CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 1 Introduction Feminist bureaucrats: inside–outside perspectives
Rosalind Eyben and Laura Turquet
Drawing on direct experience, this book is about feminists working politically to promote their organizations' gender equality goals. The aim is that by sharing this experience, the book's contributors can help others in similar positions to debate and reflect on the challenges of their jobs, and that readers from within the wider international women's movement will gain insights to help them engage more strategically with their allies inside development organizations. From a theoretical perspective, the literature stresses the significance of supportive individuals positioned within the bureaucratic system. Thus the book's insider standpoint is its academic contribution – describing and analysing the political processes of everyday bureaucratic life in which feminists assert their agency and creativity.
This book is about feminists reflecting critically on their own experience as gender advisers in large development bureaucracies. The job of such specialists includes reviewing policies and strategies, awareness-raising and skill development, and identifying and introducing systems and incentives for planning and monitoring in support of gender equality (Derbyshire, 2012). Not everyone in these posts is feminist and there are also feminists doing other jobs but – except tangentially – this book is not about them. Its theme is the limits and possibilities for feminist gender specialists to make their organizations capable of promoting and supporting rights-based approaches for social transformation that liberate men as well as women from gendered norms. This book is about bureaucrats working politically to transform bureaucracies, 'so that they become a tool in transforming lives of women' (O'Neill and Eyben, 2013).
Feminists tend to see bureaucrats as preservers of the status quo. A feminist bureaucrat appears a contradiction in terms. Yet, as this chapter will argue, it is this very contradiction that offers them the chance of becoming change agents. The intellectual and emotional rejection of a bureaucracy's hierarchical and controlling character can alienate any feminist employee, but for feminists employed as gender specialists this feeling of not really belonging may be exacerbated by an awareness that their presence is not welcome. The job of gender specialist often exists because of external pressure and prevailing norms more than from any core organizational commitment. Their marginalization – a sense of being on the edge rather than fully integrated into the organization – makes life complicated and full of quandaries. It can sometimes be lonely and the lack of recognition can be depressing. Some find their position untenable and leave to exert pressure for change from the outside; others stay to learn the advantages of being on the edge. As insiders they learn to understand and behave appropriately in the organization that employs them – otherwise they will have no credibility and little influence. As outsiders, they keep their critical distance from the organization, enabling them to challenge 'how things are done around here'. Positively accepting their inside–outside status, they reach out beyond their organizations to the feminist movements in civil society which they understand to be the principal force for transformative change in gender equality. By working politically and exploiting, rather than lamenting, their position on the edge of the organization, feminists employed to work on gender equality issues can change development bureaucracies. In that context, this introductory chapter explains the book's origins, approach and aims, followed by an overview of the other chapters.
Origin, approach and purposes
The book's origins lie in the editors' own experiences as policy practitioners and bureaucrats working in large international organizations. Feminist bureaucrats find it difficult to communicate their experience: they are busy in their jobs, often unfamiliar with academic discourse, and possibly cautious about revealing to the outside world the realities of their workplace. Hence, when Rosalind conceived a research project about feminist bureaucrats working as gender specialists, it made sense to design it not for extracting data from reserved officials, but instead as participatory action research, offering them a safe space to reflect upon and improve their own practice. In 2007, a collaborative project was born in which about a dozen gender specialists (including one man) and researchers shared their common aspiration for social emancipation and gender justice. The project had a conversational approach. Rosalind was doing research with, instead of on, her subjects (Pillow, 2003). This approach made some of those involved want to write in their own voice, and that encouraged others to contribute. Although not everyone contributing to the present book was a member of that original project, all the authors write in its spirit of self-enquiry and honest sharing, and Chapters 4, 8, and 11 capture the reflections and learning of those in the wider group who have chosen to remain anonymous.
Approach
Our approach takes seriously the notion of feminist reflexivity. We ask what is it about our positionality that shapes both how any one of us relates with others and how we choose to act. Hence this book is partial (in the two related senses of this word). First, it makes no claims to represent the situation of all feminist gender specialists in development (although when we have presented our findings to a wider audience of such specialists they have recognized these as their own). Second, the book reflects a certain, necessarily limited, perspective of a small number of professional, educated, (mostly) women, analyzing their own direct experiences of working with gender equality or women's rights units in governments and development agencies. In most cases, the book does not seek to explore the effects of development's bureaucratic politics as these make waves (or ripples) in the lives and prospects of women in general, and in whose name the authors are working. Nevertheless, all the contributors are well aware of the 'long road to walk from victories for women in bureaucratic spaces to gains for women on the ground' (Rao, 2013).
Brigitte Holzner, for example, worries in Chapter 5 whether spending her time on the construction of texts is of any relevance to the real world; Claudia (a disguised character in Chapter 8) agonizes over whether she is making any difference in the lives of 'rural women in Bangladesh'; and in the same chapter, Ratna is concerned that spending all day 'just answering emails and reading stuff ... you'll have forgotten what it's like, the reality on the ground for women'.
Indeed, it is this anxiety about whether one's job is worthwhile that led some of the research participants to wonder whether it was self-indulgent to spend time holding up the mirror to themselves. If theirs is not the 'real world', what is the relevance or utility of a book that discusses and analyses their working lives? The answer, and the challenge, is to keep the bigger picture in mind – otherwise reflection is narcissistic – without staying silent on the minutiae in practice of how change is brokered. Silence about such minutiae is politically unhelpful to the real world, because the secrecy of bureaucracies produces a power effect. Weber notes that every bureaucracy will try to hide what it gets up to unless it is forced into revelation, invoking 'hostile interests' if need be to justify the secrecy (Bendix, 1959).
Development bureaucracies may be particularly competent at exercising these privileges of power, whereby power is legitimized by reference to 'the poor' for whose sake the organization exists. Staff commitment to this supreme objective may also make them reluctant to reveal their organization's inner workings and thus expose it to criticism. However, when the blinds stay down, those trying to look in through the window find it hard to see – and therefore to influence – what is going on. Feminist bureaucrats at the threshold between inside and outside are appropriately positioned to pull up the blinds. In the absence of external pressure they cannot secure the institutional change they are seeking. Thus making public their reflexive analysis is not self-indulgent if it contributes, as one of them said, to 'demystifying the bureaucracy'.
As such, this book provides an actor-oriented perspective on organizational politics. By 'actor-oriented' we mean that the book is concerned with how specific individuals 'deal with the problematic situations they encounter' (Long, 2001: 57) and how they act as brokers at the interface of bureaucracy and civil society. Feminists' potential to convert any bureaucracy – even a new one like UN Women – into an engine of social change remains a matter for debate. It is a particularly pertinent question for the complex bureaucratic architecture of international development, whose shared normative discourse is, as the World Bank puts it, 'working for a world free of poverty'. For the authors of the present book, the debate is more than academic. As Aruna Rao (2013) stresses, it is emotional and personal:
[The] politics around gender equality issues are deeply felt. People who get involved in such intense processes are forced to re-examine their own personal beliefs and behaviours – to walk the talk. And they have to do so in an environment which is rife with politics but where no other issue except human rights is politically framed.
Part of the emotion relates to the discomfort of inhabiting a marginal location in which you are never fully accepted anywhere, either inside or outside the bureaucracy. Yet, when they learn to be comfortable with their position, feminist bureaucrats exploit their marginality through political strategies that include building and balancing internal and external alliances, leveraging outside pressure, and turning dominant discourse on its head.
Accepting rather than worrying about the contradictions inherent in being a feminist bureaucrat means they can discover unexpected pathways of personal and organizational change, discoveries that can help the bureaucracy move closer to achieving its rhetorical aspirations of supporting women's empowerment and gender equality. It is largely a succession of small wins and discouraging defeats that over time turn into bigger victories, such as the feminists' success in securing the establishment of the new United Nations organization, UN Women, in 2010. As Joanne Sandler notes in Chapter 10, the changes that achieved this outcome did not happen quickly, but resulted from years of struggle and many people's efforts. To do this requires above all the commitment and craft of a political strategist.
Political purpose
It is the authors' hope that in sharing their experiences they can help others in similar positions to debate and reflect on the challenges of their jobs. The material from this book has already had a positive reaction from participants at a workshop in Scandinavia for gender specialists from bilateral agencies and development non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Thus the book should first of all prove useful to like-minded colleagues and to those planning a future career in development. For gender specialists newly recruited into development's organizational world, there is little to guide them on effective strategizing in the corridors of power. In addition, another key audience, as just indicated, is the many feminists on the outside who are advocating for development organizations to implement and strengthen commitments they have made. By revealing the inner workings of bureaucracies this book may enable such advocates to become more skilled in supporting their insider colleagues.
From the perspective of a feminist working for a local women's rights organization in an aid-recipient country, a gender specialist in a donor bureaucracy appears self-evidently in a privileged and powerful position. Yet, these two very differently positioned sets of actors need each other. On the one hand, feminist bureaucrats working as gender specialists want to support women mobilizing as a powerful driver for social transformation. On the other hand, women's rights movements cannot ignore donors' policy influence and may make good use of donors' money. In 2011, on a worldwide basis, women's rights organizations received a third of all their funding from donor bureaucracies like those represented in the present book – bilateral and multilateral agencies and international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) (Pittman et al., 2012). This proportion is likely to be significantly higher in poorer countries (the donors in this book do not fund women's rights organizations in richer countries). For example, a study of the effects of the external financing of women's rights organizations in Ghana and Bangladesh (Mukhopadhyay et al., 2011) found their most important sources of funding were bilateral agencies and INGOs.
Yet, as instrumentalist gender equality discourse assumes greater prominence within international bureaucracies, it becomes ever clearer that so much of what should be a fundamentally transformative project is lost in translation. Gender specialists in donor head offices of organizations, including INGOs, and who Rosalind interviewed for the above study, commented that although women's empowerment and gender equality remain central objectives for many donors, it has become a struggle to preserve and fund rights-based approaches. To that end, they stressed their desire to develop a quality relationship with women's rights organizations so they could work better together for a shared objective and ensure their organizations are held to account for their own commitments.
Perhaps it is naive to imagine that there can be solidarity between feminist activists in civil society, some of whom fiercely critique the whole development paradigm, and feminists situated in what one of the feminist bureaucrats in this book described as 'the belly of the beast'. It is a hotly debated issue (Mohanty, 2003; Mullings, 2006). There are, however, women's rights activists that do recognize the strategic value of engaging with those working for change from within international development agencies. The present book should help them do so.
Academic intent
The book's academic intent is to explore how bureaucratic organizations can support real-world change. A parallel stream of research has examined the nature and challenges of gender mainstreaming in international development organizations (Goetz, 2003; True, 2003; Rao and Kelleher, 2005; Prugl and Lustgarten, 2006; and Klugman, 2008) and emphasized the significance of the role of supportive individuals positioned within the bureaucratic system for action on gender justice. However, since most scholars have had little or no insider access to the organizations they study, they have been unable to describe and analyse the political processes of everyday bureaucratic life in which people assert their agency and creativity.
We have to factor in this lack of knowledge about the micro-political strategies of feminist bureaucrats when considering the question, usefully explored by many feminist researchers, of what makes change happen in global policy spaces (Tickner, 2001; Hafner-Burton and Pollack, 2002; Parpart et al., 2002; True, 2003; Moghadam, 2005; Molyneux and Razavi, 2005; Sen, 2006). Case studies about successful instances of policy processes are available, such as securing the UN Declaration on Violence Against Women (Joachim, 2003), and more recently securing Security Council Resolution 1325 (Shepherd, 2008), but studies such as Moghadam's (2005) on feminist policy networks do not sufficiently appreciate the informal and very discreet role of those feminists who support these networks from positions inside official organizations. The role of gender specialists in the development agencies of United Nations member countries is taken into account even less. They may have been supporting campaigns to achieve changes in global policies in favour of gender equality in a number of ways, such as securing the resources to fund a campaign or international conference, influencing their country's delegations, financing the costs of Southern campaigners, and encouraging their own national lobby groups to be active on the issue. However, their own official caution may render these feminist bureaucrats invisible, misleading us about their role and preventing civil society activists and academics from enquiring as to how they could most usefully support them.
