Gender Expertise in International Governance: A Conceptual Introduction

One of the remarkable outcomes of feminist politics since the UN Decade for Women has been the development of specialized knowledge about gender relations and the packaging of this knowledge as expertise. Policies of gender mainstreaming in various organizations of international governance have generated demand for such expertise and for professionals able to deploy it. In the proposed paper we provide a conceptual introduction to the phenomena of gender experts and gender expertise with an eye towards mapping out new research agendas on feminist politics in international governance. The Paper starts with a discussion of the notions of gender expertise and gender experts. It goes on to make a series of propositions on how gender expertise and gender experts “work” in international governance developing questions such as: • How is the professional field of gender expertise organized? • What is the discursive structure of gender expertise in different issue areas and how does gender expertise gain authority? • How does gender expertise operate in transnational policy fields structured by intersecting power relations, including post-colonial relations? While largely conceptual, the paper draws on an extensive review of empirical research, including research the co-authors have conducted during the past four years in the context of a project of “Gender Experts and Gender Expertise” funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.