Global Strategies for Gender Equality: The United Nations Before and After Beijing

Mona Lena Krook and Jacqui True (Washington University in St. Louis and University of Auckland)

Paper presented at the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, San Francisco, CA, March 26-29, 2008.

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Abstract: What explains the simultaneous, global rise of gender quotas and gender mainstreaming? Are they distinct or complementary approaches in theory and in practice? We trace the common emergence of gender quotas and gender mainstreaming in global public policy, focusing on the role of the United Nations in their diffusion across member states. From the outset this international organization has viewed quotas and mainstreaming as complementary strategies for achieving gender equality. But gender quotas and gender mainstreaming have since diverged in their political trajectories, developing around distinct advocacy networks and forms of expertise. Despite their similar historical roots in the policy discourses of the UN, there are important practical and conceptual differences between the promotion of representative gender quotas and the mainstreaming of gender in public policy. We analyze three main differences between quotas and mainstreaming: 1) their different ontological focus on the subject of ‘women’ versus ‘gender’; 2) their different theoretical analysis of gendered power in political representation versus policy and bureaucratic structures; 3) their different praxis addressing descriptive versus substantive representation. Taken together, these theoretical differences – combined with distinct policy trajectories – have significant implications for feminist political theory and the strategies of global women’s movements.

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Introduction Efforts to advance women’s rights around the world have long had a global dimension. The first transnational feminist networks emerged as early as the mid-nineteenth century, with goals like gaining the right to vote for women, promoting peace, and securing legislation on women’s work outside the home (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Rupp 1997). At the same time, a variety of international organizations have identified gender equality as a central policy concern, many upon their founding (Adams and Kang 2007; Berkovitch 1999; Hoskyns 1996). A key actor in this regard has been the United Nations (UN), the international organization with the broadest global scope. Within the first year of its existence, the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) established the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), whose annual meetings play a core role in defining and elaborating UN policy on women and gender. In honor of the CSW’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1972, 1975 was declared International Women’s Year, which later led to the designation of 1976 to 1985 as the UN Decade for Women (Tinker and Jaquette 1987). As part of these activities, women inside and outside the UN lobbied to organize a World Conference on Women in Mexico in 1975, which was followed by the Second World Conference on Women in Copenhagen in 1980, the Third World Conference on Women in Nairobi in 1985, and the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. The main effects of these global gatherings have been the formation of a wide range of new transnational feminist networks (Alvarez 2000; Moghadam 2005), as well as an expansion in the policy areas identified by the UN and its various bodies as crucial to women’s social, economic, and political empowerment. The Platform for Action signed in Beijing focused on twelve ‘strategic objectives,’ including issues like poverty, education, and human rights (see United Nations 1995b). However, it also contained various references to what can be viewed as two new ‘meta-strategies’ for achieving equality between women and men. The first is the concept of “equal participation in decision-making,” which is described in the Platform for Action as “a leverage function without which it is highly unlikely that a real integration of the equality dimension in government policy-making is feasible. [It] is not only a demand for simple justice or democracy but can also be seen as a necessary condition for women’s interests to be taken into account” (United Nations 1995b, 109). The second is the notion of “gender mainstreaming,” which is defined as applying “a gender perspective in all policies and programmes so that, before decisions are taken, an analysis is made of the effects on women and men, respectively” (United Nations 1995b, 116). Viewed in conjunction with one another, these strategies suggest that gender equality cannot be achieved without (1) the inclusion of women as policy-makers and (2) the consideration of the gendered implications of all public policies. Although versions of these meta-strategies appeared in earlier UN documents, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women, they took their current form first only in Beijing. The policy responses of member-states were immediate and far-reaching. Prior to the 1990s, about 20 countries had witnessed the adoption of quotas regulating the selection of female candidates to political office. Since then, however, more than 80 countries have passed – and even more have debated – policies to improve the number of women elected (Krook 2006, 312-313). Most of these measures have been adopted voluntarily by

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individual political parties, but a growing share entail constitutional and legal reforms requiring that all parties recruit more women. In most cases, the proportion is set at 30%, mirroring the target endorsed by ECOSOC in 1990 and included in the Beijing Platform for Action and many later UN documents (Krook 2009; United Nations 1995b, 109). Similar patterns are evident in the case of state bureaucracies for women. Before the 1990s, about 40 countries had established state-level agencies to address women’s issues in public policy. In the following years, however, similar structures were set up in 90 more countries (True and Mintrom 2001, 32). At the same time, the remit of many existing agencies was expanded to include gender mainstreaming, replacing or supplementing their earlier focus on women’s issues and gender equality policy (Squires 2005; True 2003). In line with these shifts, many other regional and international organizations have taken similar steps to integrate quotas and mainstreaming into their policy priorities related to women and gender (Adams and Kang 2007; Krook 2004; True 2008a). Taken together, these two strategies appear to pose a radical challenge to ‘politics as usual’: one calls for a new set of policy-makers, while the other aims to revise existing practices of policy-making. The nature of these goals, as well as similarities in the timing, suggest that the UN – as well as many other actors – view them as two overlapping tracks for achieving women’s empowerment. However, to date most research on these strategies has tended to focus on one to the exclusion of the other (but see Squires 2007; Towns 2004; Hall and True 2008). Given clear points of intersection, what explains this divided attention? This paper considers this question in four parts. The first section explores the nature of quotas and mainstreaming as tactics for promoting gender equality and asks how the two came to be seen as partner strategies in Beijing. Searching for precedents, the second section traces the origins and evolution of both policies in the UN system, noting that despite different points of departure, the two strategies began to converge in scope and focus in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The third section then examines the current status of quotas and mainstreaming, finding that in the years since Beijing, the two strategies have developed largely around distinct advocacy networks and forms of expertise. Seeking to understand these separate origins and trajectories, the fourth section outlines three conceptual and practical differences between quotas and mainstreaming which, in a striking way, reflect central debates in the theory and practice of feminist politics. The paper thus concludes with a discussion of what these developments mean for theorizing and devising concrete strategies for the empowerment of women at both the global and national levels. Quotas and Mainstreaming: Partner Strategies for Gender Equality In the Beijing Platform for Action, equal participation in decision-making and gender mainstreaming are simultaneously recognized as individual strategic objectives and as overarching strategies for achieving gender equality. Strategic Objective G addresses “women in power and decision-making” and notes that “although women make up at least half of the electorate in almost all countries and have attained the right to vote and hold office in almost all States Members of the United Nations, women continue to be seriously underrepresented as candidates for public office” (paragraph 184). It explains this state of affairs by outlining various barriers to women’s full participation, including practices of discrimination, unequal power relations inside the family, and traditional patterns of socialization. It projects that the inclusion of women will result in new political priorities and distinct legislative proposals that would not only raise the gender-specific concerns of women but that would also provide new perspectives

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on mainstream political issues. To this end, the section recommends that governments commit themselves to establishing the goal of gender balance, including through the setting of specific targets to substantially increase the proportion of women, “if necessary through positive action” (paragraph 192, section a), and that political parties “consider developing initiatives that allow women to participate fully in all internal policy-making structures and appointive and electoral nominating processes” (paragraph 193, section b). Strategic Objective H focuses on “institutional mechanisms for the advancement of women,” by which it means the national machineries that have been established in many member states to “design, promote the implementation of, execute, monitor, evaluate, advocate and mobilize support for policies that promote the advancement of women” (paragraph 198). It observes that many of these agencies have lacked clear mandates and suffered from low and sometimes even declining commitments in terms of staff, training, and resources. For this reason, it calls on governments to create or strengthen existing national machineries “vested in the highest possible level of government” (paragraph 205, section a) with “clearly defined mandates and authority… [to] perform policy analysis, undertake advocacy, communication, coordination and monitoring of implementation” (paragraph 205, section b). The section also advocates a new policy-making approach that involves working to “promote a gender perspective in all legislation and policies” (paragraph 207, section d), aided by the generation and dissemination of gender-disaggregated statistics, in order to “eliminate obstacles to the exercise of women’s rights and eradicate all forms of discrimination against women” (paragraph 207, section c). The goal of Strategic Objective G is thus to increase women’s descriptive representation, or the proportion of women among policy-makers. In most countries, this target has been facilitated by the adoption of various types of quota policies that either reserve seats for women or require parties to change their candidate selection practices to recruit more women. In contrast, the aim of Strategic Objective H is to improve women’s substantive representation, or the integration of women’s interests in public policy. The particular approach advocated by the UN in this context is known as gender mainstreaming, which involves considering the gendered implications of all public policies with the goal of promoting gender equality. While distinct, these two objectives are linked in that they draw attention to both the form and content of the policy-making process, a connection that is explicitly recognized in the preface to the Platform for Action, which notes:

“It is essential to design, implement, and monitor, with the full participation of women, effective, efficient, and mutually-reinforcing gender-sensitive policies and programmes, including development policies and programmes at all levels that will foster the empowerment and advancement of women” (Protocol 19; emphasis added).

This passage suggests that quotas and mainstreaming, while elaborated as distinct policy approaches, were conceptualized within the broader framework of the Platform for Action as partner strategies for achieving gender equality. Crucially, the two are seen as overlapping and mutually reinforcing, but not fully reducible one to the other: equal participation is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for mainstreaming gender in public policy. Rather, both strategies must be pursued simultaneously in order to maximize opportunities for including women and gender in policy-making processes.

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Global Policy for Women: Origins and Evolution in the United Nations Policies to promote women’s status prior to Beijing can be divided into two broad categories: (1) efforts to secure and guarantee political rights for women and (2) attention to the role played by women and gender in economic development. However, what is meant by ‘political rights’ and ‘development’ has evolved over time, reflecting progress in these areas as well as the elaboration of new theoretical perspectives on what these goals should entail. Despite their distinct origins, however, policy initiatives in both of these areas began to converge in the late 1980s and early 1990s as they came to be articulated as two prongs in a more comprehensive strategy for promoting gender equality at the global level. Women’s Political Participation Concerns to promote women’s participation in politics have long been central to UN gender equality policy. However, the exact definition of ‘participation’ has evolved over time. Initially this concept referred exclusively to the rights of women to vote and run for political office, but in recent years it has grown into a stronger demand for the right for women to hold political office at roughly equal rates as men. The focus on basic political rights for women was first raised in some of the earliest meetings of the UN, because at the time of its founding in 1945, only slightly more than half of its 51 members allowed women equal voting rights or permitted them to hold public office (United Nations 1995a, 8). At the insistence of female delegates, the Charter of the United Nations included the definition and protection of the “equal rights of men and women” among the goals of the organization (United Nations 1995a, 10). The following year, the General Assembly unanimously adopted Resolution 56 (1) recommending that all member states adopt measures granting women the same political rights as men (A/RES/56(1), 11 December 1946). Over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, the attainment of women’s political rights dominated the attention of those actors inside the UN charged with developing policy on women. Beginning in 1947, the Secretariat conducted yearly surveys on women’s political rights around the world, and from 1949, the CSW – inspired by the approval of the Inter-American Convention on the Granting of Political Rights to Women in 1948 – began to press for a similar convention within the UN. Although many member-states opposed parts of the draft, especially the article on equal rights to hold public office, the Convention on the Political Rights of Women was adopted by the General Assembly in 1952, with 46 votes for, 0 against, and 11 abstentions. Yet, similar to what would occur with CEDAW many years later (cf. Mayer 1995), more than 40 states parties said they would reserve the right not to abide by some provisions (United Nations 1995a, 18). The earliest international meetings convened to support the work of the CSW were therefore a series of seminars on the ‘participation of women in public life’ held in Bangkok in 1957, Bogotá in 1959, Addis Ababa in 1960, and Ulan Bator in 1965, which were followed by two seminars on the ‘civil and political education of women’ held in Helsinki in 1967 and Accra in 1968.1

1 Seminar on the Civil Responsibilities and Increased Participation of Women in Public Life, Bangkok, 5-16 August 1957; ST/TAA/HR/1; Seminar on Participation of Women in Public Life, Bogotá, 18-29 May 1959, ST/TAO/HR/5; Seminar on Participation of Women in Public Life, Addis Ababa, 12-23 December 1960, ST/TAO/HR/11; Seminar on the Participation of Women in Public Life, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, 3-17 August 1965, ST/TAO/HR/24; Seminar

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By the 1970s, women in most countries had achieved equal political rights, but women continued to occupy only a very small minority of all elected positions worldwide. The need to expand the definition of women’s political participation was recognized by delegates to the first UN World Conference on Women held in Mexico City in 1975, who noted in the World Plan of Action:

“Despite the fact that, numerically, women constitute half the population of the world, in the vast majority of countries only a small percentage of them are in positions of leadership in the various branches of government. Consequently, women are not involved in decision-making and their views and needs are often overlooked in planning for development” (paragraph 57).

They therefore called on governments to “establish goals, strategies and timetables for increasing with the decade 1975-1985 the number of women in elective and appointive public offices and public functions at all levels” (paragraph 62). Similar language was included in CEDAW, adopted in 1979 by the UN General Assembly. Article 7 states that women should be ensured not only the right “to vote in all elections and public referenda and to be eligible for election to all publicly elected bodies” (Article 7, section a) but also the right “to participate in the formulation of government policy and… hold public office and perform all public functions at all levels of government” (Article 7, section b). By the end of the UN Decade for Women, a more elaborate section on “equality in political participation and decision-making” was included in the Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies. Both governments and political parties were urged to “intensify efforts to stimulate and ensure equality of participation for women in all national and local legislative bodies” (paragraph 86). The document asked governments to consider securing women’s participation “through legislative and administrative measures” (paragraph 88) and called on parties to “institute measures to activate women’s constitutional and legal guarantees of the right to be elected and appointed by selecting candidates” (paragraph 91). Indeed, linking women’s full participation to the goals of peace and human rights, the Forward-looking Strategies go so far as to conclude that “women’s equal role in decision-making with respect to peace and related issues should be seen as one of their basic human rights and as such should be enhanced and encouraged at the national, regional and international levels” (paragraph 253). In this context, the Beijing Platform for Action can be viewed as further deepening what is understood as women’s full and equal political participation. Its major innovations include a specific target of 30% women (paragraphs 184 and 189), stronger language regarding the need for positive action (paragraphs 189, 192, and 194), attention to the possible role of different types of electoral systems in promoting or hindering the increased election of women (paragraph 192), and consideration of the need for political parties to promote women on candidate lists as well as in relation to internal party structures (paragraph 193). To achieve these goals, the declaration called for a wide range of actors to encourage women’s active participation in all types of social, economic, and political decision-making, not only through the strategic use of positive action, but also through contributions to “public debate on the new roles of men and women in society on Civic and Political Education of Women, Helsinki, 1-14 August 1967, ST/TAO/HR/28; Seminar on Civic and Political Education of Women, Accra, Ghana, 19 November-2 December 1968, ST/TAO/HR/37.

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and in the family” (paragraph 194 , section e) and the development of “career advancement programmes for women of all ages that include career planning, tracking, mentoring, coaching, training and retraining” (paragraph 194, section g). Women, Gender and Development Policy Gender mainstreaming first emerged as a concept in the 1980s from challenges to the Women in Development (WID) paradigm by a new Gender and Development paradigm (GAD). The WID paradigm was developed and institutionalized in the 1970s during the UN Decade for Women and subsequent UN world conferences on women. WID advocates argued that demands for social justice and equity for women would be more effective if they were “strategically linked to mainstream development concerns” (Razavi and Miller 1995a: 6; Palmer 1992). They combined arguments for equity and economic efficiency but privileged the latter. WID advocates were influenced by the liberal feminist focus on women’s productive labor and the need to integrate women into the public sphere and formal economy of paid work. The focus was on how economic development could advance women as a group rather than how development policies should be altered to advance gender equality. However, the main policy documents of the period, such as the country reports of the International Labor Organization (ILO), did not consider the role or impact of women’s productive labor on mainstream development projects (Razavi and Miller 1995: 8). Instead donor support was given for small-scale income-generating women-only projects. These projects often reinforced women’s economic marginalization and relegated them to secondary roles. Critics argued that the WID approach focused on what development could get from women rather than on women’s needs (Goetz 1995; see also Moser 1993). However, the WID approach did bring analysis of women’s situation into the realm of macro-economic and international policy making (1995:18). The GAD paradigm developed as a result of the critical analysis of WID practice by international feminist development practitioners, scholars and Southern feminist activists. It addressed the impact of gender relations between women and men on development policies thus superseding WID’s focus on integrating women into development policies and projects (often as a special group/specific category for targeted development assistance). Consistent with socialist feminist theories of women’s subordination, GAD advocates argued that no amount of formal, public power would help to overcome a gender imbalance of power in the home. They sought “to develop a theory of gender which was integrated into and informed by gender analysis of the world economy” and that took into account women's unpaid reproductive labor (Razavi and Miller 1995a: 15). By contrast with the WID approach that stressed the efficiency gains to be had from utilizing women’s labor for economic development, GAD analysis was explicitly political, focusing on gender power relations and bottom-up development involving women’s NGOs and participatory planning. As Razavi and Miller state, “the policy implications of social relations analysis...involve the political project of women’s self-empowerment" (1995a:32; also Kabeer 1992). The shift in thinking brought about by the GAD paradigm was partially reflected in the Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies at the 1985 Third United Nations World Conference on

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Women. Paragraph 114 states that “effective participation of women in development should be integrated in the formulation and implementation of mainstream programs and projects.” This paragraph emphasizes that women should be at the centre of development policymaking and programs, and by implication, that development policy should be more gender-sensitive and responsive. Gender mainstreaming as a concept is in effect a later development – and more institutionally palatable version – of the GAD paradigm. Similar to GAD it marks a shift from the belief that development could advance women’s rights to a new consensus that development was not possible without the full participation of women. Mainstreaming first emerged as a policy approach in international organizations and governments in the mid-1980s. It was intended to rectify the slow pace of progress in women’s status, and the continued marginalization of women-specific projects, which was a feature of the WID approach. Mainstreaming, institutionalization and integration are used interchangeably to mean the same thing in this period (Goetz 1995; Moser 1993). The earliest studies of mainstreaming are of gender integration in international development organizations.2 By the 1990s, the UNDP, World Bank and ILO had all adopted the same kind of gender mainstreaming strategies and tools through a kind of snowball effect with the UN women’s conferences being the major mechanism of diffusion (Razavi and Miller 1995b; also Geisler, Keller and Norma 1999). Razavi and Miller (1995b: 3) define gender mainstreaming as ensuring “that gender considerations are routinely included in the way an organisation operates.” Change in processes is viewed a critical step towards “concrete change in the activities of an organization - i.e., its projects, programmes and policies - and, ultimately, to seeing improvements in the situation of the subjects of policy intervention.” However, many international organizations and development agencies adopted gender mainstreaming or the term ‘gender’ without changing their previous WID focus. Razavi and Miller (1995a) note “considerable confusion over the meaning of gender and the policy implications of the discursive shift from ‘women’ to ‘gender’ among states and donor agencies.” Gender is used in various ways by different policymaking organizations depending on their institutional mandates. In their study for the Beijing Prepcoms, Razavi and Miller argue that an integrationist approach to gender mainstreaming was adopted by UNDP, the World Bank and the ILO (see Jahan 1994). This approach involved two main components: (1) integrating gender issues into all of the activities funded and/or executed by an organization, and (2) diffusing responsibility for gender mainstreaming beyond the WID/gender units – through mechanisms such as gender training and guidelines – making it a routine concern of every bureaucratic unit (1995b: ii). Gender mainstreaming in the United Nations signals the spread of the GAD paradigm and gender analysis beyond development discourse and Southern, developing countries to all policy areas and countries. The global diffusion of mainstreaming policies reflects a growing consensus about the limitations of women’s agencies and women’s equality viewed in isolation from women’s relationship to men. The Beijing Platform for Action consolidates the major shift from WID to GAD to gender mainstreaming. Acknowledging the potential for marginalization in all initiatives

2 Jahan (1994) analysed gender integration strategies in government, NGO development agencies and donor countries; Kardam (1991) examined international development organisations; and Andersen ed. (1993) investigated UNIFEM’s development work.

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that seek to redress gender inequality and injustice, the PFA states that: “Women/gender units are important for effective mainstreaming, but strategies must be further developed to prevent inadvertent marginalization as opposed to mainstreaming of the gender dimension throughout all operations” (paragraph 308). Gender Advocacy and Expertise: Contemporary Trends in the United Nations By the mid-1990s, equal participation decision-making and gender mainstreaming were clearly identified with the broader UN framework as partner strategies for gender equality. In the years since Beijing, however, the two strategies have diverged as they have been further theorized and put into practice within the UN system. The promotion of quotas for women in politics has led to calls for recognizing greater diversity within the category ‘women,’ as well as efforts inside the UN to identify particular arenas of ‘decision-making’ over which the organization can exert its influence. The elaboration of mainstreaming has entailed relying more and more on professional ‘gender experts,’ at the same time that patterns of implementation have required further analysis to identify why this approach has not achieved anticipated changes in policy-making processes. Women in Decision-Making In the years following the Beijing conference, equal participation has continued to be a core focus of UN gender equality policy. At its 23rd Special Session in June 2000, the UN General Assembly convened to review and appraise progress on the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (meetings otherwise known as ‘Beijing +5’). In Resolution S-23/3, it observed in relation to women and decision-making that “the actual participation of women at the highest levels of national and international decision-making has not significantly changed since the time of the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995” (paragraph 23). However, the General Assembly also noted that women in some countries had achieved a higher proportion of political positions, which it attributed to the introduction of “affirmative and positive action policies, including quota systems or voluntary agreements in some countries and measurable goals and targets… training programmes for women’s leadership, and…measures to reconcile family and work responsibilities of both women and men” (paragraph 22). The Resolution also brought in a new emphasis on the role of men, arguing that “policy-making processes require the partnership of women and men at all levels,” and thus that “men and boys should…be actively involved and encouraged in all efforts to achieve the goals of the Platform for Action and its implementation” (paragraph 58). In preparation for the 49th Session of the Committee on the Status of Women five years later (known also as ‘Beijing +10’), the Secretary-General presented a new report in late 2004 that assessed the changes made since 2000 and outlined a host of further actions and initiatives to be taken on the wide array of issues identified in Beijing. This document found that most countries reported some increase in women’s participation at various levels of decision-making but still “the most obvious trend [was] a continuing lack of equitable participation” (paragraph 327). In a significant advance over previous reports and declarations, it contained a much greater range of detail on the status of women in political office around the world, as well as on various measures taken in individual countries to improve the proportion of women. For example, it included more specific data on women’s representation in national parliaments (especially paragraphs 327-331),

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and for the first time, mentioned countries where women had achieved the office of president and prime minister (paragraph 329). It discussed a number of cases of quota adoption (paragraphs 336-343), but also described several non-quota-based strategies pursued around the world to promote women’s representation. These included public funding for political parties to promote women’s participation, promotion of women in internal party structures, leadership training for women (paragraphs 336 and 345), and awareness-raising among the public at large (paragraph 346), efforts spearheaded variously by parties, parliamentary committees, ad hoc coalitions, and research centers (paragraph 343). As these conversations have continued, however, UN policy has also reflected further on what is meant by ‘women’ and ‘decision-making’ in this context. In the years after Beijing, for example, a number of UN documents on gender equality included clauses recognizing diversity within the descriptive category of ‘women’ as a group. Attention to intersectionality is not entirely new. The Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies stated that governments should ensure that women, “including those from the most vulnerable, least privileged and most oppressed groups, may participate actively in all aspects of the formulation, monitoring, review and appraisal of national and local policies, issues and activities” (paragraph 92). However, discussions since Beijing have focused on identifying what groups of women might be considered multiply excluded. The Platform for Action itself urged a wide range of actors to “assist women and girls, particularly those with special needs, women with disabilities and women belonging to racial and ethnic minorities to strengthen their self-esteem and to encourage them to take decision-making positions” (paragraph 197). It also emphasized the need to “encourage greater involvement of indigenous women in decision-making at all levels” (paragraph 192). The discussions at Beijing +5 again singled out the barriers to indigenous women’s participation (paragraph 66, section b) but also pointed to the need to enable “older women to be actively engaged…to assume a variety of roles in communities, public life and decision-making (paragraph 83, section c). The organization’s gender equality policy also focused increasingly on two particular aspects of decision-making that the UN was particularly well-placed to influence. The first related to women in post-conflict countries. In October 2000, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1325, in which it urged member states to “ensure increased representation of women at all decision-making levels…for the prevention, management, and resolution of conflict” (paragraph 1), as well as the Secretary-General to “appoint more women as special representatives and envoys” (paragraph 3) and “expand the role and contribution of women in United Nations field-based operations, and especially among military observers, civilian police, human rights and humanitarian personnel” (paragraph 4). The CSW, for its part, made special mention of the need to promote women in decision-making in Afghanistan at its annual sessions in 2002, 2003, and 2004. During the Beijing +10 discussions at the CSW meetings in 2005, delegates extended the reach of this policy even further by passing Resolution 49/5 calling on governments to “involve women in all levels of decision-making in disaster situations, including in community-level welfare centres for displaced persons,” inspired by the December 2004 tsunami in South Asia. The second addressed gender balance within the UN itself. Although the UN Charter stated in Article 8 that there be no restrictions on the eligibility of men and women to participate in the organization, women continued to be under-represented to a significant degree throughout the UN. In the late 1960s, women in the Secretariat organized a support network to focus on

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improving the status of women at the UN (United Nations 1995a, 25). The Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies also included a clause stating that “more women should be appointed as diplomats and to decision-making posts within the United Nations system, including posts in fields relating to peace and development activities” (paragraph 79). However, it was not until the Beijing Platform for Action that these calls were linked to general concerns to promote women in decision-making. The Platform asked governments to “aim at gender balance in the lists of national candidates nominated for election or appointment to United Nations bodies, specialized agencies and other autonomous organizations of the United Nations system, particularly for posts at the senior level” (paragraph 192, section j). It urged the UN to “implement existing and adopt new employment policies and measures in order to achieve overall gender equality,” “develop mechanisms to nominate women candidates for appointment to senior posts in the United Nations,” and “collect and disseminate quantitative and qualitative data on women and men in decision-making and…monitor progress towards achieving the Secretary-General’s target of having women hold 50 per cent of managerial and decision-making positions by the year 2000” (paragraph 195). In 2001, the General Assembly passed Resolution 56/126 asking for up-to-date statistics on the number and percentage of women in all organizational units and at all levels in UN system, which it followed with Resolution 57/180 in 2002 urging for stronger efforts to achieve gender balance within the UN system. The Secretary-General submitted reports to the annual meetings of the CSW in 2002 and 2003 on progress achieving this goal, which led the CSW in 2003 to issue a new call for a 50-50 gender distribution by 2015. Gender Mainstreaming In the period leading up to and immediately after Beijing there was a tendency for gender mainstreaming to be seen by the United Nations as an umbrella approach to gender equality that incorporated women’s participation and stressed economic development. In the new millennium, gender mainstreaming has become a highly-specialized policy approach with the development of advanced techniques and methodologies to implement it. In theory, mainstreaming was intended to be an agenda-setting approach that transformed development and economic policymaking among other areas by bringing gender perspectives to centre-stage (Jahan 1994). However, in practice, as was the concern with Women in Development (WID) policy, mainstreaming has evolved into an integrationist approach that includes gender concerns in mainstream policymaking without disturbing existing agendas. Gender-equal policies, for instance, have been increasingly promoted as a means for governments to achieve their growth and competitiveness goals. This integrationist conception of gender mainstreaming is reflected in the modifications to UN human rights frameworks to take account of gender, and in the practices of UN peacebuilding and peacekeeping operations since the late 1990s. Following the Beijing conference, gender mainstreaming approaches and methodologies for designing, implementing, evaluating and measuring policies were rapidly diffused and replicated across UN agencies and member states. Ten per cent of United Nations Development Program (UNDP) resources were allocated to sub-programs for developing gender mainstreaming methodologies and tools and supporting “partnerships for the empowerment of women and their inclusion in decision-making processes” as a follow-up to the Beijing conference. In an important communication from its Executive Director James Speth, the UNDP explicitly acknowledged that mainstreaming and gender-balanced decision-making were twin strategies in

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the Platform for Action (Speth 1996). Similarly, the UN General Assembly passed a Resolution 51/69 on gender mainstreaming in 1996 that called on member states to implement the Platform for Action “by promoting an active and visible policy of mainstreaming a gender perspective at all levels, including in the design, monitoring and evaluation of all policies.” Item 21 of this resolution links women's empowerment to “integrating a gender perspective.” Following these commitments in 1997 the ECOSOC produced a definition of gender mainstreaming that endures today as the most influential understanding of the term in the UN. According to this definition, gender mainstreaming is:

“[T]he process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes, in all areas and at all levels. It is a strategy for making women’s as well as men’s concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic, and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal is to achieve gender equality.”

Despite the commitment to gender equality, the ECOSOC definition of mainstreaming does not define the meaning of gender equality. However, it considers gender-balanced decision-making as one of five principles underscoring gender mainstreaming, and “gender balance” within the United Nations is stated as a central goal of gender mainstreaming, and in effect, a proxy for gender equality. Gender mainstreaming has become particularly relevant in two areas of recent UN policy; human rights and security. In the first area, human rights, mainstreaming has provided a methodology in the UN Treaty bodies not explicitly focused on women's rights for responding to the challenges of the “women's rights are human rights” global movement.3 The 1998 declaration, Integrating the Human Rights of Women Throughout the United Nations’ System, called on UN Treaty bodies to “regularly and systematically take a gender perspective into account in the implementation of their mandates” and to integrate a gender perspective, including “gender-sensitive guidelines” in reviewing state reports, preparing general comments and issuing recommendations and concluding observations. Such a mandate requires Treaty committees to collect and use sex-disaggregated data in their judgments, to explicitly consider both gender-specific (read: women) violations of human rights and violations of the human rights of women as part of their investigations into racial discrimination, torture, social, economic and cultural rights, and the rights of children and migrant workers. Gender mainstreaming has been integrated within the UN human rights system but it has not transformed this system. The limitations of the anti-discrimination framework for the realization of women’s human rights have not been overcome nor has an intersectional approach to rights been promoted that highlights groups subject to multiple intersecting forms of oppression. Ladan Rahmani (2005) argues that the organizational attitudes in each treaty body committee, including the gender imbalance on the committees and their lack of conceptual understanding of gender

3 There are seven UN Treaty Bodies. With the exception of CEDAW, six committees are not explicitly focused on discrimination against women. They are the Committees on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Against Torture, on the Rights of the Child, and the Rights of Migrant Workers.

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have compounded the difficulties in implementing mainstreaming. As a result, gender equality as failed to move beyond its prescriptive norm status in UN human rights. Gender mainstreaming has made inroads in a second area, UN security policy, and specifically within UN peacekeeping and peacebuilding missions due to the mandate of Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security. The October 2000 Resolution 1325 resembles 1980s UN women and development discourses that treat women as a special category that has yet to be included. For instance, Resolution 1325 discusses “women's participation in peace negotiations and decision-making processes” and the role of women in rebuilding societies and in the post-conflict phase. But gender mainstreaming is proposed as the solution to redressing women’s marginalization in negotiating and implementing peace and security in different local, national and international contexts. The UN Security Council recognizes the importance of a gender perspective on international peace and security and the need for gender expertise to inform the planning of peace and security operations. In 1325 it calls for the integration of gender across United Nations security policy and operations, including the need for better representation and participation of women, gender analysis and sex-disaggregated data and research on peacekeeping and peacebuilding operations. An expanding transnational advocacy network has grown up around Resolution 1325 since 2000 including gender experts in the United Nations Inter-agency Taskforce on Women, Peace and Security, a member-state group, Friends of 1325, and women’s international NGOs. They have relied on gender mainstreaming as the mechanism for implementing 1325 (Cohn 2008). Gender advocates have conducted “research at the grassroots level to build up knowledge in the area of gender and peacebuilding and to provide multilateral and bilateral donors with proven strategies to improve their capacities in this field.”4 In the Congo, Kosovo, and East Timor, women’s organizations have worked very closely with the UN Gender Advisor and Gender Affairs Units within the peacebuilding missions to integrate gender perspectives and mainstream the concerns of local women into all levels of the transitional and new governments. Despite its promotion in Beijing as a global strategy for reaching gender equality, gender mainstreaming is more at home today in new states and developing countries where government administrations are overhauled, radically reformed or established for the first time and where there is the power of an international organization such as the UN behind it. Complements and Tensions: Concepts and Practices of Quotas and Mainstreaming These two sets of policy histories indicate that while quotas and mainstreaming were viewed as partner strategies in Beijing, they originated in distinct policy proposals and have subsequently developed along separate, although sometimes intersecting, tracks within the UN system. These patterns appear puzzling at first glance, given how closely these strategies were aligned in some of the language in the Platform for Action. Situating them in relation to various debates in feminist theory and practice, however, offers considerable leverage for understanding some of the tensions and ambiguities informing these developments. These stem from differences related to focusing on (1) ‘women’ versus ‘gender’ as the main analytic category, (2) electoral versus

4 While they have interpreted and operationalised gender in peace and security policies differently, according to Barnes (2006), all major donors have dedicated gender expertise or policies on peacekeeping/peacebuilding (for example, CIDA, USAID, WB, UNDP, UNCR).

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bureaucratic politics as the optimal location for feminist intervention, and (3) descriptive versus substantive representation as the best means for empowering women as a group. Although popular usage often conflates ‘women’ and ‘gender,’ feminist research clearly draws a line between these two terms: the first refers to biological categories of ‘sex,’ while the second alludes to social constructions of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine.’ In relation to this distinction, strategies to promote equal participation in decision-making focus primarily on women, despite a tendency to label these measures ‘gender quotas.’ This emphasis stems from the simple fact that women form a small minority of all elected representatives worldwide: as such, the goal of equal participation requires focusing exclusively on increasing the number of women in these political bodies. In contrast, mainstreaming strategies place greater weight on gender as an analytical category, arguing that it is crucial to consider the gendered implications of all public policies, not simply those that have traditionally been framed as ‘women’s issues.’ All the same, both strategies implicitly involve references to the other category. While quota policies are aimed at increasing the number of women, they necessarily entail reducing the number – or at least the proportion – of men currently sitting in elected political assemblies around the world, and thus diminishing the association between masculinity and politics. Similarly, mainstreaming has traditionally been conceptualized as a gendered approach to policy-making, but it has tended in practice to involve among other things bringing mainly women into new gender specialist positions, including in such non-traditional policy areas as security and economic policy. These variations in emphasis connect with vivid feminist debates about the value of engaging with existing political institutions, which are not only dominated by men but also by masculine norms and priorities. As political strategies, quotas and mainstreaming share a similar orientation in that they reflect a belief in the possibility to transform these institutions from within, whether through a critical mass of female policy-makers or the routinization of gendered policy analysis. They diverge, however, with regard to which institutions they identify as the most promising and effective bases for articulating new policy visions (cf. Weldon 2002). Quotas focus squarely on promoting women in elected – and to a lesser extent, appointed – political positions. While these strategies are sometimes defended exclusively on the basis of fairness and equality, they are also frequently justified on the grounds of interests and resources, with the idea that the inclusion of women will bring new values into politics that will improve the prospects for democracy overall (cf. Phillips 1995). Mainstreaming, in comparison, is a strategy aimed mainly at transforming bureaucratic politics through interventions by gender experts and activists within the structures of the state. Differences in these arenas of policy-making have led to the development of two largely separate scholarly literatures, one focused on women’s legislative behavior and the other on ‘state feminism’ (Celis et al 2008). Yet, some feminist research has theorized the existence of a ‘triangle of empowerment’ (Vargas and Wieringa 1998), which requires fostering collaboration among women in parliament, the state, and civil society in order to elaborate gendered policies beneficial to women as a group. This perspective recognizes the need for mutual support and input into the policy-making process to ensure that the policies formulated and approved do in fact take the diversity of women and their needs and goals into account. These concerns intersect with questions about the relationship between efforts to promote women’s descriptive versus substantive representation. As discussed above, quotas are viewed predominantly as measures to improve the numbers of women in political decision-making. In

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contrast, mainstreaming is seen primarily as a strategy for incorporating attention to gender in the course of the policy-making process. In this sense, they entail distinct praxis: one is focused on the inputs while the other is focused on the outputs of public policy. However, this distinction is less clear in practice than it is in theory. A closer look at arguments for quotas, for example, reveals that the descriptive representation of women is justified primarily because it is believed to enhance their substantive representation. Yet, on their own, numbers say very little about how motivated or influential female politicians may be in bringing women’s concerns – or a gender-sensitive perspective – to bear on legislative outcomes. Along similar lines, the main impetus for gender mainstreaming tends to come from local women’s movements and transnational feminist networks. Further, the personnel employed in government mainstreaming agencies tend to be overwhelmingly female, and indeed, are often expected to be. These patterns suggest that simply equating these strategies with either descriptive or substantive goals is insufficient, even as these two notions of representation remain distinguishable from one another in theory and typically in practice. Conclusions and Implications: Feminism and Policies for Gender Equality Quotas and mainstreaming came into focus at the global level in the mid-1990s as partner strategies for achieving gender equality. Yet, they originated in distinct policy realms within the UN system and have since diverged in their political trajectories, developing around distinct advocacy networks and forms of expertise. These patterns can be explained with reference to three conceptual and practical differences between quotas and mainstreaming, which offer important leverage for understanding some of the tensions and ambiguities informing these developments. These stem from differences related to focusing on (1) their distinct ontological focus on ‘women’ versus ‘gender,’ (2) their different theoretical analysis of gendered power in political representation versus policy and bureaucratic structures, and (3) their distinct praxis regarding the need to focus on the descriptive versus the substantive representation of women. These findings have important implications for feminist political theory and the strategies of global women’s movements. First, despite the tendency to discuss two distinct notions of representation, both quotas and mainstreaming effectively link the descriptive and the substantive representation of women. Most accounts of mainstreaming assume that women are needed to mainstream gender perspectives in policy and that the presence of women is itself a good indicator of the implementation of gender mainstreaming. Likewise advocates of gender quotas assume that there is a need to increase the number of women in power in order to promote women’s interests. Yet despite these theoretical assumptions, practical experience reveals that men can also be mainstreamers and represent women’s interests by advocating gender-sensitive policies. Indeed, attention to gender inequalities is often marginalized because it is associated solely with women representatives and/or women’s policy machinery. Quotas and mainstreaming are unlikely to be successfully implemented unless men champion them in political and policy institutions. The implication for feminist theory from the experience of United Nations initiatives is that while concepts of women’s descriptive and substantive representation often reinforce one another in practice, too closer association between the presence of women and gender equality outcomes may also serve to undermine one or the other goal.

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Other tensions shared by quotas and mainstreaming also have implications for feminist theory. The adoption of quota and mainstreaming strategies has often shifted women inside political and policy institutions, and left them without a strong women’s movement to advocate for women and keep gender-specific concerns and issues on the political agenda. Inside institutions women who once advocated for women as a group suddenly must accommodate existing institutional prerogatives in party and legislative systems or policy processes and frameworks. Despite the focus of quota and mainstreaming strategies on women as a collective constituency then, their implementation often produces individual rather than collective articulations of women’s interests. They may contribute to the weakening of women’s movements outside institutions and the lack of a dynamic women’s movement may make it more difficult for both unmobilized women and women policymakers to politically connect with other women as women. The irony that mainstreaming and quota strategies may have served to depoliticize gender equality goals and demobilize women’s movements suggests that there is a significant gap between their theoretical intentions and their practical effects. Various actors have exploited the weaknesses in both strategies to undermine their effectiveness. For instance, some policy actors have used mainstreaming as an argument to close down women-specific policy institutions, programmes and budget lines. By the same token, some women first elected to representative positions under a quota system have later denounced that system and their association with it. The fact that both quota and mainstreaming efforts often fall short of their transformative goals to redress gender imbalances and inequalities compels us to return to their original theoretical conceptualization. One possible reason that both strategies have failed to meet expectations is because they have commonly neglected to address the role of women’s voice and civil society in the politics of gender mainstreaming and gender-balanced decision-making. If so, a crucial implication of these findings for global women’s movements is precisely the need to politicize shortcomings between theory and practice. In some countries, quota adoption has occurred largely in the absence of wide-scale political mobilization by women, while in others women’s movements have been critically engaged in promoting quota policies and ensuring their effective implementation (Krook 2009). Similarly, the implementation of mainstreaming policies has been varied in practice, and in some cases, have served to undercut the radical potential of the mainstreaming approach. It is therefore crucial that mainstreaming be accountable to women’s movements by providing mechanisms for deliberative engagement (True 2008b). “Such deliberations may surface new and more consensual conceptualizations of gender equality more sensitive to the diversity among women and views of subordinate men” (Ackerly forthcoming). Two further lessons for women’s movements are (1) the need to build bridges between these two gender equality strategies, avoiding easy assumptions about overlaps and links, and (2) the need to promote connection between strategies and women ‘on the ground.’ In relation to the first, this study has shown that quotas and mainstreaming are not reducible one to the other. It is crucial to pursue both strategies simultaneously to avoid the perception that problems of inequality are ‘solved’ with a single policy solution. In relation to the second, the disengagement of civil society actors from these developments suggests a need to focus on fostering a ‘triangle of empowerment’ (cf. Vargas and Wieringa 1998) among groups of women in the state, in

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parliament, and in civil society. Together, these moves signal the potential to devise a more ‘holistic’ strategy for gender equality, informed by the input of a broad range of actors.

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