Missionaries and Mandarins: Feminist Engagement with Development Institutions

Abstract

This book examines the various strategies of engagement employed by women working to transform the bureaucratic structures of state organizations, multilateral institutions and NGOs to make them more gender-equitable. These strategies involve combining the task of pursuing transformative agendas from within bureaucracies - of being 'missionaries' - while adapting to the techniques and practices of the bureaucracy as a 'mandarin' would have to do. The contributors examine struggles not only at the discursive level, where women's needs are constructed and contested, but also at the institutional level of the rules and procedures of bureaucratic actors, and at the level of resource allocation. Studies from many different countries, including Vietnam, Australia, the United States and Morocco, illustrate both the variety of institutional strategies adopted by feminists in different political and cultural settings, and the highly diverse forms of political action by women which can be seen to constitute feminist politics. From their different perspectives the contributors acknowledge the gendered nature of bureaucracies but argue against the view that these institutions are monolithic and impermeable. This book has much to say to all those feminists working within bureaucracies - whether state or civil society institutions - with the aim of promoting women's concerns; it will also interest those who have chosen a strategy of 'disengagement'. In addition, the book makes a significant contribution to recent developments in the anthropological study of organizations.

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