Gender And Decentralization

Using three case studies, the United Kingdom, Poland, and Pakistan, Rincker shows how decentralization reforms lead to women's empowerment create new institutional offices as power shifts from the national level to a meso-tier level, which is located between the national government and local municipalities. She indicates that three conditions, "the gender policy trifecta," need to be met to achieve this: legislative gender quotas, women's policy agencies, and gender-responsive budgeting.

GENDER & DECENTRALISATION Gender and Decentralization in Nigeria is a product of two years’ research sponsored by the Gender Unit of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada, as part of its Gender and Decentralization Program for sub-Saharan Africa. The overall objective of the program was to document and analyze specific state decentralization reforms that have worked to promote women’s rights, and/or reforms that have created barriers to the protection and realization of these rights. At the core of the Nigerian project were women’s representation and political effectiveness in local administration. The issues transcended the usual structural analysis of the political, administrative and fiscal changes associated with decentralization and a breakdown by gender. Given the centrality of equity and accountability issues in current good governance debates, a feminist perspective on voice and action was inserted into the traditional public administration perspective. Going beyond numbers, description of gender inequitable electioneering processes, poor accountability of the state, of political parties and the women’s constituency, the book also focusses on feminist political activism at the grassroots level. The authors also document the potential impact of re-politicizing civil society, and restructuring of gender ideologies to achieve self determination and increase women representation and political effectiveness.

Based on a large number of interviews with women politicians of many generations and women who have entered the three-tier Panchayati Raj institutions since the mid-1990s in Kerala, this book tries to initiate fresh debate on the impact of the large-scale induction of women into the institutions of local self-government in India. The State of Kerala has been hailed as a success story in accommodating gender concerns in local-level planning and political decentralisation; this conclusion has been based on relatively simple evaluative exercises that ask whether women of diverse backgrounds have gained entry into formal institutions of governance or not. This book seeks to place political decentralisation and its possibilities for women within the historical and contemporary contexts. Against the popular assumption that the liberal feminist promise made by the state will be delivered, say, once the noxious influence of male relatives is removed, the book points to the multiple social forces that shape possibilities and hindrances for women, and reshape gender divisions in the political field. The book thus pays attention to women in both local governance and politics. Secondly, it examines how women have utilised, extended, survived within or subverted these spaces. In the present context in which fifty per cent of the seats in the institutions of local self-government are being reserved for women, and there exists considerable skepticism about reservations for women in the Parliament, this book offers reflections on both local governance and ‘high’ politics. Published by Zubaan.

"This book is a product of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue's Decentralization Task Force, and was first conceived at a conference held at Columbia University in New York in 2009"--Page vii.

Since the mid-1980s, the presence of women in governance has become a major marker of successful democracy in global and national discourses on the democratization of society. A diverse set of nation-states have legislatively mandated gender quotas to ensure the presence of elected women representatives (EWRs) in various rungs of governance. Since 1993, the Indian state has legislated a massive program of democratization and decentralization. As a result, more than 1.5 million EWRs have taken office within the lower rungs of governance or the Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRI). This book is an ethnography of the Indian state and its policy of legislated entry of women into political life. It argues that political participation of women is necessary to change the political practices in society, to make institutions more gender, class and caste representative, and to empower individual women to negotiate both formal and informal institutions. Its locus is the everyday life contexts of EWRs in the southern Indian state of Karnataka who negotiate their own meanings of politics, state, society, empowerment and political subjectivity. Analysing three factors – structural boundaries, sociocultural divisions and conjunctural limitations imposed on the participation of EWRs by political parties – the book demonstrates that the social embeddedness of PRIs within everyday practices and social relations of identity and power severely constrain and shape the political participation and empowerment of EWRs. Providing a valuable insight into contemporary state and feminist praxis in India, this book will be of interest to scholars of grass-roots democracy, gender studies and Asian politics.