Creating Voice and Carving Space: Redefining Governance from a Gender Perspective

Good governance became the mantra in international development debates in the 1990s. The key approaches to bringing about good governance involved reforming the state and ‘improving’ public administration. Improving and strengthening democratic governance, while acknowledged as important by some international development agencies, was concentrated nevertheless on reforming the institutional design of the state through reforms of th electoral, judicial and legal systems and decentralization and devolution of government. But were these approaches sufficient to make governance participatory, accountable and responsive to citizens and respectful of rights? The action research on which this book is based undertaken in eight country contexts across two regions, Southern Africa and South Asia, by sixteen civil society organisations, looked at governance as political process, rather than solely as a series of technical interventions to improve state functioning. It investigated how women among marginalized groups could be enabled to stake their claim to participation in governance, and ho to create accountability of governance institutions to poor women’s interest and rights. The book provides insights into the changing role of civil society organisations representing women’s interest in creating ‘voice’ of the most marginalized women and strategies, methods and tools developed to reach poor women’s voices to governance institutions in order to ensure policy responsiveness and implementation.