Fitting gender into development institutions

This paper analyzes some of the more prominent strands of gender and development (GAD) discourse that have justified the need for policy attention to women on efficiency and poverty grounds. The analysis is set within the context of organizational politics, as well as the changing national and international policy environment of the past decade which has hastened the need for gender lobbies to forge strategic alliances with like-minded social forces. While admitting the analytical and methodological weaknesses that very often characterize the gender policy discourses, the paper draws attention to the political imperatives and institutional constraints within which these arguments have taken shape. A clearer recognition of these constraints and the fact that gender discourses are context-specific raises questions about the allegations of instrumentalism that are often levelled against them by institutional outsiders. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.