Gendering Global Governance: A Feminist Institutionalist Perspective

This paper will argue that adopting a feminist institutionalist perspective can improve our understanding of global institutions and global governance and particularly the gender of governance. It will open up the ‘black box’ of formal and informal institutions; improve existing non gendered analyses of networks and informal governance; and complement existing feminist IPE analyses but not replace them. The paper is in three main sections. The first section provides a brief overview of existing feminist scholarship on global institutions and global governance highlighting the strengths and remaining gaps. It argues that we know quite a lot about the governance of gender, particularly in terms of policy outcomes and ideas/ narratives/ discourses but that we know less about the gender of governance, despite some of the very important recent strides. The second section outlines the elements of a feminist institutionalist approach that can help us with our analysis of both actors and institutions. The final section brings the two together and, as part of a new research agenda, begins to outline what a feminist institutionalist analysis of global governance might look like by focusing on two formal (the World Bank and the IMF) and two informal (the G8/20 and the Group of 30) institutions.