Mainstreaming women in development? : a gender analysis of the United Nations Development Programme in South Africa.

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Gender Mainstreaming (GM) was popularised as an approach to advance gender equalityat the United Nations (UN) World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. Since thenit has been adopted by the UN and international development organisations as theapproach to integrate women and gender issues into development. The United NationsDevelopment Programme (UNDP), a major international development organisation,claims a strong policy commitment to GM. As such, it is an important organisation tostudy for its GM implementation to establish what lessons can be learnt from its practice.Because it is an international organisation, the study has implications for global GM aswell as for SA.This thesis examines mainstreaming women and gender in development in the UNDPCountry Office in South Africa (UNDP/SA). It explores the gap between GenderMainstreaming policy and practice, through discursive analysis of UNDP policydocuments and reports, as well as an analysis of qualitative interview data andparticipatory approaches. The study focuses on the organisational challenges facinginstitutions trying to mainstream gender, particularly in the South African context. It putsforward a proposal for improving GM by combining organisational development andfeminist theory. Through the proposal, which focuses on a broad transformation processwithin which to frame GM implementation, the thesis aims to contribute towardsadvancing gender equality through GM in South Africa and elsewhere.Development was initially gender-blind until the early 1970s. Since then, developmentorganisations have moved women and gender onto the development agenda throughvarious approaches. The major approaches have been Women in Development (WID),Gender and Development (GAD) and Empowerment. The current approach, GenderMainstreaming (GM), is about moving women and gender issues from the margin to thecentre of development organisations and their practice. While being an improvement onthe earlier approaches, GM still faces a number of challenges for successfulimplementation in development organisations such as the UNDP.This qualitative study interrogates the GM policy discourse of the UNDP/SA, and finds aserious gap between its policy discourse and practice. This gap is evident not only in theUNDP/SA, but also in one of its funded projects, the Capacity Building Project for theOffice on the Status of Women. GM fails to make an impact because of factors such aslack of training, absence of political will from senior managers in developmentorganisations (and in government), and lack of resources. It is also clear that GM cannotoccur in the absence of a broad organisational transformation process. To address thechallenges facing GM, I propose a model for implementation with a special focus on thedeep structure of organisations that exposes the masculinist roots of gender inequality.What is essential for this model to succeed is that GM implementation should be framedwithin a broader organisational transformation process, based on organisationaldevelopment and feminist theory.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University