Through a series of case studies written by women in development organizations this book reflects on the progress of gender mainstreaming. It shows how feminists can build effective strategies to influence development organizations and attempts to foster greater understanding and forge more effective alliances for social change.

Since the early 1980s Ecuador has experienced a series of events unparalleled in its history. Its “free market” strategies exacerbated the debt crisis, and in response new forms of social movement organizing arose among the country’s poor, including women’s groups. Gendered Paradoxes focuses on women’s participation in the political and economic restructuring process of the past twenty-five years, showing how in their daily struggle for survival Ecuadorian women have both reinforced and embraced the neoliberal model yet also challenged its exclusionary nature. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork and employing an approach combining political economy and cultural politics, Amy Lind charts the growth of several strands of women’s activism and identifies how they have helped redefine, often in contradictory ways, the real and imagined boundaries of neoliberal development discourse and practice. In her analysis of this ambivalent and “unfinished” cultural project of modernity in the Andes, she examines state policies and their effects on women of various social sectors; women’s community development initiatives and responses to the debt crisis; and the roles played by feminist “issue networks” in reshaping national and international policy agendas in Ecuador and in developing a transnationally influenced, locally based feminist movement.

This text argues that development organizations must be recognized as structurally deeply gendered, and that strategies for women must aim at institutional transformation.

In the seven years since the first edition of this book, global attention has focused on some remarkable transitions to democracy on different continents. Unfortunately, those transitions have often failed to improve the situation of women, and democratic practices have not included women in government, homes, and workplaces. At the same time, non-governmental organizations have continued to expand a policy agenda with a concern for women, thanks to the Fourth World Congress on Women and a series of United Nations-affiliated meetings leading up to the one on population and development in Cairo in 1994 and, most important, the Beijing Conference in December 1995, attended by 50,000 people. Two new essays and a new conclusion reflect the upsurge of interest in women and development since 1990. An introductory essay by Sally Baden and Anne Marie Goetz focuses on the conflict over the term "gender" at the Beijing Conference and the continuing divisions between conservative women and feminists and also between representatives of the North and South.

This collection of essays by leading feminist thinkers from North and South constitutes a major new attempt to reposition feminism within development studies. Feminism's emphasis on social transformation makes it fundamental to development studies. Yet the relationship between the two disciplines has frequently been a troubled one. At present, the way in which many development institutions function often undermines feminist intent through bureaucratic structures and unequal power quotients. Moreover, the seeming intractability of inequalities and injustice in developing countries have presented feminists with some enormous challenges. Here, emphasizing the importance of a plurality of approaches, the authors argue for the importance of what 'feminisms' have to say to development. Confronting the enormous challenges for feminisms in development studies, this book provides real hope for dialogue and exchange between feminisms and development.

The authors draw upon their earlier research examining how feminists have negotiated identity and learning in international contexts or multisector environments. Feminism in Community focuses on feminist challenges to lead, learn, and participate in nonprofit organizations, as well as their efforts to enact feminist pedagogy through arts processes, Internet fora, and critical community engagement. The authors bring a focused energy to the topic of women and adult learning, integrating insights of pedagogy and theory-informed practice in the fields of social movement learning, transformative learning, and community development. The social determinants of health, spirituality, research partnerships, and policy engagement are among the contexts in which such learning occurs. In drawing attention to the identity and practice of the adult educator teaching and learning with women in the community, the authors respond to gender mainstreaming processes that have obscured women as a discernible category in many areas of practice.

Feminists in Development Organizations arises from a collaborative project between 2007 and 2012 in which a group of feminists working inside the head offices of multilateral organizations, government aid agencies and international non-governmental organizations came together to critically reflect on their work. The personal stories in this book show that these feminists are 'tempered radicals' positioned on the border of the development agencies that employ them. It is a place where they are neither fully one thing nor another: neither fully paid-up, pen-pushing bureaucrats, nor full-blown feminist activists on the barricades. Nevertheless, feminist bureaucrats see their work as urgent, essential and a necessary contribution to global efforts to achieve women's rights. This book reflects on the progress of gender mainstreaming. It shows how feminists can build effective strategies to influence development organizations to foster greater understanding and forge more effective alliances for social change. This book is aimed at staff of development organizations - who want their organizations to become an instrument in helping transforming the lives of women - and at students and researchers concerned with the politics of gender mainstreaming.