Beyond Binaries: Strategies for a 21st-Century Gender Equality Agenda

Written ten years ago, Mukhopadhyay’s article, ‘Mainstreaming Gender or ‘Streaming’ Gender Away’, sits at a fascinating juncture in relation to feminist pathways for changing development institutions to advance cultures of equality. The debates about gender mainstreaming as a conceptual framework and as a strategy had significant resonance during the first ten years of the new century. Gender mainstreaming had been hailed as a strategy of choice at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing held in 1995. Less than a decade later a slew of reports and meetings — from the Norway-sponsored meeting Strategies for Gender Equality: Is Mainstreaming a Dead End? (Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2002) to the metaevaluations undertaken by Norway and others,1 — contributed to the growing chorus of voices proclaiming the questionable uptake, cost-benefit or results that most large development agencies had experienced with gender mainstreaming. The lack of accountability for implementing policies and strategies, the millions of dollars invested in watered-down gender training, the growing networks of gender specialists struggling with each other and their institutions for a shrinking pie was constantly interrogated by, what Prugl calls, an ‘international cadre of gender experts who play a key role in translating feminist knowledge into policy applications … [becoming] instruments in the government of gender’ (Prugl 2010).