Description
Following the findings and policy messages of the World Development Report on Gender Equality and Development 2012 (WDR2012), the World Bank’s Gender and Development group are seeking to deepen the evidence base on promoting women’s agency as a basis for enhanced action on gender equality. A component of this work is a review of evidence on the relationship between collective action and women’s agency: whether and how different forms of collective action enhance women’s ability to
exercise agency in key domains (what the WDR 2012 terms “expressions of agency”) and the operational implications for Bank policies and programmes. This is the focus of this paper. The paper seeks to clarify the conceptual terrain of collective action; identify the links with women’s agency; and draw lessons from the evidence on what works and what does not for boosting development and gender-equality outcomes. The paper does not attempt to do justice to the very wide literature on collective action in development, nor the broad feminist scholarship on the political and historical role of national and transnational women’s movements.
Source
Language
English
Authors
Dr. Alison Evans with Divya Nambiar
