Essays On Gender And Governance - United Nations Development ...

Locating Gender in the Governance Discourse
engendering of institutions (especially state institutions) should
be tested against the twin criteria of processes (participatory) and
outcomes (gender-equitable). Molyneux’s (1985) distinction
between strategic and practical gender interests 12 may also be
usefully employed here. The Indian experience of quotas for women
in panchayats, for instance, would suggest that these provisions
enable a larger number of women to participate in the deliberations
and decision-making processes of the institutions of local selfgovernment.
The policy outcomes could be assessed in terms of
the extent to which their practical gender interests are often
advanced, even if their strategic gender interests are usually not.
A regime of positive rights has been suggested as a possible
instrument of achieving these objectives. The challenge, before a
rights-based view of governance, is that of ensuring all three
generations of rights simultaneously : seeing them as
interdependent and equally important to effectively accomplish.
This would encompass not merely the formal structures of power
in the three realms of governance, but the informal structures of
power, and the family and household as well. A rights-based view
of governance also implies, most crucially, that we forsake the topdown
approach to governance which predisposes us to emphasise
the greater representation of women in the hierarchical structures
of the top institutions of governance. Contrary to this, we should
treat as instructive the presence - and indeed the preponderance -
of women at lower levels, in every arena of governance, to suggest
forms of governance that are more participatory. A rights-based
view of governance encourages this, as it endorses the making of
claims, rather than the passive receiving of quotas/welfare.
12
A useful discussion of such a differentiated view of women’s interests may be found in
Caroline O.N. Moser (1993).
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