International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   The term governance recognizes that habits and beliefs are important determinants of how institutions, including governments, legal systems, corporations, and other nonstate organizations, work in practice. Governance has been used by foreign assistance agencies to focus on the attitudes and values that are needed to make democracies effective beyond formal electoral politics and to describe processes that make it possible to integrate the policies and preferences of states and interest groups in supranational organizations like the European Union. The work of Brush (2003) and Duerst-Lahti and Kelly (1995) suggests that the relationship between the two concepts, gender and governance, can be viewed in different ways. Two categories for gender analysis of governance are useful in this essay, governance of gender and gender governance . Governance “produce[s] gender difference and male dominance” as it marks meaning, establishes and contests terrain and “otherwise organize[s] power in collective life” ( Brush 2003 :51). Gender relations are relations of power, so we can assume that governance has traditionally privileged men and masculinity while marginalizing women and their concerns. Much of the data produced by the UN, especially the gender disaggregated data from UNDP (United Nations Development Program) and UNIFEM (United Nations Development ... log in or subscribe to read full text