The Tactical Challenges of Gender Mainstreaming

Following decades of concerted efforts to mainstream gender within international development, gender experts and activists now contend with an unforeseen tactical consequence of these efforts. Namely, some of the strategies that have proven most successful in advancing gender equality are poorly suited to being mainstreamed and championed by development agencies, policies, and programs. In this paper, I will draw on several gender practitioners’ research, as well as my own experiences as a gender consultant, to argue that trends in the mainstreaming of gender may actively impede several effective techniques for addressing gender inequalities. More specifically, I elaborate on the value and impact of two techniques to addressing gender inequalities: (1) the provision of core funding to women’s rights organizations over an extended period of time, and (2) employing action-learning methodologies that emphasize emergence and self-reflection. I establish why gender experts like Rao and Kelleher have advocated in favour of these approaches, and I consider the structural challenges that impede the use of such techniques within the development sector. In doing so, I argue that development agencies’ growing emphasis on quantifiable, results-based projects undermines a central tenet of the aforementioned techniques: namely, that gender expertise at the local level yields impact and is therefore deserving of recognition, resources, and exploration. I also elaborate on how funding for gender programming creates complex “trickle-down gender” structures in which local women’s rights organizations are generally subordinated to larger, international NGOs.