Re-politicising gender planning

Since the 1980s, the Gender Policy and Planning Programme at The Bartlett has been on a mission to further the research and theory for achieving gender parity.

Women working as stone breakers in the quarrying sector in Moyiba, an informal settlement in Freetown. Each of the images on this page formed part of a research project on 鈥楪ender and Informal Livelihoods鈥� conducted by the DPU and the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre (SLURC), funded by Comic Relief and the UK DFID.听*Credit: Julian Walker*

In the 1970s, as feminist movements gained traction across the world, the term 鈥榳omen in development鈥� entered the global policy lexicon, promoted in international development initiatives such as the first UN Decade for Women (1975鈥�85).

Starting from the mid-1980s, however, dissatisfaction with the marginalisation of women鈥檚 subordination as a concern, led to increasing calls for 鈥榞ender mainstreaming鈥� 鈥� addressing gender inequality through mainstream development interventions (such as housing, health or economic development programming) rather than through a small and under-resourced 鈥榳omen鈥檚 sector鈥�.

As part of this approach, colleagues at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU), Caroline Moser and Caren Levy, began developing the Moser / DPU Gender Planning Framework. This set out to broaden the analytical focus from 鈥榳omen鈥� to 鈥榞ender鈥�, to draw attention to the fact that examining women in isolation was not enough to achieve equality. If the status of females was to be improved, the focus should instead be on gender 鈥� that is, on the socially constructed roles of, and relationships between, women and men.

In addition, the framework sought to provide the analytical tools to disaggregate the different gender roles that women and men undertake, highlighting the different patterns of their involvement in production (for example, producing goods for sale), reproduction (looking after children or the home), community affairs (organising collectively in the community), and political participation, as well as their unequal access to and control over resources.

Practical measures

Residents collecting water from a community managed spring in Moyiba, Freetown. The management and use of water is governed by gender norms and clearly illustrates the gender division of labour.听*Credit: Julian Walker*

In the late 1990s, Levy, who is now Principal Investigator for the DPU鈥檚 Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality (KNOW) project, took the programme鈥檚 work forward by developing the 鈥榃eb of Institutionalisation鈥�. This is a conceptual tool that emerged from her experience in supporting work on gender planning principles in a number of development agencies, including the Swedish, Norwegian and British governments, Unicef and the United Nations Development Programme.

The Web responded to Levy鈥檚 experience that it was difficult to move from rhetoric to practice in gender mainstreaming, without analysing and addressing key sites of power and resistance to gender equality in mainstream development institutions and in civil society.

More recently, the GPPP has continued to work with a range of development agencies, government institutions and civil society organisations globally towards integrating its ideas into the wider policy landscape. This has been achieved by looking at how a gender perspective re-orients our understanding of other aspects of development, including urban planning and the environment, and also how to engage practically with the intersection of gender with other axes of inequality 鈥� along lines such as race, class or disability.

Re-emphasising radical roots

A member of the Sierra Leone Federation of the Urban Poor interviews a fish trader in the Freetown community of Portee-Rokupa.听*Credit: Julian Walker*

At the same time, the GPP鈥檚 work engages with wider concerns among advocates of gender equality and women鈥檚 rights that the gender mainstreaming 鈥榩roject鈥� has been co-opted. Critics argue that efforts to embed gender equality considerations into the mainstream policy agenda has led to powerful actors and organisations adopting the language of gender equality and making gestures in its direction, while sidestepping the implementation of the large-scale social and political change required for women to be truly emancipated.

In response, the GPPP aims to re-emphasise the fundamental radicalism of the original framework for gender planning, and the notion implicit in it that simply moving women into the mainstream is not enough without altering the context within which they operate. In other words, the solution to co-optation is not to drop the idea of gender planning, but to re-politicise it and confront the clusters of power that are preventing change.

As Levy听, the challenge is to construct a 鈥渄evelopment planning which incorporates gender justice along with justice for all identity groups within a wider 鈥榩roject鈥� for progressive and transformative social change鈥�.

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