination. These include the recognition of marital rape and domestic violence, reframing of rape from a crime of property or morality into crimes against persons, their bodily and sexual integrity, criminalisation of stalking and sexual harassment (MacKinnon, 1979; Zippel, 2006), or recognising the link between rape and genocide in international law (Russell-Brown, 2003). In addition, feminist actors developed innovative services and policy interventions directed at survivors of violence, but also attempted to mainstream feminist thinking in wider governance models. Specific forms of intervention were at the core of the early waves of feminist mobilisation engaging with VAW. The first waves of mobilisation engaging specifically with VAW took the form of shelter movements and self-help movements (Dobash and Dobash, 1992; Elman, 2003; Matthews, 1994; Schechter, 1982; Weldon, 2002). At the core of these movements was, on the one hand, the articulation and recognition of the problem of VAW as a socially cross-cutting issue that affected women universally; on the other hand, the attempt to provide support and empowerment to victims of violence (Dobash and Dobash, 1992; Edwards, 1987). These early initiatives set up innovative services and strategies to tackle and denounce VAW, such as shelter services, self-help groups, speak outs, rape crisis centres and ‘take back the night’ marches from later in the 1970s. These activities were intended to achieve recognition for the problem, but also to provide support and empowerment to survivors largely autonomously from states, where states were perceived as hostile, patriarchal and reluctant to engage with violence occurring in what was seen as the private sphere at that time (Dobash and Dobash, 1992; Matthews, 1994). The community-based and empowerment-driven shelter and crisis intervention models developed during these early years along with different rituals for presenting testimony (such as tribunals or speak outs or marches) and self-help groups. Their added value was in providing services to women while also serving as political arenas, where social transformative action could be undertaken through feminist empowerment. These early initiatives stood at the foundation of challenging the sharp division between the private and the public, and asserting the private as political and as potential location for abuse of women’s rights. While the early years of feminist engagement with VAW in some countries were marked by a rhetoric and practice of autonomy from states, as awareness concerning violence against women increased and generated more demand for support, state involvement became inevitable. Models developed by women’s organisations became the standards for similar institutions now funded and increasingly also run by state institutions (Elman, 2003; Walker, 1990). Some of the initial services moved from full collectives to hybrid models (see Chapter 9 in this Handbook). As state actors took centre stage in policies addressing violence against women, the specific feminist elements of empowerment and transformation were increasingly threatened by bureaucratic and neoliberal state operations. In the US context, analysis showed how feminist elements of intervention were replaced by an individualist, therapeutic notion of intervention (Bumiller, 2008) in line with principles of the neoliberal state. Another innovative feminist contribution to governance modes was the coordinated community intervention model and perpetrator programmes developed initially in the early 1980s in Duluth, Minnesota (Hester and Lilley, 2014; Shepard and Pence, 1999). These programmes aimed to move beyond the shelter-based protection model to a coordinated intervention model

Feminist governance in the field of violence against women  361 in which victim-centred intervention is secured by the coordinated action of all stakeholders, including police, prosecutors, health care, social services, probation, child protection and women’s rights groups, and other civil society groups representing locally vulnerable populations (Shepard and Pence, 1999; Walby et al., 2015). Women’s rights groups had a particularly important role to play in keeping the victim-centred approach and mainstreaming feminist perspectives into intervention modes (Martin, 2007; Walby et al., 2015). As such, coordinated community responses can also be seen as mechanisms that mainstream the feminist approach to intervention and counteract the appropriation of VAW interventions by alternative policy logics. The other element of the Duluth programme that contributed to establishing a feminist logic of intervention into VAW was the targeted perpetrator programmes geared to address power and control mechanisms underlying the logic of violence against women (Hester and Lilley, 2014). These programmes were geared towards male perpetrators rather than protecting women and aimed to transform stereotypical and power-driven attitudes and behaviours, rather than putting the emphasis on the traditional criminal intervention of sanctioning. While the efficiency of these perpetrator programmes is discussed especially if reliant on self-referral and not made mandatory (Stark, 2007), and the perceived diversion of public funding from chronically underfunded women’s services towards treating men makes them controversial, overall, they are considered as one of the successful feminist models of intervention that disrupted previous modes of thinking about violence (Hester and Lilley, 2014). Finally, feminist transnational advocacy also successfully framed VAW as a human rights issue (Keck and Sikkink, 1998). The process not only resulted in a series of new international documents, as described in the next section of this chapter, but fundamentally changed human rights thinking. While the traditional human rights paradigm considered states as the main perpetrators of human rights violations, the feminist approach to VAW, and later children’s rights advocacy, directed the attention to the role of private actors, such as members of the family, the immediate community or in any case people known by the victims as the main perpetrators (Edwards, 2011). Even if states were not directly involved in perpetrating such abuse they had responsibility to address it. Achieving this paradigm shift along with mainstreaming references to women’s rights more generally, and VAW more specifically in international human rights governance, was a major success of feminist transnational advocacy (Kelly, 2005). This huge success, however, also came at a cost. In order to emphasise resonance with mainstream human rights and also to maintain the wide scope of the advocacy efforts, transformative elements of the feminist paradigm were played down, and only partially and with limited enforceability integrated into the international human rights framework (Kelly, 2005). A norm concerning state obligations to combat VAW was created, but its feminist transformative elements did not become mandatory elements of enforcement. This allowed the appropriation of feminist agendas for the pursuit of alternative objectives (Merry Engle, 2006; Zwingel, 2005). With the growing involvement of states and international organisations, the importance of public–private partnerships between women’s groups and state actors emerged as fundamental in governing VAW interventions. Women’s rights organisations stood for a conscious design and implementation of services and policies in accordance with a feminist analysis of the problem and feminist outcome, focusing on three primary goals – protection, prosecution and prevention – addressing power inequalities in a wide variety of realms. Where partnership was difficult or impossible, VAW interventions could easily be co-opted or appropriated by alternative logics of intervention.

362  Handbook of feminist governance These processes of appropriation of VAW interventions provided one of the main venues for feminist debates about financial and organisational autonomy from states. Co-option of feminist objectives was widely discussed in this field as a problematic issue (Bumiller, 2008; Kelly, 2005; Matthews, 1994). This was a core reason of why feminists in many places opted for autonomous organising, though some levels of cooperation with states was unavoidable in order to respond to the demand for services from women victims of violence (Matthews, 1994; Roggeband, 2004). Yet, in other places, feminists were more open to cooperation with state actors (Elman, 2003; Roggeband, 2004, 2012). While autonomous organising had always been vulnerable to limited resources and availability of voluntary work and charity, organisations dependent on state resources were more prone to co-option of their agendas as well as state budget restructuring (Elman, 2003). Matthews’ (1994) analysis of conceptions of autonomy in the context of rape movements pointed to the need to understand autonomy dually: at the practical as well as at the ideological level. She argued that while autonomy is critical for pursuing transformative feminist objectives, providing alternatives to state action is not the only way to achieve autonomy. Instead, she proposed a more complex understanding, which is based on a critical engagement with states, recognisably the main provider of resources for addressing VAW, including domestic violence. Matthews (1994) further noted the discrepancy between a more radical understanding of autonomy at the ideological level versus a more engaging approach towards the state at the practical, institutional and resource levels. Her suggestion was institutionalisation while keeping a critical standpoint and remaining autonomous on another level. Arnold and Ake (2013) addressed the tension between autonomy and institutionalised cooperation with states by pointing to the complexity of different streams of activism within women’s movements and the benefits of insider–outsider cooperation.

THE TRANSNATIONAL GOVERNANCE OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN VAW became part of the global development and human rights agenda due to the persistent work of transnational feminist advocacy networks (Keck and Sikkink, 1998). Several important events triggered international feminist networking on VAW. Tracing these events clearly points to the trajectory of VAW in transnational feminist governance reforms. In 1975, the United Nations (UN) first World Conference on Women, convened in Mexico City, gave an important impetus to feminist organising at both national and international levels (Friedman, 2003; Jaquette, 1994; Keck and Sikkink, 1998). The conference made gender a political issue and promoted international networking between feminists from across the globe, but VAW was not yet on the agenda. One year later, in March 1976, the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women gathered over 2,000 women from 40 countries. The event was created with the intention to ‘make public the full range of crimes’ committed against women in all cultures (Russell and Van de Ven, 1976). The initiators Diana Russell and Nicole Van de Ven were inspired by Bertrand Russell’s International War Crimes Tribunal, a people’s tribunal on crimes committed in the Vietnam War. The concept of VAW was not yet used, and instead activists were running separate campaigns against rape, battering and incest and some more context specific forms of violence like sexual torture of political prisoners in Latin America, female genital mutilation in Africa and dowry deaths in India. Unlike issues that previously created division between feminists, the issue of violence helped to bring together

Feminist governance in the field of violence against women  363 activists from different contexts and with different intersectional positions (Keck and Sikkink, 1998). The UN Decade for Women (1976–85) and global conferences helped to further catalyse exchanges and transnational cooperation among feminists and opened new international policy arenas to be targeted (Alvarez, 2009; Keck and Sikkink, 1998). The UN, and also the Organization of American States (OAS), provided a specific strategic framework that helped feminists to frame women’s rights as human rights and VAW as a violation of women’s human rights (Bunch, 1992; Meyer, 1999). This led to naming VAW a priority issue in the Nairobi Forward Looking Strategies (1985), the first unanimously adopted intergovernmental document which defined the concept of VAW comprehensively (Joachim, 2007; Pietilä and Vickers, 1990). The UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) initially did not include any references to violence against women as a form of discrimination. As part of its norm work, the CEDAW Committee adopted the comprehensive General Recommendation No. 19 (1992) introducing the concept of gender-based violence and recognising it as a form of discrimination ‘that seriously inhibits women’s ability to enjoy rights and freedoms on a basis of equality with men’. States parties were now asked to report on combatting VAW under their CEDAW reporting obligations. Following the Vienna Conference on Human Rights and the Tribunal staged there providing testimony on VAW, in 1993 the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women in which governments agreed that ‘States should condemn violence against women and should not invoke any custom, tradition or religious consideration to avoid their obligations with respect to its elimination … [and] Develop penal, civil, labour and administrative sanctions in domestic legislation to punish and redress the wrongs caused to women who are subjected to violence’ (Article 4). Together with the CEDAW jurisprudence, the Declaration provided a normative framework which defined VAW and obliged states to take measures with the aim of eliminating such violence. As a Declaration it was not legally binding on member states, but it nonetheless recommended a series of specific legislative, educational and administrative measures to be taken by states and thus legitimised pressure by feminist activists on ‘their’ states. Furthermore, in 1994 the UN Commission on Human Rights also decided to appoint a UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women. In 1999, the CEDAW Committee also adopted the Optional Protocol to the CEDAW, providing an individual complaints procedure in cases of discrimination, including VAW. These international rituals, documents and institutions indicate an emerging global consensus on VAW and the emergence of transnational governance to combat it. The evolution of these norms and institutions continued under the auspices of CEDAW reporting as well as through the large number of cases brought before the CEDAW Committee under the Optional Protocol (Zwingel, 2005). However, there was still a lot of space for states to decide on the scope, depth and gender sensitivity of their actions. Feminists were more successful at the regional level in the push for binding international law on VAW. The first regional treaty uniquely devoted to violence against women was the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women adopted June 1994 in Belém do Pará, Brazil by the OAS General Assembly (Friedman, 2009; Roggeband, 2016). The OAS Convention, developed in the midst of the wider transnational mobilisation described above, adopted a feminist interpretation of the problem and offered a broad definition of VAW and its scope, dealing with physical, sexual and psychological forms of violence whether taking place at home, in the community or

364  Handbook of feminist governance in the public sphere, and whether perpetrated by state or non-state actors (Friedman, 2009; Roggeband, 2016). The Belém do Pará Convention obliges state parties ‘to pursue, by all appropriate means and without delay, policies to prevent, punish and eradicate such violence’ and it specifically defines the compliance mechanisms designed to supervise enforcement of the treaty (Articles 7 and 12). A second regional treaty is the Maputo Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, adopted in 2003 by the African Union, and entered into force in 2005. The Protocol makes VAW a core aspect of women’s right to dignity and the right to life, integrity and security of the person. It commits states to eliminate all practices ‘based on the idea of the inferiority or the superiority of either of the sexes, or on stereotyped roles for women and men’ (Article 2.2) and to ‘enact and enforce laws to prohibit all forms of violence against women … whether the violence takes place in private or public’ (Article 4.2), and a series of other specific measures to combat VAW. The third regional treaty, the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combatting violence against women and domestic violence, the Istanbul Convention (IC), adopted in 2011, is so far the most comprehensive international treaty dealing with VAW. It moves the international legal framework a step further by establishing a legally binding definition of VAW as ‘a violation of human rights and a form of discrimination against women’ and establishes a strong link between VAW and gender inequality. As such, it embodies the most up-to-date feminist expertise on combatting VAW (Acar and Popa, 2016). On top of a detailed framework for criminal justice interventions, it includes complex packages of action devoted to protection of victims and prevention of VAW and domestic violence (Möschel, 2021), as well as measures to empower victims (Article 18) to overcome the consequences of violence. The Convention mandates the use of a gender-sensitive perspective on all measures implemented under the Convention, including promoting equality between women and men as well as empowerment of women (Article 6) and the inclusion of civil society groups in most actions under the Convention. The IC introduces a paradigm shift for many countries in Europe by making progress towards a complex VAW intervention and monitoring model. The IC covers primarily Council of Europe (CoE) member states,1 but it is open for signature by other states not members of the CoE and may also serve as a catalyst for boosting the fragmented European Union (EU) governance structure for VAW (Roggeband, 2021). Feminist observers have noted that the EU’s initiatives on VAW comprise a limited set of directives combatting specific aspects of gender-based violence, mainly in areas where the EU has legal competences, like human trafficking (free movement) and sexual harassment in the workplace (internal market).2 In addition, the EU has developed a range of soft law measures like declarations, awareness-raising campaigns, studies and capacity-building programmes and funding mechanisms aimed to sponsor cooperative action along these lines intended to address the wider issue of VAW (Montoya, 2013). Ratification of the IC by the EU is opposed by several member states while the European Parliament and the European Commission (EC) continue to support it. In its Gender Equality Strategy (2020: 3) the EC stated that accession to the Council of Europe Convention is a key priority and that in case this remains blocked ‘it will propose measures to achieve the same objectives as the Istanbul Convention’. The three regional treaties are key forms of feminist governance in the field of VAW. They reveal the central role of feminist activism in pushing for gender sensitive governance instruments, and they demonstrate, though not to the same degree, the centrality in the feminist paradigm of linking VAW to gender inequality. Women’s rights activists and feminist experts

Feminist governance in the field of violence against women  365 and scholars were included in the preparation and drafting of these international treaties (Acar and Popa, 2016; Friedman, 2009; Joachim, 2007; Zippel, 2006). Women’s rights organisations also play a central role in the implementation of these policies at the national level and the monitoring mechanisms of the OAS Convention (MESECVI) and the IC (GREVIO) draw on feminist expertise and actors.

OPPOSITION Similarly to the Belém do Pará Convention, which is the most ratified instrument in the inter-American system,3 the Istanbul Convention at first emerged as a landslide victory for gender equality norms with 34 ratifications by 2019.4 However, along with the wave of ratifications the Convention has also become a major site of contestation at national as well as at the EU level (Berthet, 2021). As a result many governments, in particular in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), have refused to ratify it (Krizsán and Roggeband, 2021) and Turkey actually withdrew from the Convention in 2021 after having ratified it in 2012. In 2018, Bulgaria was the first country to block ratification, followed by Hungary in 2020. Processes of ratification are pending and also extremely contested in the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia. In addition, some countries like Turkey that initially ratified the Convention have expressed their wish to withdraw. Opposition to the feminist governance of VAW goes back to the years when the VAW issue reached the feminist agenda. The Vatican, while accepting the legitimacy of VAW as a problem, already stated its concern about making the link between VAW and gender inequality in its statements at the Beijing Conference (Buss, 1998). Contestation in recent years takes these early efforts to oppose gender transformation to new levels (Graff et al., 2019). Opposition to the IC comes from a loose set of actors including relatively new civil society organisations and think tanks, acting together with established actors such as organised religion and political parties and state actors (Krizsán and Roggeband, 2021). Who initiates and leads this opposition varies across countries; for instance, in Poland it is strongly orchestrated by the Roman Catholic Church, whereas in Bulgaria and Croatia (religious) civil society organisations take the initiative and in Hungary, opposition comes from the state, which is also the case in Poland since the Law and Order party took office in 2015 (Krizsán and Roggeband, 2021). While the anti-IC campaigns may be orchestrated by different actors, various non-governmental organisations are the backbone of all of these mobilisations. These include organisations that focus on the defence of the family, traditional and national values, opposing different aspects of liberal democracy including in this context progressive, rights-based approaches to gender equality and LGBTI+ issues. Many of these organisations are tied to religious traditions and churches, but not all of them. Opposition is also backed by some of the traditional opponents of VAW policies like men’s rights organisations, family protection and children’s rights groups. And, finally, they are now also joined by right-wing nationalist groups concerned about national sovereignty and the protection of traditional, national values. Oppositional actors are driven by two core concerns: first, they focus on the transformative aspects of the Convention and the supposed ‘gender ideology’ of the IC. Second, they view the Convention as a threat to national values and culture, and an instrument of foreign intervention challenging national sovereignty and democratic control. The IC introduces terminology of VAW and gender not previously used in policy debates in the CEE region and puts the, so far

366  Handbook of feminist governance largely silenced, issue of gender equality at the centre. Opponents resist the use of gender in the Convention arguing that gender is a problematic legal category, not in line with a ‘traditional’ or ‘constitutional’ binary understanding of sex (Krizsán and Roggeband, 2021). For instance, the Hungarian think tank Center for Fundamental Rights argued that the Convention ‘rules out the definition of biological sex and introduces genders instead’ so that ‘nobody could be simply a man or woman anymore, instead would belong to one of the endless artificially created gender categories’. Or the Croatian conservative Catholic organisation Vigilare argues that ‘[the Convention] seeks to introduce into the Croatian legislative framework the notion of gender, which does not exist, neither in the Constitution of Croatia, nor in the constitutions of other countries’. Opponents represent the IC as a ‘Trojan horse’ used by proponents of gender ideology to smuggle their ideas into law under the cover of an international treaty combatting VAW, an ideology aimed at transforming traditional socio-cultural norms including those relating to the family (Hungarian NGO Center for Human Dignity). The IC is seen to endanger national traditions, religious doctrine, traditional heterosexual families and children. It is said to create opportunities for ‘enforcing same-sex marriages’ and introduce school programs for studying homosexuality and transvestism (Bulgaria, IMRO; see Cheresheva, 2018). The Bulgarian NGO association Society and Values argues that the adoption of the IC will lead to the study of ‘non-stereotyped gender roles’ and will deprive parents of their right to educate their children in accordance with their moral and religious beliefs (Krizsán and Roggeband, 2021). Intervention in the education system and the family is framed as a conspiracy of a powerful internationally supported left-wing lobby and is problematised not just as a sovereignty issue, but also as a democracy problem. Opponents argue that a treaty that raises so much controversy should be submitted to broad public consultation and in some countries they have lobbied for referenda and organised petitions to demonstrate that substantial parts of the population are against the convention. Another strategy to prevent ratification is the production of alternative knowledge, in which conservative think tanks play a key role. In some countries, notably Hungary and Poland after 2015, anti-IC actors have also infiltrated or captured state institutions. This access to institutional politics and the support of major political parties and even governments is an important explanation for the success of opposition to the IC. One final notable strategy is harassment and persecution of actors defending the IC. Women’s rights and IC advocates are singled out as agents of foreign ideologies and vilified as such. Opponents use (social) media to attack and threaten women’s rights organisations and orchestrate smear campaigns. Also, on some occasions violence has been used against activists, not only by non-state actors, but in Hungary and Poland (after 2015) by state actors (Krizsán and Roggeband, 2021). Contestation over the gender aspects of the IC has fundamental consequences for the governance of VAW in Europe. In CEE countries it takes place amidst an unprecedented politicisation of gender equality. This politicisation is linked to other aspects of the wider gender equality project as well, but the IC and its gender transformative aspects stand at the centre of the debates in several countries (Korolczuk and Graff, 2018; Kuhar and Paternotte, 2017). Politicisation has both positive and negative consequences. On the positive side it brings a reinvigoration of feminist activism, diversification of protest strategies, a strengthening of feminist coalitions and widening of alliances with actors that previously have not engaged with VAW or gender equality issues. Particularly in countries with autocratic governments openly opposing the Convention, we see advocacy for the Convention make its way on to the

Feminist governance in the field of violence against women  367 agenda of pro-democracy mobilisation, and protection of women from violence problematised as a core democracy issue. Politicisation results in a much wider use of VAW as a policy term, on both sides of the contestation (Krizsán and Roggeband, 2021), compared to previous silence over crimes such as domestic violence (Krizsán and Roggeband, 2018). Debates on the Convention do not block policy changes in various fields of VAW. On the negative side, however, we find that politicisation exposes women’s rights actors to confrontation, smear campaigns, raids, auditing and even violence in unprecedented ways and leads to a variety of coping strategies, including in some cases consideration of removing gender from the names of their organisations. Contestation also leads to cooptation of VAW policy regimes for objectives other than gender equality. While new policies are passed and budgets spent on violence overall increase, the new services and provisions that emerge as a result of these changes are not in line with long-established feminist protocols and practices. Instead, women’s rights groups with expertise in the field are marginalised or excluded from them. In general, the vilification of women’s rights advocates results in their marginalisation in or exclusion from VAW policy processes. Alternative policy logics prevail, which may benefit some women victims, but are not addressing VAW as a gender inequality problem and do not recognise and engage with the structural aspects of the problem (Krizsán and Roggeband, 2021).

CONCLUSIONS Overall, while feminist advocacy has been extremely successful in introducing new norms and institutional frameworks to combat VAW, maintaining feminist principles and gender equality transformation at the core of these new modes of governance remains an ongoing struggle. This chapter has presented the diversity of feminist governance innovations through the lens of one particular policy field: that of combatting VAW. While far from being exhaustive, it illustrates some of the main modes of governance introduced by women’s rights advocates or as a result of their activism at the national and international level. We discussed the contributions of feminist VAW activism to reforming modes of governance as well as some of the compromises their institutionalisation meant for initial feminist objectives. The pushback against the CoE Istanbul Convention, the most recent and most comprehensive international instrument in the field, makes clear that the issue of VAW, despite the advances in (inter) national legislation, remains contested. Feminist activism remains vital to uphold and advance VAW policies in the national and international realm

NOTES 1.

The CoE has 47 member states, 27 of which are members of the EU. It defines itself as the European continent’s leading human rights organisation. 2. Kantola (2010) analysed the development of the EU Directives on trafficking. Zippel (2006) undertook a thorough analysis of the development of EU sexual harassment policies. 3. Out of the 35 member states of the OAS, 32 have ratified it – the United States, Canada and Cuba being the outliers. Many countries passed national legislation on VAW within five years after the Convention was adopted. 4. The IC was ratified by 22 countries before entering into force in 2014, and by 12 countries since.

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Feminist governance in the field of violence against women  369 Krizsán, Andrea and Conny Roggeband (2018) The Gender Politics of Domestic Violence: Feminists Engaging the State in Central and Eastern Europe, New York: Routledge. Krizsán, Andrea and Conny Roggeband (2021) Keeping the Trojan Horse Out: The Istanbul Convention as a Site of Struggle over Gender Equality and Democracy in Europe, London: Palgrave. Kuhar, Roman and David Paternotte (eds) (2017) Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against Equality, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. MacKinnon, Catherine (1979) Sexual Harassment of Working Women, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Martin, Patricia Yancey (2007) ‘Coordinated Community Services for Victims of Violence’. In L. O’Toole, J. R. Schiffman and M. L. Kiter Edwards (eds), Gender Violence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, New York: New York University Press, 443–50. Matthews, Nancy A. (1994) Confronting Rape: The Feminist Anti-Rape Movement and the State, New York: Routledge. Mazur, Amy (2002) Theorizing Feminist Policy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Merry Engle, Sally (2006) Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Meyer, Mary K. (1999) ‘Negotiating International Norms: The Inter-American Commission of Women and the Convention on Violence against Women’. In Mary K. Meyer and Elisabeth Prügl (eds), Gender Politics in Global Governance, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 58–71. Montoya, Celeste (2013) From Global to Grassroots: The European Union, Transnational Advocacy, and Combating Violence against Women, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Möschel, Mathias (2021) ‘Article 13 of the Istanbul Convention’, in Sara de Vido and Adriana De Stefano (eds), The Istanbul Convention: A Commentary, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Pietilä, Hilkka and Jeanne Vickers (1990) Making Women Matter: The Role of the United Nations, London: Zed Books. Roggeband, Conny (2004) ‘“Immediately I Thought We Should Do the Same Thing”: International Inspiration and Exchange in Feminist Action against Sexual Violence’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 11(2): 159–75. Roggeband, Conny (2012) ‘Shifting Policy Responses to Domestic Violence in the Netherlands and Spain (1980–2009)’, Violence Against Women 18(7): 784–806. Roggeband, Conny (2016) ‘Ending Violence against Women in Latin America: Feminist Norm Setting in a Multilevel Context’, Politics and Gender 12(1): 143–67. Roggeband, Conny (2021) ‘Violence against Women and Gender-Based Violence’. In Gabriele Abels, Andrea Krizsán, Heather MacRae and Anna van der Vleuten (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Gender and EU Politics, New York: Routledge, 352–63. Russell, Diana E. H. and Nicole Van de Ven (1976) Crimes against Women: Proceedings of the International Tribunal, Westerham: Russell Publications. Russell-Brown, Sherrie L. (2003) ‘Rape as an Act of Genocide’, Berkeley Journal of International Law 350(21): 350–74. Schechter, Susan (1982) Women and Male Violence: The Visions and Struggles of the Battered Women’s Movement, Boston, MA: South End Press. Shepard, Melanie F. and Ellen L. Pence (eds) (1999) Coordinating Community Responses to Domestic Violence: Lessons from Duluth and Beyond, Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Stark, Evan (2007) Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life, New York: Oxford University Press. Walby, Sylvia et al. (2015) Stopping Rape: Towards a Comprehensive Policy, Bristol: Bristol University Press. Walker, Gillian A. (1990) Family Violence and the Women’s Movement, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Weldon, Laurel (2002) Protest, Policy, and the Problem of Violence against Women: A Cross-National Comparison, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Zippel, Katrin (2006) The Politics of Sexual Harassment: A Comparative Study of the United States, the European Union and Germany, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zwingel, Susanne (2005) ‘From Intergovernmental Negotiations to (Sub)National Change: A Transnational Perspective on the Impact of CEDAW’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 7(3): 400–424.

PART V OTHER REGIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON FEMINIST GOVERNANCE

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

INTRODUCTION The importance of regional institutions to the integration of feminist principles into governance has never been more apparent than now in the African context. Africa, consisting of 54 countries is a region in which men still dominate in leadership and manifest masculinised logics in the everyday and reinforce patriarchy. At the same time, it is a region that appears particularly committed to regional governance as evidenced by the existence of 39 regional organisations on the continent (Byiers, 2017). Indeed, the trajectories of politics that saw the reconstitution of Organisation for African Unity (OAU) as the African Union (AU) in 2001 underscore the importance of regionalism in the governance of the continent. In the context of the AU especially, feminist agents within and outside the organisation advocate for feminist principles in law and policy practice. From the promotion of norms of gender equality, to the creation of new bureaucratic practices that allow greater engagement with feminist activists/ organisations, feminist principles have arguably gained a place in regional governance structures. This is particularly the case in the area of peace and security (see Haastrup, 2021), where the AU has embraced the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Yet, and as has been argued (Van der Vleuten et al., 2014), the discussions about regional governance in academic and policy context tend to omit issues of gender. Governance within this continental organisation is used as a proxy for regional governance. This chapter seeks to illustrate the ways in which the governance of peace and security at the AU/continental level provides some space for feminist inclusions. It draws on primary official documents and academic scholarship on gender and the AU. I show the ways in which regional integration practices have provided new entry points for feminist activism. This process through which gender comes into ‘the regional’ is guided by endogenous and exogenous factors that rely on African women’s organising and Indigenous legal instruments as well as global normative ones. I argue, however, that despite the significant work done by feminists to set governance agendas informed by feminist insights, there remains a blind spot within the AU itself. Using the example of the sexual harassment complaints that emerged in the AU Commission, and subsequent investigation into them, I show that while practices aimed externally show some feminist gains, the complaints illustrate the fragility of feminist transformation within an institution still characterised by hegemonic masculinities. Feminist institutionalism (FI) provides a useful frame for understanding the ways in which AU processes include, reject, alter or ignore gender norms (Haastrup, 2018: 220). It allows us to pay attention to the informal rules, or practices, that function beyond the surface but are essential to the work that the AU does across the continent. As shown elsewhere in this 371

372  Handbook of feminist governance Handbook, FI is interested in patterns of change and continuity. In this context, FI helps to understand the ways in which feminist principles have been integrated into the new processes of regional governance at the continental level. Furthermore, the notion of nested newness shows how despite the opportunities to include feminist principles within AU at its formation – opportunities that were leveraged by feminist agents – there is still resistance to change because no institution is a ‘blank slate’ (Mackay, 2014). Indeed, legacies from the OAU, the patriarchal nature of African societies and the regional integration experience more broadly, endure within the new institution. In short, this chapter is a ‘story’ about how, on the one hand, ‘feminist change agents’ use the establishing of a new regional institutional order to ‘insert new actors, new values, and new rules’ (Mackay, 2014: 549) but on the other hand, old habits die hard. The chapter focuses on the inclusion of gender concerns within the peace and security architecture of the AU, its core area of governance. The chapter also seeks to illuminate the extent to which feminist principles are manifested beyond this peace and security domain, showing how reversion to old patterns reinforces the status quo of regional governance (Mackay, 2014: 566; Chappell, 2006). Ultimately, the focus on the AU will provide a means through which to understand the complexities of feminist engagement with regional governance.

REGIONAL GOVERNANCE AND INTEGRATION IN AFRICA: WHERE DOES GENDER FIT? Van der Vleuten and Van Eerdewijk (2014: 18) define regional governance as ‘the system of rule at the regional level where authority is exercised by state and non-state actors in formal and informal ways, and where global, regional, national and subnational levels are linked’. According to Amandine Gnanguênon (2020), regional organisations are a particular feature of the African sociopolitical landscape. Many are focused on similar issues and have overlapping mandates. Some are more visible than others in terms of recognition of their impact on the socioeconomic and political life of African governments and citizens. These represent broad sub-regions and are known as regional economic communities (RECs) or regional mechanisms (RMs). While these sub-regional organisations cover a variety of policy sectors including economy, development and peace and security (Gnanguênon, 2020), in most cases, gender equality is a cross-cutting priority (Table 30.1). Through a system of norms, principles, legal instruments and compliance mechanisms, regional gender equality regimes are being developed. These regional organisations, to an extent, coalesce in the African Union (AU) where the RECs and RMs are designated as the building blocks of the continental organisation. Unlike its predecessor, the AU has explicitly sought to institutionalise feminist norms like gender equality within the organisation, primarily through its executive branch, the Commission. In line with the commitment to create a new continental organisation that sought to protect the most vulnerable, the Constitutive Act of the African Union included provisions for gender equality. Specifically, the Constitutive Act mandates the AU not only to promote gender equality but also gender-mainstreaming. In the new organisation, gender equality is designated as a human right. Gender equality in this context ‘refers to the equal rights, responsibilities and opportunities of women and men and girls and boys’ (African Union, 2018a: 63). Moreover, the AU is invested in gender-mainstreaming, ‘a strategy for implementing greater equality for

Building gender norms into regional governance  373 Table 30.1

RECs and their gender equality regimes

Regional economic communities (RECs)

Gender equality policy frameworks and instruments

Arab Maghreb Union (AMU)

–

COMESA

Gender Policy (2016)

East African Community (EAC)

EAC Gender Equality and Development Bill (2017) EAC Gender Policy (2018)

Economic Community of Central African States

ECCAS Gender Policy (2019)

(ECCAS) Economic Community of West African States

Dakar Declaration on the Implementation of UNSCR 1325 (2010)

(ECOWAS)

Supplementary Act on Equality of Rights between Women and Men (2015) ECOWAS Plan of Action on Gender and Trade 2015–20 ECOWAS Gender and Migration Framework and Plan of Action 2015–20

Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD)

The Gender Management System (GMS) Handbook Gender Mainstreaming Customized Tools/Guidelines IGAD Institutional Gender Policy IGAD Gender Policy Framework 2012–20 Regional Action Plan for Implementation of UNSCRs 1325 and 1820

Southern African Development Community (SADC)

SADC Declaration on Gender and Development (1997) Addendum on the Prevention and Eradication of Violence Against Women and Children (1997) SADC Gender Policy (1997) SADC Protocol on Gender and Development (2008; amended 2016) SADC Gender Mainstreaming Toolkit (2009) SADC Gender Workplace Policy (2009)

women and girls in relation to men and boys. [It] is the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programs, in all areas and at all levels’ (African Union, 2018a: 64). The inclusion of gender within what is effectively the constitution of the AU and the commitment to mainstreaming are feminist innovations for the continental organisation, led by the AU executive, the Commission (Figure 30.1). While the Constitutive Act gives a broad mandate for including gender concerns in the work of the AU, new frameworks comprising legal instruments and structures have been layered within the organisation to reinforce gender equality as a norm. Already in 1981, African countries adopted the African Charter on Human Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR), which included the principle of non-discrimination within a regional context. However, its attention to gender issues did not go far enough for feminists and women’s rights activists (Haastrup, 2019a: 379). The Charter failed to challenge the structure of power that engenders gender inequality or even acknowledge that for many Africans the source of discrimination is patriarchy. The Charter is, however, important because it paved the way for the adoption of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, also known as the Maputo Protocol, which was adopted in 2003. The Maputo Protocol would have been impossible without the campaigning of feminist activists for over 20 years. In particular, the Protocol was a direct result of feminists constituting regional advocacy networks – ‘a collection of individuals and organisations from the same world region working together toward a common goal’ (Adams and Kang, 2007: 452).

374  Handbook of feminist governance

Figure 30.1

African Union organisational structure

The Maputo Protocol explicitly commits the AU, other regional organisations and African state governments to a range of feminist principles including gender equality in all areas of sociopolitical, economic and legal life. It is seen as especially progressive as the first international treaty that explicitly articulates abortion as health care. It also disavows harmful practices like female genital mutilation (FGM) and sexual harassment, and provides gender-based violence campaign points for feminists. Intersectionality is underscored through acknowledgement of the interactions of oppression for disabled women, and widowed women, something previously excluded from public discourse and human rights statutes (see Haastrup, 2015). Moreover, gender is narrated here as a structure of power that shapes the regional order. Other policy instruments that have informed the development of Africa’s gender regime (see also Haastrup, 2013) include policy instruments like the Nairobi Forward Looking Strategies (1985) and the UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (1993). Overall, apart from representing a clear progression of the African Charter and other continental instruments, the Maputo Protocol is also a result of leveraging global frameworks that can be viewed as exogenous to the continent. Three landmark frameworks informed the eventual adoption of the Maputo Protocol. First, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), often referred to as the international bill of human rights for women. Several court cases challenging discrimination against women have leveraged CEDAW as a means of localising anti-discrimination based on gender in Africa (see Bond, 2014).

Building gender norms into regional governance  375 Second, there was the push given by the Beijing Platform for Action to enact gender concerns in policy frameworks and practices and to make gender equality central to governance. The Beijing Platform for Action was all encompassing in that it focused on the public and private spheres of women’s lives. It emphasised women’s equality and empowerment via development, thus highlighting the impact of economic hierarchies that go together with geo-political positions in the international system. The third framework is United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325, Women, Peace and Security, which called for the experiences of women to be incorporated into war and peace-making practices. Adopted in 2000, this global normative framework has been the basis for institutional innovation at the regional level (OAU, 2000). While these three frameworks can be read as exogenous to regional governance in Africa, the presence and impact of African feminists in achieving these important milestones suggests a more complicated story. For example, the Dakar Fifth Regional Conference on Women in 1994 produced the African position, which fed into the Beijing Platform for Action. Moreover, Gertrude Mongella from Tanzania was General Secretary to the Conference. The outcome document explicitly links insecurity to negative outcomes for women in development, foreshadowing UNSCR 1325. Indeed, African feminists and activists who focus on peacebuilding directly fed into the resolution that launched the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda through the 2000 Windhoek Declaration and the Namibia Plan of Action. In any case, the adoption of the Maputo Protocol soon after the formation of the AU is an important example of feminist activism and campaigning at the regional level. Understanding these contributions of African feminists to key milestones in the governance of gender in Africa locates ‘feminist struggle … as a critical stance against the mainstream of patriarchal power’ (Ahikire, 2014: 9).

GENDER EQUALITY IN TRANSLATION WITHIN THE REGIONAL GOVERNANCE ORDER Since the creation of the AU, there has been a systematic effort to turn grand declaratory statements and normative frameworks into tangible mechanisms or instruments of governance at the continental level (see Forere and Stone, 2009; Haastrup, 2013, 2019a, 2021; Omotosho, 2015). As all the RECs are intended to be building blocks of the AU, it makes sense that whole-of-region approaches are embedded within the continental institution. This has not slowed down the creation of new gender equality instruments at the regional level, which in a sense reinforce the budding importance of feminist principles to the processes of regional integration. Yet, at the AU, recently there has been a particular emphasis on governance practices to promote gender equality, gender mainstreaming and especially women’s leadership in Africa, implemented primarily through the AU secretariat, the Commission. To underscore the commitment to gender equality in the Constitutive Act of the AU, the Women, Gender and Development Directorate (WGDD) was established. The aim of the WGDD is to mainstream gender within the AU and promote gender equality initiatives across the continent including in the relationship between the AU in Addis Ababa and its member states, and between the AU and RECs. WGDD is the new and improved iteration of the Women’s Division in the former OAU.

376  Handbook of feminist governance Yet, there were no significant resources apportioned to the directorate, and it did not capture the main remit of the AU, peace and security, with instead a ‘soft’ focus on development. The directorate as conceived in the early days of the AU typified an understanding of women and gender framed within a human rights discourse. As evidenced in the first policy developed from the directorate, the 2004 Solemn Declaration on Gender Equality in Africa (SDGEA), the commitment to gender equality is also a commitment to reinforcing a binary between men and women, thus silencing alternative gender identities. Gender equality here is heteronormative. Nevertheless, the Directorate’s mandate was clear and included the harmonisation of member states, sub-regional and AU level approaches to gender equality – in this sense, it was inclusive and sought to share best practices. Overall, the SDGEA appeared to roll back the explicitly feminist gains made by the adoption of Maputo, through a regressive understanding of gender equality in the regional context. Indeed, as previously noted, gender was linked to issues of ‘maternal health and economic development’. This narrow understanding also meant that gender equality was linked primarily to women’s empowerment and thus ‘mainstream fixations on representation, and women and children as victims’ (Haastrup, 2015). Yet, except for SADC in 2008, none of the RECs were advocating policies on gender in the immediate aftermath of Maputo. This would suggest that much of the activism going on around embedding feminist principles in the process of regionalism and regionalisation was happening at the national and continental level. Nevertheless, despite the weaknesses of the SDGEA, it is significant in that it opens up the space for women’s rights and feminist organisations to participate in the processes of regionalisation. Since 2007, the Gender is my Agenda Campaign (GIMAC), a consortium of 55 organisations, has worked to promote gender perspectives within the AU’s work. Created initially to monitor progress towards the implementation of the SDGEA, its remit arguably has expanded given that it holds an annual pre-summit meeting to inform the AU’s overall agenda from a gender perspective. In 2009, the SDGEA was subsumed by the first African Union Gender Policy. The 2009 Gender Policy set the groundwork for the AU’s decade-long agenda, the African Women’s decade (2010–20). While the declaration of this decade signalled a significant win for activists and underlined that feminist principles concerning women’s lives and experiences was integral to the overall functioning of regionalism, it also firmly aligned ‘gender’ to ‘doing something about women’. In the evolution of the regional order alongside gender equality principles, the dominant narrative of gender has been women’s rights as human rights, with no account of patriarchal power. A partial explanation for why we see a deviation from the aspirations of Maputo could perhaps be found in the policy area that has come to characterise regionalism in Africa – from the sub-regional level to the continental one – peace and security. The next section reflects on the ways in which the focus on security as the prime motivator for regionalism has accelerated the integration of some feminist norms in some ways, while in others it constrains the possibilities of feminist transformation.

SECURITY GOVERNANCE IN AFRICA VIA THE WOMEN, PEACE AND SECURITY AGENDA From its onset, regional integration in Africa has tended to prioritise cooperation on security, specifically to tackle wars and conflicts. For example, although the Economic Community of

Building gender norms into regional governance  377 West African States (ECOWAS) was formulated as an economic bloc, it came to prominence due to the coordination of members’ armed forces via ECOMOG (Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group). ECOMOG had been convened in 1990 as a response to the civil war in Liberia. Meanwhile, the OAU, whose purpose was to maintain sovereignty and the territorial integrity of postcolonial states, had many aspirations but little achievements. Significantly, the absence of the OAU from the theatre of one of the worst atrocities in human history – the Rwandan genocide – spelled the end for the regional organisation. While the aspirations of the AU are quite broad, the regional context meant the elimination of violent conflict and the guarantee of peace and security for African citizens eclipsed all other policy priorities. Part of the transformation from the OAU to the AU was the idea that the focus on state security at the expense of citizens no longer worked. Thus, and as a means of responding to insecurity on the continent, the AU adopted the notion of human security. This concept of security, which privileges the protection of human life, was to be guaranteed by the AU’s security apparatus, the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA). The APSA includes the Peace and Security Council, the Continental Early Warning system, the Panel of the Wise, the RECs, and the Peace and Security department. They all derive their power from the Constitutive Act. As the APSA is the core of the AU, understanding the practices of feminist governance requires attention to what happens in the area of peace and security. How precisely do feminist principles inform this new regional security governance architecture? Indeed, these linkages between the promotion of feminist principles and regional security governance perfectly capture the relationship between the local, regional and global (see Haastrup, 2019a, 2019b). This linkage coalesces in the United Nations Security Council’s WPS agenda which, as noted above, was the result of years of feminist activism including African women’s campaigning. As described elsewhere in this Handbook, UNSCR 1325 is structured around four pillars – participation, prevention, protection, and relief and recovery. The participation pillar focuses on women’s representation at ‘all levels of decision-making, including peace-processes, electoral processes … and the broader social-political sphere’. The prevention pillar focuses on integrating gender perspectives and allowing women to participate in the prevention of violent conflict. The protection pillar obligates ‘the United Nations and its agencies, countries, regional organisations and civil society’ to protect women and girls’ rights in conflict and post-conflict settings. The final pillar on relief and recovery extends protection by prioritising sexual and gender-based violence survivors’ access to sexual and reproductive health services, and trauma counselling. In this context, UNSCR 1325 has resonated within the AU and its aims on the continent. Already in 2003, the Maputo Protocol acknowledged UNSCR 1325 in Articles 10 and 11, which emphasise the right of women to a peaceful existence and to participate in promoting and maintaining peace on the continent/region. Beyond this, it obligates member states of the AU to ensure that this happens. Feminists view the governance of peace and security as an opportunity to leverage regional initiatives as well as the broader global WPS commitment to achieve feminist gains. As part of the move to implement the WPS agenda, actors like GIMAC emphasise women’s representation and participation in conflict and post-conflict processes on the continent. They draw on SDGEA, the Gender Policy and indeed sub-regional initiatives where they exist (see also Haastrup, 2019a: 380). The impact of WPS, however, cannot be discounted, whether on policy instruments, or the role of key feminist actors, or practices that link the issues of peace and security.

378  Handbook of feminist governance African states have committed rhetorically to the WPS agenda. Thus, at the continental, sub-regional and national levels, attention to the WPS agenda has been facilitated by African women, who themselves were instrumental in its development and adoption, particularly feminist activist-scholars. In the context of the peace and security architecture, it is perhaps useful to understand gender as a structure of power that has implications for the organisation of political life. As feminists have noted, security institutions tend to privilege masculine ideas (see Kronsell, 2005). The AU, via its peace and security architecture, confirms this assumption. Across the organs that constitute the APSA, men make up much of the membership. The prevalence of masculinised bodies and experiences makes feminist principles of gender equality and the strategy of gender mainstreaming even more urgent. The WPS has facilitated the prioritisation of feminist principles in the context of the AU’s main tasks of peace and security. One of the most significant institutional innovations within the AU has been the creation of the Office of the Special Envoy (OSE) The brainchild of former Chairperson Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, herself a feminist, the OSE was created specifically to mainstream gender within the APSA and accelerate the implementation of the agenda across the region including at member state and sub-regional level. Although the OSE was not created until almost ten years after the SDGEA, the work to embed feminist principles in the AU had continued, although slowly. For example, feminist civil society organisations via GIMAC, and beyond, worked across the continent to support member states in developing their road maps for implementing the WPS agenda, National Action Plans (NAPs). This work allowed for a revolving door between local aims, and policies and strategies at the continental level. This culminated in the 2009 AU Gender Policy. The Gender Policy consolidated previous policy instruments and had a primary purpose of ‘localising’ the WPS agenda, signalling the centrality of the gender/security link in regional governance (African Union, 2009). The influence of the WPS agenda is also seen in the expansion of the AU’s peace and security concerns articulated in the 2006 Framework for Post Conflict Reconstruction, the 2011 Policy Framework for Security Sector Reform and Agenda 2063 (Hendricks, 2017). By the time the OSE was created in 2014, it solidified the message that in the continental/ regional governance of security ‘women’s empowerment, leadership and visibility’ was integral (Haastrup, 2021). In this office, the Special Envoy that was appointed was one of the most visible feminists within GIMAC, Senegalese Bineta Diop, having led what is considered the largest of the feminist civil society organisations in Africa, Femmes Africa Solidarité (FAS). The OSE is strategically located in the Chairperson’s office. This location, rather than within the APSA itself, indicates a commitment to the systemic integration of the WPS into the main work of the AU and also gives greater prominence to the OSE’s work on gender, despite the continued existence of the WGDD. This location, moreover, ensures that gender issues are not siloed (Haastrup, 2021). It is the job of the Special Envoy to provide ‘guidance and leadership on the institutionalization of the WPS agenda’ (Haastrup, 2019a: 381). And there are several ways in which this has been done. In the initial phases of appointment, the OSE created a gender, peace and security work plan, and the Gender, Peace and Security programme. These strategies existed as a means to implement the WPS agenda within five years across Africa. This period also saw the insistence that the AU Commission needed Gender Focal Points across its peace and security apparatus, in liaison offices, at the RECs level and in missions (African Union Commission, 2018).

Building gender norms into regional governance  379 The Special Envoy through her office is obliged primarily to implement the global normative framework at the regional level, which in principle also includes national and local levels. Consequently, the OSE has played a significant role in the increased adoption of NAPs in African countries since 2014. Between 2014 and 2020, nine African countries adopted an NAP for the first time (Peace Women, n.d.) while six of the 11 that previously had an NAP adopted updates. In all then, despite the work that is still left to be done, the WPS Special Envoy has been instrumental in promoting the WPS agenda in a regional context. But has the impact of these instruments had an overall impact on governance processes within the region?

GOVERNING THE ERADICATION OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE AT REGIONAL LEVEL The protection pillar of UNSCR 1325 prioritised dealing with sexual violence, particularly but not solely in conflict situations. By most accounts of WPS, this focus within the agenda has far eclipsed other foci. So, how well are the feminist principles embedded within the organisation positioned to respond to this specific challenge? As Cormac Smith (2018) shows, despite the general lack of attention to Africa in narratives about the ‘global’ #MeToo movement, sexual violence in Africa is significant, perhaps even more acute than in the Global North. Given global momentum, the African context, and instruments and mechanisms at the disposal of the OSE in the AU, this was the opportune space to prove the effectiveness of the regional gender architecture. Instead, the AU was confronted with its own #MeToo moment.1 In May 2018, the South African newspaper Mail and Guardian revealed two internal complaints by women staff within the AU. The complaints listed a litany of accusations against an institutional culture that allowed ‘routine ill-treatment, humiliation and discrimination on the basis of their gender’ (Allison, 2018). One of the internal memos, titled Me too up for her; She matters for all of us, leveraged the global movement. The memo was addressed to AU Commission chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat and the deputy chairman Kwesi Quartey, though Faki has claimed he was unaware of the memo. That the AU had such complaints might have been shocking but unsurprising. Sexual violence is endemic in every society and societal institutions manifest the same. What is perhaps surprising is that with all the tools at its disposal, its own house was in disorder. As one analyst noted, ‘not only did the African Union fail to empower its female staffers as it championed women’s rights around the continent, it also failed to protect them from sexual harassment’ (Chutel, 2018). The exposé by Mail and Guardian prompted an immediate investigation, which was completed approximately six months later, in November 2018. In the first instance, the chairman of the AU Commission appointed a three-person panel including Bineta Diop, the Special Envoy for WPS as Chairperson; Justice Tujilane Rose Chizumila, a judge at the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights (AfCHPR) and Lucy Asuagbor, a member of the ACHPR and Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Women in Africa (African Union Commission, 2018). The panel was supported by a seven-person taskforce, which included representation from the WGDD. The composition of the panel underscored the privileged role that the Special Envoy on WPS had within the AU Commission – with the WGDD playing a subordinate role. The mandate of the panel was to investigate the different manifestations of gender discrimination within the institution, including harassment allegations.

380  Handbook of feminist governance The result of the investigation was published in November 2018. The outcome report revealed a deeply gendered institution that appeared to have missed out on the benefits of its own feminist advocacy. The investigation further revealed that the AU itself had no sexual harassment policy despite its commitments to the WPS agenda. As per the initial accusations, the investigation revealed a ‘professional apartheid’ that manifested itself in what is effectively a ‘jobs-for-sex’ system in which young women were the main targets. The investigation relied on interviewing 88 individuals using a methodology described as relying on a ‘balance of probabilities, best evidence rule, triangulation and corroboration’ so the panel could establish whether and how further investigation was warranted and design redress for victims/survivors (African Union, 2018b: 1). This approach made visible gender discrimination and sexual harassment among the seven elements of problems within the AU (African Union, 2018b: 2). On sexual harassment in particular, the panel found that incidents of sexual harassment exist in the Commission. This is established by the almost unanimous confirmation of the prevalence of this occurrence by interviewee … Evidence presented suggests that this form of harassment perpetuated by supervisors over female employees in their charge, especially … during official missions outside the work station. (African Union, 2018b: 2)

The panel went on to note that that lack of sexual exploitation and abuse policy was part of the problem. It further noted that already vulnerable women, due to employment precarity, were most exposed to sexual harassment, especially ‘short-term staff, youth volunteers and interns’ (African Union, 2018b: 2). Evidence of jobs for sex was described as follows: Senior departmental staff, who position themselves as ‘gate-keepers’ and ‘king-makers’, make … promises to young women that they will be offered contracts. (African Union, 2018b: 3)

Further evidence indicated that women who had been subject to discrimination and sexual harassment did not feel comfortable reporting through any mechanisms within the institution, as whistle-blowers were not protected. Unfortunately, those who did report later withdrew their complaints, likely due to fear of retaliation. Overall, the report conveyed an institution that had not internalised the lessons it was championing. It especially called into question the extent to which the AU can act outside of the WPS remit on the everyday concerns of ordinary women including those that exist outside of conflict zones. While the rapidity of convening an investigation was applauded, the outcome has been criticised. Only a five-page excerpt of the investigation was released into the public domain (African Union, 2018b). The report was relatively sparse except for an extended quote from the main report on sexual harassment. The report has further been criticised for downplaying the gender dynamics underpinning human resources practices within the institution. So, while the outputs from the institution reflect the work of feminist groups, and therefore feminist principles, the institution itself appears to be inhospitable to feminist governance and on issues it actively promotes externally. This is not unique to the AU. For instance, in the recent domain of feminist foreign policy (FFP), there is a tendency of states that practice FFP to emphasise their feminist credentials abroad, while performing poorly amongst the most marginalised groups at home (Haastrup, 2020; Haastrup and Hagen, 2020). Learning again from feminist institutionalism, the fact it did

Building gender norms into regional governance  381 not occur to the institutional feminist agents that the AU needed a sexual harassment policy suggests, at the very least, an unintended reversion to the status quo. The status quo, however, is not simply a blank slate; rather AU practices, while seeking to supply what the OAU lacked, invariably replicate the ‘old’ institutional culture (OAU Charter, 1963).

CONCLUSION The continental architecture for gender equality promoted by the African Union is evidence of the adoption of feminist principles into the core of regional governance. The development has been gradual and reinforces the importance of local and global norms and practices for pushing the agenda forward. Locally or endogenously, women and feminist groups have been instrumental to the inclusion of feminist informed practices within the AU’s core area of function – peace and security. This inclusion has mainly taken the form of building the infrastructure for externalised peace and security practice. In exploring the processes through which feminist principles have been included (or excluded) at the highest levels of regional governance, it is fair to conclude that in almost two decades and despite the seemingly myriad mechanisms, transformative change has been eluded. Where transformative change is impossible for the women of the AU, there is reason to be sceptical of possibilities within African states themselves, and of the progressive role of the AU. This chapter has explored the ways in which feminist actors have embedded feminist ‘newness’ in the new institutions of regional governance. The feminist institutionalist lens that has informed this unique analysis demonstrates that change is possible but can be limited by the past and by the enduring nature of gendered hierarchies. Importantly, this chapter has tried to show that the impact of embedding feminist principles cannot be underestimated. This work is supported by specific feminist networks, but the aftermath of the AU sexual harassment investigation poses a danger for feminist regional governance. The institutional culture that has facilitated sexual violence within the organisation undermines the credibility of the AU as a feminist gender actor on sexual violence across the continent and delegitimises its work on the WPS agenda. Indeed, the marginalisation of women within an institution that demonstrates hegemonic masculinity shows how easy it can be for feminist principles to take a back seat to competing institutional priorities (Haastrup, 2021). While the current Special Envoy for Women, Peace and Security, together with other feminists within the organisation, has demonstrated leadership and motivation for institutional transformation, change appears limited to the external practices of the AU. This analysis shows not only the limits of institutional change, but also the constraints experienced by feminists who must contend with the ‘old’.

NOTE 1. The AU Commission was not by any means the only regional institution implicated in #MeToo, as demonstrated by Berthet and Kantola (2020) in their account of the EU Parliament.

382  Handbook of feminist governance

REFERENCES Adams, Melinda and Alice Kang (2007) ‘Regional Advocacy Networks and the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa’, Politics and Gender 3(4): 451–74. African Union (2009) African Union Gender Policy, Addis Ababa: African Union. African Union (2018a) AU Strategy for Gender Equality & Women’s Empowerment 2018–2028, Addis Ababa: African Union. African Union (2018b) ‘Outcome of the Investigation of Allegations of Harassment Against Women and Other Institutional Malpractices in the African Union Commission’. https://​au​.int/​sites/​default/​ files/​pressreleases/​35394​-pr​-en​_communique​_on​_the​_outcome​_of​_investigations​_of​_allegations​_of​ _harassment​_at​_the​_auc​_22nov2018​.pdf. African Union Commission (2018) ‘Terms of Reference of the High-Level Committee (HLC) to Investigate Allegations of Harassment Against Women at the AU Commission’. https://​au​.int/​sites/​ default/​files/​pressreleases/​35394​-pr​-tors​_of​_the​_high​_level​_committee​_to​_investigate​_allegations​ _of​_harassmen​.​_​.pdf. Ahikire, Josephine (2014) ‘African Feminism in Context: Reflections on the Legitimation Battles, Victories and Reversals’, Feminist Africa 19: 7–23. Allison, Simon (2018) ‘M&G Sexism Exposé Prompts African Union Investigation’. https://​mg​.co​.za/​ article/​2018​-05​-07​-mg​-sexism​-expose​-prompts​-african​-union​-investigation/​. Berthet, Valentine and Johanna Kantola (2020) ‘Gender, Violence and Political Institutions: Struggles over Sexual Harassment in the European Parliament’, Social Politics 28(1): 143–67. https://​doi​.org/​ 10​.1093/​sp/​jxaa015. Bond, Johanna E. (2014) ‘CEDAW in Sub-Saharan Africa: Lessons in Implementation’, Michigan State Law Review 2014(2): 241–64. Byiers, Bruce (2017) ‘Regional Organisations in Africa – Mapping Multiple Memberships’, ECDPM, Talking Points blog. https://​ecdpm​.org/​talking​-points/​regional​-organisations​-africa​-mapping​-multiple​ -memberships/​. Chappell, Louise (2006) ‘Comparing Political Institutions: Revealing the Gendered “Logic of Appropriateness”’, Politics and Gender 2(2): 223–5. Chutel, Lynsey (2018) ‘The African Union Has Failed to Protect Its Young Female Employees from Sexual Harassment’. https://​qz​.com/​africa/​1477259/​metoo​-african​-union​-sexual​-harassment​-report​ -shows​-abuse/​. Forere, Malebakeng and Lee Stone (2009) ‘The SADC Protocol on Gender and Development: Duplication or Complementarity of the African Union Protocol on Women’s Rights?’ African Human Rights Law Journal 9(2): 434–58. Gnanguênon, Amandine (2020) ‘Mapping African Regional Cooperation: How to Navigate Africa’s Institutional Landscape’, ECFR Policy Brief. https://​ecfr​.eu/​publication/​mapping​-african​-regional​ -cooperation​-how​-to​-navigate​-africas​-institutional​-landscape/​. Haastrup, Toni (2013) ‘Where Global Meets Local: The Politics of Africa’s Emergent Gender Equality Regime’. In T. Murithi (ed.), Handbook of Africa’s International Relations, London and New York: Routledge, 103–11. Haastrup, Toni (2015) ‘Are Women Agents? Reading “Gender” in Africa’s Rights Frameworks’, E-International Relations. http://​www​.e​-ir​.info/​2015/​10/​26/​are​-women​-agents​-reading​-gender​-in​ -africas​-rights​-frameworks. Haastrup, Toni (2018) ‘Creating Cinderella? The Unintended Consequences of the Women Peace and Security Agenda for the EU’s Mediation Architecture’, International Negotiation 23(2): 218–37. Haastrup, Toni (2019a) ‘WPS and the African Union’. In Jacqui True and Sara Davies (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Women Peace and Security, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 375–87. Haastrup, Toni (2019b) ‘Women, Peace and Security – the African Experience’, Political Insight 10(1): 9–11. Haastrup, Toni (2020) Gendering South Africa’s Foreign Policy: Toward a Feminist Approach? Foreign Policy Analysis 16(2): 199–216. Haastrup, Toni (2021) ‘Studying Femocrats, Gendered Practices and Narratives of Masculinist Protection’. In Katharina P. W. Döring, Ulf Engel, Linnéa Gelot and Jens Herpolsheimer (eds),

Building gender norms into regional governance  383 Researching the Inner Life of the African Peace and Security Architecture: APSA Inside Out, Leiden: Brill, 164–85. Haastrup, Toni and Jamie Hagen (2020) ‘Race, Justice and New Possibilities: 20 Years of the Women, Peace and Security agenda’, LSE Women, Peace and Security blog, 28 July. https://​blogs​.lse​.ac​.uk/​ wps/​2020/​07/​28/​race​-justice​-new​-possibilities​-20​-years​-of​-the​-women​-peace​-and​-security​-agenda/​. Hendricks, Cheryl (2017) ‘Progress and Challenges in Implementing the Women, Peace and Security Agenda in the African Union’s Peace and Security Architecture’, Africa Development 42(3): 73–98. Kronsell, Annica (2005) ‘Gendered Practices in Institutions of Hegemonic Masculinity’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 7(2): 280–98. Mackay, Fiona (2014) ‘Nested Newness, Institutional Innovation, and the Gendered Limits of Change’, Politics & Gender 10(4): 549–71. OAU (2000) The Constitutive Act of the African Union, Lomé: Organisation of African Unity. OAU Charter (1963) ‘OAU Charter, Addis Ababa, 25 May’. https://​au​.int/​en/​treaties/​oau​-charter​-addis​ -ababa​-25​-may​-1963. Omotosho, Babatunde, J. (2015) ‘African Union and Gender Equality in the Last Ten Years: Some Issues and Prospects for Consideration’, Journal of Integrated Social Sciences 5(1): 92–104. Peace Women (n.d.) ‘WILPF Monitoring and Analysis of National Action Plans on Women, Peace and Security’. http://​1325naps​.peacewomen​.org/​. Smith, Cormac (2018) ‘#MeToo, Africa Too?’, Africa is a Country, March. https://​africasacountry​.com/​ 2018/​03/​metoo​-africa​-too. Van der Vleuten, Anna and Anouka van Eerdewijk (2014) ‘Regional Governance, Gender and Transnationalism: A First Exploration’. In Anna van der Vleuten, Anouka van Eerdewijk and Conny Roggeband (eds), Gender Equality Norms in Regional Governance: Transnational Dynamics in Europe, South America and Southern Africa, London: Palgrave Macmillan, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1057/​ 9781137301451​_2. Van der Vleuten, Anna, Anouka van Eerdewijk and Conny Roggeband (2014) Gender Equality Norms in Regional Governance: Transnational Dynamics in Europe, South America and Southern Africa, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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

INTRODUCTION This chapter examines ways in which feminist institutional building can slowly lead to the adoption and implementation of gender equal policies by focusing on two East Asian countries. Following Guido, Walsh and Banaszak (see Chapter 3 in this Handbook), the chapter traces the history of feminist institutions that have been created and implemented as (1) sex/gender quotas, (2) women’s/gender equality policy agencies, and (3) gender/equalities mainstreaming. As Anne Marie Goetz notes (in Chapter 10 in this Handbook), the Fourth UN World Conference on Women identified national women’s machineries as one of the 12 crucial areas of concern, inspiring women’s rights activists in Japan and Korea to mobilise successfully to establish feminist institutions in both countries. While Japan and South Korea are prominent advanced industrialised nations in the Asian region, the economic and political empowerment of women in the two countries hardly matches the size of their economy nor the strength of their democracy. That is, Japan is ranked as third and South Korea as 12th richest country in the world today, in terms of GDP size,1 and the two countries are also highly rated democracies (first and second within Asia, 23rd and 24th globally) according to the Economist’s Democracy Index.2 On the contrary, Japan and South Korea rank last and second-to-last among all Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member countries in the glass-ceiling index.3 Similarly, the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s monthly ranking showed in November 2020 that South Korea was ranked at 119 out of 193 countries with 19 per cent female parliamentarians, and Japan even lower at 167 with 9.9 per cent female parliamentarians in the lower house.4 These contradictory figures concerning gender equality (i.e. highly developed and democratised countries, where gender gaps are persistent in both political and economic spheres) are particularly surprising considering the fact that women’s policy machineries were created two decades ago, and a number of legal measures have been adopted in order to advance gender equality policies. The current gender equality standing of Japan and Korea contrasts with that of Taiwan, where women account for 41.6 per cent of lawmakers, and women’s empowerment index in the country is the highest among all Asian countries (Chen and Mazzetta, 2021), thanks to the successful implementation of gender quotas and gender equality policies promoted by the Cabinet’s Gender Equality Committee (Huang, 2015). In this regard, delving into the cases of Japan and Korea allows us to identify both the success and limits of women’s policy machineries inspired by the Beijing Conference on Women in 1995 in the Asian region. Women’s economic and social conditions are far from improving, and opposition to feminism and feminist institutions (e.g. backlash) presents key challenges to furthering feminist governance in both countries (Kano, 2011; Lee et al., 2018;). Low status and the lack of resources, as well as conservative governments’ efforts to diminish 384

Feminist institutions and implications for gender equality in East Asia  385 the roles of women’s policy machineries all contribute to their limited role (see Goetz, Chapter 10 in this Handbook). At the same time, it is important to note that feminist institutions in the two countries have brought about important policy changes to promote gender equality. In particular, internalisation of feminist equality objectives in government and institutionalisation of gender mainstreaming policy tools like gender-sensitive budgeting are key to expanding and deepening gender equality policy in the two countries.

EMERGENCE OF FEMINIST INSTITUTIONS The most significant achievement in the history of feminist institutions can be regarded as the creation of women’s policy units and relevant laws in the two countries. In Japan, debates on gender equality in the 1980s led first to the Equal Employment Opportunity Law in 1985, then the subsequent enactment of Basic Law for a Gender-Equal Society, and finally Basic Plan for a Gender-Equal Society in 1999. Following these changes, new administrative structures were built, and municipal ordinances were passed in order to mainstream gender policy (Yamaguchi, 2018). For example, the Gender Equality Bureau – a national machinery for advancing women’s rights – was created under the Cabinet Office in 2001 (Kano, 2011). This kind of institutional design intended the gender equality bureau to be able to intervene in other ministries’ and agencies’ work, so that gender policy was not limited to a single ministry within the government. At the same time, an administrative division was created in each bureaucratic ministry and agency to coordinate gender-related policy efforts.5 Furthermore, prefectural and local governments followed these actions by passing their own gender equality ordinances and established administrative offices. In this way, ‘the Basic Law fulfilled the function of being a blueprint for change’ (Kano, 2011: 49) that trickled down to prefectural and city governments. Tokyo metropolitan city and Saitama prefecture were the first two local bodies to pass related ordinances in the year 2000. Korea took a similar path of establishing feminist institutions, by creating a centralised women’s policy unit. Both international and domestic pressures to promote women’s development and gender equality eventually led to Framework Act on Women’s Development in 1995 under the Kim Young-sam administration (Chang et al., 2006). President Kim Dae-jung established the President’s Special Committee on Women’s Affairs in 1998, with the goal of making gender mainstreaming – understood as promoting women’s issues in all national policies – a focal point of his administration. In addition, positions of women’s policy officers were created in six government ministries (Ministry of Labor, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Law, Ministry of Health and Welfare, Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, and Ministry of Administration and Local Government) to coordinate gender-related policies across different ministries and agencies (Kim and Kim, 2011: 392). In 1998, the Korean Women’s Development Institute, originally established in 1983 to conduct basic research to promote women’s social status and development, was moved to the supervision of the President’s Special Committee on Women’s Affairs, and then in 1999 to prime minister as an official government-funded research institute (Chang et al., 2006: 15).6 Three years later, in 2001, the Special Committee was abolished, and instead the Ministry of Gender Equality was established. The specific mission of the newly established ministry included increasing women’s representation in the decision-making level of government bodies, developing gender sensitive statistics, and an evaluation system for gender policy

386  Handbook of feminist governance Table 31.1 Pre-2000

Institutional changes and events Japan

South Korea

– The first election by universal suffrage without

– Women’s suffrage included in Article 11 of the national

distinction of sex (1946)

constitution (1948)

– The Equal Employment Opportunity Law (1985)

– Framework Act on Women’s Development (1995)

– Basic Act for Gender Equal Society (1999)

– President’s Special Committee on Women’s Affairs &

– Gender Equality Bureau (2001)

– Political Party Act (revision) (2000)

– The Act on Promotion of Women’s Participation

– Ministry of Gender Equality (2001) (title of the ministry

Gender Policy Units (1998) Post-2000

and Advancement in the Workplace (2015) – Law to Promote Co-participationof Men and Women in Politics (2018)

has changed several times since then) – Public Official Election Act, Political Funds Act (revision) (2002) – Framework Act on Gender Equality (2014) (previously Framework Act on Women’s Development) – Gender Equality Office in eight government ministries (2019)

Source: Compiled by the author.

(Kim and Kim, 2011: 394). Since its establishment, the ministry has undergone a number of changes in line with new missions of various administrations: it was renamed the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family in 2005, expanding its domian to include child care and family work. The conservative government that took power in 2008 changed the name to Ministry of Gender Equality (although it was changed back to Ministry of Gender Equality and Family in 2010)7 and significantly limited the scope of the ministry (Kim and Kim, 2011). In 2014, the Framework Act on Women’s Development was revised to Framework Act on Gender Equality, highlighting the government’s responsibility in promoting gender equality. According to this Framework Act, the Minister of Gender Equality and Family is designated as the person ultimately in charge of formulating the Master Plan for Gender Equality Policies (updated every five years), and the Gender Equality Council under the prime minister is designated as the body responsible for deliberating on, and coordinating major matters regarding gender equality.8 Recently in 2019, Gender Equality Offices (similar to women’s policy officers) were recreated in eight government ministries and agencies, an important addition to the existing feminist institutions in the country.9 Currently, the activities of the Gender Equality Bureau of the Cabinet Office in Japan can be summarised as follows: expansion of women’s participation in policy and decision-making processes, work–life balance, gender equality and disaster risk reduction, elimination of violence against women, and support for the promotion of gender equality in local governments.10 Similarly, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family in South Korea is working in the areas of gender equality policy, family policy (including issues related to work–life balance), youth policy, and protection of human rights (e.g. gender-based violence).11 Indeed, recent reports from both countries reveal that women’s policy machineries are actively working to promote gender equality in these priority areas. Specifically, the Fifth Basic Plan for Gender Equality in Japan lists new government targets for women’s participation in the decision-making process, providing equal opportunities for men and women in the labour market, as well as eliminating all forms of violence against women (Cabinet Office, 2021). Similarly, the new year’s plan for the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family includes a number of priorities, such as affirmative action measures to

Feminist institutions and implications for gender equality in East Asia  387 increase women’s representation in the public sector, as well as adopting other measures to assist career-interrupted women, victims of gender-based violence (particularly in cyberspace) and single-parents (MOGEF, 2021). In addition to building feminist institutions, both countries adopted tools like gender budgeting, although the specific methods of implementation vary. In South Korea, gender budgeting is mandated in the National Finance Act (2006), while in Japan, the Basic Plan for Gender Equality links the government’s gender equality policy to budgeting issues without an official legal basis (Ichii and Sharp, 2013: 3). The Fourth Basic Plan for Gender Equality provides a framework for monitoring the performance of gender-related programmes (IMF, 2017). There are signs that gender budgeting is contributing to increasing gender equality. The Gender Equality Bureau in Japan estimated total expenditure on gender equality priorities to be 4 per cent of the general budget in 2009 (Ichii and Sharp, 2013). In Korea, the government’s budget for gender equality has been slowly increasing (although it still comprises only 2.3 per cent of the central government budget in 2021), and an increase in gender equality awareness among government officials who have experience in preparing gender budget statements is also noticeable (KWDI, 2021: 6–7).

UNCERTAIN FUTURE OF WOMEN’S POLITICAL REPRESENTATION Women’s political representation has been particularly problematic in both Japan and Korea. Women’s groups in both countries have made significant efforts to promote increased political representation of women and ultimately women’s policymaking. Japan was slow to develop legal measures to increase women’s presence in politics. Neither quota adoption nor women’s political representation was an important priority for the political leaders of the dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) (Dalton, 2015). By contrast, other parties have introduced measures to support women’s access to politics. For instance, Netto, the political wing of the seikatsu club cooperative – a grassroots movement promoting the well-being of community residents – has been key to representing women’s interests by nominating female candidates and addressing fundamental concerns of housewives (shufu) in local politics (Gelb and Estevez-Abe, 1998; Shin, 2016). Similarly, both the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) and the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) have consistently expressed interest in systematically increasing the number of women legislators (Gaunder, 2015). Party strategies to increase women’s political presence, however, have been mainly limited to parties other than the dominant LDP, and therefore their impact has been limited to local councils. In 2013, a coalition of approximately 60 women’s groups – the Association to Promote Gender Quotas (Q no kai) – held a number of meetings with parliamentarians and organised public forums to raise awareness on women’s political representation.12 In response, an all-party parliamentary group ‘women’s political participation and empowerment’ prepared the Gender Parity Law (the Law for the Promotion of Gender Parity in Politics), which was successfully adopted in 2018 (Miura, 2018: 88). The law stipulates, as a basic principle, that political parties should aim at parity in the number of female and male candidates in national and local elections. The law also places an obligation – both at national and local levels – to implement gender equality in politics (Miura, 2018: 87).

388  Handbook of feminist governance The recent passage of the Gender Parity Law was considered significant in that the law encourages parties to ‘make an effort’ to implement quotas or numerical targets in order to achieve gender parity in politics. However, the gender parity law relies on parties simply to make an effort, rather than legally binding parties to do so.13 It is unclear how political parties would react to a gender parity law that relies on parties’ own efforts to achieve gender equality in politics. In this regard, the long-term impacts of the gender parity law on women’s numerical representation remain to be closely monitored in the future. As previously mentioned, parties other than the LDP have worked to promote women’s political representation, particularly in local councils. Yet, a recent study finds that female members of minor parties and those with no party affiliation (Independents) are passionate about acting for women, but their minority status prevents them from actually turning their ideas into policy outputs (Osawa and Yoon, 2019). Therefore, what is important is for major parties like the LDP in Japan to actively recruit female candidates, and for those female legislators to be able to speak for women once they are elected. In South Korea, quota adoption has been a primary goal of women’s groups from early on, since democratisation of the country in 1987. Women’s organisations across the ideological spectrum formed coalitions to push for the adoption of gender quota laws and for subsequent revisions (Yoon and Shin, 2015). In 2000, the Political Party Act was revised to recommend that parties nominate at least 30 per cent women in their proportional representation (PR) lists in both national and local elections, although specific enforcement measures were not included. The election laws (e.g. Political Party Act, Public Official Election Act, Political Funds Act) were revised several times in subsequent years. As of today, while political parties are ‘mandated’ to comply with 50 per cent zipper-list quotas for PR candidate lists (or else the party’s list is rejected), no sanctions apply to non-compliance with the gender quotas in single-member districts, even though large portions of seats in both the national and local legislatures are elected in SMDs rather than in PR (Shin, 2016: 358). Instead, political parties are simply given access to additional political funds as an incentive when conforming to the 30 per cent quota in the majoritarian tier. Overall, gender quotas have contributed to women’s numerical increase over time in South Korea. The percentage of women in the National Assembly remained very low at 5.9 per cent in 2000, but jumped to 13 per cent in 2004. The percentage of female members elected to the National Assembly gradually increased to 17 per cent in 2016, and to 19 per cent in the most recent election in 2020. At the same time, the proportion of female parliamentarians is still far from meeting the 30 per cent critical mass. Parties, on the surface, show support for quotas, but resist informally by complying only in the PR tier of the mixed electoral system: they show lack of commitment to enforcement in single-member districts where they face strong opposition from male incumbents (Yoon and Shin, 2017). As a result, most female representatives win seats in uncontested elections through zipper-list quotas in PR. Moreover, there is an informal agreement that exists among parties that PR members serve a single term, making it difficult for those elected female members to run again as PR list candidates in subsequent elections (Yoon and Shin, 2015). Despite the uncertain future impacts of the Parity Law in Japan and legislative gender quotas in South Korea, there are still some positive signs regarding women’s sustainable and substantive representation in the two countries. For instance, while most women have won seats through zipper-list quotas in PR, the number of women elected in SMDs has continuously increased since quotas were adopted in 2000 (e.g. from five in 2004 to 19 in 2016). Similarly,

Feminist institutions and implications for gender equality in East Asia  389 about 50 per cent of women elected in SMDs had previously served as PR members in the National Assembly (Shin, 2014). Thus, the impact of zipper-list gender quotas is not limited only to PR, but may spill over to SMDs under the mixed electoral system, contributing to women’s sustainable representation in South Korea. Furthermore, a comparative investigation of statements in local councils in Japan and Korea revealed that female members, regardless of their party affiliation, speak about women’s issues more often than their male counterparts in both countries (Yoon and Osawa, 2017). As expected, parties representing distinct constituencies and ideologies (e.g. conservative vs progressive) highlight different aspects of women’s concerns, but overall, female legislators are more likely than male legislators to advocate for women’s interests in local councils. These findings suggest a greater possibility of women’s substantive representation as more women are elected in the future.

FEMINIST GOVERNANCE AND LIMITED POLICY IMPACTS Despite more than two decades of institutional history, women’s policy units seem to have made little progress in advancing the social and economic conditions of women in the two East Asian countries. One area in which progress has been slow is in women’s economic empowerment. The global gender gap index places Japan at 110th and South Korea at 115th out of a total of 149 countries. Of the features listed under the category, women’s low level of labour force participation, and representation as senior officials and managers seem particularly problematic. In Japan, women’s average labour force participation is about 17 per cent lower than that of men (68.4 per cent for female, 85.6 per cent for male). The gap is much more extreme when considering women’s representation as legislators, senior officials and managers (13.2 per cent female, 86.8 per cent male). The Abe government has strived to improve women’s economic participation and representation in recent years. The fundamental idea behind Abe government’s ‘womenomics’ policy is to boost Japanese gross domestic product (GDP) by 12.5 percentage points by increasing women’s participation in the labor force (Matsui et al., 2014: 5). The policy also contained the slogan ʻ30 by 20’, which aims to put women into 30 per cent of leadership positions in the economy and government by 2020.14 To meet this target, the Act on Promotion of Women’s Participation and Advancement in the Workplace was passed in 2015, to assess employers according to their efforts to empower women. According to this law, corporations and local municipalities ranked highly on this measure would be eligible for modest grants, but they were voluntary measures for which no clear penalties for non-compliance were indicated. Not only was the impact of Abe’s womenomics limited, but the measures were harshly criticised by feminist scholars, as women’s economic participation and advancement were discussed in the context of katsuyo (utilisation) or katsuyaku (lively contribution), considering women as assets to re-energise the national economy (Kano, 2018). In Korea, the problem of women’s economic participation and advancement is even more serious (Figure 31.1). Women’s labour force participation rate has stagnated at around 50 per cent since 2000. In 2020, women’s labour force participation is at 59.1 per cent, which remains 18.8 points lower than that of men. What’s worse, Korean women in their 20s and 30s experience career interruption due to child care or housework (i.e. M curve phenomenon), and they face worse working conditions when they are re-employed (Figure 31.2). The gender wage gap in Korea is narrowing, but it

390  Handbook of feminist governance

Source: OECD Statistics (https://​stats​.oecd​.org/​Index​.aspx​?DataSetCode​=​LFS​_SEXAGE​_I​_R​#).

Figure 31.1

Korean labour force participation (2000–2020)

Source: OECD Statistics (https://​stats​.oecd​.org/​Index​.aspx​?DataSetCode​=​LFS​_SEXAGE​_I​_R​#).

Figure 31.2

Women’s economic participation by age group for Korea and OECD countries (2020)

Feminist institutions and implications for gender equality in East Asia  391 is still greater than that of other OECD countries. For instance, the average gender wage gap in the OECD was 15.3 per cent in 2017, while that of Korea was 36.7 per cent – the highest among all OECD countries and higher even than that of Japan (Chang et al., 2019: 109). One of the main reasons for the continuing gender wage gap is women’s tendency to work in low-wage jobs within non-regular work (more so than men). The Ministry of Gender Equality has adopted several ongoing strategies to increase women’s representation in private corporations and women’s leadership capacity, and various support policies have been implemented to bring career-interrupted women back into the labour market. Yet, the various institutional measures implemented by the government to support female workers have done little to improve women’s economic participation and advancement. Moreover, the recent #MeToo movement hinted at the hostile working environment women face in the two countries, well-known for their patriarchal and masculine cultures. In Japan, #MeToo began in the social media when a freelance writer named Hachu wrote and shared a post on Facebook describing the sexual harassment she experienced at Dentsu – Japan’s leading advertising agency. Shortly afterwards, a freelance journalist, Shiori Ito shared her story of being raped by Yamaguchi – a prominent TV journalist and acquaintance of then Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe – who invited her to dinner for a possible job opportunity while she was interning at Thomson Reuters. Similarly, #MeToo in South Korea was ignited by Ji-Hyeon Suh, a female prosecutor, when she shared her experience of sexual harassment and discrimination within the prosecutor’s office on live TV news in January 2018. Not too long afterwards on the same live news programme, Ji-Eun Kim, a staff member of Hee-Jeong An, a Governor of Chungbuk province, exposed publicly the sexual assault she had endured while working for Governor An. The early cases of #MeToo occurred in work-related environments in both countries. In Japan, the movement began with two freelance workers who did not have permanent positions, which gave them some liberty to speak out about their experiences. This also means that speaking out about sexual assault experiences may be far more difficult for other women, who fear harming the reputation of the firm as well as their own careers – the reason why most female victims of sexual harassment choose to stay silent and anonymous (Hasunuma and Shin, 2019). In Korea, the early cases involved prominent figures in powerful positions, where men relied on their powers to sexually harass and assault female subordinates repeatedly. What is even more surprising, however, is how little has changed as a result of the #MeToo movement, despite the large amount of public attention to the issue. This has been particularly true in the case of Japan, where the movement was limited mostly to the journalism field. By contrast, in Korea, the #MeToo movement ignited by a female prosecutor led to a bottom-up grassroots movement of women speaking out about their experiences in different professional fields, such as sports, culture and the arts, and education (i.e., #School MeToo). The movement eventually led the government to recreate Gender Equality Offices in eight government ministries in 2019, whose key mission is to address sexual assault cases occurring within the boundaries of the ministry (e.g. addressing #MeToo cases in schools and universities and adopting legal measures to prevent further cases in the Ministry of Education), in addition to coordinating gender equal policymaking (Park et al., 2019). Nevertheless, the news in 2020 that the personal secretary of Seoul Mayor Won-soon Park accused the mayor of sexually harassing her for more than four years, and that her requests for help to the Seoul City Hall went ignored, suggested that organisational culture with regard to preventing and addressing sexual assault cases changed little.

392  Handbook of feminist governance

BACKLASH AGAINST FEMINIST INSTITUTIONS AND INTENSIFYING GENDER CONFLICT Unprecedented levels of backlash against feminist institutions occurred in the early 2000s in Japan, when the questioning of government policies for gender equality increased in the Diet (Kano, 2011: 42). Around this time, several municipal gender equality centres were built, offering meeting rooms, libraries and educational programmes for city residents. These actions were considered an invasion of feminism into the local community as a result of gender equality ordinances and centres. The conservative attacks began in newsletters and pamphlets produced by conservative organisations like Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), and these attacks were quickly picked up by the conservative mass media like the Sankei and online communities, criticising both the direction of municipal gender equality ordinances and the educational programmes held in municipal gender equality centres. The term ‘gender free’ often became the target of attack. Although it was used mostly to mean ‘free from gender bias’, it was regarded as ‘eliminating gender’ (Kano, 2011: 45). The fact that the women’s policy machinery was created as an outcome of international mobilisation, rather than domestic grassroots mobilisation, added to the build-up of hostility toward these institutions (Kano, 2011). Institutional backlash against feminist institutions was not difficult to foresee from the outset, when specific wordings were chosen for political reasons. For example, the Basic Law for a Gender-Equal Society in Japanese includes the phrase, ‘danjo kyodosankaku’, which translates as ‘co-participation and planning of men and women’. It was a strategic move by conservative politicians to use a murky term instead of a clearer and straight-forward term for equality, which is ‘byodo’ (Yamaguchi, 2018: 68). Conservative politicians avoided using ‘byodo,’ because it was understood as equality in outcome rather than opportunity, and instead preferred ‘sankaku’ – participation in planning – calling for a greater role for women in society (Kano, 2011: 44). Backlash against feminist institutions has been even more intense and visible in South Korea. Thousands of citizens signed a petition in 2020 demanding the government abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, because ‘clearly the ministry that operates with taxpayers’ money is doing nothing to improve the conditions of women’.15 In male-dominated online communities, it is not too difficult to come across comments that point to the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family as the main cause of their frustration (Lee et al., 2018). Yet, to understand the essence of this institutional backlash, it is important to look at gender conflict that is deeply rooted and growing in Korean society. Since the Korean War, Korean men between 18 and 35 have been required to serve for approximately two years in the military. However, young men today don’t believe this should be a duty assigned only to men;16 they also believe they are missing out on important opportunities during the years of their military service. Furthermore, while men in their 20s agree that older generations of women have made sacrifices and were discriminated against, they do not believe that women of similar ages as themselves experience discrimination based on sex. Therefore, when the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family announces a plan to expand female representation both in government and the private sector, young men believe these measures give women an unfair advantage, and make it more difficult for men to get jobs and become successful in their careers.

Feminist institutions and implications for gender equality in East Asia  393

CONCLUSION This chapter has shown that Japan and South Korea similarly launched women’s policy units to achieve gender equality more than 20 years ago, although the two countries differed in specific institutional design, and the form of legal measures to promote women’s political representation. Nevertheless, the low status of women’s policy machineries, as well as lack of resources, has been a constant challenge, limiting their institutional capacity to implement gender equality policy. This in part explains why policy impacts and women’s advancement in economic and social spheres have been slow in both Japan and South Korea. Furthermore, the two countries are strikingly similar in facing backlash, despite continued policy efforts by feminist institutions to advance gender equality policy. As discussed previously in this chapter, backlash has been more pronounced in the case of South Korea, and the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family has become the central target of the backlash movement. The two country cases are important, because they have implications for other new democracies in the Asian region where feminist institutions are developing and expanding. While specific mechanisms of these national policy machineries differ, both countries have highly stable policymaking institutions and tools like gender budgeting to implement gender equality policy. In this regard, the presence of these institutions and tools makes it possible to pass gender-related legislations (e.g. on violence against women), and strengthen national capacities for gender-sensitive planning and budgeting, even when backlash intensifies.

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

See https://​www​.worldometers​.info/​gdp/​gdp​-by​-country/​. See https://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​wiki/​Democracy​_Index​#cite​_note​-index2019​-7. See https://​www​.economist​.com/​graphic​-detail/​2019/​03/​08/​the​-glass​-ceiling​-index. See https://​data​.ipu​.org/​women​-ranking​?month​=​10​&​year​=​2020. For details of the organisational structure of the national machinery in Japan, see https://​www​ .gender​.go​.jp/​english​_contents/​about​_danjo/​lbp/​basic/​toshin​-e/​org​-e​.html. 6. To date, the Korean Women’s Development Institute supports gender equality policymaking in the country by conducting basic research in major policy areas impacting women. See https://​eng​.kwdi​ .re​.kr/​about/​goal​.do. 7. See https://​eng​.kwdi​.re​.kr/​publications/​genderPolicy​.do. 8. See https://​elaw​.klri​.re​.kr/​eng​_mobile/​viewer​.do​?hseq​=​52893​&​type​=​part​&​key​=​38. 9. Eight ministries and agencies include Ministry of Education, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Health and Welfare, Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Ministry of Employment and Labour, Supreme Prosecutors’ Office, and National Police Agency (Park et al., 2019). 10. See https://​www​.gender​.go​.jp/​english​_contents/​mge/​index​.html. 11. See http://​www​.mogef​.go​.kr/​eng/​pc/​eng​_pc​_f001​.do. 12. WINWIN – a group that has continuously worked towards women’s political representation – is an executive organisation of Q no Kai. See http://​www​.winwinjp​.org/​. 13. Miura notes that legal quotas were considered unconstitutional for two reasons. First, it violates freedom of association, namely the freedom for political parties to recruit and nominate their own candidates; second, it was considered unconstitutional to discriminate against men and that legal quotas endangered men’s right and freedom to run for office (Miura, 2018: 88). 14. The government became less ambitious in 2015, when it lowered the target to 7 per cent of leadership positions in government and 5 per cent in the private sector in the Fourth Basic Plan of Gender Equal Society.

394  Handbook of feminist governance 15. See https://​www1​.president​.go​.kr/​petitions/​591086. 16. In their study of 3,000 adult men, Ma et al. (2018) found that 72 per cent of men in their 20s think that the male-only draft is a form of gender discrimination, and almost 65 per cent believe that women should also be conscripted.

REFERENCES Cabinet Office (2021) The Fifth Basic Plan for Gender Equality, Government of Japan. Chang, Youngmin, Youngsun Chang, Jiyoung Han and Youkyoung Chung (2006) Revisions to the Framework Act on Women’s Development, Seoul: National Assembly of the Republic of Korea, Gender Equality and Family Committee. Chang, Eun Ha, Kyung Hee Kim, Young Taek Kim, Jiso Yoon, Hye Seung Cho, Ji Hyun Hong, Jung Soo Kim, Yoonjung Park and Youngsook Cho (2019) Review of Global Agenda on Gender Equality and South Korea’s Experience, Seoul: Korea Women’s Development Institute. Chen, Chun-hua and Matthew Mazzetta (2021) ‘Taiwan Ranks No. 6 in World for Gender Equality: GEC’, Focus Taiwan, 5 January. https://​focustaiwan​.tw/​society/​202101050012. Dalton, Emma (2015) Women and Politics in Contemporary Japan, Abingdon: Routledge. Gaunder, Alisa (2015) ‘Quota Nonadoption in Japan: The Role of the Women’s Movement and the Opposition’, Critical Perspectives on Gender and Politics, Quotas and Non-quota Strategies in East Asia, Politics & Gender 11(1): 176–86. Gelb, Joyce and Margarita Estevez-Abe (1998) ‘Political Women in Japan: A Case Study of the Seikatsusha Network Movement’, Social Science Japan Journal 1(2): 263–79. Hasunuma, Linda and Ki-young Shin (2019) ‘#MeToo in Japan and South Korea: #WeToo, #WithYou’, Journal of Women, Politics & Policy 40(1): 97–111. Huang, Chiang-ling (2015) ‘Gender Quotas in Taiwan: The Impact of Global Diffusion’, Politics & Gender 11(1): 207–17. Ichii, Reina and Rhonda Sharp (2013) ‘Government Budgets and the Promotion of Gender Equality in Japan and South Korea’, paper presented to the IAFFE panel of the Society of Heterodox Economics Conference University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2–3 December. IMF [International Monetary Fund] (2017) ‘Gender Budgeting in G7 Countries’, IMF Policy Paper, 19 April. Kano, Ayako (2011) ‘Backlash, Fight Back, and Back-Pedaling: Responses to State Feminism in Contemporary Japan’, International Journal of Asian Studies 8(1): 41–62. Kano, Ayako (2018) ‘Womenomics and Acrobatics: Why Japanese Feminists Remain Skeptical about Feminist State Policy’, Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Cultural Studies and Politics 2(1): 1–13. Kim, Seung-kyung and Kyounghee Kim (2011) ‘Gender Mainstreaming and the Institutionalization of the Women’s Movement in South Korea’, Women’s Studies International Forum 34: 390–400. KWDI [Korean Women’s Development Institute] (2021) ‘2021 Gender Budgeting in Korea’, KWDI Center for Gender Budget Research. Lee, Sooyeon, Jiso Yoon, Hyekyung Chang and Sooah Kim (2018) Measures to Regulate Sexist Hate Speech, Korea Women’s Development Institute. Ma, Kyoung Hee, Youn-Joo Cho, Hee Young Moon, Euna Lee and Soon-Mi Lee (2018) Study on Gender Inequality and Men’s Quality of Life, Korea Women’s Development Institute. Matsui, Kathy, Hiromi Suzuki, Kazunori Tatebe and Tsumugi Akiba (2014) ‘Japan: Portfolio Strategy Womenomics 4.0: Time to Walk the Talk’. https://​ www​ .goldmansachs​ .com/​ insights/​ pages/​ macroeconomic​-insights​-folder/​womenomics4​-folder/​womenomics4​-time​-to​-walk​-the​-talk​.pdf. Miura, Mari (2018) ‘Interview with Mari Miura: The Gender Parity Law in Japan: The Potential to Change Women’s Under-Representation’, Journal of Gender Studies 21: 87–99. MOGEF [Ministry of Gender Equality and Family] (2021) ‘Plans of the Ministry’, internal document of the Ministry. https://​www​.korea​.kr/​archive/​expDocView​.do​?docId​=​39303​&​call​_from​=​rsslink. Osawa, Kimiko and Jiso Yoon (2019) ‘Who Represents Women and Why in the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly’, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 25(3): 437–58.

Feminist institutions and implications for gender equality in East Asia  395 Park, Seon-young, Bok-tae Kim and Jiso Yoon (2019) Reorganization of Gender Governance on Administrative Procedures of Gender Equality Policies: Focusing on Gender Equality Office, Korea Women’s Development Institute. Shin, Ki-young (2014) ‘Women’s Sustainable Representation and the Spillover Effect of Electoral Gender Quotas in South Korea’, International Political Science Review 35(1): 80–92. Shin, Ki-young (2016) ‘Women’s Mobilizations for Political Representation in Patriarchal States: Two Models from Japan and South Korea’. In Mino Vianello and Mary Hawkesworth (eds), Gender and Power: Towards Equality and Democratic Governance, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 344–65. Yamaguchi, Tomomi (2018) ‘The Mainstreaming of Feminism and the Politics of Backlash in Twenty-First Century Japan’. In Julia C. Bullock, Ayako Kano and James Welker (eds), Rethinking Japanese Feminisms, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 68–86. Yoon, Jiso and Kimiko Osawa (2017) ‘Advocating Policy Interests in Local Politics: Women’s Substantive Representation in Japan and Korea’, Asian Women 33(2): 43–67. Yoon, Jiso and Ki-young Shin (2015) ‘Mixed Effects of Legislative Quotas in South Korea’, Critical Perspectives on Gender and Politics, Quotas and Non-quota Strategies in East Asia, Politics & Gender 11(1): 186–95. Yoon, Jiso and Ki-young Shin (2017) ‘Opportunities and Challenges to Gender Quotas in Local Politics: The Case of Municipal Council Elections in South Korea’, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 23(3): 363–84.

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

INTRODUCTION Women’s empowerment has been an issue impacting all of society. In South East Asia, women’s activism has taken place at the grassroots level, mostly through civil society organisations (CSOs), within the private sector as well as at governmental level. Throughout the 20th century, women discovered that their voices are taken more seriously if they speak as one through an organisation. On the other hand, women’s representation as decision-makers is still low in all sectors particularly in legislative, regional organisations and corporate sectors (Inter-Parliamentary Union, 2021), leading to direct and indirect discrimination as addressed in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Substantive gender equality, non-discrimination and state accountability to protect women’s rights are the heart of the women’s rights convention, CEDAW. This convention has been ratified and acceded to by 189 member states of the United Nations, providing a much-needed legal entity for states and organisations to leverage their demands (United Nations Treaty Collection, 2020). For governments, ratification means they have agreed to take necessary actions to adhere to the convention. For CSOs, CEDAW provides a universal framework to hold the government accountable for advancing gender equality. CEDAW spells out broad state obligations in Articles 2–4, which mention that the state parties must enact non-discriminatory policies, promote and take proactive measures for women’s advancement, and introduce affirmative actions to intensify de facto equality (IWRAW-ap.org, 2020). Since CEDAW was adopted by the UN General Assembly, there have been attempts by governments as well as CSOs to introduce and later on embed feminist values and governance within their organisations using CEDAW as the guiding instrument. 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. This chapter studies the operational values of feminist governance in Asia specifically within intergovernmental (IGO) and CSO regional organisations. It focuses on the extent to which feminist values are practised through regional IGOs and CSOs in Asia. How has feminist governance been realised within these organisations? To examine the issue, this chapter (i) discusses gender equality advocacy within a regional IGO and CSO; and (ii) analyses these regional actors based on three main components of feminist governance. Two regional organisations are selected as case studies, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Asia Pacific Forum for Women, Law and Development (APWLD). Although the organisations differ starkly in terms of their organisational structures, they have a similar objective of empowering women and girls. For ASEAN, the objective is stated in the ASEAN Charter of 2007 while in APWLD, its mission is stated in the APWLD Constitution. Both organisations adopt the human rights approach where women’s rights are human rights. 396

Feminist governance in Asia  397 ASEAN, an IGO with 10 member states, was established in 1967. There are two main consultative bodies that directly and indirectly promote feminist values: the ASEAN Commission on the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Women and Children (ACWC) and the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR). AICHR was established in 2009 and subsequently, the ACWC was formed on 7 April 2010 (ACWC, 2010; ASEAN Secretariat, 2009). Since AICHR’s inception, it has organised meetings and workshops related to women’s rights that directly assist ACWC objectives. As a loosely integrated regional IGO, the ASEAN structure is based on three pillars: political-security, socio-cultural and economic pillars. Despite being the only two anchors of human rights within ASEAN, AICHR and ACWC usually work without coordination. Although AICHR is the overarching human rights council of ASEAN, it is placed within the ASEAN political-security pillar, while ACWC is placed within ASEAN socio-cultural pillar. As for commissions within ASEAN, although AICHR and ACWC only act as advisors, they have directly empowered human and women rights non-governmental organisations (NGOs) through engagement and networks. Meanwhile, the APWLD is a feminist CSO that advocates gender equality within the Asia Pacific. Established in 1985, and presently based in Chiang Mai, APWLD comprises two types of membership: organisational membership and individual membership. To date, there have been 235 NGO members and individual members from 27 countries since its founding. As a regional NGO, APWLD initiated capacity-building workshops and women’s rights advocacy by engaging with governments, IGOs and women NGOs in the Asia Pacific region. This chapter focuses on feminist governance by analysing feminist values, mechanisms and networks. It highlights the roles of ASEAN (through AICHR and ACWC) and APWLD in fostering feminist governance based on values, mechanisms and networks. There are areas of cooperation and contestation faced by these organisations in promoting gender equality and feminist-related agendas.

REGIONAL GOVERNANCE IN THE ASIA PACIFIC REGION Feminist values, mechanisms and networks, which are indicators of feminist governance (Table 32.1) illuminate how regional governance and feminism influence the Asia region. Feminist values refer to gender equality, inclusiveness, empowerment, substantive equality, philosophy and principles. Mechanisms refer to organisational structures, platforms, protocols and law, while networks refer to the collaborative endeavours and the discursive relationships that exist among CSOs, IGOs, state governments and business organisations to foster feminist values. This chapter contextualises the evolution of Asian feminist governance by mapping the actors involved, particularly IGOs and CSOs. To enrich the above conceptualisation, the element of culture must be considered since the sites of governance are enveloped by cultural contexts. Culture in this context refers to human and organisational attitudes towards feminist beliefs, rights, justice and expectations. This approach is also known as the Substance– Structure–Culture approach, which provides a framework to scrutinise both existing laws that directly or indirectly enable or oppress women and methods to reform the law to eliminate all forms of discrimination against women (APWLD, 2014). Many feminist governance values are derived from CEDAW and supported by the ASEAN Charter and other human rights conventions. These international agreements construct and

398  Handbook of feminist governance Table 32.1

Feminist governance elements in South East Asia

Feminist Governance

Description

1.

Values

State obligation, substantive equality and non-discrimination

2.

Mechanism

Government and regional IGO policies, laws, administrations

3.

Network

Local, regional and global organisations, specific government and IGOs agencies

Source: Syahirah (2015).

pressure ASEAN member states to revisit and amend different laws, policies and practices related to women’s rights and human rights in general. In South East Asia and much of the world, CEDAW is a good example of a substantive normative framework. As an international women’s convention, CEDAW became a compass of feminist governance in South East Asia after all ASEAN state members ratified it. Meanwhile, the changes made in state policies and structures after CEDAW ratification are good examples of the structural approach. The IGO and CSO networks constructed through CEDAW are a part of culture-building that has shaped feminist governance in the Asia region. This regional–global governance is strengthened by ratification of other human rights conventions such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the introduction of the ASEAN Charter in 2008. Through the regional Charter and member states’ ratification of human rights conventions, feminist values, mechanisms and platforms have been shaped and strengthened over time. Table 32.2 indicates member states’ commitment to CEDAW. Table 32.2

ASEAN state members and CEDAW

No

States

Date of ratification

State reports

Shadow/alternative report

1.

Brunei

24/5/2006

None

None

2.

Cambodia

15/10/1995

2004, 2011

2006, 2010, 2016

3.

Indonesia

13/9/1984

1997, 2005, 2011, 2019

2007, 2012, 2019

4.

Laos

14/8/1981

2005, 2008, 2017

None

5.

Malaysia

5/7/1995

2004, 2018

2005, 2012, 2018

6.

Myanmar

22/7/1997

2000, 2007, 2016

2000, 2008, 2016

7.

Philippines

5/8/1981

1993, 1997, 2006, 2015

2006, 2016

8.

Singapore

5/10/1995

2000, 2007, 2009, 2015, 2019

2007, 2011, 2017

9.

Thailand

9/8/1985

1997, 2004, 2015

2003, 2017

10.

Vietnam

17/2/1982

1986, 2001, 2007, 2013

2006, 2010, 2013

Source: Syahirah (2015); United Nations (2021).

This table indicates that all ASEAN member states have separately ratified CEDAW. The earliest states to accede to CEDAW were Laos, the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia in the 1980s. Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar and Singapore ratified it in the 1990s. The last member state to ratify CEDAW was Brunei in 2006. As one of the main human rights conventions, CEDAW has comprehensive provisions that shape regional–global governance for women’s rights and human rights in general (Syahirah, 2015). Several feminist governance values are evident in CEDAW. The first relates to countries’ obligation to rectify any laws, administrations and mechanisms not compliant with CEDAW’s equality standards. Member states also have the obligation to submit and present periodic reports related to the progress of the amendments. For example, a women’s development ministry was introduced in 2001 after the Malaysian government acceded to CEDAW in 1995

Feminist governance in Asia  399 (Malaysian Government, 2004, 2018). This resulted in several laws that discriminate against women being amended. For example, in Article 8(1) of the Malaysian Federal Constitution, the word gender was added to ensure no discrimination based on sex occurred. The second value is substantive equality which refers to the methods states use to uphold equality by acknowledging the differences in treatment received by men and women throughout history. It also takes into account indirect discrimination due to culture, mindsets and stereotypes within communities. Therefore, this feminist governance value emphasises the need for different measures and treatment of men and women to achieve equal outcomes – for example, quotas for women. ASEAN state members that have introduced quota policy for women are Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam (International IDEA, 2020). The third feminist value in CEDAW is non-discrimination including demands that member states make explicit efforts to eliminate forms of discrimination due to sex and intersectionality. For example, in a concluding comment, the CEDAW committee congratulates Indonesia for adopting new laws to eliminate discrimination against women and promote gender equality (United Nations, 2007). In terms of the mechanisms of feminist governance, the establishment of ministries and policies related to women and human rights has meant various platforms, protocols and laws to ensure the realisation of feminist values within the ASEAN region. After the ratification of CEDAW, every member state established a ministry for women and introduced a policy to address women’s issues and interests. After the ASEAN Charter, two ASEAN consultative bodies were established and given the mandate of addressing issues related to women and human rights. The existence of AICHR and ACWC have strengthened feminist values and constructed forms of power for civil society organisations and government agencies to amplify women and human rights issues locally and regionally. These consultative bodies also directly adopt a global governance framework, particularly inclusiveness, legitimacy, accountability, transparency, universality, reciprocity and rationality (Dingwerth, 2003; Syahirah, 2015). Since 11 February 2015, AICHR has adopted a consultative relationship with CSOs to enhance its engagement. In November of that year, CSOs were invited to various events and workshops such as AICHR–SOMTC Joint Workshop in Yogyakarta, Indonesia 5–6 November 2015 to discuss the human rights-based approach to combat trafficking in persons, especially women and children (AICHR, 2015). By having these visible mechanisms within states and ASEAN, CSOs and related agencies gain institutional power to engage in feminist governance and monitor member states’ compliance with and implementation of feminist governance. Institutional power is constructed through various international treaties which have been endorsed by member states. These organisations gain rights and authority to monitor and demand that member states adhere to the values and action plans of feminist governance. Barnett and Duvall (2005) have highlighted the contestation of power that occurs within global governance, namely around structural power and institutional power. Structural power is associated with a country’s sovereignty, based on its history, culture, law and religious interpretation. The institutional power of feminist governance has grown through the UN human rights conventions. In particular, CEDAW has strengthened the power of feminist ideas and advocacy networks. Due to this power, various global, regional and local civil society organisations can operate as advocacy agents within the ASEAN framework. This chapter focuses on how the regional agencies, AICHR and ACWC, as well as the CSO APWLD can utilise the values, mechanism and network of feminist governance to eliminate discrimination against women.

400  Handbook of feminist governance

GENDER EQUALITY IN AICHR AND ACWC More than 32 years since its establishment, ASEAN has begun to adopt and promote gender equality values and mechanisms through ACWC and AICHR. Discussion on human rights in ASEAN started in 1993 through a Joint Communique of the 26th ASEAN Foreign Ministers Meeting. After participating in the UN World Conference on Human Rights and adopting the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, member states of ASEAN agreed to adopt the ASEAN Charter in November 2007 (ASEAN, 2007). Article 14 of the ASEAN Charter states that a human rights body is needed to ensure effective human rights governance within the South East Asia region. Hence, in 2009 at the 15th ASEAN Summit Thailand, AICHR was inaugurated and designed to be an integral part of the promotion and protection of human rights in ASEAN. In line with the adoption of CEDAW and CRC, the ACWC was created on 7 April 2010 to address issues related to women and children in the South East Asia region. ACWC started to develop policies and programmes based on a global feminist governance framework by engaging various stakeholders including CSOs. Regional feminist governance began to be operationalised by the appointments of AICHR and ACWC representatives from the 10 member states. AICHR and ACWC have growing normative roles in addressing issues related to women’s vulnerability, dignity, rights and well-being. However, due to the nature of ASEAN’s loosely integrated structure of regionalism and member states’ political sovereignty, AICHR and ACWC face challenges in eliminating discrimination and human rights abuses in the region. The first challenge is that AICHR and ACWC are widely criticised by stakeholders, particularly CSOs, as ineffective and ‘toothless’. They are also perceived as protecting the state members’ interest more than promoting human rights in the region. The Chairperson of ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR), Charles Santiago, said at the High-Level Dialogue on Human Rights in ASEAN: If AICHR cannot be reformed as a way to protect people’s rights in the region, then should we look for another mechanism? This is the challenge I think for today and a challenge for our governments. If we can answer this question we can move forward for human rights in the region, as well as the protection and promotion of human rights for our communities. (ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights, 2019)

Second, as consultative bodies, AICHR and ACWC lack mandates or a system that facilitates smooth coordination among bodies to avoid duplication and overlapping of programmes. There are also gaps between the three pillars of ASEAN. Gender issues and human rights are not mainstream issues and are not the main priority of ASEAN (Forum Asia, 2020; Mules, 2017). Although AICHR and ACWC are supposed to be regional mechanisms for women and human rights, the terms of reference (TOR) of these councils do not address the need to respond or give assistance to any urgent cases related to women, children and human rights violation in ASEAN. Since ASEAN is a loosely integrated regional intergovernmental organisation, it is difficult to achieve consensus in certain matters, including reforming the AICHR and ACWC TORs (Forum Asia, 2020). Another challenge is that since the governments of the member states have the prerogative to choose their representatives, the representatives have varied backgrounds – coming from government offices, NGOs and the academy. This has contributed to a lack of commitment and understanding of the objectives of AICHR and ACWC (Forum Asia, 2020).

Feminist governance in Asia  401 Although there are major challenges, the existence of AICHR and ACWC has made a substantive contribution to human rights and gender equality endeavours within ASEAN. Despite growing criticism of the inclinations of ASEAN member states to emphasise the ‘ASEAN way’ (Mules, 2017), AICHR and ACWC have managed to create platforms for governments, civil society and academicians to discuss and highlight different issues related to gender equality and human rights. These platforms have strengthened the values and networks of gender equality initiatives. The main breakthrough was the adoption of the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration in 2012. As the first standard-setting political document to codify basic human rights and fundamental freedoms, this declaration helps empower stakeholders and gender equality and human rights movements within the South East Asia region (ASEAN Secretariat, 2013). AICHR and ACWC give institutional power to different women’s NGOs and CSOs to push and strengthen gender equality and human rights mechanisms within ASEAN. At ASEAN events, stakeholders have managed to highlight the importance of all ASEAN state members upholding CEDAW and CRC as part of the ASEAN Political-Security Community Blueprint and the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community missions (Forum Asia, 2020). However, the two councils report to different pillars of ASEAN; the AICHR reports to the ASEAN Foreign Ministers Meeting under the political-security pillar, while the ACWC reports to the ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on Social Welfare and Development and the ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on Women under the socio-cultural pillar (Forum Asia, 2020). This set-up can be both beneficial and challenging to the feminist governance in ASEAN. As a consultative body, AICHR is described as the overarching human rights institution in ASEAN with overall responsibility for the promotion and protection of human rights in ASEAN, while ACWC’s TOR states the need to work with AICHR as well as other relevant bodies pertaining to issues related to women and children’s rights. Although there are limits to taking action as consultative bodies, AICHR and ACWC have mandates to engage and organise consultative dialogues with various national, regional and international stakeholders (Forum Asia, 2020). The establishment of these human rights consultative bodies created an epistemic community comprising ‘a network of professionals with recognized expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within that domain or issue-area’ (Haas, 1992: 1–2; Hara, 2019). This community can directly influence decision-makers by providing national and regional frameworks for policies relating to women, children and human rights. It is a discursive but effective mechanism to diffuse advocacy ideas and strategies from civil society to governments and ASEAN. In assessing the impact of ACWC, Forum Asia (2020) conducted a survey related to the ACWC’s governance particularly on its selection process, and its performance on the promotion of human rights and fundamental freedoms of women and children in ASEAN. The survey tried to measure ACWC roles as an advocate for women and children and how it assisted ASEAN member states in preparing CEDAW, CRC, UPR and other Treaty reports. Other than that, this survey also measured to what extent ACWC efforts on stakeholders’ capacity-building and information provision related to women’s and children’s rights are publicised. The findings indicate that ACWC is constrained by (i) a lack of support from ASEAN member states resulting in the absence of an annual budget and resources for ACWC; and (ii) ACWC’s structural position is vague and the selection process for its representatives could be improved. ACWC needs to be a fully-fledged human rights mechanism to eliminate all forms of discrimination against women. Sixty-five per cent agreed with the statement that

402  Handbook of feminist governance the ACWC has performed satisfactorily on the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms of women and children in ASEAN since there had been changes to national policies concerning violence against women and children. However, the ACWC’s direct contribution to the changes remains unclear. Respondents surveyed stated that the top three priority areas for ACWC should be (i) strengthening initiatives to eliminate violence against women and children by developing accountability mechanisms within ASEAN; (ii) eliminating violence against women in the context of public health emergencies; and (iii) developing a regional action plan on women, peace and security to support women in conflict and the post-conflict situations in ASEAN. Discussions about the AICHR and ACWC reveal the complexity involved in trying to strengthen feminist governance components within ASEAN. In terms of values, there is frequent contestation between the feminist governance values of state obligation, non-discrimination and substantive equality, and the core values of the ASEAN way that uphold sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of one another. Therefore, AICHR and ACWC can only act as advisory entities and are regarded as weak by CSOs and human rights activists. Despite the contestation, AICHR and ACWC directly attain institutional power through the CEDAW reporting process that upholds the principle of state obligation upon ratification. ASEAN state members are obliged to adopt and implement policies and amend laws to be in line with CEDAW. AICHR and ACWC also manage to empower CSOs and human rights activists through meetings, workshops and events related to human rights, particularly women’s and children’s rights. With these activities, AICHR and ACWC have strengthened and amplified feminist governance despite values and structural contestation within ASEAN.

THE ASIA PACIFIC FORUM ON WOMEN, LAW AND DEVELOPMENT, AND FEMINIST ADVOCACY At the Asia Pacific regional level, the APWLD is one of the most vocal feminist organisations. Feminist governance is apparent from the inception of APWLD, as it is in many feminist civil society organisations (see Chapter 2 of this Handbook), in terms of feminist values, mechanisms and networks. Gender equality for all is the stated goal of APWLD. Recognising that advances in women’s human rights can be achieved and sustained when autonomous feminist movements exist and have enabling environments in which to work, APWLD uses feminist analysis to dissect, engage with and transform laws, legal practices and the system that shape and inform them (APWLD, 2020). It fosters feminist movements to influence policies, laws and practices at different levels of governance. APWLD upholds the concept of Women’s Human Rights developed during the UN Decade for Women (1976–85). Since the APWLD’s founding, its founders and members have advocated for change and utilised intersectional perspectives. By 2010, the organisation began to emphasise both intersectionality and a stronger theory of change as it strives to achieve development justice for all. More challenging for APWLD has been the mechanisms of feminist governance. APWLD is a grassroots-based organisation formed in 1986 when lawyers, activists and scholars set up a secretariat in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. From 1997 until 2008, the grassroots members operated within task forces that were answerable to the Regional Council, the highest governing body of APWLD. Members of the Regional Council are elected every three years. They represent six sub-regions in the Asia Pacific and provide directions for the Programme and

Feminist governance in Asia  403 Management Committee members who work with the Secretariat of APWLD. The organisation has developed extensive networks in 27 countries with the main aim of promoting legislation to ensure the protection and empowerment of women while recognising that law can also be used to inhibit women’s potential. Between 1997 and 2007, APWLD members had the opportunity to serve on six different task forces: Violence against Women; Rural and Indigenous Women; Women’s Participation in Political Processes; Labour and Migration; Women’s Human Rights; and Women and Environment. New members were nominated to different task forces by other members. Each task force would meet annually to plan and execute its activities. During the Strategic Planning Meeting on 27–8 January 2002, the Regional Council decided on six programmes for the six task forces. However, there was a crisis in 2006 when APWLD ran out of funds. Based on the third external evaluation for 2003–5, members knew that APWLD had to restructure itself to be sustainable. In 2008, the APWLD Operations Manual outlining management, administrative and financial guidelines and procedures was finally completed. Task forces were replaced by organising committees. This shift towards a horizontal organisational structure provides more space for members to participate. Furthermore, the move to conduct major meetings online also allows for greater participation and more voices to be heard. In 2008, there were four major programmes organised by APWLD: Beyond Marginalisation, Women in Power, Feminist Legal Theory, and Grounding the Global. By 2015, two additional programmes had been added: Feminist Development Justice and Climate Change. One of the common threads that bind the programmes together is the concern to eradicate all forms of violence against women (VAW). APWLD members see VAW as a cross-cutting issue that must be addressed by all programmes. Through the years, many cases of VAW have been documented by APWLD in rural areas, the workplace and public spaces, as well as within households. Each programme developed approaches to confront VAW in a targeted manner. For example, the Feminist Legal Theory programme explicitly highlights laws, regulations and inadequate support systems concerning VAW (Ramli, 2018). Comparative analyses were undertaken to compare and contrast actions taken by state enforcement agencies, as well as the support given by NGOs to victims of violence. One of the strongest activities of APWLD is the capacity-building programmes developed by different organising committees. Two capacity-building programmes are the Feminist Law and Practice Training Programme (FLP) and the Gender and Politics Training – Women in Power (WiP) Programme. On the one hand, FLP is a long-standing programme that focuses on the transforming of discriminatory laws, policies and practices by women’s rights advocates and organisations. On the other hand, WIP trains participants who have the aspiration to become candidates for election in their respective countries. Besides training, APWLD is also known for Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR). FPAR is feminist-organised training to document rights violations, collectively craft solutions and advocate a strategy for change at the local, national, regional and international levels. FPAR can be designed for specific contexts and issues such as climate justice, women’s rights to decent work, a living wage and participatory democracy, and discrimination against marginalised women. In the case of climate justice, women’s organisations located within village communities utilised FPAR to mobilise cross-movement collaboration in the form of co-creation of the Feminist Fossil Free Future. The strength of APWLD is its networks from the grassroots to the global level. Using information gathered from grassroots members, injustice towards women’s human rights

404  Handbook of feminist governance defenders such as harassment and imprisonment were brought to the attention of regional and international bodies. At the global level, APWLD has been engaging with UN treaty bodies and special procedures since the new millennium. It campaigned for the creation of the mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and in 1994 Radhika Coomaraswamy, one of APWLD’s founding members, was the first appointment to the position. To facilitate direct engagement between Asia Pacific women’s rights organisations and UN mandate holders, APWLD began to hold annual consultations with the UN Special Rapporteur, attended by NGOs working on VAW as well as victims of VAW. These consultations have been expanded to other mandate holders with the aim of ensuring that women’s human rights are systematically integrated into UN human rights bodies and mechanisms. The regional consultations provide a safe space for women to provide first-hand testimonials on specific cases directly to the mandate holders. More importantly, the consultations provide an opportunity to identify patterns of rights violations, influence the themes of the mandate holders’ reports, and share strategies and strengthen networks in the Asia Pacific region. Another important engagement is the commencement of the Ground Level People’s Forum organised by APWLD for civil society and people’s movements to have their voice heard on the implementation of the Global Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Forum, through its networks, provides an alternative venue to follow up on and review the SDGs as compared to the UN High-Level Political Forum (HLPF). The HLPF of 2019 focused on the review of SDG 4 on education, SDG 8 on decent work, SDG 10 on reducing inequality, SDG 13 on climate change and SDG 16 on peaceful, just and inclusive societies. Malaysia is one of the 183 countries committed to implementing the SDGs. Knowing the importance of the global development framework, 40 CSOs established the Malaysia SDG CSO Alliance in 2015. The network has been able to push for SDG implementation through the establishment of the first All-Party Parliamentary Group Malaysia on SDGs in the Malaysian Parliament. At least two of the key persons in the All-Party Parliamentary Group on SDGs – Shanthi Dairiam and Rashila Ramli – are associated with APWLD. Although APWLD is a feminist organisation, its effectiveness was initially limited by difficulties in making itself sustainable. This is due to the very rapid expansion of membership in many countries, the lack of clear operational manuals for daily operations and, most of all, its limited fundraising abilities. APWLD diverted the crisis by taking stock of its situation and adhering to recommendations made by external evaluators. The Strategic Planning Meeting held in 2008 was a turning point for APWLD. It was at this meeting that a complete restructuring of the organisation as well as a five-year financial sustainability plan was put into place. More importantly, members continue to uphold the values of feminist governance and belief in what they were fighting for despite these adverse conditions.

INTERNAL VARIATION WITHIN AND BETWEEN ASEAN AND APWLD Feminist governance relies heavily on networks for its advocacy work. For both ASEAN and APWLD, organisational structures determined the impact of their programmes. Analysis of their networks indicates the uniqueness, as well as the strengths and weaknesses, of ASEAN and APWLD in terms of the advocacy collaboration and partnership needed for feminist gov-

Feminist governance in Asia  405 Table 32.3

Applying feminist governance concepts to ASEAN and APWLD

Feminist governance ASEAN (within)

APWLD (within)

Values

Contest (liberal vs feminist

Cooperate (consistent feminist values

values)

despite cultural differences)

Cooperate – AICHR and

Contest (drastic organisational

ACWC are embedded within

restructuring and fundraising activities)

ASEAN and APWLD (between)

Mechanisms

Contest Contest

ASEAN Network

Contest (work in silo)

Cooperate (strong linkages from the

Some cooperation

ground to the global level)

ernance. For that reason, we identify areas of contestation and cooperation within and between the two organisations (Table 32.3). Contestation and cooperation within ASEAN or APWLD can be explained by the strength of the values held by members. Members of ASEAN represent the values of their state; thus, there is a tendency towards protecting one’s national interest while pursuing mutual gains. Although there is some interdependence, the three pillars of ASEAN tend to operate independently from one another. APWLD, on the other hand, places a strong emphasis on feminist values. While their programmes were cohesive, they had to overcome the organisational and financial challenges. APWLD, as a regional advocacy organisation, works to increase democratic voices and feminist values within ASEAN. APWLD continues to support the Southeast Asia Women’s Caucus on ASEAN, organise the Asia-Pacific People’s Forum and published the ASEAN Handbook for Women’s Rights Activists. Due to differences in values as well as mechanisms between the two regional organisations, their interactions are characterised more by contestation than cooperation. Since AICHR and ACWC are embedded within ASEAN, these councils have similar objectives and policies to the ASEAN Charter and international human rights conventions. In the case of APWLD, its biggest feminist governance challenge was the need to undergo drastic organisational restructuring and fundraising activities in 2008. Although ACWC and AICHR share similar feminist values with APWLD, there is contestation in terms of policies and structures as IGO councils need to adhere to the core principles of ASEAN (i.e. consultative status). In terms of practice, these two organisations often create policies or documents that differ significantly from APWLD goals and expectations, especially on issues related to human trafficking and refugees. Although these organisations work on the same issues in various feminist governance platforms, there is dissatisfaction due to differences in expectations and actions between APWLD, on the one hand, and AICHR, on the other. For example, in the case of human trafficking issues, both ASEAN and APWLD seek to eliminate or minimise human trafficking. Both organisations call for the implementation of the 4Ps (prevention, protection, prosecution and partnership). However, ASEAN emphasises ASEAN member states’ role as the primary enforcement units, while the focus of APWLD is the well-being of the victims regardless of member states’ positions. The difference in focus can lead to contestation instead of cooperation.

406  Handbook of feminist governance

CONCLUSION This chapter sheds light on feminist values, governance and advocacy in the Asia Pacific. International agreements, particularly CEDAW, have been the catalyst of feminist governance in the Asian region, and the Beijing Platform for Action and the Global Agenda 2030 on SDGs have also been important. These are seminal for feminist movements since they take gender equality and non-discrimination as pillars for action. We have focused on feminist values, mechanisms and networks to highlight the strength, challenges and opportunities for feminist governance in Asia. Although there has been more contestation than cooperation, the CSO networks, as well as specific actors within IGOs, can augment the state obligations to eliminate discrimination and promote gender equality. The chapter also describes APWLD’s role as a feminist governance amplifier within the Asia Pacific region. Despite the challenges, AICHR and ACWC within ASEAN, and APWLD at the civil society level, remain adamant in their quest to foster gender equality through feminist governance in Asia. An examination of the organisational structure of ASEAN and APWLD and their goals suggests that feminist governance flourishes in more horizontal organisations. This analysis also shows that IGOs tend to be guided by the national interest of their member states. IGOs such as ASEAN can produce many documents moving towards feminist governance, but these serve only as a guide to all member states, such as those on human trafficking and the implementation of SDGs. CSOs that are engaging with IGOs usually make use of IGO official documents in their efforts to push their agenda forward. To overcome some of the challenges highlighted in this chapter, groups of like-minded CSOs tend to form alliances, which can better engage with government bodies because of their stronger voices and extensive expertise. In South East Asia generally, contestation tends to prevail over cooperation. Feminist governance represented by feminist values, mechanisms and networks has been put in place by organisations such as APWLD. With IGOs such as ASEAN, while mechanisms to support feminist governance are not in place, feminist values and networks are being consistently introduced into the system. It is through constant interaction between such organisations that gender equality can prevail in the region.

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Feminist governance in Asia  407 ASEAN Secretariat (2009) ‘ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights’, Asia-Pacific Journal on Human Rights and the Law. https://​www​.asean​.org/​storage/​images/​archive/​publications/​ TOR​-of​-AICHR​.pdf. ASEAN Secretariat (2013) ‘ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (AHRD)’. In ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (AHRD) and the Phnom Penh Statement on the Adoption of the AHRD and Its Translations, Jakarta: Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 1–8. Barnett, Michael and Raymond Duvall (2005) ‘Power in International Politics’, International Organization 59(1): 39–75. https://​www​.jstor​.org/​stable/​3877878. Dingwerth, Klaus (2003) The Democratic Legitimacy of Global Public Policy Networks: Analysing the World Commission on Dams, Berlin: The Global Governance Project. Forum Asia (2020) ‘Report on the ACWC+10: Assessing the Commission’s Impact on Protecting Women and Children’s Rights in ASEAN’. https://​www​.forum​-asia​.org/​?p​=​33115. Haas, Peter M. (1992) ‘Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination’, International Organization 46(1): 1–35. https://​www​.jstor​.org/​stable/​2706951. Hara, Abubakar Eby (2019) ‘The Struggle to Uphold a Regional Human Rights Regime: The Winding Role of ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR)’, Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 62(1): 1–18. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1590/​0034​-7329201900111. Inter-Parliamentary Union (2021) ‘Inter-Parliamentary Union: For Democracy. For Everyone’. https://​ ipu​.org. International IDEA (2020) ‘Gender Quotas Database’. https://​www​.idea​.int/​data​-tools/​data/​gender​ -quotas. IWRAW-ap.org (2020) Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). https://​cedaw​.iwraw​-ap​.org/​. Malaysian Government (2004) Combined Initial and Second Periodic CEDAW Report. https://​kpwkm​ .gov​.my/​instrument​_antarabangsa​.pdf. Malaysian Government (2018) Sixth Periodic Report by Malaysia under Article 18 of the Convention, due in 2022. https://​tbinternet​.ohchr​.org. Mules, Ineke (2017) ‘ASEAN 50 Years On: Success or Failure?’. https://​www​.dw​.com/​en/​asean​-50​ -years​-on​-success​-or​-failure/​a​-38043777. Ramli, Rashila (2018) ‘Transnational Advocacy Networks: The Examples of APWLD and NCWO – Comments on the Indian Case Study from a Malaysian Perspective’. In Beatrix Schwarzer, Ursula Kämmerer-Rütten, Alexandra Schleyer-Lindenmann and Yafang Wang (eds), Transnational Social Work and Social Welfare: Challenges for the Social Work Profession, London: Routledge. Syahirah SS, Sharifah (2015) ‘Regional-Global Governance Network on Women’s Rights: CEDAW and Its Implementation in ASEAN Countries’, Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 172: 519–24. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.sbspro​.2015​.01​.397. United Nations (2007) ‘Concluding Comments of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women: Indonesia’. https://​www​.un​.org/​womenwatch/​daw/​cedawdaw/​cedaw25. United Nations (2021) ‘United Nations Documents’. https://​www​.undocs​.org. United Nations Treaty Collection (2020) ‘Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW)’. https://​treaties​.un​.org/​Pages/​ViewDetails​.aspx​?src​=​TREATY​&​mtdsg​ _no​=​IV​-8​&​chapter​=​4​&​lang​=​en.

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

INTRODUCTION This chapter offers a panoramic analysis of the conflictive yet prolific relationship between feminist social movements and states in Latin America. Feminist movements have a long history of developing relationships with states in the region. Access to institutional state spaces has broadened, especially after most Latin American countries signed the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action to implement gender mainstreaming. Gender mainstreaming in the region has been described as a key characteristic of the ‘third wave of feminism’ that began in the 1990s (Varela, 2019). Scholars and activists usually describe this third wave as a process spearheaded by white, middle-class and professional women occupying positions in new bureaucratic organisations or in non-governmental organisations (NGOs) specialising in gender public policy. Drawing from a narrative of ‘betrayal versus loyalty’ some ‘stories’ told from this third wave perspective argue that the relationship between the feminist movement and state institutions undermined the movement’s autonomy, led to tepid results and excluded intersectional and non-binary groups (see Gargallo, 2006: 10; hooks, 2017). However, some feminist analysts have critiqued this characterisation. First, they question a dichotomy between outside and inside feminist activism, providing a positive notion of femocracy (Eisenstein, 1996), and addressing the concept of insiders to analyse when feminists become part of the state fabric (Banaszak, 2010). Second, they advance the understanding of variation in gender policy mechanisms and their consequences in different countries (McBride and Mazur, 2010). Third, they explore factors involved in generating this variation (Htun and Weldon, 2018). As Mazur and McBride show (Chapter 5 in this Handbook) international researchers have developed comparative theory that not only enhances our understanding of feminist governance, but also of gender justice advocates. In Latin America, this non-dichotomous perspective has permeated feminist research. Some scholars consider that the process of gender mainstreaming implies including issues on the political agenda and securing institutional change (Vargas, 2008). Using the notion of femocracy, Zaremberg (2004) analysed the management styles of women who were both outsiders and insiders in relation to gender institutions in Chile and Argentina. Referencing the notion of femocracy but focusing on the concept of institutional activism, Abers and Tatagiba (2015) describe an ‘artisanal feminist institutional activism’ within the Brazilian Health Ministry. Some of this research is in dialogue with feminist scholars who employ concepts such as triangles of empowerment or velvet triangles regarding women’s cooperation for feminist governance (Vargas and Wieringa, 1998; see also Chapter 27 in this Handbook). 408

Latin American perspectives on feminist governance  409 Considering this non-dichotomous perspective, Brazilian feminist scholar Sonia Alvarez (2014, 2019) argues that the feminist movement was always heterogeneous and has multiple relationships with Latin American states. She describes this heterogeneity by distinguishing between gender mainstreaming and sidestreaming. This differentiation is of special interest in this chapter. Alvarez describes gender mainstreaming as a vertical flow between feminist organisations and the state. Following this flow, feminists leverage their agendas by occupying positions in women’s groups embedded within government bodies and thereby influencing public policy. In the case of Brazil, analysed by Alvarez, gender mainstreaming includes a whole participatory system through Women Councils and Conferences (Matos and Paradis, 2013). Participatory systems in Latin America imply different gender justice effects, depending on the political project pursued in each country (Zaremberg, 2016). In contrast, sidestreaming promotes a horizontal flow between loose networks of feminist organisations previously on the margins of the vertical flow. These organisations do not necessarily look to interact with states. In fact, some of them look to avoid or even confront the state. In addition, they are usually not connected with formal international feminist organisations. Black women’s networks in slums, cooperating through rap or street art groups, Indigenous women confronting neo-extractive projects, LGBT+ marginal urban clubs, young university feminists’ collectives and social networks on campuses, the direct action of abortion doulas; these are a few examples included in the sidestreaming flow. In other words, sidestreaming locates previously marginalised feminist collectives in the centre of the debate, and re-prioritises intersectional (race, ethnic, class, etc.) and non-binary (LGBT+) demands and strategies within the feminist agenda. Mainstreaming and sidestreaming are two different means through which feminist movements are innovating in the feminist governance field. At the same time, studies have discussed the overlapping legal and illegal dual faces of some Latin American states and implications for gender justice in the region (Hernández Castillo et al., 2008; Segato, 2014). Based on an intersectional, anthropological and historical view that focuses on Indigenous, Afro and popular women’s experiences, these studies emphasise the intimate relationship between criminal states and gender violence. Moreover, they move the field of feminist governance studies beyond simple accusations of betrayals, posing, either implicitly or explicitly, the following question: To what extent is feminist governance really possible in state contexts that perpetuate gender, ethnic, racial and class inequalities historically embedded in colonial oppressions and perpetuated in criminal logics? In this chapter, I argue that responding to this question requires a complex understanding of the state, even if it is a criminal state. It also necessitates understanding the state as an ensemble (Jessop, 2015) rather than as a monolithic space. The state not only exercises legitimate violence but also infrastructural domination (Mann, 1984). It is thus a heterogeneous (even incoherent) relational space where violent and infrastructural administrative domination occur simultaneously. Zaremberg and Almeida (2022) propose several dimensions to capture this fragmented state ensemble. One of these dimensions is the separation of powers, as a key element for states under democratic contract. In this chapter, I will focus the analysis on this dimension (branches of power), as well as on the concepts of mainstreaming and sidestreaming. The sidestreaming analysis, in particular, will provide reflections about challenges to overcoming intersectional inequalities and implementing feminist governance in Latin America. Following Kantola (Chapter 4 in this Handbook) we analyse feminist governance (both at the centre and at the margins) to observe multiple ways in which states and feminist movements interact and challenge each other.

410  Handbook of feminist governance Considering these perspectives, the next sections analyse the long, tense and prolific relationship between feminist movements and states in Latin America.

MAINSTREAMING BY BRANCHES In Latin America, so-called state feminism is a result of processes that intersect: the mobilisation of feminist movements at a national and international level; the many degrees and rhythms of democratic transitions; and the various political turns that have alternately modified the state. As Guzmán (2001) notes, during these processes, external action pushes various gender public policies from feminist movements to the states. Simultaneously, as women access bureaucratic and elective positions, they drive a model of action from within the state itself that also generates policy advancements in favour of women. Since the 1970s, Latin American feminists have developed a variety of gender-sensitive policies that include: affirmative action policies, policies for women, gender perspective policies and gender mainstreaming policies (Rodríguez Gustá, 2021). The first (affirmative action policies) were key to the advancement of women’s political rights, particularly through the application of quota laws in the region (this will be discussed further below), while the last, gender mainstreaming, has been predominant since the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action. From that moment, state feminism created various organisational and legal instruments to promote gender agendas. Some of these policy instruments are women’s policy agencies (WPAs), included as one of the most important national mechanisms for the advancement of women (NMAW), sectorial policies, national plans and programmes for gender equality, and equity laws. This gendered institution-building was nurtured within international and regional feminist governance institutions. Regional institutions deserve a special mention because Latin America stands out in the adoption of multilateral feminist conventions – for example, the first international convention on violence against women in 1994 (van der Vleuten et al., 2021). Following the 1995 Beijing Conference agreements, the WPAs became administrative structures with the main mission to promote and support gender equity in all governmental bodies and legislation. Despite this general orientation, the scope of these mechanisms differed considerably between the various countries of the region. García (2016) classifies WPAs according to the manner of their insertion in executive branches. High-scoring WPAs constitute ministers, or administrative organisations where the head occupies a ministerial position. Medium-scoring WPAs depend on the presidency; their heads do not participate in the governmental cabinet, and they may occasionally have some relative autonomy (offices attached to the presidency, secretariats, national institutes and other figures). Finally, a low score corresponds to mechanisms that depend on a ministry or a lower authority. Using this typology to classify 19 Latin American countries, this author describes important variations between countries and concludes that, with the exception of Panama, the higher the hierarchical level, the more functions the mechanism performs. Fernós (2010) also shows similar variation and analyses the factors that generate it. In addition to the influence of international cooperation, she addresses how state institutionality, respect for the rule of law, economic crisis, violent civil strife and civil war limit the NMAWs. She also observes that civil war and violent civil strife in Central American countries create major obstacles to the introduction of gender policies within a human rights framework.

Latin American perspectives on feminist governance  411 More recently, Barreiro and Soto (2016) assessed sectorial policies (e.g. policies against gender violence), gender mainstreaming mechanisms, equality plans and equality laws in Latin America. Regarding the NMAWs, they find that equality plans tend to be considered from a sectorial perspective rather than from a truly transversal or horizontal perspective that would require the active involvement of ministries and other hierarchical administrative organs. They also show how equality laws have a direct impact on gender mainstreaming within public administration. The same sample of 19 cases reveals that 10 countries had equality laws and 17 had equality plans in 2016. The cases of Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, El Salvador and Honduras are particularly noteworthy as they illustrate a severe deterioration of the gender agenda within the gender mainstreaming process, due to a political context that tends to control, and even repress, the feminist movement and associated civil society organisations. At the same time, there have been significant indications of advancements in the gender agenda within the legislative and judicial branches. Unlike other regions, such as Europe, Latin American legislatures incorporated quotas and parity laws that forced parties to guarantee women’s access to elected positions (Caminotti, 2016; Htun and Piscopo, 2014). The impact of these laws is remarkable, reflected in the increase in the percentage of women in Latin American legislative bodies from 9 per cent in 1990 to 30.8 per cent in 2019 (IPU, 2019). Within this context, it is once again possible to observe crucial variations. For example, while in Bolivia, Mexico and Costa Rica more than 40 per cent of seats are occupied by women, Brazil just slightly exceeded 10 per cent in 2018 and Panama barely reached 18.3 per cent in 2019 (Freidenberg and Brown, 2019).1 This increased access to legislative branches in the region led to a flourish of laws. In the first period, bills that were not related to doctrinal issues and hence generated less moral or religious controversy (such as anti-gender violence laws) were approved in most of the region’s national legislatures (Htun and Weldon, 2018). But it is only recently that controversial bills like the legal or voluntary interruption of pregnancy were approved in Argentina and Uruguay. Aspects of LGBT+ agendas such as so-called equal marriage laws have also been advanced in some Latin American legislatures (see Corrales, 2020). On the other hand, the judicial branch has played a crucial role in the advancement of gender agendas and gender mainstreaming processes, although this has been largely overlooked by scholars in the region who tend to concentrate on the executive and the legislative branches. Specifically, Supreme Courts have played a crucial part in advancing the feminist agenda on controversial topics relating to doctrinal issues, such as abortion and LGBT+ rights (Bergallo and Michel, 2018). The courts of Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and El Salvador have also protected key legal abortion exceptions and countered several unconstitutional actions. Recently, the Supreme Court made a historical ruling decriminalising abortion for all Mexican women. The courts in Latin America constitute decisive counter-balancing instruments in the face of the conservative, religious, anti-abortion activism that has permeated legislative and executive spaces (Beltrán y Puga, 2018; Ruibal, 2021). The judicial branch is also a strategic space for achieving LGBT+ rights (López Pacheco, 2018). On the other hand, from a political sociological perspective, the relationship between the building of a democratic state and the role of an active and strong feminist movement is crucial and significantly affects the degree and type of gender mainstreaming processes that occur in the region. Analysing the case of Mexico, Cerva Cerna (2006) finds that a slow democratic transition, over-focused on party political alternation (from a hegemonic party that ruled for more than

412  Handbook of feminist governance 70 years), encouraged a more instrumental and technocratic, rather than substantive, gender mainstreaming process (see also Alfama, 2015). Zaremberg and Almeida (2022) found that in Brazil (in contrast to Mexico), as the democratic transition was based on extensive social mobilisation, the substantive agenda of abortion formed part of the political scenario and draft legislation was presented in the national legislature in 2005.2 Meanwhile, quota laws and the issue of parity moved into the background as women’s access to elected positions was severely weakened within the electoral and party system. On the other hand, several studies have pointed out that the ideological orientation of a ruling party does not ensure the advancement of gender mainstreaming in Latin America (see Friedman and Tabbush, 2019). It is often argued that progress on the gender agenda is favoured by left-wing rather than right-wing parties (Kittilson, 2003). However, leftist governments in Ecuador during the Correa presidency, or in Argentina during Cristina Kirchner’s government, did not result in strong WPAs, despite their parties supporting an increased number of women (some of them feminists) in the legislature. Once again, a comparison between Mexico and Brazil shows that despite the conservative-pragmatic parties in government from 2000 to 2018 in Mexico, a relatively strong WPA was installed (achieving a medium score in terms of García, 2016). In contrast, even though Brazil was ruled by a centre-left coalition from 2003 to 2016, the gender agenda had non-linear progress, and faced crucial obstacles. Moreover, strong feminist movements do not always result in stronger gender institutionalisation. Following the categorisation proposed by McBride and Mazur (2010), Rodríguez Gustá (2021) argues that despite the presence of one of the strongest feminist movements of Latin America, the WPA remained symbolic under Kirchnerism in Argentina (2002–15), and thus almost irrelevant to the Argentinian feminist movement’s organising and lobbying during this period. In contrast, under the Cambiemos (a right-wing party) administration (2015–19), the WPA was strengthened following the appointment of a feminist leader as its head. By 2019, the WPA upgraded from symbolic to marginal.3 In comparison, the Brazilian WPA converted from an insider agency, representing state feminism, to an anti-women agency, captured and reframed by conservative actors. The transformation of WPAs and other gender mechanisms to the opposite extreme of their initial purpose is a concerning phenomenon within a context of increasing backlash in Latin America. Scholars have identified this phenomenon of conservative coalitions capturing WPAs at both the subnational and national level (Tarrés, 2006). The Brazilian case is paradigmatic and striking because of the profound leap from gender progressive institutions to the complete opposite. However, similar or even more alarming declines can be seen specifically in Central America. In this sub-region, where evangelical churches account for more than 40 per cent of the population, WPAs in the executive and other branches have experienced substantial setbacks. Beyond the ideology of the governing party, counter-reforms cancelled abortion exceptions (even in cases of rape), stigmatised reproductive and sexual education, and publicly discriminated against LGBT+ groups. In other cases, as in Peru or Paraguay, strong conservative groups have been able to mobilise a significant portion of the population against sexual education and LGBT+ rights reforms. In sum, Latin American counter-movements are threatening the feminist institutionalisation that took decades to build, with different degrees of success (Piscopo and Walsh, 2020; Zaremberg et al., 2021).

Latin American perspectives on feminist governance  413

SIDESTREAMING: MORE GRASSROOTS, LESS STATES? During the 1970s, scholars explained how Latin American feminism had two tendencies: some activists joined left-wing political parties and movements, while others did not belong to any organisation. According to Alvarez (2014, 2019), Latin American feminist activists have, for some time, demanded spaces free of discrimination based on LGBT+ orientations or ethnic, Afro and class cleavages. Thus, heterogeneous ascriptions were evident in the feminist movement from the first stages or waves. In the 1980s, some scholars pointed to an increasing distance between some feminisms and the state and parties (included left parties) in a context of the democratic transitions in the region (Fischer, 2005). As was mentioned previously, in the 1990s, a process of gender mainstreaming was accompanied by an increased gap between so-called autonomous versus institutional feminism (Gargallo, 2006). Feminists from the ‘margins’ asserted that ‘state feminists’ use of the category of gender restricted the feminist view to a binary relationship between women and men, and excluded other sexual orientations. At the same time, the predominance of white, urban, highly educated women at the forefront of gender mainstreaming processes was criticised. In addition, some of the so-called ‘feminists of the rupture’ pointed out that international cooperation involved a certain degree of imperialism, as the embedded developmental perspective suffocated local agendas and views (Barrancos, 2020). Simultaneously, other feminists discussed un-doing and performing gender (Butler, 2004) and including a set of inequalities from an intersectional perspective (Crenshaw, 1989). Many scholars and activists from Latin America have contributed to these discussions with fundamental innovative frameworks. Particularly at the beginning of this century, they proposed the need to decolonise feminism (Curiel, 2010; Espinosa, 2009; Hernández Castillo, 2001; Hernández Castillo et al., 2008; Lugones, 2008, 2011; Mendoza, 2014; Segato, 2013). In opposition to a heteronormative, capitalist and hierarchical gender perspective, embedded in a Eurocentric paradigm, these feminists propose problematising the patriarchy in light of perspectives that consider territory, race, ethnicity, class and sexual orientation (Curiel, 2010; Espinosa, 2010; see also Townsend-Bell, Chapter 7 in this Handbook). In other words, these feminist perspectives criticise the discursive frames of so-called Global North feminisms that seek to fit all women into the concept of ‘white woman’, without understanding the meanings and perspectives that Latin American women have built from their own experiences and from their different positions of domination/oppression (Lugones, 2008). It is thus crucial to highlight the specific approaches emerging from so-called Indigenous and communitarian feminism (see Paredes, 2008; Paredes and Guzmán, 2014). As with other streams within feminism, Indigenous and communitarian feminism is also heterogeneous. Gargallo (2012) identifies four lines within the women of the original nations of Abya Yala.4 These are: Indigenous women who work for the rights of women at the community level but who do not call themselves feminists because they fear community reaction; Indigenous people who refuse to call themselves feminists because they question the label of white and urban feminists; Indigenous women who connect their activism in communities with the activism of white feminists and claim to be feminists or ‘equal’ to these feminists; and Indigenous people who openly affirm themselves as feminists but from an autonomous and critical thinking perspective. Although not all Indigenous women and their movements fully identify themselves as ‘feminists’, their struggles began from a decolonial position against racism, the

414  Handbook of feminist governance marginalisation of their people and the sexism of their cultures and communities, seeking to recover autonomy over their bodies, their territories and their stories (Curiel et al., 2005). Within this context, it is particularly interesting to observe the conceptualisations of state coming from feminists connected to this decolonial thinking. From their perspective, the state has to be redefined by its margins, as a construct that is constantly reconfiguring its boundaries (see Banaszak et al., 2003). As mentioned above, Segato (2014) argues that Latin American dual states have two faces: one formal, and displayed publicly; the other informal, working on a hidden level and connected to criminal organisations that thereby constitute ‘narco-states’. This hidden side of the state demarcates its borders, killing women to achieve domination over its territory. This violent cruelty exercised over women’s bodies is the clear communication of a moral defeat of marginal communities where honour codes, embedded in patriarchal paradigms, still prevail. The real motivation of this gender violence is thereby political, and not simply libidinal. In addition, these states are incapable of including Indigenous normative frameworks without oppressing, devaluing and even exterminating this population. Indigenous women’s world views thus suffer a double chain of oppression. Within their communities they are victims of male discrimination and outside their communities, they experience a lack of recognition from a dual state, including devaluation by white women who live according to the accepted and hegemonic rules of the state. For example, due to this double discrimination, Mapuche women leaders in Chile differentiate between gender issues within the Mapuche culture and outside of it, refusing to denominate themselves as feminists (Cuminao, 2009; Richards, 2002). Referring not only to the decolonial paradigm but crucially the historical marks of the Latin American slavery experience, Afro Latin American feminisms, mainly (but not only) in Brazil, have queried both the classic and Western conception of the state and of heteronormative and binary feminism (Lozano, 2010). Under the slogan of ‘blacken the feminism’, Afro-descendant Brazilian women have led a struggle against racism, including traces of racism within ‘white’ mainstream feminism (Carneiro, 2011; Curiel, 2007, 2008). Central topics in the feminist agenda have been reformed under this shift of perspective. Even abortion has been reformulated in terms of ‘reproductive justice’. Considering that slavery impeded motherhood experience (infants were separated from their mothers to be sold in slave markets), Afro feminists in Latin America have claimed to shift the focus to policies that can assure health and social protection for Afro-women mothers. From this perspective, abortion is only one more point in a broader agenda which includes sexual and social rights (Gonzalez, 2008). By virtue of this profound criticism, decolonial, Afro and intersectional feminisms, which conceive of the state from its margins, have generated serious doubts regarding the extent to which feminist activism can achieve palpable results through heteronormative, racist and patriarchal states. These doubts are far from irrelevant, particularly for the most unequal region in the world. These queries are also raised by the strong relationship between Afro and Indigenous communitarian feminists in struggles against neo-extractive industries supported by Latin American states (Korol, 2016). For example, Aymara and Quechua women of Peru are the main leaders of communitarian defence of their territories. Similarly, other prominent leaders fighting for their territories in Guatemala (such as Lorena Cabnal or Lolita Chavez) propose a feminism that heals the body by protecting the earth, conceptualising the healing of the body-earth as an emancipatory process (Cabnal, 2010). From these women’s perspectives the priority is to strengthen feminist or women’s grassroots networks from the margins, not

Latin American perspectives on feminist governance  415 to work with a state that not only does not recognise them but also cooperates in their extinction. As Townsend-Bell points out (Chapter 7 in this Handbook) decolonial and postcolonial feminist perspectives ask what happens when we stop seeking inclusion in spaces that are structurally, and perhaps constitutionally, unable to grant it. Nevertheless, despite the accuracy of these remarks, some innovations can be identified in the interactions between sidestreaming feminist actions and these dual Latin American states. For example, in spite of serious conflicts within communitarian feminism itself, the Bolivian and the Ecuadorian Indigenous women’s movements have leveraged several legislative, and even constitutional reforms (Espinoza, 2011; Pacari, 2004; Prieto et al., 2005). The incorporation, in both constitutions, of the Sumak Kawsay or Good Living proposal, associated with Indigenous world views, promotes a political orientation aimed at the development of an economy of care, based on principles of communal reciprocity and cooperation. Despite these constitutional provisions, many gender mainstreaming mechanisms in these two countries appear to have been weakened during supposedly pro-women, Indigenous world view governments (Perea Ozerin, 2017). Simultaneously, some normative Indigenous frameworks have been recognised within legal state paradigms after critical socio-legal processes within the judiciary, as happened regarding the right to autonomous government in Cherán in Michoacán, Mexico; or within local legislatures certifying Indigenous methods for election of municipal authorities in Oaxaca, Mexico. These processes have different consequences for Indigenous women depending on their ethnic ascription, Indigenous normative tradition and roles played during mobilisation (Hernández Castillo, 2016). On the other hand, in Mexico, the well-known Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) put forward a woman candidate for the presidential elections of 2018. This was an interesting twist in the case of a decisive (and understandable) break between the movement and a highly repressive Mexican state that has failed to respect the San Andrés Accords on Indigenous rights.5 In the case of the EZLN, the candidature of María de Jesús Patricio Martínez (Mari Chuy: a traditional doctor and human rights defender of Nahua origin) was preceded by several International Women’s Encounters of ‘Women who Fight’ (Encuentro Internacional de Mujeres que Luchan).6 These encounters are spaces of reflexive debates and meetings between self-declared autonomous Zapatista and non-Zapatista women.

CONCLUSION Feminist governance in Latin America shows significant heterogeneity. Several notable feminist actions have resulted in the construction of sophisticated gender mainstreaming mechanisms (WPAs, NMAW, equality plans and laws). Furthermore, legislative quotas and parity laws provide women with increased access to governmental electoral and non-electoral positions. Simultaneously, judicial branches, particularly through Supreme Courts, have played a crucial role in enabling controversial issues (such as abortion and LGBT+ rulings) and in blocking severe counter-movement actions. However, these achievements suffer from important weaknesses. On the one hand, some advancements (i.e. some WPAs) present a more instrumental and technocratic rather than substantive profile. The conversion from symbolic and marginal to insider WPAs does not necessarily depend on the ideology of the governing party. Left-wing governments of the so-called Pink Tide period, during the first decade of the 21st century, did not guarantee a broader scope

416  Handbook of feminist governance for gender mainstreaming processes and, following this period, a severe conservative backlash has transformed some WPAs into anti-movement agencies. On the other hand, in varying degrees, these mechanisms appear to perpetuate Latin American states’ inability to reach their margins, thereby excluding intersectional and non-binary demands and perspectives. Sidestreaming processes within the feminist Latin American movement sharply question these limitations, while intersectional and decolonial feminist perspectives give voice to Afro and Indigenous women, who, regardless of whether or not they identify as feminist, demand broader recognition. Despite the negatives, these groups claim that some innovative actions are permeating Latin American states in the executive, legislative and even judicial branches. Examples include the constitutional processes in Ecuador and Bolivia and judicial recognition of some particular Indigenous normative frameworks in Mexico. An interesting paradox arises from these paradigmatic attempts. Sidestreaming feminist movements claim an autonomy that implies no relation with dual and even criminal Latin American states. At the same time, from the margins, and privileging grassroots strategies, they seem to aspire to modify these states in some way (or at least not completely resign from the state). In this context, feminist governance in Latin America has an enormous challenge to learn new languages to process conflicts and extend bridges between innovative aspirations from the margins and dominant states embedded in historical paths of persistent inequality.

NOTES 1. Proportions in Nicaragua also appear to exceed 40 per cent; however, these percentages conceal the democratic deterioration in the country and the irregular situation regarding the selection of candidates. 2. However, this bill proposal was defeated in the national legislature in the same year (2005). 3. Rodriguez Gustá revises McBride and Mazur typology as follows: Insider agencies, those that facilitate gendering policy debates based upon women’s movements’ demands and represent state feminism; Marginal agencies, those that fail to influence the policy agenda despite seeking alliances with women’s movements; Symbolic agencies, those excluded from main policy debates and without links to feminist movements; and Anti-Movement agencies, whose policy ‘microframes’ are at odds with women’s rights activists. 4. In 2004, the Indigenous Continental Confederation officially adopted the name Abya Yala to refer to the American continent. This name, coined by the Kuna people, means ‘land of vital blood’ and is used to refer to the territory where the original peoples settled. Abya Yala is conceived as a form of Indigenous claim against the colonisation of their territories for more than 500 years. 5. The failure to fulfil these Agreements after the political alternation in 2000 seriously impeded the development of constructive ties between the Mexican state and the EZLN, and undermined efforts to intensify the Mexican democratic transition in a substantive way. 6. The EZLN also approved a crucial Revolutionary Law for Women in 1993.

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

INTRODUCTION In the 2020 American presidential election, pundits cautioned about a ‘mirage effect’: presidential candidates appearing well ahead in bitterly contested states, then leads quickly disappearing with more ballots counted (Kahn and Lange, 2020). This evocative ‘mirage’ resonates with the nature of feminist governance across North America. Despite multiple manifestations of the gendering of governance on this continent, noteworthy manipulations of feminism and examples of rhetorical, and ephemeral, gender equality commitments, render them illusory, especially for less privileged women. Strategic opportunities for feminist governance of different kinds have been seized and shaped by diverse North American women, but their respective country-specific environments, and social locations, have resulted in fundamental constraints. This chapter explores select changes and challenges to feminist governance, primarily focusing on two countries possessing dramatically different economic, social, cultural and political contexts. We spotlight Canada and Mexico for their multi-pronged institutionalisation of feminist governance, but also for their emblematic North–South dynamics. Regional institutions promoting gender equality are less prevalent on this continent than elsewhere, although we study the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and its more recent renegotiation, as a catalyst for multiple feminisms. Moreover, we emphasise the diffusion of governance feminism which foregrounds equality, diversity and inclusion in words, but in deeds, instrumentalises and/or institutionalises neoliberal, individualised, marketised priorities, such as efficiency and economic progress (Halley et al., 2018; Paterson and Scala, 2020: 50). Rodríguez Gustá et al. (2017) identify three feminist governance models: bureaucratic ones that encompass teams of staff and experts to lead committees and councils that coordinate procedures to advance women’s equality; participatory models characterised by more state–society interactions with gender-based policy machineries; and, finally, transformative models that include a mix of bureaucratic and participatory processes involving and seeking to empower diverse groups of women. Elements of these models have been undertaken across North America and we highlight their changes over space and time, but we also point to prevailing governance feminist mandates and mechanisms regionally, arguing that their lack of social justice outcomes have contributed to feminist mirages, particularly for marginalised women. While Mexico developed a participatory feminist governance model with clear transformative governance ambitions, the United States (US), despite decades of feminist mobilisation, has been more reticent to put in place institutional guarantees of equality. Moreover, these are by no means linear processes, as seen in Canada’s transition from a period of robust bureaucratic feminist governance with elements of participatory governance in the 1970s 421

422  Handbook of feminist governance and early 1980s, to a period of retrenchment, and then to revocation, especially from 2006 to 2015. Subsequently, a seemingly transformative turn has instead manifested more governance feminism. The first section sketches the evolution of women’s state machinery and feminist governance in Mexico, as well as the practical realities that limit their effectiveness. The second section then highlights changes in Canadian feminist governance over time and evaluates the recent implementation of Gender Based Analysis/Gender Based Analysis Plus (GBA/ GBA+) – policy lenses intended to foreground gender (GBA) and gender, diversity and intersectionality (GBA+) – exploring whether they constitute transformative feminist governance. The relationship between feminist governance and governance feminism is explored further in the third section, as we consider NAFTA, old and new, along with Canada’s role in mining ventures in Mexico. The final section weaves all these strands together to provide some concluding reflections. Before proceeding, we must acknowledge the difficulties in understanding and encapsulating the political, economic and cultural intricacies involved, especially given that Canada and the US epitomise the privileges of the Global North, while Mexico, although a South–South regional leader, still experiences its political and economic exigencies, including profound poverty and inequalities. Our own subjective, Canadian vantage point, and writing ‘across major cultural and linguistic barriers’ (Frías and Angel, 2012: 7) compound the matter, rendering an admittedly partial and cursory account. Colonialism, federal systems and written constitutions are institutional features shared by Canada, Mexico and the US, but then the differences abound.

MEXICO’S MOVES TOWARDS TRANSFORMATIVE FEMINIST GOVERNANCE Local mobilisation and the growing internationalisation of the feminist agenda were linked in Mexico and had an impact on national norms. However, tensions also developed between Mexico’s autonomous feminist movements and an ‘official feminist movement that sought to recapture and neutralize independent voices, accompanied by conservative women’s voices seeking to limit a threatening change’ (Ortiz-Ortega and Barquet, 2010: 115). The 1970s saw emergent feminisms and national and international milestones, with Article 4 in the constitution affirming equality between women and men in 1974, and Mexico City hosting the United Nations’ First World Conference on Women in 1975. Yet there were deep divisions between feminists and leftists, between middle-class women who saw themselves as feminists, and between working-class, peasant and Indigenous women, some of whom rejected this label and associated priorities such as abortion and reproductive rights. Indeed, the 1975 women’s world conference spurred a counter-conference and subsequent Coalición de Mujeres Feministas (Coalition of Feminist Women) revealing divergent autonomous versus state-focused feminist priorities. These ‘diverse feminist subjects’ included a ‘popular’ movement of workers, rural women and housewives from poor inner-city neighbourhoods that formed after the first Encuentro Nacional de Mujeres (National Women’s Meeting) in 1980 (Damián, 2015). Indigenous women participated in these and other popular movements (Garza et al., 2008), which then

Feminist governance in North America  423 prepared the ground for the next decade’s flourishing Indigenous feminist movement (following the 1994 Zapatista uprising). Mexico’s women’s movements have had ‘strong transnational ties and a well-developed capacity for advocacy’ (García-Del Moral and Neumann 2019: 461). Through the 1980s, for example, feminists lobbied politicians around violence against women (VAW) reforms, and while they were initially either ignored or co-opted by the long-standing Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) (Beer, 2017), inroads were made a decade later. With the 1994 Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women, feminist activists held Mexican governments accountable to international commitments signed in Cairo and Beijing (Amuchástegui et al., 2010). From the 1990s onward, feminist grassroots activists mobilised transnationally around the disappearance and brutal murder of young women, in Ciudad Juárez and beyond (García-Del Moral and Neumann, 2019: 466). Local and international mobilisation had an impact on national developments. The 1990s saw legislation responding to sexual crimes, political rights and violence (Ortiz-Ortega and Barquet, 2010). Women and feminists from different sectors, civil society organisations and parties came together to promote women’s leadership in the 1991 National Convention of Women for Democracy that called for the election of women to Congress (Baldez, 2007), and led to the 1993 Federal Code of Institutions and Electoral Procedures law, which recommended (but did not require) that parties promote more women. Securing quota laws became ‘a top priority’ for numerous women’s groups (Baldez, 2007), as Mexico now lagged behind several Latin American countries in this regard. The foregoing laid the groundwork for a national programme, Programa Nacional del Mujer (PRONAM), formed in 1996, and the 1997 establishment of an Equity and Gender Commission. The latter, and the subsequent creation of state-level women’s institutes, signalled an increasing institutionalisation of gender-related concerns (García-Del Moral and Neumann, 2019: 462), although feminist initiatives ‘to foster formal dialogue between female legislators and women from civil society organizations’ continued (Ortiz-Ortega and Barquet, 2010: 126). In 2000, the end of one-party dominance presented an opportunity, even though the party that replaced PRI, the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), was conservative. More than ‘120 women’s organizations and 319 candidates’ signed an agreement for a ‘Legislative Agenda and Government Rule in Favour of Equity’ (Ortiz-Ortega and Barquet, 2010: 129) and the new president, Vincente Fox, saw the strategic value, internationally, in promoting human rights, as well as feminism, diversity and Indigeneity (Beer, 2017). Fox thus supported the ‘creation of institutionalized spaces of dialogue with Mexican civil society’ (García-Del Moral and Neumann, 2019: 462), including the establishment of the Women’s National Institute, Instituto Nacional de las Mujeres (INMUJERES). Manipulation was evident by both conservative and left-wing Mexican parties, but Fox’s instrumentalisation of women’s claims was particularly explicit. He was criticised for naming a PAN partisan and anti-choice woman as INMUJERES’s head, while his response to Zapatista women’s mobilisation combined ‘old developmentalism with a liberal multiculturalist discourse, having little to do with the real demands of indigenous people’ (Ortiz-Ortega and Barquet, 2010: 130). Still, by adopting a rights rhetoric, Fox’s government found itself under more national and international scrutiny (García-Del Moral and Neumann, 2019).

424  Handbook of feminist governance Meanwhile, INMUJERES’s policymaking voice and bureaucratic and participatory feminist governance mechanisms were integral to the creation of the first National Programme for Equality of Opportunities and Non-Discrimination Against Women 2001–06 (PROEQUIAD), and successive plans at decade’s end, and into the next. INMUJERES influenced federal and state legislation on gender violence (Beer, 2017) and ‘assisted the emerging gender units at line ministries’ through training, ‘general advice, and the provision of tools’ (Rodríguez Gustá et al., 2017: 467–8). A Program for Strengthening Gender Mainstreaming was launched in 2008, and by 2016, gender units existed in almost all federal secretariats (Rodríguez Gustá et al., 2017) and some at the state level. Participatory governance was reflected in INMUJERES’s two civil society bodies: the Consultative Council and the Social Council with advisory and monitoring roles, respectively, whose delegates were integrated into the INMUJERES board (Rodríguez Gustá et al., 2017). In Mexico, then, feminist activists leveraged, and feminist legislators legitimated, supranational authority, which in turn created national momentum on feminist governance, seemingly at the North American forefront in institutionalising gender equality with several legal, legislative supports and structures. However, whether Mexico has been effective in implementing and enforcing its efforts is another issue. Rodríquez Gustá et al. (2017) suggest, ‘under the PAN and PRI governments, while gender innovations occurred, actual policy content and orientations remained ambiguous’ and there were various loopholes, ‘especially in the coordination with subnational governments’ (468), rendering mainstreaming incomplete and fragmented (Ortiz-Ortega and Barquet, 2010). Moreover, as with the Canadian case below, these developments do not remain static and there can be backsliding (Rodríguez Gustá et al., 2017). INMUJERES created a ‘legal basis and location of the principal gender regime’, fostered norms to promote gender equality and broaden governmental mandates (Sørensen, 2018: 106), as well as encouraged civil society participation, with an aim of transformative feminist governance. Yet, these bureaucratic and participatory governance models are about inclusion that typically involves governance feminist rationales, where the objective becomes bringing women into institutions, and not sufficiently scrutinising the institutions for their heteropatriarchal, racialised and capitalist logics. Marginalised people become the problem, not the institutions (Paterson and Scala, 2020). For many Mexican women, the individuals in INMUJERES were part of social classes far removed from their realities. Stark inequalities endure between Mexican women and men, and between different groups of women, from education to the economic realm (Frías, 2008). Nowhere is this more apparent than in Mexico’s continuing ‘obscene levels’ of gender violence (Sandin, 2020) and its femicide ‘pandemic’ (Sørensen, 2018), with little enforcement of laws and few resources for prevention or support of victims (Frías and Angel, 2012). Granted, autonomous women’s movements have creatively mobilised against femicide (‘Feminists take over’, 2020) and the term feminicidio was coined to frame it as both gendered violence and a state-complicit concern. Between 2004 and 2011, seven federal initiatives responded to feminicidio, and in 2012 it became a crime in Mexico’s Criminal Code. Nonetheless, as encapsulated by García-Del Moral and Neumann (2019): ‘a successful naming and shaming campaign by local feminist actors linked to litigation in … supranational arenas, and the intervention of feminist legislators’ succeeded in the criminalisation of feminicidio, but this ‘transformative potential has been perverted in practice’ (454) in that ‘the very state which perpetuates gendered violence is expected to be the guarantor of justice’ (480).

Feminist governance in North America  425 Linda Stevenson (2009) captures the complexities of women’s lives in Mexico by describing a ‘beautiful, yet tragic mosaic’ (421) combining vibrant civil society engagement and more receptive political institutions, but with persistent gender-based economic inequality, violence and death. Diverse Mexican women and feminists have mobilised on multiple scales, from local to transnational, and this country’s national feminist governance, institutionally, could be considered ahead of Canada and the US. Yet there are many complications, contestations and contradictions. These include party manipulations, transformative governance efforts challenged by governance feminist priorities, and often lethal inaction and impunity particularly around feminicidio.

CHANGING FEMINIST GOVERNANCE IN CANADA Canada illustrates key trends including the transition from constructing to dismantling and/ or defusing feminist state machinery with the rise of neoliberalism, to the growing influence of governance feminism, in the guise of transformative feminist governance. But first, some historical context. In response to the recommendations of the 1970 report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women (RCSW), the contours of the ‘women’s state’ were drawn at the federal and provincial/territorial scales. Networks of Ministers responsible for the Status of Women, women’s policy directorates and advisory councils – like the federal Status of Women Canada (SWC) and Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women (CACSW), respectively – incorporated both bureaucratic and participatory elements, while funding for women’s organisations and grassroots activism provided varying levels of procedural and substantive representation, with some coming closer than others to a transformative model (i.e. Ontario under the New Democratic Party) (Findlay, 2015). Extensive women’s mobilisation successfully entrenched equality in two sections of Canada’s 1982 constitution and new Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and then a few years later, effectively scuttled two constitutional amendment processes that some feared jeopardised these rights (Dobrowolsky, 1998). Nonetheless, by the mid-1980s and 1990s, neoliberalism brought what Brodie and Bakker (2007) call ‘the 3 Ds of degendering policy capacity’: delegitimisation of women’s voices in public policy; dismantling of women’s policy machinery; and disappearance of a gender lens in policymaking. The Liberals terminated the CACSW, favouring technocratic solutions in the form of GBA/GBA+, the systematic application of a gender and/or intersectional lens to policymaking (Scala and Paterson, 2017). This resulted in both reduced feminist governance capacity and a reorientation away from feminist advocacy in the policy process. Neoliberalism intensified and conjoined with social conservatism, under Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives (2006–15). Drastic cuts ensued, including those to SWC: its regional offices were closed; equality was removed from its mandate; and its critical research buried. GBA was left to atrophy. Equality-deserving groups were denied and denigrated. In contrast, Justin Trudeau’s 2015 Liberal election mantra supported feminism, diversity and Indigeneity, akin to Vincente Fox’s earlier discourses. When Trudeau became prime minister, some saw an opening for transformational feminist governance. Those changes, including the launching of an Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), something the Harper government refused to do, gender parity in cabinet,

426  Handbook of feminist governance a new Feminist International Assistance Policy, the creation of an LGBTQ2 Secretariat, and the spotlighting of GBA+ on two federal budgets, served to buoy bureaucratic, and to some extent, participatory feminist models, with new funding opportunities and a greater role for women’s organisations (Findlay, 2020; Paterson and Scala, 2020). However, critiques of Trudeau’s ‘fake’, ‘Facebook’ or at least neoliberal brand of feminism grew (Ashe, 2020; Dobrowolsky, 2020; Findlay, 2020; Kingston, 2016), suggesting less progress, more feminist mirage. Despite the appropriation of progressive language and concepts borrowed from intersectionality – such as references to systemic inequality – Trudeau’s feminism mainly focused on privileged women’s concerns (Dobrowolsky, 2020; Findlay, 2020; Paterson and Scala, 2020). An example of this policy bias was the six-month extension of Parental Leave, accessible only to women who could afford to take a longer leave without any additional financial support (Cattapan et al., 2017; Dobrowolsky, 2020; Findlay, 2020), and its accompanying discourses around ‘daddy days’ and ‘birth parents’ framing families in heteronormative and bionormative terms (Findlay, 2020). Trudeau’s talk of Indigenous rights and reconciliation was increasingly at odds with the foot-dragging around implementing the MMIWG Inquiry’s recommendations, the structural changes needed around the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Lightfoot, 2018) and the remaining state-sanctioned sex discrimination against Indigenous women (Brake, 2019). With the elevation of GBA+, inequality becomes a ‘technical’ issue that can be solved with better information and expertise, yet GBA+ training is limited, primarily online, not mandatory in all departments and the analysis is often superficial (Scala and Paterson, 2017). The 2017 and 2018 GBA+ budgets, with their investments in male-dominated infrastructure, leniency on tax loopholes, privatisation and lack of action on pressing needs in child care, failed in many ways to address the ‘G’ let alone the ‘+’ in their analyses. The ‘+’ is an attempt to integrate intersectionality but it rarely goes beyond an additive approach, and there are questions about its applicability to Indigenous women and colonialism (Findlay, 2019; NWAC, 2010). Another cause for alarm is the rapid corporatisation of GBA/GBA+ consulting and education (Findlay, 2019). Trudeau government GBA/GBA+ pledges regarding policy development could thus epitomise both inclusion and exclusion of diverse women’s concerns, supplanting the women’s state (Scala and Paterson, 2017) as well as reducing input from organised and autonomous women’s movements and devaluing their knowledge (Rankin and Wilcox, 2004). To be sure, SWC received more support, was renamed Women and Gender Equality (WAGE Canada), and upgraded to a full department with a larger mandate (Findlay, 2020). Yet the new acronym is telling, evoking employability and governance feminist emphases on econocentric concerns. Moreover, WAGE is still quite marginal, with limited financial and human resources for substantive analysis. Commitments to bureaucratic innovations have also been transitory. For instance, the LGBTQ2 Secretariat was aligned to a central agency (the Privy Council Office) only briefly, before its demotion to a line department (Canadian Heritage) with less reach and profile. Transformational governance has yet to materialise, but there are issues even on the bureaucratic and participatory sides. Trudeau’s feminist government has produced reactive approaches to policy that appeal to an individualistic, equality of opportunity logic dovetailing with neoliberal goals of efficiency, effectiveness and economic progress, rather than a response to intersectional power dynamics (Paterson and Scala, 2020). This amounts to governance feminism and a mirage that creates the illusion of inclusion, a distraction and refraction from transformational change.

Feminist governance in North America  427

CONTINENTAL TRENDS: GOVERNING TRADE AND MINING Shifting regimes governing trade and mining provide a window into intra-North American connections and diverse women’s, including Indigenous women’s, mobilisation. While Rodríguez Gustá et al.’s (2017) framework was designed for cross-national comparisons of gender policy machineries, we apply it here in a continental context, where elements of bureaucratic, participatory and transformative models can also be identified. The chosen policy areas illuminate the complexities of feminist governance, governance feminism and the multilevel navigation of these opportunities and constraints. The North American region is endowed with many natural resources, leveraged in different ways, reflecting distinctive politico-economic trajectories. The Global North–Global South dynamic provides an obvious example, but there are also disparities between Canada and the US, with the latter a historic economic powerhouse vis-à-vis Canada’s staples-based economic vulnerabilities. Yet, as we shall see, Canada has also pursued its own empire-building agenda in the Global South (Klassen, 2014), including Mexico. Economic benefits are disparately felt across the continent, given colonialism and the intersections of gender, race, class, ability, age, sexuality and citizenship status among other power relations. For example, Indigenous women in North America ‘occupy multiple worlds that place greater value on whiteness (couched in the language of progress and civilization), on heteronormativity and misogyny … and on a range of other hierarchies and structures of oppression’ (Starblanket, 2020: 124). In the 1980s, free trade was a ‘key mainstream economic issue taken up by feminists in Canada’ (MacDonald, 1995: 2008) and by the 1990s, NAFTA became a site of continental feminist struggle (Bashevkin, 1989; Cohen, 1996). Feminist concerns included: gendered and racialised wage inequality; poor working conditions and job losses; increased unpaid and caregiving work; cuts to public services; increased capital mobility; a growing urban/rural divide; gender-based violence; violations of reproductive justice; food and agricultural disruption; intensification of climate change; economic, social and geographic dislocation; and land dispossession, most acutely for Indigenous peoples (Aguilera Fernández and Castro Lugo, 2017; Altamirano-Jiménez, 2020; Cohen, 1996; Macdonald and Ibrahim, 2019; Navarro, 2002). Women were impacted differently in each country. Canadian feminists waged vociferous campaigns first against the Canada–US Free Trade Agreement in the 1980s and then NAFTA, in coalition with other social justice organisations (Cohen, 1996). Women’s organisations in border towns in the US worried that NAFTA ‘eliminated them from an economy that was built on their backs’ (Navarro, 2002: 94). In Mexico, inequalities interacted with ‘pre-existing class, ethnic, gender and regional cleavages’ (Navarro, 2002: 84). Nonetheless, across North America, women also forged linkages through groups such as Mujer a Mujer, Mujeres en Accion Sindical, Labour Notes, and the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (MacDonald, 1995). Feminists offer a range of views on NAFTA governance. Critics, like, Altamirano-Jiménez (2020), explain how its rules functioned to override the recognised territorial jurisdiction of Indigenous Peoples in Mexico. Gabriel and Macdonald (2005) examine how NAFTA epitomised neoliberal and globalised norms that contributed to the retrenchment of state feminism and curtailing of feminist influence on public policy, including gender-based analysis of trade policy. Cohen (1996) also warned NAFTA undermined democratic institutions, prioritising market-oriented institutions over citizenship rights, while at the same time urging cross-country women’s solidarity. As such, NAFTA simultaneously presented a threat to

428  Handbook of feminist governance existing bureaucratic modes of governance, but conceivably allowed for new extra-state participatory action. Navarro’s study of local organising by Mexican-American, Spanish-speaking female garment workers suggested that NAFTA foregrounded these identities becoming ‘an incitement to discourse’ and serving as ‘vehicles for political expression’ (2002: 84). Some saw NAFTA as an opportunity for ‘feminist internationality’, based on the commonality of gendered economic impact (Gabriel and Macdonald, 1994). Gabriel and Macdonald (2021) reflect on how, through NAFTA’s labour and environmental side accords, ‘Transnational linkages were forged among social movements in the three countries, including labour unions, environmentalist groups, women’s organisations, faith-based groups, farmers, social justice organisations and others’. They also note that its ‘migration governance architecture’ creates new spaces for activism and cooperation among migrant workers. The renegotiation of NAFTA proved to be a challenge, however, especially under the Trump presidency with his racist disparagement of Mexicans and his macho dismissal of Trudeau as ‘meek and mild’ and ‘very dishonest and weak’ (Macdonald, 2020: 512). Trump was even less impressed with Canada’s then Foreign Affairs Minister, Chrystia Freeland, declaring: ‘We are very unhappy with … the negotiating style of Canada. We don’t like their representative very much’ (MacCharles, 2018). Still, some saw these renegotiations as an opening. Pitched as a ‘progressive trade agenda’ and later dubbed an ‘inclusive approach to trade’, the hope was that the new NAFTA would be more responsive to labour and environmental protections (Macdonald, 2020: 513). Trudeau attempted ‘to bring on board civil society through mechanisms of consultation and by partial incorporation of its demands’ (Macdonald, 2020: 517). There have long been calls for feminist and intersectional analysis that considers the differential impact of macroeconomic policy and trade (Cohen, 1996), and the Canadian government itself acknowledged that ‘trade affects women and men differently’ (Macdonald and Ibrahim, 2019). Conversations, led in part by Freeland, also turned to imagining what a ‘feminist NAFTA’ would/could/should look like. Mexico, initially reluctant to apply a gender lens to trade, eventually became an important ally of Canada’s position against pressure from the US to drop this concern (Figot, 2017). Nevertheless, the three countries’ discussions on a gender chapter were fraught. One potential model lacked an enforcement mechanism; there was pushback from both Mexico and the US on moving beyond a gender binary to include sexuality and gender identity, as well reticence around ‘external oversight’; and the Trump administration resisted the very principle of feminist trade (Figot, 2017; Macdonald and Ibrahim, 2019). In many respects, the results were more mirage than material, with the ‘New NAFTA’ reflecting more governance feminism than feminist governance. As Macdonald and Ibrahim (2019) conclude, despite ‘some limited language recognizing the importance of gender equality’ there is ‘no gender chapter’ and the agreement ‘merely entrenches a dominant trade model that growing numbers of experts, civil society and social movement actors want to see rebuilt from the ground up’. More optimistically, the new agreement does make some improvements to labour protections related to workplace discrimination, equal pay, health and safety, caregiving, and workplace violence and harassment. Furthermore, NAFTA renegotiation did carve out room for equality-deserving groups across the continent to engage in a reimagining of gendered trade regimes. Macdonald and Ibrahim (2019) list some key ingredients that could go far beyond the addition of a gender chapter (see also Hannah et al., 2020):

Feminist governance in North America  429 Meaningful consultation with experts and the public; gender mainstreaming, particularly … pertaining to public services, intellectual property (access to medicines), agriculture, environmental protection and labour rights; and applying an intersectional gender analysis that considers the complex, multidimensional and context-specific nature of an agreement’s gendered impacts, both before and after implementation.

Macdonald and Ibrahim’s ingredients make for a more robust recipe for transformative trade governance, than what the new NAFTA ultimately yielded. Finally, we move to one additional, and related, mirage: Canada’s contradictory role in mining ventures in Mexico and its disastrous effects on Indigenous women, despite the Canadian federal government’s expressions of Indigenous reconciliation, feminism and feminist foreign policy. As Aggestam and True discuss in Chapter 16 in this Handbook, state-led feminist foreign policy is a recent phenomenon. In 2017, Canada released the Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP) with ‘six principal action areas, namely gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls, human dignity, growth that works for everyone, environment and climate change action, inclusive governance, and peace and security’ (Morton et al., 2020: 331). This was a welcome shift from the previous Conservative government, but concerns remain. Morton et al. (2020) problematise the economic instrumentalism, paternalism and gender essentialism on which the FIAP rests, reflecting a ‘feminist neoliberalism’ unlikely to meet the needs of marginalised and stigmatised women. They also point out that even though other countries, including Mexico, are applying a feminist lens to all of their foreign policy, Canada’s is largely limited to international aid, leaving other foreign interventions unexamined. There are few areas where this gap is starker than in Canadian mining. Klassen (2014) outlines the extent of Canadian mining interests and their consequences: ‘with more than 3000 projects in over 100 countries, Canadian mining capital has been associated with human rights abuses, land confiscation, bribes and corruption, political repression, labour exploitation, gendered violence, and ecological destruction’ (153). The Canadian state, including the former Canadian International Development Agency, has long been a global enforcer in the extractive industry and is therefore complicit in conflicts ‘over land rights, water use, deforestation, poverty, and dispossession in the contested zones of global mining’ (Klassen, 2014: 215). Mexico is a resource-rich country and mineral development continues to entice business interests at home and abroad. Canadian mining companies are a strong presence, supported through a continental governance regime secured by the Canadian state (Altamirano-Jiménez, 2020). Mining provides yet another instance where Canada’s feminist governance is unevenly applied and stubbornly neoliberal/limited in its orientation. Altamirano-Jiménez (2020) highlights the disconnect between Canada’s multiple national (and international) commitments to Indigenous peoples and the devastating impact of its mining operations, particularly on Indigenous women in Mexico. She explores the integral connection of body to land in Indigenous ways of knowing and being, and thus mining’s simultaneous colonisation of bodies and land, noting how ‘narratives of good governance, white civility, and promises of employment generation serve to conceal current processes of dispossession and the violence sustaining the racially structured national and global Canadian mining industry’ (Altamirano-Jiménez, 2020: 159). Again, feminist governance is revealed as a mirage, on offer only to a select group of economically and politically advantaged women.

430  Handbook of feminist governance Of course, this too can be complicated further. Indigenous societies are diverse and dynamic. Mining certainly can have ‘devastating effects on the environment, and negative cultural and social effects with its impact on sites of cultural or religious significance’, but it can also ‘generate employment and business development opportunities and substantial revenues for indigenous people’ (O’Faircheallaigh, 2013: 1792). This can mean multiple strategies and responses including Indigenous women’s protest, refusal and absenting themselves from negotiations, as well as embedding themselves in the process. The latter, however, can also point to the reach, and multiple guises, of governance feminism.

LESSONS LEARNED, CONCLUSIONS This chapter contributes to studies of feminist governance by highlighting how and why multilevel governance (including Indigenous governance), and diverse women’s and feminist movements, have contributed to what are often quite convoluted and contested feminist governance mechanisms in North America. The task of trying to encapsulate North American feminist governance trends is gargantuan, and so we provide several snapshots and hope to home in on key lessons learned. Mexico’s state capacities are not as robust as those of Canada and the US, and yet Mexico’s women’s movements have mobilised on multiple scales. This helps to explain the sophisticated institutionalised feminist governance measures that have been adopted and why Mexico’s institutional mechanisms may exceed the measures found in either the US or Canada. However, we show how such ‘gains’ cannot be assumed, given shifting institutional landscapes and substantial differences between women. Canada provides another case in point, where the distinction between feminist governance and governance feminism is blurry and in flux. Finally, the cases of trade and mining in North America illustrate the messiness of continental governance, the hypocrisies at play, and multi-layered feminist acts and omissions. All this serves as a vivid account of manifestations, manipulations and mirages for some, when it comes to feminist governance. We continue to see examples of bureaucratic and participatory governance, but the claims of transformational feminist governance, especially given prevailing governance feminist mandates and mechanisms, have not translated into substantially, and substantively, enriched realities, particularly for marginalised women.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Our profound thanks to Laura Macdonald, Hepzibah Muñoz-Martínez and Christina Gabriel for their invaluable insights on an early draft of this chapter; we are also very grateful for the work of our Research Assistants, Katherine Lewis (Saint Mary’s) and Erin Esau (Mount Saint Vincent).

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Feminist governance in North America  433 Sandin, Linnea (2020) ‘Femicides in Mexico: Impunity and Protests’, Centre for Strategic and International Studies, 19 March. https://​www​.csis​.org/​analysis/​femicides​-mexico​-impunity​-and​ -protests. Scala, Francesca and Stephanie Paterson (2017) ‘Gendering Public Policy or Rationalizing Gender? Strategic Interventions and GBA+ Practice in Canada’, Canadian Journal of Political Science 50(2): 427–42. Sørensen, Ninna Nyberg (2018) ‘Diffusing Gender Equality Norms in the Midst of a Feminicide Pandemic: The Case of AMEXCID and Decentralized Mexican South-South Cooperation’, Progress in Development Studies 18(2): 95–109. Starblanket, Gina (2020) ‘Transforming the Gender Divide? Deconstructing Femininity and Masculinity in Indigenous Politics’. In Fiona MacDonald and Alexandra Dobrowolsky (eds), Turbulent Times, Transformational Possibilities? Gender and Politics Today and Tomorrow, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 121–40. Stevenson, Linda S. (2009) ‘A Mosaic of Women’s Lives in Mexico’. In Joyce Gelb and Marian Lief Palley (eds), Women and Politics Around the World: A Comparative History and Survey, Volume 2, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC CLIO, 421–39.

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

INTRODUCTION Feminism is a highly contested term in the Pacific Islands. Regional governance in the Pacific has historically been heavily male-dominated, with gender issues not given high priority. This is despite a gender lens being critical in countering the major social, environmental and development issues facing the contemporary Pacific: women and girls in the Pacific experience high levels of gender-based violence, are especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change and encounter pervasive gender-based discrimination in terms of employment, land-holding, inheritance and access to justice, education and health services. The Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) is the primary regional governance body. There is significant diversity among member countries in terms of socioeconomic status, traditional and contemporary leadership structures, and sovereignty arrangements. Other key regional engagement and collaboration forums include the Pacific Community, a regional development agency and United Nations (UN) subgroupings including the Alliance of Small Island States and the Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS) group, which enable small Pacific states to exercise global influence through collective diplomacy particularly on the issue of climate change. Entrenched cultural and traditional norms, influenced by missionary and colonial ideals, have positioned women largely outside of public life in the region. The Pacific has consistently ranked poorly in terms of women’s political representation. As of August 2020, the proportion of women in the lower or only chambers of parliament in the region was 16.7 per cent, the lowest of any world region and below the global average of 25.1 per cent; excluding Australia and New Zealand, that figure drops to 6.4 per cent. The only three countries in the world with zero women parliamentarians – the Federated States of Micronesia, Papua New Guinea, and Vanuatu – are all found in the Pacific.1 Yet despite these heavily male-dominated political spaces, there are increasing numbers of women at senior levels in the public sector (Chan Tung, 2013; Haley and Zubrinich, 2016), including in regional architecture; in 2014, Dame Meg Taylor of Papua New Guinea became the first female PIF Secretary General. Despite their underrepresentation in elected positions, Pacific women have been actively engaged in politics, particularly around environmental and decolonisation issues. This transnational activism was formative in the development of local women’s movements. The first Pacific Women’s Conference was convened in 1975, and in subsequent years other regional feminist and women’s groups emerged. These formal and informal networks provide a key avenue of influence in regional governance, which persists as a driver of advocacy and norm change. Whilst the relationship with Western feminism has been fraught, there is a long history of Pacific women’s organising to advocate for goals that are feminist in nature, if not in name. 434

Feminist regional governance in the Pacific Islands  435 This chapter explores the origins and trajectory of feminist regional governance in the Pacific Islands. First, it gives a brief overview of regional identity formation and governance architecture. Then, the gender equality agenda at the regional level is examined, including the role of development partners. Next, it explores how feminist and women’s groups have contested prevailing development paradigms in the region. The fourth section looks at women’s contributions to regional security. Finally, it asks whether recent developments suggest a greater feminist consciousness is emerging in regional governance, and considers the role of civil society in shaping Pacific feminist futures.

REGIONAL IDENTITY AND INSTITUTIONS Regional governance structures in the Pacific originated in the colonial period, to serve colonial purposes. The postcolonial era brought significant change: new institutions, including the South Pacific Forum in 1971 (renamed the Pacific Islands Forum in 1999), with greater Pacific Islander control over regional policy and governance (Fry, 2019). Core regional institutions are represented by the Council of Regional Organisations of the Pacific (CROP), including PIF, the Pacific Community, and others such as the University of the South Pacific. A significant proportion of the funding for these institutions comes from Australia and New Zealand. A newer generation of regional groupings sit outside of CROP and are either self-funded by Pacific states or rely on other donors for funding; this group includes PSIDS and the Melanesian Spearhead Group, and do not include Australia and New Zealand as member states. Through regionalism, a collective identity has emerged, partly based around Fijian statesman Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara’s enduring idea of a ‘Pacific way’. A Pacific approach to international relations, the ‘Pacific way’ emphasises consensus, collective diplomacy and regional engagement based on shared Pacific traditions and values. This narrative, however, has been critiqued as marginalising women: In macrolevel political negotiations, regional solidarity has always been vital to securing the interests of Pacific Island states. Inherent in this process, dominated by male negotiators, was the disembodied practice of homogenizing the Pacific, with the imagined beneficiary of Pacific regional solidarity being, implicitly, male. (Slatter and Underhill-Sem, 2009: 207)

Regionalism has always presented an opportunity for Pacific Islands countries to work together to overcome challenges of smallness and isolation. Yet this framing of ‘small island states’, rather than ‘great ocean states’, has been resisted by influential Pacific Islanders who argue that the former entrenches global power disparities and belies the Pacific region’s history of interconnectedness (see Hau’ofa, 1994). Today, a more assertive regional politics draws on the notion of a ‘blue Pacific continent’ to emphasise the region’s strength, autonomy, collective identity and strategic importance (Taylor, 2019). This new form of politics is evident in the successful and highly visible collective diplomacy of Pacific Islands states on the issue of climate change (Carter, 2015). The place of feminist governance in the ‘blue Pacific’, however, is complicated by the persisting marginalisation of women.

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THE GENDER EQUALITY AGENDA Gender equality has become increasingly institutionalised throughout the region, reflecting a broader global focus on women and girls, particularly through the Beijing Platform for Action, the Millennium Development Goals and the 2030 Agenda. One recent symbol of this is the Pacific Women Leaders Network: established in 2020, two years later a Pacific Women Leaders Meeting was formalised as part of the annual Pacific Islands Forum calendar (Payne, 2022). Figure 35.1 summarises the various loci of regional feminist governance, with PIF and the Secretariat of the Pacific Community, and internationally the United Nations, taking central roles. Yet gender remains largely siloed, with limited attempts to mainstream, or even include, gender in national development strategies (JSCFADT, 2015: 296). While gender equality has emerged as an international and regional priority, the lack of gender mainstreaming remains a stumbling block. The language of feminism and women’s rights is far from indigenised in the Pacific, and there is a persistent belief that gender equality is a foreign and externally driven agenda, manifesting in local resistance to gender equality initiatives (Box 35.1).

BOX 35.1 ‘CEDAW IS A SECRET AGENT OF SATAN’ In 2015, the Tongan Government announced its intention to ratify CEDAW. Strong resistance emerged, particularly from religious groups; at a protest one sign read ‘CEDAW is a secret agent of Satan’. Opposition to CEDAW centred around issues of land and succession rights, abortion and same-sex marriage (Lee, 2017). A petition to the Parliament and the King opposing the ratification of CEDAW was signed by more than 10 per cent of Tonga’s population. In response, the Civil Society Forum of Tonga collected a petition in support of CEDAW from 13 non-governmental organisations, but as women’s advocate ‘Ofa Guttenbeil-Likiliki noted, civil society lacked the significant resources of the churches (RNZ, 2015). Ultimately, after the King publicly stated his view that ratification would be unconstitutional, the government abandoned its plan. Between 2011 and 2016, the Pacific received an average of US$2 billion in foreign aid a year, making it the most aid-dependent region in the world measured by aid as a proportion of gross domestic product (Dayant, 2019). The scale of aid in the Pacific means that development partner priorities can have – or be perceived to have – significant influence on national and regional policy. Over USD$5.6 billion in aid with gender equality or women’s empowerment as a principal or significant objective was allocated between 2009 and 2017 by OECD-DAC members to the Pacific (Reddy and Buadromo, 2020). Most development partners have identified gender as a priority or a cross-cutting issue, including the largest regional aid donor, Australia, which in 2012 endowed the ten-year AUD$320 million Pacific Women Shaping Pacific Development initiative. This is the largest overseas investment Australia has made to gender equality, influenced in part by the reorientation towards a gender mainstreaming approach to aid, security, trade and multilateralism in foreign policy by the United States and United Kingdom (True, 2016: 228). In 2021, Australia committed AUD$170 million over five years to a successor programme, Pacific Women Lead.

Figure 35.1

Relationship between regional and international governance arrangements

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438  Handbook of feminist governance A focus on gender equality does not necessarily lead to feminist policy outcomes. Aid advocacy groups have sought to push development partners in the Pacific to adopt an explicitly feminist framing. In 2020, five Australian non-governmental development organisations argued for the adoption of a feminist foreign policy, arguing that such an approach was critical to Australia’s objectives in the region (ActionAid et al., 2020). Yet an enduring issue is that the role of development partners in promoting gender equality reinforces, for some, the foreignness of ideas of women’s rights. Beyond the formal gender equality agenda, women have been active and important participants in shaping the direction of regional governance, inside and outside of formal institutions. This has not always been with an explicitly feminist perspective, as prominent Pacific Islands women activists have heavily critiqued, or outright rejected, the label (see Jolly, 2005; Trask, 1996). Key contributions of women to regional debates on development and security are outlined below.

GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT Women’s groups in the Pacific have been influential actors in setting forth alternative views on development and critiquing prevailing neoliberal ideas. This work has been bolstered by transnational connections with other women’s movements from the Global South, particularly through DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era), a global feminist network of which Fiji’s Claire Slatter was a founding member. DAWN promotes alternative development paradigms through a Global South and women-centred approach (Sen and Grown, 1987). The group is credited with introducing a critical development perspective into Pacific regional debate (Fry, 2019: 224). This perspective, and its feminist underpinnings, is clear in a 1994 book of essays by Pacific women, Sustainable Development or Malignant Growth?, which contains thorough critiques of mainstream development paradigms. It issued a call to action to rethink what constitutes development in the region, recognise the contribution of women and foreground women’s perspectives. The volume noted resistance to Western feminism in the Pacific, but highlighted the potential for an emerging feminist consciousness: The contributions in this collection bear cogent and often poignantly-impassioned witness to the fact that there are indeed far more commonalities than there are differences in the life experiences, aspirations and struggles of women in our Pacific community … these commonalities can provide a strong foundation on which to build a pan-Pacific feminism. (Griffen, 1994: 283)

While this perspective was not incorporated into the mainstream readily, it gained more traction in the 2000s in opposition to the Pacific Plan and regional free-trade agreements (Fry, 2019). Women were also active in the creation of the Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG), which promotes alternative approaches to development. In 2004, the Pacific Plan for Strengthening Regional Cooperation and Integration was endorsed at the PIF Leaders’ Meeting. It was criticised for insufficiently reflecting the lived realities of Pacific Islanders, and for advocating a neoliberal agenda inimical to Pasifika interests. Pacific civil society voices were central to the opposition to the Pacific Plan (Slatter, 2006). Activists employed a gender perspective, arguing that ‘the new regionalism of market

Feminist regional governance in the Pacific Islands  439 integration offers few prospects for improving the lives and standard of living of the majority of Pacific women’ (Slatter and Underhill-Sem, 2009: 196). Core regional successes – such as the end to nuclear testing in the region and the global ban on driftnet fishing – have often been coordinated efforts involving regional institutions, state governments and civil society, reflecting the symbiotic relationship between activists, policy actors and political leaders in advocating international policy change (Penjueli, 2015; Slatter and Underhill‑Sem, 2009). In this context, the lack of an institutionalised voice for civil society in regional governance had been criticised. The opposition to the Pacific Plan was characterised as ‘a long overdue reclaiming of political regionalism by Pacific NGOs’ (Slatter and Underhill-Sem, 2009: 204). The backlash to the Pacific Plan resulted in a reimagining of Pacific regionalism, with the plan’s successor – the Framework for Pacific Regionalism – an attempt to incorporate the voices of non-state organisations, at least to an extent, into regional agenda-setting (Slatter, 2015). While gender equality and gender mainstreaming goals had been added to the Pacific Plan in 2007, the Framework for Pacific Regionalism included gender equality as an agreed value from the outset. Even where gender equality has been incorporated into the regional political agenda as a formalised priority, activists have continued to contest the way in which it has been adopted – that is, without challenging underlying development paradigms. The ‘legal-technocratic approach’ to gender equality has been criticised by prominent Pacific scholars as ignoring the structural barriers to gender justice (Slatter and Underhill-Sem, 2009: 206). This is the approach to development that Amelia Rokotuivuna critiqued when she noted that ‘development has become a very technical pursuit’ (Slatter, 2006: 23).

GENDER AND SECURITY Throughout the modern history of Pacific regional governance, networks of women’s groups and women’s policy machineries have been contributing to regional security discussions and policy. These contributions have often been ‘at the margins’ (Teaiwa and Slatter, 2013), and hampered by a lack of engagement – or outright opposition – by key male political actors. As Sharon Bhagwan-Rolls (2014: 118) notes of the Pacific region, ‘When it comes to notions of “traditional” security, women remain invisible.’ Yet this belies the extent of their engagement on regional security: From the heights of the 1970s and 1980s antinuclear movement, especially the protests against nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands and French Polynesia, through the ‘events’ in New Caledonia, the decade-long civil war in Bougainville, successive military coups in Fiji, and civil unrest in Solomon Islands, Pacific Islands women have been actively critiquing and reclaiming concepts of ‘security’. (Teaiwa and Slatter, 2013: 447–8)

Environmental security has been a fundamental anxiety in the Pacific region in the postcolonial era. Pacific islands such as Mururoa in French Polynesia and Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands were testing grounds for nuclear weapons, causing massive environmental damage and enduring health issues. The Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) Movement was a coalition of non-governmental organisations formed in 1975, closely aligned to the burgeoning regional women’s movement. Women were active as leaders in the NFIP, advocating both decolonisation and an end to nuclear testing (Box 35.2). The regional women’s movement, in

440  Handbook of feminist governance their first formal conference held in Fiji in 1975, likewise made these two goals fundamental to its mission (Fry, 2019).

BOX 35.2 WOMEN’S ACTIVISM FOR A NUCLEAR-FREE CONSTITUTION IN PALAU The movement to include a nuclear-free clause in Palau’s constitution was driven by women. As Isabella Sumang (1994: 225) reflected: In our Palau culture, it is women who have responsibility for preserving the land for generations still to come. So, when the women of Palau realised that our overwhelmingly male-elected leadership was not going to stand up to US military ambitions, we took it upon ourselves to take action.

The Otil A Belaud (Anchor of the Land) women’s organisation was a prominent voice in the movement. Its leader, Mirair Gabriela Ngirmang, and other female elders led the popular and legal fight for a nuclear-free constitution, drawing on support from the regional women’s movement, including through awareness-raising at Pacific women’s conferences. The nuclear-free clause, however, proved contentious in negotiations for a compact of free association with the USA and was, after 15 years and 11 plebiscites, eventually overturned (dé Ishtar, 2008). Building on this legacy of environmental activism, women are prominent actors in the movement to combat climate change in the region. Political leaders including Hilda Heine of the Marshall Islands, the first female head of government of an independent Pacific state, and Fiamē Naomi Mata‘afa, who in 2021 became the first female prime minister of Samoa, have played an important role in highlighting the existential risk that climate change poses to the Pacific. The underrepresentation of women in the climate change diplomacy space is a recognised issue; while Pacific women have played leadership roles in climate negotiations, the reality is that they are operating in a space that is heavily masculinised and oriented towards the Global North (Carter and Howard, 2020). Given that women are particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts, a gender-responsive approach to climate change mitigation and adaptation is important. Such an approach must foreground local knowledge, prioritise women’s representation at all levels of governance and acknowledge the ways in which the impacts of climate change intersect with and compound other gender inequalities (Tanyag and True, 2019). Women-led initiatives such as Women Wetem Weta (Women’s Weather Watch), a disaster risk reduction programme in Vanuatu that mobilises a core group of women to warn communities of incoming climate-related events, demonstrate the benefits of such an approach. The dominant security issue for many women in the Pacific is gender-based violence. While a global issue, the prevalence of intimate partner violence is high across the Pacific (ODE, 2019). Since 2008, when Vanuatu’s Family Protection Act was passed, there has been significant regional diffusion in terms of family violence legislation; similar legislation was passed in Samoa, Palau, Tonga and Papua New Guinea in 2013, and in Kiribati and Solomon Islands in 2014 (Box 35.3). Yet such legislative reform has often been the subject of fierce resistance in the region, and is rarely implemented effectively (Biersack, 2016).

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BOX 35.3 THE VANUATU FAMILY PROTECTION ACT The Vanuatu Family Protection Act was first drafted in 1997, but took 11 years to be passed into law. The delay was due to strong opposition from influential groups including the National Council of Chiefs and the Vanuatu Christian Council. Opponents argued that the legislation went against both customary and religious values (Biersack, 2016). Once the bill had finally passed in 2008, it was the subject of an unsuccessful constitutional challenge, in a case supported by the Vanuatu Christian Council. The case of the Vanuatu legislation shows the powerful vested interests that can seek to work against feminist law reform in the region; yet it also shows that change, while slow, can be made despite fierce opposition. In a more traditional sense of security, women have been active in peace processes across the region. In Bougainville, a decade-long secessionist conflict was waged from the late 1980s. The beginning of the peace process was attributed to women (see Sirivi and Havini, 2004). Similarly, in Solomon Islands where ethnic conflict broke out in 1998, women peacebuilders were critical actors in informal peace processes (Monson, 2013). The role of women in post-conflict institution-building varied. In the case of Bougainville, the traditions of matriliny in the region, and women’s substantial role in peacemaking, were leveraged to ensure guaranteed seats for women in decision-making spaces: first, on the constitutional commission that drafted the 2004 constitution, and then in the Bougainville House of Representatives and Executive Council (Baker, 2019). In Solomon Islands, however, women were marginalised in post-conflict political decision-making (Monson, 2013). Women’s civil society has played a defining role in protesting successive military coups in Fiji and promoting democracy. Such protest has taken both direct and indirect forms, reflective of the changing political context in Fiji (George, 2012; Leckie, 2002). While the coups and increasing militarisation in Fiji have generally been seen as detrimental to women’s rights, political perspectives in Fiji amongst women are obviously diverse. Some Fijian women’s organisations take an explicitly feminist approach and others resist the label, yet productive connections between conservative and more radical groups have been made on issues of women’s health and welfare (Leckie, 2002). In addition to this domestic advocacy, Fijian civil society organisations have drawn on Fiji’s status as a regional hub to extend and enhance activist networks on key security issues of concern for women across the Pacific, including gender-based violence (George, 2012). Since the adoption of the landmark UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, greater global attention has been focused on gender and security. Within regional governance, this global agenda has had an impact. Regional networks such as the Pacific Women’s Media and Policy Network on UNSCR1325, coordinated by the Fiji-based FemLINKPACIFIC, sought to build connections between women working in the peacebuilding space and to foster awareness of the Women, Peace and Security agenda (Bhagwan-Rolls, 2014). In 2010, a Pacific Regional Working Group on Women, Peace and Security was established with representatives from the UN, regional organisations, national governments and civil society; the working group developed a Regional Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security that was adopted by PIF in 2012.

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A PACIFIC FEMINIST FUTURE? The Pacific Islands Forum’s 2018 Boe Declaration described climate change as ‘the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific’ (PIFS, 2018). Pacific women, who are disproportionately affected by the impacts of climate change, will play an important role in responding to this global challenge. Scholars and activists have been clear about the need for regional governance structures to value and foreground the contributions of women in addressing climate change and other key issues facing the Pacific Islands (see Bhagwan-Rolls, 2014; Howard and Carter, 2021; Slatter and Underhill-Sem, 2009). In 2016, the inaugural Pacific Feminist Forum was held with over 130 participants from 13 countries. Following the conference, Jane Alver (2017) noted that Pacific feminists actively sought out alternative organising spaces to the established regional structures which often locked women’s voices out. The Forum developed a Pacific Feminist Charter for Change, which defined its feminism within the frame of common Oceanic identity – the bonds of wansolwara (ocean), vanua (land) and tua’a (ancestors) – underpinned by strength in diversity (PFF, 2016). A second Forum, held in 2019, redoubled the commitment to the principles of the charter, and in particular to collective action on gender equality, human rights and justice (PFF, 2019). It reasserted the importance of strengthening Pacific feminist voices, especially in light of attacks on human rights defenders, shrinking space for civil society and the threats of poverty and climate change (FWRM, 2019; RNZ, 2019). Against the backdrop of backlash and threats to feminist civil society, analysis suggests that a ‘negotiated sisterhood’ that encompasses intersectional alliances has benefits for amplifying Pacific feminist voices to regional and global institutions (Alver, 2021). In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, concerns were raised regarding the possible regression of human rights in Pacific Islands stemming from the pandemic response, including increased rates of gender-based violence (Amnesty International, 2020). In addition to health impacts, the pandemic has detrimentally affected livelihoods and exacerbated existing gender inequalities in the Pacific (Cliffe, 2020; UN Women, 2020). Women’s groups in the region already faced significant issues in terms of access to stable funding, networks and decision-makers, and Covid-19 has compounded these challenges. Prominent women leaders such as Dame Meg Taylor (2020) have raised concerns over waning international attention to the climate crisis due to Covid-19, and the potential impacts for the Pacific. The future of regional governance itself is uncertain given the rift between Micronesian states and other PIF members over the selection of Taylor’s successor as Secretary General (Carreon and Doherty, 2021). In this global and regional context, ensuring a feminist future for regional governance remains a work in progress. Making this project even more difficult is the entrenched resistance in the Pacific to Western-centric models of feminism. Yet regional governance has been shaped in many ways by women’s activism that has been feminist in nature if not in name. Power and decision-making structures, development theories and regional security initiatives have all been influenced and critiqued by feminist thought. In the contemporary Pacific, emerging coalitions such as the Pacific Feminist Forum are asserting their voice and articulating a political agenda. As they say in their Charter ‘our Pacific feminist and women’s activism is vibrant and always growing, and draws on its rich lineage and herstories.’

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NOTE 1. In November 2021, Dr Perpetua Konman became the first woman ever elected to the Congress of the Federated States of Miconesia (Puas and Oliver, 2022).

REFERENCES ActionAid Australia, CARE Australia, International Women’s Development Agency, Oxfam Australia and Plan International Australia (2020) ‘A Feminist Foreign Policy for Australia – Joint Submission to the 2020 Review of Australia’s International Development Policy’. https://​iwda​.org​.au/​resource/​a​ -feminist​-foreign​-policy​-for​-australia​-joint​-submission/​. Alver, Jane (2017) ‘ANU Gender Institute – Feminist Utopias’, ANU Gender Institute, 2 September. http://​genderinstitute​.anu​.edu​.au/​feminist​-utopias​-my​-feminist​-utopia​-paradise​-found​-pacific. Alver, Jane (2021), ‘The Negotiation of a Feminist Sisterhood in the Pacific – Two Recent Cases of International Alliance Building’, Global Policy 12(2): 229–38. Amnesty International (2020) ‘Pacific Countries Must Not Use COVID-19 to Regress on Human Rights’, 15 April. https://​www​.amnesty​.org/​en/​documents/​asa05/​2144/​2020/​en/​. Baker, Kerryn (2019) Pacific Women in Politics: Gender Quota Campaigns in the Pacific Islands, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Bhagwan-Rolls, Sharon (2014) ‘Thinking Globally and Acting Locally: Linking Women, Peace and Security in the Pacific’. In Gina Heathcote and Dianne Otto (eds), Rethinking Peacekeeping, Gender Equality and Collective Security, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 118–30. Biersack, Aletta (2016) ‘Human Rights Work in Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Vanuatu’. In Aletta Biersack, Margaret Jolly and Martha Macintyre (eds), Gender Violence and Human Rights: Seeking Gender Justice in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu, Canberra: ANU Press, 271–339. Carreon, Bernadette and Ben Doherty (2021) ‘Future of Pacific Islands Forum in Doubt as Palau Walks Out’, The Guardian, 5 February. https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​world/​2021/​feb/​05/​future​-of​-pacific​ -islands​-forum​-in​-doubt​-as​-north​-south​-rift​-emerges. Carter, George (2015) ‘Establishing a Pacific Voice in the Climate Change Negotiations’. In Greg Fry and Sandra Tarte (eds), The New Pacific Diplomacy, Canberra: ANU Press, 205–20. Carter, George and Elise Howard (2020) ‘Pacific Women in Climate Change Negotiations’, Small States and Territories 3(2): 303–18. Chan Tung, Asenati Liki (2013) ‘Leading the March for Gender Equality? Women Leaders in the Public Services of Samoa and Solomon Islands’. In David Hegarty and Darryl Tryon (eds), Politics, Development and Security in Oceania, Canberra: ANU Press, 139–45. Cliffe, Emma (2020) A Feminist Future for the Pacific: Envisioning an Inclusive and Transformative Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, The Humanitarian Leader Working Paper 009. Melbourne: Centre for Humanitarian Leadership. Dayant, Alexandre (2019) ‘Follow the Money: How Foreign Aid Spending Tells of Pacific Priorities’, The Interpreter, 17 April. https://​www​.lowyinstitute​.org/​the​-interpreter/​follow​-money​-how​-foreign​ -aid​-spending​-tells​-pacific​-priorities. dé Ishtar, Zohl (2008) ‘Celebrating the Life of Gabriela Ngirmang of Palau (Belau)’, Capitalism Nature Socialism 19(1): 141–4. Fry, Greg (2019) Framing the Islands: Power and Diplomatic Agency in Pacific Regionalism, Canberra: ANU Press. FWRM [Fiji Women's Rights Movement] (2019) ‘Build Up Begins for 2nd Pacific Feminist Forum’, 22 March. http://​www​.fwrm​.org​.fj/​news/​media​-releases/​67​-all​-category/​news/​press​-releases/​530​-pff​-pr​ -build​-up​-begins​-for​-the​-2nd​-pacific​-feminist​-forum. George, Nicole (2012) Situating Women: Gender Politics and Circumstance in Fiji, Canberra: ANU Press. Griffen, Arlene (1994) ‘At the Dawn of the “Pacific Century”: A Place for Pacific Feminism’. In ‘Atu Emberson-Bain (ed.), Sustainable Development or Malignant Growth? Perspectives of Pacific Island Women, Suva: Marama Publications, 279–84.

444  Handbook of feminist governance Haley, Nicole and Kerry Zubrinich (2016) Women’s Political and Administrative Leadership in the Pacific, Canberra: ANU Press. Hau’ofa, Epeli (1994) ‘Our Sea of Islands’, The Contemporary Pacific 6(1): 148–61. Howard, Elise and George Carter (2021) ‘Leadership Doesn’t Always Come From the Top’, BroadAgenda, 15 January. https://​www​.broadagenda​.com​.au/​2021/​leadership​-doesnt​-always​-come​-from​-the​-top/​. Jolly, Margaret (2005) ‘Beyond the Horizon? Nationalisms, Feminisms, and Globalization in the Pacific’, Ethnohistory 52(1): 137–66. JSCFADT [Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade] (2015) ‘Empowering Women and Girls – The Human Rights Issues Confronting Women and Girls in the Indian Ocean– Asia Pacific Region’, Canberra, Australian Parliament. Leckie, Jacqui (2002) ‘The Complexities of Women’s Agency in Fiji’. In Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Peggy Teo and Shirlena Huang (eds), Gender Politics in the Asia-Pacific Region, London: Routledge, 156–80. Lee, Helen (2017) ‘CEDAW Smokescreens: Gender Politics in Contemporary Tonga’, The Contemporary Pacific 29(1): 66–90. Monson, Rebecca (2013) ‘Vernacularising Political Participation: Strategies of Women Peace-Builders in Solomon Islands’, Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 33. http://​ intersections​.anu​.edu​.au/​issue33/​monson​.htm. ODE [Office of Development Effectiveness] (2019) Ending Violence against Women and Girls: Evaluating a Decade of Australia’s Development Assistance, Canberra: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Payne, Marise (2022) ‘Speech to UN Women IWD Event’, Sydney, International Convention Centre, 4 March. Penjueli, Maureen (2015) ‘Civil Society and the Political Legitimacy of Regional Institutions: An NGO Perspective’. In Greg Fry and Sandra Tarte (eds), The New Pacific Diplomacy, Canberra: ANU Press, 65–78. PFF [Pacific Feminist Forum] (2016) Charter of Feminist Principles for Pacific Feminists, Suva, Fiji: Women’s Rights Forum. PFF [Pacific Feminist Forum] (2019) ‘Pacific Feminists Commit to Action Plan for Change’, 22 May. https://​www​.scoop​.co​.nz/​stories/​WO1905/​S00154/​pacific​-feminists​-commit​-to​-action​-plan​-for​ -change​.htm. PIFS [Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat] (2018) ‘Boe Declaration on Regional Security’. https://​www​ .forumsec​.org/​2018/​09/​05/​boe​-declaration​-on​-regional​-security/​. Puas, Gonzaga and Norleen Oliver (2022) ‘Electing the First Woman to the Congress of the Federated States of Micronesia’, Department of Pacific Affairs In Brief 2022/1, Canberra: The Australian National University. Reddy, Michelle and Virisila Buadromo (2020) Where is the Money for Women and Girls in the Pacific? Mapping Funding Gaps, Opportunities and Trends, Nadi, Fiji: Women’s Fund and Urgent Action Fund for Women’s Human Rights, Asia and Pacific. RNZ [Radio New Zealand] (2015) ‘Tongan NGOs to show CEDAW support’, 25 May. https://​www​.rnz​ .co​.nz/​international/​pacific​-news/​274524/​tongan​-ngos​-to​-show​-cedaw​-support. RNZ [Radio New Zealand] (2019) ‘Pacific Feminists Urged to Stay Strong’, 24 May. https://​www​.rnz​.co​ .nz/​international/​pacific​-news/​389954/​pacific​-feminists​-urged​-to​-stay​-strong. Sen, Gita and Caren Grown (1987) Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives, New York: Monthly Review Press. Sirivi, Josephine Tankunani and Marilyn Taleo Havini (eds) (2004) As Mothers of the Land: The Birth of the Bougainville Women for Peace and Freedom, Canberra: Pandanus Books. Slatter, Claire (2006) ‘Treading Water in Rapids? Non-Governmental Organisations and Resistance to Neo-Liberalism in Pacific Island States’. In Stewart Firth (ed.), Globalisation and Governance in the Pacific Islands, Canberra: ANU Press, 23–42. Slatter, Claire (2015) ‘The New Framework for Pacific Regionalism: Old Kava in a New Tanoa?’ In Greg Fry and Sandra Tarte (eds), The New Pacific Diplomacy, Canberra: ANU Press, 49–63. Slatter, Claire and Yvonne Underhill-Sem (2009) ‘Reclaiming Pacific Island Regionalism: Does Neoliberalism Have to Reign?’ In Bina D’Costa and Katrina Lee-Koo (eds), Gender and Global Politics in the Asia-Pacific, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 195–210.

Feminist regional governance in the Pacific Islands  445 Sumang, Isabella (1994) ‘The Pentagon’s “Chosen” People’. In ‘Atu Emberson-Bain (ed.), Sustainable Development of Malignant Growth? Perspectives of Pacific Island Women, Suva: Marama Publications, 223–8. Tanyag, Maria and Jacqui True (2019) ‘Gender-Responsive Alternatives on Climate Change from a Feminist Standpoint’. In Catarina Kinnvall and Helle Rydstrom (eds), Climate Hazards, Disasters and Gender Ramifications, London and New York: Routledge, 29–47. Taylor, Meg (2019) Griffith Asia Lecture 2019, Brisbane, Griffith University, 11 November. Taylor, Meg (2020) COVID-19 and Climate Change: We Must Rise to Both Crises, Suva, Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, 17 April. Teaiwa, Teresia and Claire Slatter (2013) ‘Samting Nating: Pacific Waves at the Margins of Feminist Security Studies’, International Studies Perspectives 14(4): 447–50. Trask, Haunanki-Kay (1996) ‘Feminism and Indigenous Hawaiian Nationalism’, Signs 21(4): 906–16. True, Jacqui (2016) ‘Gender and Foreign Policy’. In Mark Beeson and Shahar Hameiri (eds), Navigating the New International Disorder – Australia in World Affairs 2011–2015, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 224–41. UN Women (2020) Women, Peace and Security and COVID-19 in Asia and the Pacific, Bangkok: UN Women.

Index

3 Ds of degendering policy capacity 425 #BlackLivesMatter 353 #MeToo movement 27, 94, 303, 308, 379, 391 Abels, Gabriele 320 ableism 113, 114 Aboriginal women 116 abortion decriminalisation of 115 abortion rights 82 accountability 54, 120, 141, 151, 180, 182, 242, 243 to feminist objectives, standards and practice 181 ACHPR see African Commission of Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) Acker, Joan 305 Ackerly, Brooke 100 ActionAid 227 activism 29 spaces for 210 activist to aspirant moment 165 Act on Promotion of Women’s Participation and Advancement in the Workplace 389 actor–agency relations 65 ACWC see ASEAN Commission on the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Women and Children (ACWC) Ad Hoc Committee, Women’s Rights (European Parliament) 315 administrative hierarchy 127 advocacy 6, 115, 121, 122, 169 approaches 120 by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) 141 coalitions 10 institutional legitimacy for 152 networks 203, 204 of feminist actors 203 advocacy networks 5 advocates transnational network of 209 affirmation 352 affirmative representation 31 Africa equality machineries in 131 African Commission of Human and Peoples’ Right (ACHPR) 379

African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) 377, 378 African Union (AU) 9, 189 ACHPR 373 APSA 377 Constitutive Act, the 372, 373 feminist agents 371 gender-mainstreaming 372 Maputo Protocol, the 373, 374, 375, 376 OSE 378 RECs and RMs 372 WPS agenda 371 Afrofeminism 9, 347 and Black feminism 348 France 349 intersectional invisibility 350 Agenda for Sustainable Development 2030 190 Aggestam, Karin 205, 241 Ahmed, Pervaiz 113 Ahrens, Petra 301, 302 305, 308 AICHR see ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) Albright, Madeleine K. 207 all-party parliamentary groups (APPGs) 151, 156, 157 Altamirano-Jiménez, Isabel 427, 429 Alvarez, Sonia E. 409 Alver, Jane 442 Amnesty International 210 analytic affirmative action 31 Andrew, Merrindahl 68 anti-feminist movements 6 anti-gender movements 77, 83, 153, 306, 341, 343, 359 anti-gender resistance 182 anti-gender rhetoric 342 ‘anti-oppression’ principle 26 Anti-Racism & Diversity (ARDI) (European Parliament) 302 anti-violence against women (VAW) laws 129, 170 APPGs see all-party parliamentary groups (APPGs) APSA see African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) APWLD see Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD) armed conflict 131 Arora-Jonsson, Seema 264

446

Index  447 Arria Formula Meeting 242 Article 119, equal pay (Treaty of Rome) 324, 336 ASEAN Commission on the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Women and Children (ACWC) 397, 399 feminist values 399, 405 gender equality 400 ASEAN Handbook for Women’s Rights Activists 405 ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) 397 feminist values 399 gender equality 400 Asia APWLD and feminist advocacy 402 gender equality, ACWC and AICHR 400 internal variation, ASEAN and APWLD 404 regional governance 397 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) 106, 250 Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD) capacity-building programmes 403 climate justice advocacy 270 feminist advocacy 402 feminist governance 397, 402, 405 FPAR 403 gender equality 397, 402 internal variation 404 Asuagbor, Lucy 379 asymmetrical devolution 82 austerity policies 84 politics 92 Australia feminist scholars 65 femocracy 63 foreign policy gender strategy 205 women’s movement 68, 69 Australian health care movement 41 autonomous women’s communities 31 autonomy 41, 178 for regional branches 81 importance of 31 of feminist movements 31 organisational 31, 32 awareness-raising campaigns 165 Aymara and Quechua women, Peru 414 Bacchi, Carol 91, 93 Bachelet, Michelle 291 backlash 134, 135, 392 Bakker, Isabella 425 Ballington, Julie 176, 189, 191 Banaszak, Lee Ann 39, 41, 55, 64, 65, 69, 70, 88

Bancada Femenina 153, 156 Bardall, Gabrielle 196 Barnett, M. 399 Barreiro, Line 411 Barroso, José Manuel 339, 341 Bashevkin, Sylvia 207 Batliwala, Srilatha 113 Beaman, Jean 353, 355 Behl, Natasha 90 Beijing Declaration 162 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action 189, 229 Beijing Platform for Action 126, 127, 134, 141, 161, 162, 163, 190, 205, 206, 255 implementation of 131 Belém do Pará Convention 364, 365 Bello Ramírez, Jeisson Alanis 90 Bereni, Laure 68 Bergmann, Christine 45 Berthet, Valentine 306, 308 Beveridge, Fiona 129 Bhagwan-Rolls, S. 439 Bishop, Julie 140, 203, 205 Black and Mestiza feminism 30 Black feminism 9, 27, 347, 348, 350 Black feminist theorising 52 Black Lives Matter 122 blame shifting politics of 78 Boe Declaration 442 Bolsonaro, Jair 133 boomerang effect 64, 336 Boyle, Alan 243 breastfeeding debates over 169 Brodie, Janine 425 Brown, Nadia 353, 355 Brown, Wendy 323 budget decision-making process 146 Budget impacts distributional analysis of 1 bureaucracies vulnerability of 128 bureaucracies for women 126 Bureau for Problems Concerning Women’s Employment (European Commission) 315 Caglar, Gülay 2 campaign funding 168 campaign support 170 Canada 10, 425 feminist international assistance policy 204 foreign security policy 205 Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) 256

448  Handbook of feminist governance Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women (CACSW) 425 candidate-centred regulation 170 candidates ‘choice’ among 166 quota regulations 165 capacity-building programmes 168 research and 169 capacity development programmes 165 capitalism 58 carceral feminism 91 care economy 11, 46 CARE International 222 Carter, David 174 caste 114, 161 CEDAW see Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) CEDAW Committee 130 Center for Fundamental Rights 366 Central American Women’s Fund 118 Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy (Berlin) 210 Cerva Cerna, Daniela 411 Chappell, Louise 65, 67, 193 Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Canada) 82 child care costs 122 debates over 169 child marriages 133 Chinkin, Christine 243, 278, 279 Chizumila, Tujilane Rose 379 Chorev, Nitsan 218 Chun, Jennifer 93, 94 cis-gendered, heterosexual women 46 citation 106, 107 civil society 153, 154, 210 actors in 165, 169 groups 166 groups, diversity of 157 civil society organisations (CSOs) 288, 291, 292, 318 APWLD 397 CEDAW 396, 398 committee hearings 338 feminist values 396 policymaking 336 single-axis umbrella 337 supranational equality 338 supranational umbrella 336 transnational 340 civil society representatives 130 claims-making institutionalised platform for 152 class 32, 114, 161

inequalities of 56 classism 113 climate change 8, 434, 440, 442 adaptation 264 denialism 263 Gender Action Plan, COP 264 gender in and gender of 264 limits and potential, feminist governance 271 local and everyday feminist governance 268 national and global level, feminist governance 266 standpoint theory 262 white male effect 263 climate change and Gender Action Plans (ccGAPs) 269 co-creation, space for 196 Code Pink 278, 280, 281, 282 coding process, transparency of 106 Cohen, Marjorie Griffin 427 Cohn, Carol 244, 245 Cole, Elizabeth R. 94 co-leadership model 118 collective action 26, 28 deliberation and 28 collective feminist knowledge 27 collective leadership model of 117 collective voice 113, 120 collective wellbeing 113 collectivism 2 Collins, Patricia Hill 64, 88 colonialism 108 federal laws 83 oppression and dispossession 116 systems of 94 colour women of 102 Combahee River Collective 27 Commission of Inquiry on Syria’s report 242 Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) (UN) 130, 287, 288 Agreed Conclusions 2021 190 Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) (European Parliament) 9, 152, 153, 154, 299, 327 economic crisis (2008) 300, 301 history 300 planning, parliamentary calendar 300, 301 political groups 300 common language 76 Commonwealth gender budgeting pilot programmes 142 intergovernmental meetings of 139 Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA) 174, 175

Index  449 Gender Sensitising Parliaments Report 2001 175, 181 Community Disaster and Climate Change Committees (CDCCCs) 270 community groups 76 community of practice 241 community organizations non-hierarchical governance of 115 comparative gender politics research 71 competition state 56 complex inequalities 89, 100 Comprehensive Approach on WPS (European Union) 242 Comprehensive Proposal for the Composite Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women 288 computer generated equilibrium modelling (CGE) 256 conceptualisation of insider activism 67, 69, 70, 71, 89 conditional approach impact of federalism on gender equality 78 Conference of the Parties, 25th session (COP25) 262 Conference on Human Rights, 1993 277 conflict prevention 228, 229, 231, 239, 242 resolution 227 stages of 230 trajectory of 243 women’s experiences in 240, 241 women’s rights in 242 conflicts 274, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281 political and armed 57 consciousness roots of 27 consensus decision-making 1 conservative movements 6 conservative ‘norm-spoilers’ 130 constitutional authority 68, 69 constitutional restructuring 79 constitutive relationship 154 consultation inclusive forms of 1 contemporaneous accountability 180 contemporary democracies dispersion of power in 83 contestation 397, 399, 402, 404, 405, 406 continuum of violence 227 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) 5, 29, 42, 130, 161, 189, 190, 216, 267, 277, 287, 363, 374, 436 ASEAN member states 398 CSOs 396

feminist governance values 398, 399 substantive normative framework 398 Convention on the Political Rights of Women 190 cooperation 397, 404, 405, 406 cooptation potential for 63 coordinated community intervention model 360 Corbett report (on European Parliament procedures) 307 corporate governance 121 corporate power 3 corporatism 53 Council of Europe 9 Council of Regional Organisations of the Pacific (CROP) 435 counter-publics 31 COVID-19 pandemic 11, 129, 145, 146, 147, 217, 221, 278, 294, 301, 442 economic and social impacts of 145, 146 gender relations during 222 global response to 222 lockdown measures 222 sex-disaggregated data for 222 CPA see Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA) credibility of women 182, 194 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 56 crisis moments 84 critical actors 176, 178, 179 critical friendship 189, 192, 197 depiction of 193 critical junctures 38 CROP see Council of Regional Organisations of the Pacific (CROP) cross-border solidarity 30 cross-government coordination 44 cross-party caucuses 151 cross-party initiatives 156 CSOs see civil society organisations (CSOs) CSW 130 delegates 130 negotiations 130 cultural governance practicing methods of 116 Cuomo, Dana 64 Curtin, Jennifer 157 CUSMA see Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) cynical branding 134 Czech Republic media campaigns 166 Dae-jung, Kim 385

450  Handbook of feminist governance D’Agostino, Serena 94, 347, 359, 362, 365, 367, 368 Dairiam, Shanthi 404 Danish Committee 154 danjo kyodosankaku 392 data monitoring women’s exclusion 166 decentralisation 76 patterns and effects of 79 decision making 113, 131 dispersion of 76 forms of 76 human relationships in 113 processes 151 rotating 117 structures 120 decolonial 94, 95, 96 decolonial epistemology 109 decolonial feminism 95 decoloniality 95 decolonizing the curriculum 105 degrowth feminist models of 96 de Haan, Francisca 276 delegations civil society representatives on 130 deliberative democracy 46 democracies feminist studies of 54 democracy accountability 54 quality and performance 63, 71 democracy assistance community 195 democratic elections organisation of 228 democratic governance 135, 196 field of 195 institutions of 192 democratic institutions parliaments 175 democratic polities study of 54 democratic standards national implementation of 193 democratisation 132 Dersnah, M.A. 289 descriptive representation 28 Development Alternatives for a New Era (DAWN) 29 development assistance complexity of 194 development scholars 57 devolution processes 81 difference 88, 90, 91, 93, 94 Dionigi, K. 338 Diop, Bineta 379

diplomacy mechanism of 205 Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) 230, 242 disaster risk reduction (DRR) 264, 270 discourse 31 discourse analysis 105, 106, 107 dispossession 231 diversity definition of 31 Doing Feminist Research in Political and Social Science (Ackerly and True) 100 Dolan, Kathleen 103 domestic violence 360 levels of 131 donor agencies 151 donor funding 195 Drăgan, Mihaela 349 ‘drift’ institutional change 40 DRR see disaster risk reduction (DRR) dual federalism 78 negative states’ rights discourses in 80 Duflot, Cécile 27 East African Community 250 Ebola outbreak 221 echo chambers 337 ECOMOG see Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) economic case, gender equality European Semester, the 326 GDP 326 gender balance 326 institutions and actors of feminist governance 326 Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) 242, 377 Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) 377 economic governance 138 impact on spaces 139 reforms in 138 economic insecurity 254 economic modernisation 57 economic multilateralism 204 economic policies impact on women and men 138 economic policy feminist critiques of 145 ignorance in 146 economisation discursive 324, 331 economic case, gender equality 325 EES 325

Index  451 European Semester, the 326 expert knowledge 330 feminist governance 327 gender (in)equality and economised subjectivities 328 legitimisation 329 neoliberalism 323 processes, actors and tools 324 processes of 53 Treaty of Rome to Lisbon strategy 324 Economist’s Democracy Index 384 ECOSOC see United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) ECOWAS see Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) EEC see European Economic Community (EEC) Eerdewijk, Anouka van 372 effective action dependencies for 71 egalitarianism 119 EGI see Environment and Gender Index (EGI) EIGE see European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) Einhorn, Barbara 64 Eisenstein, Hester 65 elections institutional failures in 164 electoral assistance programmes 196 electoral gender quotas 165, 171 electoral politics feminist impact on 182 Elomäki, Anna 56, 340 Elson, Diane 142 Emejulu, Akwugo 92, 347, 349, 351 EMILY’s List 167 employee health packages 122 employment gender equality policy in 70 empowerment 28, 70, 71 and feminist governance 25 feminist understanding of 33 idea of 28 personal and collective 26 source of 95 Enarson, Elaine 262 encuentros in Latin America 29 environmental governance 264, 265 Environment and Gender Index (EGI) 266, 267, 268 epistemic plurality 94 Equal Employment Opportunity Law (Japan) 385 equality agencies 128 equality agendas 158 equality for the market 319 Equality in Politics survey 176

equality machineries 129, 131 in Africa 131 Equality Rights Alliance (ERA) (Australia) 115 equal marriage laws 411 equal pay for equal work 324 equal rights, concept of 312 equal treatment 312, 313 ERA see Equality Rights Alliance (ERA) Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip 133 Eschle, Catherine 92 Esguerra Muelle, Camila 90 ethic of care 120, 122 Ethiopia 170 ethnicity 161 ethnic/racial groups 71 EU see European Union (EU) European Commission 131 European Disability Forum, the 336 European Economic Community (EEC) 311, 312, 313 European Employment Strategy (EES) 325 European Gender Budgeting Network 145 European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) 131, 318, 326 European Network Against Racism, the 336 European Network of Migrant Women, the 341 European Network of Parliamentary Committees for Equal Opportunities 150 European Parliament 131 Anti-Harassment Committee 303 Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) 152, 153, 154 democracy 299 formal institutions, gender equality 300 informal political practices 304 European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) 303 European Pillar of Social Rights 317 European Semester, the 326 European Social Fund, the 313 European Union (EU) 83, 189, 242 accession conditions 131, 153 dismantling, feminist governance 56, 316 economic governance reforms 143 economisation, gender equality policy 323 equal opportunities 312, 313 European Social Fund, the 313 feminist governance 8, 311 formal setting 337 gender equality actors 335 gender equality policy 9, 311, 312, 316, 317, 318, 319, 325, 326 gender mainstreaming 313 institutions 335 intersectional feminist activisms in 9

452  Handbook of feminist governance multiannual programmes 314 post-crisis austerity policies 329 TFEU 311 ‘Women on Boards’ proposal 313 European Women’s Lobby (EWL) 154, 315, 318, 327, 336 advisory status 338 femocrats 339 Social Platform 338, 339 Euroscepticism 307 EU-UN Spotlight Initiative 231 Evans, Elizabeth 352 EWL see European Women’s Lobby (EWL) exclusion hierarchies of 120 exclusionary solidarity 30 executive scrutiny 151 fairness ‘deficient vehicle’ of 243 Fallon, Kathleen M. 101 Farquhar, Stuart 113 Fawcett Society 157 federal bureaucracy 69 federalism 76, 78 disadvantages 77 gender equality policy 78 historical legacies of 79 studies of 76 federal-unitary dichotomy 78 female candidates demand for 166 nomination and capacity-building of 170 selection of 167 female-friendly labour environment 102 female genital mutilation (FGM) 232, 374 female party members 168 female politicians combat violence against 170 FEMEN protesters 27 feminine floral dress 27 Feminine Mystique, The 52 femininity policing of 40 feminism 1, 2, 38, 44, 70, 71, 88, 90, 113, 132, 134, 180, 193 acceptance of 135 aegis of 88 autonomous vs. institutional institutional 413 decades of 135 dominance of mainstream 89 embrace of 135 feminist change agents 372 feminist institutionalism (FI) 371 gender mainstreaming 408, 410

Global North 413 heteronormative and binary 414 Indigenous and communitarian 413 in Global South 29 institutionalising 371 intersectional 414 Maputo Protocol, the 373 neoliberalisation 265 Pacific Islands 434 state 410, 412 Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance (FaDA) 278, 279 feminist activism 6, 120 conventional politics and 77 solid boundaries for 245 feminist activists 134 feminist advocacy networks organisational styles of 2 feminist analysts 71, 72 feminist ceasefire principles for 210 feminist change intergenerational nature of 122 sources of 41 Feminist Comparative Policy (FCP) 66 analysts and students 70 feminist co-option scholarship 181 feminist culture 117 feminist debates 51 feminist empowerment process radical nature of 117 feminist Encuentros 32 feminist epistemology 100, 101, 262, 263, 271 feminist establishment 134 feminist expertise role of 1 feminist foreign policy (FFP) 203, 206, 381 development of 204, 211 diffusion of 204 expertise 210 governance networks 206 impact of 211 international diffusion of 206 movement, rise of 209 promotion of 205 US coalition for 210 Feminist Foreign Policy Project, the 278 feminist funds 122 participatory resourcing in 118 feminist governance 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 38, 39, 40, 42, 47, 53, 64, 88, 89, 91, 92, 95, 102, 107, 114, 119, 134, 135, 195 analysis of 121 and climate change 262 and economic paradigms 10

Index  453 and limited policy impacts 389 and multilevel governance 6 approaches to studying 100 Asia 396 at local, national and international levels 38 autonomy 31 Canada 425 categories of 3 CEDAW 397 challenges with 8 claims 134 collective advocacy mechanisms with government funding 115 components of 126 concept of 1, 3, 5, 6, 161 contemporary institutions of 161 co-option of 92 critical friendship as methodology 192 critical role in 189 critique of 88 debate on 1, 11, 51, 54 de facto 311 definition of 1 description of 1, 89, 189, 203 development of 4, 6, 38, 39, 42, 203 dismantling mechanisms 316 economisation 327 elements, Southeast Asia 398 embodied knowledge 26 European Union and 8 feminist institutional approaches to 40 formal institutions, European Parliament 300 forms of 6, 45 gender budgeting see gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) general diffusion of 153 governmentality 32 impact of 103 impact on 163 implications for 6 inclusion in 100 influences on 39 in foreign policy 206 in international relations and global governance 7 innovation 4 institutional sources of 38 institutional structures, rationalisation 317 interventions 92 Latin America 408 minimalist view, gender equality policy 319 multi-layered sites of 89 networks 11 North America 421 partial and contingent nature of 39

pathways to 40 politics, power and empowerment 25 potential sites for 51 practice of 88, 189, 196 practices and institutions of 10 problems and solutions 164 process and outcomes of 67 project on 4 questions for 6 review of 89 scholarship 1, 101, 103, 106, 108 steps and implications for 71 strategies for 194 structures 9 terms of 51 TFNs 274 theories and understandings of 5, 72 tools 8, 51, 189, 191, 193 universalism, global feminism and transnational feminism 28 UN Women 286 VAW 359 weakening policy instruments 316 feminist governance experiments women’s health sector in Victoria 114 feminist governance research 63, 71, 72, 101, 108, 159, 217 innovative methods 107 feminist guidance/tools 189, 191, 193, 196 feminist humanitarianism 280 Feminist Humanitarian Network 210 Feminist Impact for Rights and Equality (FIRE) 280 feminist innovation 1, 8 feminist insider activism (FIA) 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70 concept of 67 definition of 63, 71 evidence of 72 instances of 67 international cross-disciplinary dialogue 64 mapping 68 potential 72 research definition of 67 results of 70 study of 71, 72 systematic focus on 72 feminist insiders 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71 analytical notion of 63 and outsiders 65 target of 69 feminist institutional approaches 38, 42 feminist institutionalism (FI) 39, 42, 67, 76, 150, 155, 175, 304, 305, 371 approaches and feminist governance 38

454  Handbook of feminist governance concept of 38 critiques of 39 description of 38 examples of 42 gender mainstreaming 45 gender policy machineries 44 governance development and change 40 methodology of 5 sex/gender quotas 42 feminist institutional scholarship 40, 65 feminist institutions 239, 311 backlash 392 emergence of 385 limited policy impacts 389 women’s political representation 387 Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP) 429 feminist international relations scholarship 204 feminist knowledge denial of 146 space for 220 feminist leadership 119 feminist materialism 65 feminist methodology 101 feminist mobilisation 47, 134 feminist movement actors ideas and demands of 70 feminist movements 39, 127, 245 professionalisation of 134 size and strength of 132 feminist networks 142, 143, 311 feminist normative frameworks 190 emergence of 8 feminist organisational philosophy 4 feminist organising 6, 120 models of 31 principles of 25 Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) 270 feminist peace and security governance co-option of 243 defining 239 description of 238 future of 246 positive engagement 240 risk of co-opting 246 transformative vehicle in 244 feminist peacebuilding governance conflict prevention 231 core values and principles 227 description of 227 development of 227 informal spaces and socio-economic justice 232 normative and institutional frameworks 229

practices and limitations 231 feminist peace research 239 feminist policy change 203 feminist policy networks 2 feminist policy objectives 128 feminist policy reforms 133 feminist power description of 113 feminist practitioner 194 feminists negative resource for 55 feminist research see feminist governance research feminist scholars 52, 252 feminist scholarship 1, 52 inclusion and exclusion of 106 feminist service delivery 122 feminist social movements 114 feminists of the rupture 413 feminist solidarity notions of 90 feminist theory 2, 29, 52 ‘affective turn’ in 52 feminist tools 195 demand for 195 feminist transnational networks 143 feminist values advocate for 240 expression of 229 institutionalising of 2 in trade 252 visibility and political support to 240 feminist women’s movement actors 64 FEMM see Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) femocrat recovering 192 femocrats 63, 65, 68, 69, 127, 132, 133, 134, 154, 336, 338, 339 ability of 140 agencies and 68 approaches of 65 Australia 63 constraints on 134 discursive strategies of 3 feminist insiders and 68 role of 65 strategies emerged from 140 Ferguson, Lucy 196 Fernandez, Alberto 134 Fernós, M. 410 FFP see feminist foreign policy (FFP) FI see feminist institutionalism (FI) FIA see feminist insider activism (FIA) Fiji 441

Index  455 financial and economic crisis (2008) 53 financial management policies 138 financial sustainability 121 Finnish Committee for Employment and Equality 154 Finnish Parliament 152 First World Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975 127 Focal Point Network of WPS 245 foreign ideologies 153 foreign policy analysis 210 description of 203 feminist governance in 209 knowledge networks 211 leadership 207, 209 principles and practices in 7 Foucauldian analysis of governmentality 58 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 42, 64, 104, 141, 337, 365 Framework Act on Gender Equality (South Korea) 386 Framework Act on Women’s Development (South Korea) 385 Framework for Post Conflict Reconstruction (African Union) 378 France feminist foreign policies 205 protest violence against women in 27 Freeland, Chrystia 428 Freeman, Jo 64, 113 free market processes 39 Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) 250, 253, 254, 256, 257, 258 French Secretariat of Equality between Women and Men 134 FRIDA 118, 120 case studies 121 Happiness Manifestx 122 Friedan, Betty 52 FTAs see Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) functionalism 217 funding opportunities 166 fundraising groups 167 fundraising networks 166 G7 203 G7 summit in Canada 133 G20 203 Gabriel, Christina 427, 428 Gargallo, Francesca 413 Gay, Amandine 349 GEM see gender equality machinery (GEM) gender activists and scholars 211

and MLG 80 and poverty 90, 92 and state architectures 78 and tobacco 219 as form of oppression 26 ‘common sense’ understandings of 132 conceptualisation of 4, 51 constitutive of 88 deconstruction of 51, 55 equality 2 equality legislation and policies 52 equality norms 1 equality norms and soft regulation 5 essentialist conflation of 231 feminist ideas on 191 feminist scholarship on 211 focal points 129 gaps in political knowledge 103 incorporation and mainstreaming 101 inequalities of 56 insensitive parliaments 174 justice 29, 30 mainstreaming 45 norms and stereotypes 77 of governance 2 perspectives 54 power and 25 specific research and training 52, 63, 166 systems 25 Gender and Family Promotion Committee (Rwanda) 169 Gender and Trade Coalition (GTC) 250 Gender and Trade Committees 255 gender architecture (UN) CEDAW 287 Commission on the Status of Women 287 Division for the Advancement of Women 287 OSAGI 287 UNIFEM 287 gender balance 161 gender-based analysis (GBA) implementation of 10 Gender Based Analysis/Gender Based Analysis Plus (GBA/GBA+) (Canada) 422, 425, 426 gender-based violence 190, 231, 232, 240, 241 gender-blind policies 228 gender budgeting see gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) Gender Climate Tracker 264, 265 gender democracy 54 gender differences 209 gendered economic policies 329 gendered institutions development of 39

456  Handbook of feminist governance gendered language 69 gendered processes of power 217 gendered violence 115 gender empowerment practices 220 gender equality 2, 8, 41, 53, 57, 58, 63, 69, 70, 78, 83, 88, 115, 145, 158, 203, 204, 206, 238, 239 access for 77 achievements 53 advancement 126 agenda 141, 143, 250 agreements 7 AICHR and ACWC 400 and economic policy 10, 143 and multilateralism 203 architecture 133 arms trade and focus on 238 as policy objective 140 bodies 154, 155 bureaucracies 128, 132 ‘business case’/economic case for 3, 325 change 194 civil society actors 166 cultural norms work against 63 debates on 83 description of 161 development of 3 East Asia 384 economisation of 9 favour of 212 feminist governance and 8 for resources 131 for women 218 fundraising networks 167 GDP 326 global norms of 191 government funds to 143 impact of 126 implementation of 206 importance of 191 in Australia’s foreign policy 140 institutionalising of 158 institutions 126, 131, 134 Japan and Korea 384, 385 machineries see gender equality machinery (GEM) mainstreaming 176 mandate 156 movement ideas for 69, 70 narrative and practice directed towards 242 national action plan for 130 national executives’ support for 126 norms of 2 objectives 195 opposition 306, 307

oriented culture 177 Pacific Islands 436 parliamentary committees 154 plans of action to achieve 191 policy 54, 76, 78, 79, 169, 239, 250, 253 political parties 167 political resistance to 177 prevention and 244 progressive language and politics of 9 projects 3 promotion of 128, 155, 167, 206 regional civil society networks 10 regressive effect on 84 reproductive rights and 157 soft power approach 209 state actors 170 training programmes 167 UN Women efforts 291 WGDD 375 Gender Equality Advisory Council (G7) 133 gender equality alliances, EU governance intersectionality 340 multilevel governance and national trajectories 342 opposition 341 Gender Equality Architecture Reform campaign 288 Gender Equality Bureau 385 gender equality machinery (GEM) 42, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 135, 150 circumstances under 128 ‘hardware’ of 128 in state with good governance 135 in wealthy countries 133 openings for 130 responsibility of 130 to initiate national planning 130 types and effectiveness 129 gender-equality policy 2 activist and feminist involvement 317 diversification, instruments 314 economisation 323 EU 317, 318, 319, 325 institutions and policy community 315 minimalist view 319 progressive extension, perimeter 312 rights policy framework 316 Gender Equality Policy in Practice Approach (GEPP) signals 70 gender-equality progress 78 Gender Equality Strategy 2020–2025 (European Council) 316 Gender-Equal Society (Japan) 385 gender expertise 192, 193, 195, 196 local sources of 196

Index  457 gender experts 192, 193, 196 pool of 196 gender-focused parliamentary bodies (GFPBs) 154, 158 achievements and limitations of 150 contribution of 158 creation of 152 description of 150 distinguishing feature of 152 effective operation of 158 emergence and recognition of 150 establishment of 152 international agencies 150 origins and diffusion 152 populist pushback 153 standing committees 154 transfer of responsibility to 154 types of 151 women’s caucuses 152 gender-friendly electoral systems 81 gender gaps in foreign policy 211 gender governance OECD meeting on 4 tools 193 gender identity 133 sexuality and 161 gender ideology 4, 57, 307, 341, 365 gender impact assessment 128 gender inclusive health emergency response 221 gender inequality 11, 54, 55, 139, 143, 203, 217, 255, 328 continued reality of 191 in trade 252 Gender is my Agenda Campaign (GIMAC) (African Union) 376 gender issues responsibility for 154 traditional positions on 133 gender justice proposals on 54 gender knowledge 146 inclusion of 220 gender mainstreaming 1, 7, 51, 54, 104, 108, 129, 145, 153, 218, 242, 250, 251, 259, 265, 287, 288, 289, 301, 302, 312, 313, 317, 323, 325, 337, 372, 385 centrality of 8 contribution to 154 current implementation of 46 equality plans 411 extent of 144 gender-sensitive policies 410 impetus for 45 implementation of 46

judicial branch 411 normalisation of 128 parliamentary and legislative 150 state feminism 410 tools 130 WPAs 410, 412 gender norms 203, 204, 206 structure of 40 Gender Parity Law (Japan) 388 gender perspectives integration of 242 gender policy agencies 39 confluence of 206 equalities and intersectionality in 57 machineries 44 gender quotas 42, 91, 155, 162, 167 adoption of 152, 155 form of 43 implementation 43 proponents of 43 statutory 43 gender regime 311, 319, 342 gender relations politics of 221 gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) 6, 11, 45, 70, 128, 274, 302, 387 Brussels Conference 142 community of practice 144 concepts and practice 142 contribution to economic governance 144 description of 138 discourse and practice 141 economic and political contexts 140 feminist ambition 145 implementation of 140, 142 in Australia 138, 139, 140, 141 initiatives 142 international spread of 141, 145 large-scale international project 141 mainstream budgeting 144 meaning and practice of 144 new avenues and challenges for 145 normative frameworks 145 opportunities for 142, 143 renewed interest in 145 research and practice 144 strategy for good budgeting 143, 144 theory and practice 147 transformative potential 144, 146 gender-responsive fiscal policies 146 gender-responsive peacebuilding ‘Seven-Point Action Plan’ for 230 specific areas for 230 gender scholarship 67, 175

458  Handbook of feminist governance gender sensitive parliaments (GSP) 150, 169 activity and support 177 advocacy, conceptualisation, operationalisation, and implementation 174, 177, 181 and feminist academics 178 and feminist epistemic community 180 and non-feminist practitioner community 182 approach to 176, 182 at global, regional and national levels 175 change 180, 183 conceptualising and operationalising 181 definition of 176, 177 description of 174 dissemination and uptake 174 feminist content 178, 180 frameworks 174, 181 gender and sensitive components of 175 history 175, 180 iterations and toolkits 177 operationalisation of 178 parliamentary acceptance of 175 practitioners 179, 180 self-assessment and implementing 178 toolkits 174 gender sensitivity 174, 176, 183 with ‘efficiency’ and ‘effectiveness’ 176 gender violence 9, 94, 229 gender wage gap 46 General Assembly Resolution 66/130 (2011) 190 George, Nicole 269, 270 Georgieva, Kristalina 146 German civil society 244 Germany foreign policy 205 GFPBs see gender-focused parliamentary bodies (GFPBs) Ghodsee, Kristen 276 Giuvlipen (Romania) 349 glass-ceiling index 384 global alliance re-formation of 250 global civil society 290 global economic governance institutions of 250 global economic recessions 83 global feminism 28, 29 Global Fund to Fight AIDS 216 global governance foreign policy and 7 institutions 7 international relations and 7 global health governance 217 global intergovernmental bodies 189 global leadership 204

global liberal norms translation of 189 global market economy 228 global multilateralism 129 global norms national implementation of 189 Global North 196, 245 experts of 196 feminist scholars from 106 situatedness in 238 global policy frameworks foundation for 242 global political economy structural inequalities in 251 Global South 196, 245 federations in 78 feminism in 29 feminist scholarship from 106 women’s empowerment in 207 Global Women’s Strike (GWS) 279 Gnanguênon, Amandine 372 Goetz, Anne Marie 290 good budgeting 143 ‘good governance’ agenda 142 governance definition of 32 feminism 3 feminist contributions to 3 feminist practices of 114 feminist principles of 212 feminist structures of 140 forms of 1 gender in 265 gender of 265 innovation 4, 10 Latin America 408 levels of 8 mainstream models of 113 norms of 28 Pacific Islands 434 participatory 421 phenomenological approach to 26 spaces 118 transnational forms of 4 governance feminism 52, 55, 421, 422, 426, 427, 428, 429, 430 governance institutions 5 governance scholarship 100 governance theory feminist contributions to 3 government ‘gender-sensitive’ mode of 232 patriarchal systems and structures of 114 governmentality 33 government bureaucracies 2

Index  459 Grace, Joan 79, 154 grants decision-making 118 grassroots women exclusion of 102 GRB see gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) Greens/EFA see Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance Griffin, Penny 92 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 326 Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance (Greens/EFA) 300, 303, 304 GSP see gender sensitive parliaments (GSP) Gustá, Rodríguez 412, 421, 424, 427 Guzman, Virginia 410 Haastrup, Toni 371 Hafner-Burton, Emilie 277 Halley, Janet 3, 88 Hankivsky, Olena 46 Happiness Manifestx 118 harassment 171 Harman, Harriet 174 Harper, Stephen 425 hate speech 306 health advocacy movements 219 health emergencies feminist response to 221 gender inclusive response to 217 sex-disaggregated data in 220 health emergency programme 219 HeForShe campaign (UN Women) 294 hegemonic masculine structure 239, 240 hegemony 108 Hernes, Helga Maria 53 heteronormativity 114, 228 heteropatriarchal modes 89 hierarchical masculinist power 122 High Level Group on Gender Equality and Diversity (European Parliament) 302 Holvikivi, Aiko 193 homogenous groups 241 homonationalism 52 homonormative scholarship 107 homophobia 113 homoprotectionism 52 Hoskyns, Catherine 45 Hsiung, Ping-Chen 64 human development 127 human resources management 122 human rights principles of 206 Human Rights Conference, Vienna 276 human rights violations 57, 242 human security 239 Hunting, Gemma 46

Hyogo Framework for Action (UN) 264 Hysteria Magazine 349 Ibrahim, N. 428 IC see Istanbul Convention (IC) ICESCR see International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) ICW see International Council of Women (ICW) IDEA see International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) identity definition of 25 diverse forms of 113 identity-based differences 102 IGAD see Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) IGOs see intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) IHR see International Health Regulations (IHR) illiberal democracies growth of 212 illiberalism 132 images 169 impact assessments 251, 255 imperialism systems of 94 inclusion 54 inclusive deliberation 46 inclusive governance 32 inclusive hearing processes 157 inclusive knowledge 107 inclusiveness 229 inclusivity 352 intersectional mobilisation 353 logic of 353 incorporate feminist deliberations 113 incorporate feminist governance 41 Indigenous and communitarian feminism 413 Indigenous Community Governance Project 113 individual activism 68 individual credibility 182 individual expert advisors 211 individual feminists 142 individual legislative initiatives 153 individual wellbeing 113 individual women parliamentarians 154 inequalities 56 categories 52 persistent 164 race and ethnicity, sexuality, and class 53 inequality consequences of 46 dimensions of 41 inferiorisation 347 Informal Expert Group (IEG) on WPS 241

460  Handbook of feminist governance informal ‘feminine’ activities 232 informal gendered institutions 40, 55, 227 European Parliament 304 opposition, gender equality 306 informal norms 41 informal spaces 231 INGOs 41 ‘in-house’– audits 178 innovation 4, 9, 11 insecurity 227 insider activism 65 ‘insider’ agencies 129 insider-outsider construct 64 insiders policy practice of 69, 70 institutional analysis 105, 106, 107 institutional architecture gender and 77 impacts of 76, 77 institutional biases 144 institutional change 38, 39, 40, 41, 381 possibilities for 42 institutional credibility 182 institutional culture 175 institutional design 3, 25, 26, 32 institutional forms variety of 44 institutionalizing intersectionality 57 institutional layering 38 institutional legacies importance of 55 institutional marginalisation 133 institutional memory 156 institutional patriarchy 116 institutional reproduction 40 institutional restructuring 79 institutional transfer 153 institutions gendered nature of 38 global governance 275, 282 patriarchal nature of 101 INSTRAW see International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW) instrumental policy 325 integrationism 46 intellectual spaces 30 Inter-Agency Network on Women and Gender Equality (‘IANWGE’) 242 interest-group mobilisation 77 Intergenerational co-leadership 118, 119 Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) 242 intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) 2, 41, 239, 275, 398

ASEAN 397, 406 feminist values 396 through CEDAW 398 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 267 intergroups 302 International Alliance of Women (IAW) 274, 275 International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) 145 international borrowing 143 international community 41, 241 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) 276, 277 International Council for Research on Women 210 International Council of Women (ICW) 274, 275 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) 190 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) 216 International Criminal Court 39, 241 international development programmes 151 international diffusion pattern of 203 international discourse 2 international financial institutions 142, 143, 144, 145, 228 economic governance reforms 145 international governance 2, 4, 5 institutions of 5 international governmental organisations (IGOs) 11 ‘taken abroad’ and shared via 174 International Health Regulations (IHR) 216, 218, 219 Emergency Committees (EC) 220 Joint External Evaluation (JEE) exercises 220 International Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIM) on Syria 242 International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) 150, 189 international institutions 2, 8, 251 International Monetary Fund 228, 232 land privatisation schemes 233 international non-governmental organisations 189 international norms 174, 183 international organisations (IOs) 221 international peace 209 International Political Economy (IPE) 251 international popularity 209 international pressure 153 international relations and global governance 7

Index  461 feminist governance in 7 traditional theory of 239 International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW) 287 International Standing Committee on Peace and International Arbitration 275 International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women 362 International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) 266 International Woman Suffrage Alliance 274 International Women’s Development Agency 211 international women’s rights 239 International Women’s Year in 1975 150 Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) 39, 150, 151, 153, 154, 155, 174, 177, 178, 189, GSP report 2011 176 in Bangladesh 177 intersectional 408, 409, 413, 414, 416 intersectional activisms Afrofeminism 347, 348, 349, 350 contemporary 349 inclusivity and affirmation 352 invisibility and activisms 349 minority activists 354 re-appropriation 348 recognition 348 intersectional consciousness 30 intersectional feminism 89 intersectional feminist activisms 9 intersectional feminist scholarship 39 intersectional inequalities 243 intersectionality 6, 26, 30, 46, 52, 54, 70, 71, 88, 90, 91, 93, 95, 100, 102, 108, 113, 115 approaches 57 appropriation of 90 basic questions of 89 concept of 30 emphasis on 134 ideas of 91 imperative 80 importance of 6 insights of 89, 95 institutionalisation 348 intervention 88 language of 90 literature on 30 mainstreaming 100 multi-agential commitment to 92 notion of 52 pairing of 95 praxis 93 presence of 31 representation 71, 72

rhetoric of 89 social and political mobilisations 352 strains of 94 terms of 70 United Nations’ approach to 92 whitening of 352 see also intersectional activisms Intersectionality-Based Policy Analysis (IBPA) project (Canada) 93 Intersectionality in Feminist and Queer Movements: Confronting Privileges 352 intersectional solidarity 30 interstitial politics 348, 351 invisibilisation mechanisms of 9 invisibility Afrofeminism 349, 350, 351 Black feminists 350, 351 de-politicising and whitening 351 Giuvlipen 349 interstitial politics 351 Roma rights movement 350 IPCC see the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) IPE see International Political Economy (IPE) IPU see Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) Islamic movement 64 Istanbul Convention on Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence (IC) 9, 342 opposition 365 protection of victims 364 ratification 364, 365 VAW and gender inequality 364 Jacquot, Sophie 325 Japan average labor force participation, women 389 economic and political empowerment of women 384 fifth basic plan, gender equality 386 gender equality 384, 385, 386 Gender Equality Bureau of the Cabinet Office 386, 387 glass-ceiling index 384 global gender gap index 389 #MeToo 391 women’s political representation 387 Jihye, George Lipsitz 93, 94 Johnsson, Anders B. 176 Juncker, Jean-Claude 339, 341 Kantola, Johanna 299, 306, 307, 308 Keck, Margaret A. 64 Kendall, Mikki 91

462  Handbook of feminist governance Keynesian approach to economic policy 139 Keynesian social liberalism 3 kidnapping 27 Kirchner, Cristina 412 Klassen, Jerome 429 knowledge, gender equality EU policymaking 330 production 330 Korean Women’s Development Institute, the 385 Kovac, Tanja 122 Krizsán, Andrea 339 Kumskova, Marina 242 Kunz, Rahel 192, 193, 195, 196 Kvinna till Kvinna (Sweden) 227 labour feminisation of 251 minimum wages for 117 labour market 11, 56 organisations 53 Lagarde, Christine 143 land private ownership of 233 Land Rights Act (Liberia) 233 Lang, Sabine 45, 342 Latin America feminicide in 231 lesbian and queer feminisms in 32 mainstreaming 410 sidestreaming 413 Law against Harassment and Political Violence against Women (Bolivia) 171 leadership 116, 178 alternative framing of 119 and engagement 115 quality of 126 rotating 2, 117, 120 spaces 118 traditional notions of 120 legalised hegemony 243 legal pluralism 78 legitimacy 243 Lépinard, Eléonore 352 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Rights – LGBT Intergroup (European Parliament) 151, 302 LGBTI 151, 290, 341 LGBTI+ 77, 80, 81, 82, 118, 365 LGBTIQ+ 291 Browne, Sophie 291 LGBTQI 243, 244, 340 LGBTQI+ 58, 131, 301, 302, 307 LGBTQIA+ 40 Liberal Party in Canada 168 liberal peace

managerial practices of 230 Liberal Women’s Caucus in the Canadian Parliament 156 Liberia formalisation of land rights 233 peacebuilding interventions in 231 Liberia Spotlight Initiative 232 Lisbon Strategy, the 325 Lisbon Treaty, the 314, 316, 337 lived experiences 30 localisation 193, 195, 228 localism 29 Lombardo, Emanuela 299, 307 Mabille, Betel 354 Macdonald, Laura 427, 428, 429 Machold, Silke 113 Mackay, Fiona 67, 79, 157, 193 Mackinnon, Catharine 54 macroeconomic policy 138, 146 Mahamat, Moussa Faki 379 Mahila Samakhya 117, 120, 121 annual leave approvals in 122 Maiguashca, Bice 92 Mail and Guardian, South African newspaper 379 Malparara way 117, 122 Mannell, Jenevieve 104 Mapuche women 414 Maputo Protocol, the 374, 375, 376 ‘marginal’ agencies 129 marginalisation 56, 108, 116, 127 marginalised groups 32 marginalised women 117 rights for 114 marginal policy ghettos 128 marital rape 360 market economy 142 market feminism 56, 318 market freedoms pursuit of 3 market hegemony values of 33 market rationality 144 Martin de Almagro, María 102 masculinised practices 43 masculinity policing of 40 Massaro, Vanessa A. 64 maternity leave directive (European Union) 327 matrix of domination 26 Matthews, Nancy A. 362 Mazur, Amy 4, 128, 408, 412 McBride, Dorothy 4, 128, 408, 412 media-based campaigns 166 Médor (Belgium) 354

Index  463 men

characteristics of 217 MENA 29 mentoring component 165 Merton, Robert. K. 64 methodological nationalism 78 Mexican National Institute for Women 134 Mexico 10, 422 feminist foreign policy 205 Micaela law (Argentina) 134 militarisation 228 legitimation of 244 militarism 239 Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) 425, 426 Mlambo-Ngcuka, Phumzile 291 MLG see multilevel governance (MLG) mobilisation 90 challenges and opportunities of 104 local and international 423 women’s 423, 425 modern state biopolitical interests of 58 Moldovan, Zita 349 Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) frameworks 119 Morton, Sam E. 429 movement building 6 movement-defining deliberations 31 Mukhopadhyay, Maitrayee 266 multicultural feminism 89 multidimensional peacebuilding 227, 228, 230, 232 multilateralism 203 economic 204 multilevel governance (MLG) 430 actors navigating 81 arrangements 78, 81, 83 asymmetrical arrangements 82 characteristics and historical legacies of 81 description of 76 gender and 76, 80 gendered implications of 80 in turbulent times 83 mediating actors in 77 operation of 80 political parties and 80 studies of 76 systems 78 understanding of 76 multilevel insider-outsider feminist strategies 64 multi-portfolio parliamentary committees 154, 155 Mushaben, Joyce Marie 320 Mwasi collective (France) 349, 350

Nairobi Forward Looking Strategies 161, 374 Nairobi Women’s Conference, 1985 287 Nandy, Ashis 57 Naples, Nancy 64 narco-states 414 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women’s Alliance (NATSIWA) 115, 116 National Action Plans (NAPs) see Women, Peace and Security (WPS) National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs) 269 National Finance Act 2006 154 National Foundation for Australian Women 141 nationalism 57 national mechanisms for the advancement of women (NMAW) 410, 411 national ownership 239 national women’s bureaucracies history of 126 national women’s machineries (NWMs) 6 diffusion of GEM 127 feminism 132 feminist governance 133 gender equality bureaucracies 129 global and regional inter-governmental institutions in supporting GEMs 129 polarisation on gender equality 132 structure, function and funding 128 see also gender equality machinery (GEM) nation branding 204 nativism 153 NATSIWA see National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women’s Alliance (NATSIWA) 120 neoliberal accumulation 231 neoliberal austerity measures 131 neoliberal discourses 92 neoliberal economic governance 142, 228 neoliberalisation 52 feminism 323 gender equality policy 323 processes of 53 see also economisation neoliberalism 39, 56, 140, 425, 429 impact of 52 influence of 3 structural critique of 250 neoliberal logics 228, 233 neoliberal macroeconomic policies 146 neoliberal priorities 88 neopatrimonial states 57 nested newness 41 networked governance 212 New Zealand ‘femocrat experiment’ 191

464  Handbook of feminist governance Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara, and Yankunytjatjara (NPY) 116 Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council Aboriginal Corporation 116 NGO see non-government organisation (NGO) Nigeria protest in 27 Ni Una Menos 27 Nobel Women’s Initiative 210 non-democratic countries 83 non-discriminatory parliamentary culture 174 non-feminist practitioner community 175 non-gendered institutional approaches 38 non-government organisation (NGO) 115 non-hierarchical practices 120 non-market activity 142 non-state groups 209 Nordic countries feminist scholars in 53 Nordic theorising 53 Nordic welfare states gender equality issues 53 normative work 189 norm change 38 norm transmission 1, 25, 26, 153 North America Canada 425 governing trade and mining 427 Mexico 422 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 421, 422, 427, 428 Nott, Sue 129 NPYWC see NPY Women’s Council (NPYWC) NPY Women’s Council (NPYWC) 116, 117 Bush Meetings 121 Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) Movement 439 NWMs see national women’s machineries (NWMs) NZ Labour Party 167 OAU see Organisation for African Unity (OAU) Office of Global Women’s Issues (OGWI) 133 Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and the Advancement of Women (OSAGI) 287 Office of the Special Envoy (OSE) 378 Office of the Status of Women (OSW) (Australia) 139 O’Malley, Devi Leiper 118 One of Us campaign (European Union) 341 opposition to gender equality see anti-gender movements oppression 26

forms of 31, 100, 113 interlocking systems of 30 Orbán, Viktor 58 organisation formal leadership aspects of 120 organisational autonomy 31, 32 organisational design 114 organisational leader 117 organisational responsibility 121 organisational theory 113 Organisation for African Unity (OAU) 371, 372, 375, 377, 381 organisations embedded power in 119 organising hybrid forms of 2 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 189 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) 150 Organization of American States (OAS) 363, 365 OSAGI see Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and the Advancement of Women (OSAGI) OSE see Office of the Special Envoy (OSE) OSW see Office of the Status of Women (OSW) Otil A Belaud (Anchor of the Land) women’s organisation 440 Otto, Dianne 244 Outshoorn, Joyce 65 Ouvrir La Voix 349 Oxfam 227 Pacific Islands 10 Boe Declaration 442 gender and development 438 gender and security 439 gender equality 436 regional identity and institutions 435 Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) 242, 434 Pacific Plan for Strengthening Regional Cooperation and Integration, The 438 Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS) group 434 ‘Pacific way’ 435 Palmieri and Ballington’s survey 70 Palmieri, Sonia 157, 175, 179, 189, 191, 192, 196 Paris Climate agreement, the 278 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness 2005 142 Parisi, Laura 100 parliamentarians prejudices and preferences of 178 parliamentary actors 168 parliamentary associations 178 parliamentary committees 155

Index  465 see also gender-focused parliamentary bodies (GFPBs) parliamentary functionality 183 parliamentary groups 151, 157 see also gender-focused parliamentary bodies (GFPBs) parliamentary leadership 150 parliamentary resources 152 parliamentary systems institutional rules of 43 parliamentary traditions 152 parliamentary transformation politics of 175 parliaments traditional working practices of 169 participants’ conceptualisation 104 participation mechanisms of 120 participatory action research 107 participatory culture 118 particularism 29 partnership 228, 230, 231 party funding regulations 165, 166 leadership quotas 168 lists 166 organisational dynamics 81 rules and procedures 165 selection processes 42 soft targets, internal quotas, and women’s sections 165 party committees streamlining of 156 party competition prominent feature in 81 party federalism 81 party funding 170 party system constellation of 42 Pateman, Carole 54 path dependencies 38 Patil, Vrushali 93 patriarchal norms 232 patriarchal relations 246 patriarchal state 55 patriarchy concept of 54 sickening extremes of 135 peace feminist approaches to 240 transformation of 238, 245 peacebuilding engendering 231 UN feminist governance in 227 Peacebuilding Commission 233

institutional creation of 229 strategy 233 Peacebuilding Fund 229, 230, 233 peacekeepers 244 peacekeeping gender positions in 244 peacekeeping mission 244, 246 deployment of 238 gender capacity of 241 peacekeeping operations 228 peace-making initiatives 227 peace operations UN documents on 106 PEFA see Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) People’s Democratic Party in Nigeria 168 performance budgeting implementation of 142 persecution 171 personal socialisation 165 persuasion 178 PIF see Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) pincer model 336 Pink Tide period 415 Platform for Action see Beijing Platform for Action policy alternatives types of 144 policy analysis 6 policy bodies vulnerability of 154 policy debates 131 policy dismantling 316 coordination instruments 317 rationalising institutional structures 317 rights policy framework 316 weakening policy instruments 316 Policy Framework for Security Sector Reform and Agenda 2063, 2011 378 policy instruments progressive diversification 314 weakening 316 policy learning process 81 policymaking forms of 76 networks 203 policy outcome dimension 70 policy problems conception of 93 policy transfer 211 policy windows 11, 30 political analysis technique for developing 27 voices in 52 political campaigns 165

466  Handbook of feminist governance indirect funding of 170 political career 166 political community territorial differentiation of 79 political context sensitivity to 39 political discourses 79 political finance 166, 170 political governance feminist principles of 32 political groups 303 political inclusion 129 political institutions 3, 40, 52 creation of 41 feminising 177 gendered changes in 39 gendered nature of 38 political intersectionality 31 political knowledge 103 political parties 77, 80 regional branches of 81 representation of 151 political party polarisation 80 political power dispersion of 83 political pragmatism 29 political recruitment models of 164, 165 theories of 163 political rights non-discrimination and equal enjoyment of 190 political stakeholders 176 politics and feminist governance 25 feminist approaches to 25 men in 166 phenomenological approach to 26 research 63 women participating in 171 politics of scale 342 Pollack, M.A. 277 populism 132 postcolonialism 57 post-conflict reconstruction 232 postdeconstruction 52 and state 58 postmodern state definition of 55 poststructural feminists 55 potential transformation levels of 70 poverty gender and 90, 92 gendered experiences of 90

power and empowerment 26 and feminist governance 25 and gender 25 and marginalisation 107 and privilege 27 centre-periphery division of 81 constitutive of 91 description of 25 divisions of 82 dynamics 28, 106 efforts to influence 26 efforts to shift 120 feminist notion of 26 hierarchies of 120, 239 of symbols and representation 32 paying attention to 101 performativity of 107 relations 25, 29, 105 risks and 104 structures of 26, 28 transferring and sharing 246 power inequalities 233 powers exclusive division of 82 power-sharing feminist principle of 243 Pratt, Nicola 244 predominant logic of inclusivity 94 principle of organising 31 private life regulation of 78 privileged women 40 productive economy 254 pro-gender equality foreign policy 205 pro-gender equality norms 204 Progress of the World’s Women 278 Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa 373 Prügl, Elisabeth 2, 55, 195, 240, 266 PSIDS see Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS) group public affairs conduct of 190 Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) 144 public funding for activities 170 public health approach 218 public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) 220 public institutions positions in 131 public life

Index  467 facets of 190 public policy 138 institutions 132 sectors of 66 public policy institutions 132 public prejudice 165 public services marketisation of 56 public space 27 Puechguirbal, Nadine 106 quantitative methods 104, 106 Quartey, Kwesi 379 quota laws 167 race 26, 32, 161 inequalities of 56 racism 113, 114 radical counter-storytelling 347 radical feminists 54 radicalism 41 radical praxes 349 radical right populism 4, 58 Ramli, Rashila 396 Rao, A. 287 Reagan, Ronald 140 Reanda, L. 277 recognition 54 RECs see regional economic communities (RECs) Rees, M. 278, 279 regional branches 81 regional contexts 1 regional conventions 190 regional economic communities (RECs) 372, 375, 377 and AU 375 SADC 376 SDGEA 376 regional governance 5 and integration, Africa 372 Asia 397 FI 371 gender equality, translation 375 institutions of 5 Pacific Islands 435 security, Africa 376 sexual violence, eradication of 379 regional governance institutions 131 regional innovation 9, 29, 32 regional institution 5, 9 significance of 1 regional integration organisations 252 regional intergovernmental bodies 10, 189 regionalism 435, 438, 439

regional mechanisms (RMs) 372 regional multilateralism 129 regional perspectives from Africa 9 from Asia 10 religious diversity 80 religious mobilisations 4 religious oppression 93 reproductive freedom 29 reproductive healthcare during lockdown 222 reproductive rights 244 research data collection process 105 ethics 108 focus groups 107 generalisability 105 process 101, 103, 104, 108 significance of 106 social movements and 108 Research Center for Women’s Advancement and Gender Equality (Mexico) 169 researchers 105 own familiarity and subjectivity 108 tasks of 103 Research Network on Gender Politics and the State (RNGS) 4, 66 resistance 175, 177, 182 resistance to change towards gender equality 306 Revillard, Anne 68 rights policy framework 316 right-wing populism 4, 153 risk 120 RMs see regional mechanisms (RMs) Roadmap for Equality between Women and Men 2006–2010 (European Union) 337 Roggeband, Conny 339 Rolandsen Agustín, Lisa 305 Romani feminism 9, 348, 349, 350 Romani Women’s Movement: Struggles and Debates in Central and Eastern Europe 353 Rosamond, Bergman 205 Roth, Benita 353 Ruane, Abigail 242 Rubery, Jill 325 Russell, B. 362 Rwandan genocide, the 377 Sacchet, Teresa 43 SADC see Southern African Development Community (SADC) same-sex marriage 82 Sandler, J. 287, 290 Sauer, Birgit 342 Sawer, Marian 63, 65, 72, 189, 194

468  Handbook of feminist governance Scottish Labour Party 42 Scottish Parliament’s Equality Committee 153 SDGEA see Solemn Declaration on Gender Equality in Africa (SDGEA) SDGs see Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) security inclusive understanding of 243 transformation of 238, 245 Security Council Resolution 1325 277 security governance 238 feminist peace and 239 Security Sector Reform (SSR) initiatives 230, 242 selection processes affirmative action in 176 self-assessment 220 semi-democratic countries 83 Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (UN) 264 Seneca Falls Convention (US) 275 ‘separate spheres’ paradigm 82 separate streams 64 service delivery 6 sex definition of 25 sex hierarchy 28 sexual harassment 135, 303, 307, 308 sexual health 244 sexual health and reproductive rights (SHRH) in foreign policy 204, 206 sexual identity 32 sexual orientation basis of 133 sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) 127 sexual violence 229, 242, 244 Africa 379 governing eradication 379 internal memos 379 #MeToo movement 379 sexual violence in conflict 151 shared competencies 82 shared decision-making 81 shared leadership practices of 6 shared participation 120 Shepherd, Laura J. 106 Shin, Young 93, 94 sidestreaming 413 Sierra Leone 168 Sikkink, Kathryn 64 Sisters in Suits (Sawer) 65 small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) 251 Smith, C. 379

Sobande, Francesca 347, 349, 351 Social Democratic Women’s Federation (Sweden) 43 social difference 31 social equality 129 social groups 25, 31 dynamics 31 social hierarchies 169 social infrastructure investments in 146 social justice 3, 239 concept of 3 feminist aims of 101 social liberal conception 3 social life aspects of 239 social movement actors 154 social movement researchers 64 social movements 2, 31, 76, 82 theories of 66 social movement spaces 30 Social Platform (EU) 336, 338, 339 social reproduction for affected groups 254 products and services relating to 255 social security benefits 140, 146 social services liberalisation 255 societal groups 255 soft regulation aspects of 5 soft targets 167 Solemn Declaration on Gender Equality in Africa (SDGEA) 376, 377, 378 Sonneveld, Shafferan 242 Soto, Lilian 411 South Africa 104 WPS agenda 205 Southern African Development Community (SADC) 376 South Korea economic and political empowerment, women 384 gender budgeting 387 gender equality policy 386 glass-ceiling index 384 global gender gap index 389 #MeToo 391 quota adoption 388 Standing Committee on Gender Equality 154 South Pacific Forum 435 Soviet Union gender quotas for parliaments 162 spaces in peace initiatives 231 Speaker’s Gender Equality Group 153 speak to power holders 195

Index  469 specialised international agencies 189 specialised parliamentary bodies 7, 153, 157 continued existence of 153 contribution of 150 feminist organisational values in 158 mainstreaming/streamlining of 154 types of 157 see also gender-focused parliamentary bodies (GFPBs) Squires, Judith 42 standpoint theory 64, 262, 263, 268, 269 state and gender 55 capacity 57 debates about 51 description of 51 discourses 51, 55 feminist governance and 58 feminist perspectives 51 feminist theories of 51, 57 gender and 53 illiberal politics of 58 institutions and processes of 51, 54 intersectionality and 56 organisational logics of 63 postdeconstruction and 58 power 8 responsibilities 138 strategic 56 universal feature of 126 women and 52 women’s position and participation in 57 state architecture 76, 78, 80 state capacity deficits of 92 state feminism 4, 56, 64, 65, 132 broader conceptions of 89 concept of 66 definition of 66 literature on 72 ‘state feminist’ label 133 state-of-the-art foreign policy expertise 204 state social policy 53 state structures, gender-biased patterns of 69, 70 States (US) Women’s March 90 Status of Women Committee (SWC) of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party in Australia 156 Stephen, Kylie 129 Stone, Diane 206, 211 Stotsky, Janet 143 ‘strategic silence’ of neoclassical economics 145 strategy reframing 120 strong party systems 156

structural adjustment policies (SAPs) 276 structural inequalities reproduction of 46 substantive empowerment 70 substantive representation 157 Suh, Ji-Hyeon 391 superficial implementation 194 supra-national organisations 105 survival sex strategies 221 sustainable development aspects of 161 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 130, 161 Svedberg, Barbro 144 Sweden feminist foreign policy 204, 205 foreign policy 204 formal quotas in 168 Speaker’s Gender Equality Group 157 Syahirah, Sharifah 396 symbolic action within political institutions 165 ‘symbolic’ agencies 129 symbols 31 Taiwan 105 TANs see Transnational Advocacy Networks (TANs) Task Force for Equality (European Commission) 317, 318 Tatagiba, Luciana 408 taxation system progressivity of 140 Taylor, Dame Meg 442 technocratic logics 233 Tedros, Adhanom Ghebreyesus 219, 222 territorial differences 82 TFNs see transnational feminist networks (TFNs) Thatcher, Margaret 140 the Netherlands abortion regulation 27 ‘Theories of Change’ document 293 the Philippines 45 third world feminism 89 Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA) 91 Timor-Leste 156 women’s parliamentary caucus 153 Tormos, Fernando 93 Townsend-Bell, Erica 31,41 trade agreements 251 trade governance attentiveness to structural inequalities 253, 256 change in 250 description of 250 ‘expert’-driven nature of 252

470  Handbook of feminist governance feminist research and activism 252 feminist values in 251 gender-based impact assessments 255 inclusive and democratic 255, 257 leading actors in 250 people in multiple roles 254 social reproduction 254, 257 trade institutions 250, 251 trade liberalisation 252 trade policy gendered impacts of 255 trade policymakers 253 traditional feminist collectivism 115 traditional governance transformation of 239 traditional governance frameworks 117 traditional interest groups 129 traditional parliamentary norms 7 traditional peace 238, 240 traditional security purposes 243, 246 transformational variety 88 transformative conversations 241 transformative economic policies 146 transformative governance 421, 422, 429 transgender individuals 71 Transnational Advocacy Networks (TANs) 336 transnational civil society 340 transnational epistemic network 7 transnational feminism 28, 29 transnational feminist networks (TFNs) 7 covid-19 278 crises 278 description 274 mobilisation 274 peace, demand for 275 peace, economic security and feminist humanitarianism 280 transnational governance institutions 2, 4, 10, 153 transnational governance networks 206, 239 transnational regional integration 76 transparency 243 transphobia 113 Treaty of Amsterdam 313, 337, 339 Treaty of Rome 311, 312, 313, 314, 324 Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU) 311 Tripp, Aili Mari 102 Trudeau, Justin 204, 209, 425, 426 True, Jacqui 100, 106, 144, 191, 241, 242 Trump, Donald 133, 263, 428 Tungohan, Ethel 93 Tunisian Parliament 153 TWWA see Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA) tyranny of structurelessness 113

UDHR see Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) Uganda women’s caucus 153, 155 UK Parliamentary Labour Party’s Women’s Committee 156 UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) 293 UK Women’s Budget Group 141 UN institutions and national ministries 145 work on peace and security 240 UN Agenda on Sustaining Peace 230 UN Beijing Conference on Women, 1995 313 UNCCD see United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) UN Conference on Population and Development 1994 157 UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women 29, 42, 130, 161, 189, 190, 216, 267, 277, 287, 363, 374, 436 UNCTAD gender and trade toolbox 256 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 426 UN Department of Peace Operations (DPO) 242 underrepresented sex 313 UNDP see UN Development Programme (UNDP) UNFCCC see United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) UNFPA see United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) ‘unitary’ states 78 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) 276 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (‘Rio+20’) 161 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) 250 United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) 267 United Nations Development Fund 183 United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) 45, 277, 278 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) 152, 168, 287 United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) 274, 276, 288, 291 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 262, 264, 265, 267 United Nations Fund for Population Activities/ Population Fund (UNFPA) 157, 277

Index  471 United Nations Security Council 8, 130, 205, 210, 229 United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 106, 227, 375, 377, 379 United Nations (UN) flagship efforts 130 institutional mechanism 126 peacebuilding architecture 227 peacebuilding governance 232 peacebuilding interventions 228 ratification of 255 system 189 United Nations (UN) Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) see Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) United Nations (UN) Security Council 238 adoption of the WPS agenda 240 and feminist actors 238 approach to peace and security 244 formal meetings of 242 future of 246 in feminist peace and security governance 241 practice of deploying 244 status quo of 240 United States racial domination among women 26 Women’s Educational Equity Act of 1974 45 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 161, 190 universalisation of interests of white 115 universalism 28 UN Peacebuilding Commission 230 UN peacebuilding frameworks feminist critiques of 228 UN Peacebuilding Fund 232 UN peace operations 205 UNSCR see United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) UN Secretary-General 232 UN Sustainable Development Group (UNSDG) 289 UN Women 11, 130 Expert Group Meetings 290 framework for feminist governance 288 gender architecture 1945–2010 287 gender equality 291 gender mainstreaming 291 multi-gendered lens 291 US Council on Foreign Relations 211 US women’s movement

Jo Freeman’s study of 64 Uthman, Io 64 value authoritative allocation of 25 Vanuatu Family Protection Act 440, 441 VAW see violence against women (VAW) VAW laws see anti-violence against women (VAW) laws velvet triangle 66, 154 CSOs 335, 336, 337 EU-civil society relationships 336 EWL 338 feminist actors and transnational institutions 336 femocrats 336, 338 gender equality actors 338 gender equality alliances, EU governance 340 gender mainstreaming 337 public hearings 338 supranational alliances 338 Treaty of Amsterdam 337 venue shopping 82 vertical decision-making 118 Vickers, Jill 77 Victorian women’s health sector 115 Vigilare (Croatia) 366 violence 206, 227 against women in politics 165, 170, 171 violence against women (VAW) 3, 7, 9, 11, 54, 128, 134, 135, 203 appropriation 362 coordinated community intervention model 360 domestic violence 360 Duluth programme 360, 361 feminist advocacy 359 marital rape 360 opposition 365 politicisation 366, 367 protection 359 self-help movements 360 shelter movements 360 transnational advocacy 361 transnational governance 362 women’s rights groups 361 violences reproduction of 91 violent conflict 227 Vleuten, Anna van der 372 Voluntary Fund for Women, The 287 von der Leyen, Ursula 317, 320, 326, 339, 340 Wallström, Margot 203, 204, 209

472  Handbook of feminist governance Walsh, Catherine E. 95 WBS see Women’s Budget Statement (WBS) Weldon, S. Laurel 66, 128 wellbeing individual and collective 113 western domination 108 WGDD see Women, Gender and Development Directorate (WGDD) whiteness 89 Whitesell, Anne 65, 69 white western hegemony 106 WHO Constitution 1948 216, 217 WIDF see Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) Wildavsky, Aaron 320 Wolfensohn, James 277 womanism 89 women advisors 140 advocacy organisations 156 and leadership 189, 200 and state 52 attractive career for 168 barriers for 101 bodies of 27, 28 budget programme 139 bureaucracies 127 candidates 43, 168 category of 52 characteristics of 217 clothing and speech 27 collective action 27 compliance 28 descriptive representation 53, 81 discrimination against 42 diverse communities of 1 economic and political participation 205 economic insecurity 11 empowerment 161, 203 engagement in the labour force 127 equal access to resources 204 exclusion 166 experiences in society 181 facilitating access by 161 fertility 127 inclusion and empowerment 161 in Global South 104 in male-dominated governance structures 52 in national governance 105 in national parliaments 162 in politics 163, 166 in public life 190 international congress of 4 intra-group differences 181 issues unit in Turkey 133

labour force participation 102 leadership challenges 219 leadership skills 170 legislative capacities 163 legislative recruitment 6 legislators 152 lived experiences 28 mobilisation 134 movement 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11 movement organisations 154 movements 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45 nomination of 170 organisations as partners 231 organisations in the Pacific 119 parliamentary caucuses 151, 154 participation and leadership 176 policy agencies 4, 65, 80, 153 policy machinery 6, 139 political participation 151, 171, 189, 190 political representation 129 private dependency of 53 proportion in parliament 167 ‘remove barriers’ for 176 representation in parliament 231 reproductive roles 127 rights 2, 141, 176, 203 rights, aspects of 130 rights, status and identities 70 sections and party leaders 168 self-confidence 165 services and advocacy organisations 4 substantive representation of 157, 174 unconventional activism of 102 universal experience of 46 unpaid labour in child care 11 violence against 3, 7, 9, 11, 54, 128, 134, 135, 171 waived nomination fees for 168 with femicide and violence 28 Women2Win in the British Conservative Party 168 Women and Gender Equality (WAGE) (Canada) 426 Women Count programme (UN Women) 292 Women for Peace 278 women-friendly legislation 169 women-friendly welfare concept of 53 Women, Gender and Development Directorate (WGDD) (African Union) 375, 378, 379 Women in Global Health (WIGH) 220 Women in Parliament: Beyond Numbers 176 Women in Public Service Project (WPSP) 167 women legislators 156

Index  473 Women Living Under Muslim Law (WLUML) (MENA region) 29 Women MPs’ Network (Finland) 156 womenomics 389 ‘Women on Boards’ proposal 313 Women, Peace and Security (WPS) 143, 204, 229, 277, 375 agenda Security Council 243 and feminist movements 246 commitments 246 Focal Points Network in 2016 241 implementation in the Security Council 245 institutionalization 378 National Action Plans 102, 243, 245, 378, 379 NGO Working Group 240, 241, 242, 245 securitisation of 246 security governance, Africa 376 women rights activists 104 women’s bodily rights 54 Women’s Budget Statement (WBS) 139, 140 as internal bureaucratic exercise 140 initiative 140 see also gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) women’s caucus/es 155, 166, 169 and standing committees 156 case studies of 156 creation of 153 establishment and strengthening of 155 function of 156 outreach of 156 single-party 158 Ugandan 153 see also gender-focused parliamentary bodies (GFPBs) women’s economic empowerment (WEE) 291, 292 Women’s Electoral Lobby SWC membership 156 women’s empowerment economic 293, 294 gender mainstreaming 291 UN-SWAP 288 UN Women 286 WEE 291, 292 Women’s Information Service, the 315 Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) 275 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) 141, 274, 275, 276, 278, 279 women’s labour market participation 324, 325, 327, 389 women’s leadership 208, 209, 211 Women’s March 27 women’s movement 63, 64, 68, 69, 141

actors 69, 70 goals 69 mobilisation 65 policy activity 72 RNGS project’s conceptualisation of 69 women’s movement organisations 153 women’s movements 55 activists 336 EU 338 gender equality norms 335 progressive 341, 343 Women’s Participation in Peacebuilding 230 Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund (WPHF) 227, 230 WomenSpeak/ERA collective budget processes (Australia) 121 women’s policy agencies (WPAs) 63, 66, 68, 69, 71, 72 high scoring 410 medium scoring 410 transformation 412 women’s rights 238 women’s rights activists 118 women’s rights organizations 361, 365 Women Wetem Weta (Women’s Weather Watch) 440 Woodward, Alison 9, 154, 308, 336 ‘work–life balance’ issues 169 World Bank 228, 232, 233 World Health Assembly 216 World Health Organization (WHO) 8 advice on health emergency response 221 bureaucracy 218 description of 216 exclusion of feminist practices 220 Executive Board 218 feminist knowledge and 218 gender inclusive policies 220 gender strategy 219, 220 Health Emergencies Programme (HEP) 220 health emergency response programme 217, 220 history of 217 internal practices and health programmes 219 internal review 219 World Plan of Action in Mexico City in 1975 161 World Summit for Social Development 276 world-systems 275, 276, 278 World Trade Organization (WTO) 250, 252, 253 WPAs see women’s policy agencies (WPAs) WPS see Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda WTO see World Trade Organization (WTO)

474  Handbook of feminist governance Yemen Peace Talks 2019 245 Young Women’s Christian Associations (YWCAs) 115, 116, 118, 120, 121 young Pacific women as leaders in 118 young women’s leadership 119 YWCA Australia Board 115 corporate governance model of 115

YWCAs see Young Women’s Christian Associations (YWCAs) Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) 415 Zaremberg, Gisela 39 Zika virus 221 Zwingel, Susanne 2