Rationale

The history of knowledge production on gender and development and its dissemination in development institutions has had a long and chequered career. The 1995 Beijing conference was a turning point that placed gender equality high on the agenda of governmental and non-governmental development organizations. It fuelled the need to raise gender awareness in institutions, to develop practical skills to plan and implement programmes, and to engender policy-making processes. The Beijing conference and the work within development bureaucracies inevitably shaped the purpose and content of gender knowledge production and dissemination.

From its origins as a tool for raising awareness, developing gender analysis and challenging power structures, gender knowledge became the handmaiden of mainstreaming gender in intractable, unaccountable bureaucracies where concerns for gender equality jostled for attention with other priorities. A plethora of manuals, checklists and tools have been developed worldwide and especially in the context of large inter-governmental and multilateral bureaucracies to train people and to function as self-help guides. The contribution that gender methodologies could make to raising awareness about inequalities and building people's skills to plan better and more fairly was marginalized as a result.

South Asia has witnessed successive generations of women’s movements since decolonization in the late 1940s. Over the past 15 years, the gender and development community in South Asia has grown exponentially. While research and development institutions have committed themselves to incorporating a gender perspective in their work, not all gender-focused research and practice is transformatory and even understanding of gender varies widely. Increasingly absent is the development and transmission of critical knowledge on gender equality that builds understanding and commitment to change. South Asian feminists’ radical demands for justice and equality, demands that were shaped by struggle and by cutting-edge research, have inevitably been diluted and changed in the context of development practice.

The failure to put women’s empowerment on the agenda of research and practice has provided the impetus for this conference. Although the first advocates for gender and development started from a theoretical and practical base to empower women and change unequal gender relations, the subsequent strategies and knowledge production became much more conservative and tried to fit gender and development into a mainstream that did not change and did not support women’s emancipation.

 During the conference, different aspects of this issue will be discussed:

• the poor fit between feminist epistemologies of empowerment and the production, communication and dissemination of gender knowledge as it is now practised
• the different roles of gender researchers and advocates: despite their differing motivations, each has a key role to play in building and transmitting knowledge and ideas on gender, gender equality and empowerment
• capacity building on gender: what needs to be done differently to build capacity more broadly and bring new life to the empowerment agenda

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