Policy Sciences 27: 283-286, 1994. © 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Book review essay Gendering policy studies: Beyond U.S. boundaries KATHLEEN STAUDT University of Texas at El Paso

Caroline Moser, Gender Planning and Development: Theory, Practice, and Training. London: Routtedge, 1993. Nuket Kardam, Bringing Women in: Women's Issues in International Development Programs. Boulder, CO.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991. Gay Young, Vidyamali Samarasinghe, and Ken Kusterer, eds., Women at the Center: Development Issues and Practices for the 1990s. West Hartford, CT.: Kumarian Press, 1993.

Gender analysts who seek to integrate transformative feminist scholarship into their disciplines have bemoaned the superficial, cursory, and belated response of those in the mainstream to patently relevant analysis. It is all too easy for mainstream analysts to dismiss titles, journals, and books with the disclaimer, 'it's not my subfield,' when words like women or gender are prominent. Some gender analysts have even gone to the extent of removing gender references in titles so as to induce readership beyond the intellectual ghetto. Yet another curious boundary exists which has not yet been bridged - the boundary dividing U.S. (or Western) approaches from international and/or comparative area studies. Although these various fields share an intellectual agenda featuring women and/or gender, cross-fertilization has yet to occur. Mutual benefits could be gained from the interaction, however. The aim of this essay is to explore the insights that might flow from a review of recent American policy analyses in comparison with recent works that highlight gender beyond U.S. borders. Policy analysis in comparative/international studies tends to focus on outcomes and then folds itself backwards to query process. Who gets what, when, why? The approach of such studies has been to put gender on a par with ethnicity/race and class in documenting and explaining differential effects and outcomes. In contrast, U.S. approaches focus more on political participation and process, such as women's participation in lobbying and legislatures as they affect policy adoption, rather than policy implementation, effects, and/or outcomes (Gelb and Palley, 1987; Stetson, 1991). Also important for comparativists/internationalists is the institutional and economic grid in which different outcomes are produced. Common fare here

284 is regime type, market vs. centrally planned economies, and international dependency. The focus on institutional grids brought comparativists squarely within the statist and state-society theoretical literatures in an effort to understand how states themselves were gendered in ways that privileged men and disadvantaged women (Charlton, et al., 1989). Along with that came enthusiastic attention to state institutions as they helped to mold policies, interact with constituencies, and control clientele (Staudt, 1990). In marked contrast, U.S. policy analysts addressed women in institutions in terms of personnel process, focusing on issues pertaining to equal opportunity, sexual harassment, and the compatibility of women's household responsibilities with the demands of full-time work (Guy, 1992). What label might be given to the internationalist/comparativist vantage point? Some two decades ago, the phrase 'women in (or and) development' (WID) was coined as a way to highlight women and to place them at the center of broadly defined change, subsumed under the problematic rubric of development policies. The pivotal question under investigation was: how is development policy defined and pursued in particular sectors, such as agriculture, industry, education, and health? Had gender been as commonly used then as it is now, perhaps it would have been the discourse of preference ('gender in/and development'), for 'social construction' was very much the perspective and men were often as much a part of the analysis as were women. Although these analysts would probably have self-identified as one type of feminist or another, comparativists were early to recognize the Western philosophical baggage associated with feminist terminology and to problematize the multitude of definitions for global application (Sen and Grown, 1987). The connection of theory to practice has long been an orientation of women/gender in development. Gestating during a time of ferment within the United Nations, WlD analytic work dovetailed with the 1975 International Year of Women, a year which turned into a Decade for Women and culminated in the 1985 Nairobi Conference. The second largest U.N. conference in history, the Nairobi Conference attracted not only the usual government appointees and officials but also representatives from numerous non-governmental organizations (NGOs). While the policy analysts' mission often involves 'speaking truth to power; the speech is sometimes haphazard or remains within the confines of a narrow academic audience. In an effort to avoid this fate, the Association for Women in Development (WID) was created in 1982 to establish a 'trialogue' between academics, policymakers, and practitioners/activists. Headquartered at Virgina Tech University in Blacksburg, Virginia, AWID sponsors biannual conferences that typically attract more than a thousand participants, roughly balanced among these three groups and representing all parts of the globe. AWID's presidency also rotates among these three constitutive groups. Whether truths are spoken to power, however, is another matter, for the largely female membership consists mainly of NGO members and outsiders-

285 on-the-inside of male-dominant institutions, such as universities, banks and public agencies. It is not surprising, then, that gendered bureaucratic politics and agency-constituency relations are a central focus of attention. The very drive to connect research to practice meets institutional, ideological, and demographic obstacles, for policy 'execution' obscures or obliterates attention to women in many cases. Several new books published in the 1990s illustrate the movement of this two-decade old subfield. In Gender Planning and Development." Theory, Practice, and Training (1993), Caroline Moser provides a useful theoretical summary of WID approaches followed by strategies for 'gender planning' in mainstream agency operations. The book addresses the difficulty of turning around organizations wherein mostly men hold power and conceive of development programs in ways that privilege men. While many women's bureaus, WID units, and even women's ministries exist within institutions and governments, they have remained on the sidelines, not in the mainstream, of overall policy missions, procedures, and outcomes. Central to Moser's conceptual scheme is the work of women in reproduction, production, and community management. She adopts Maxine Molyneux's highly useful distinction between 'practical' and 'strategic' interests to clarify how various policy strategies would address women's everyday lives and women's subordination. She delineates five policy approaches taken to women, ranging from fairly common strategies such as welfare, poverty, and equity to efficiency (now common in international agencies) and empowerment (rarely adopted). The bulk of Moser's book is addressed to planning what she broadly defines as the decision-making process about policy implementation. Expanding the framework developed by Rao et al. (1991), Moser seeks to build a foundation for gender planning, complete with a planning methodology that includes training for predominantly male policymaking and program staff. Readers learn about a range of gender training approaches, including the Harvard case approach that focuses on productive efficiency, an approach based upon Moser's conceptual scheme, and others that confront trainees with their personal prejudices. Drawing upon her diverse experiences as a Latin Americanist, a housing analyst, a gender trainer, and an operations specialist in an international banking agency, Moser recognizes the political conflict in policies that provoke a gendered redistribution of resources (Staudt, 1985), but she is convinced that techniques and expertise can restructure institutions. In Bringing Women In: Women's Issues in International Development Programs, Nuket Kardam investigates the extent to which the international women's movement has influenced the work of three international agencies. Confronting unique institutional grids, WID innovations have encountered little response in the U.N. Development Programme, moderate response in the World Bank, and high response in the Ford Foundation. Kardam's methodical diagnosis of each agency demonstrates the importance of contingency approaches for WID advocates.

286 In a very different collection, editors Gay Young, Vidyamali Samarasinghe, and Ken Kusterer bring together selections from the 1991 AWID conference. The contributors to Women At the Center: Development Issues and Practices for the 1990s are academics, activists, and professionals from Northern (Europe and U.S.) and Southern (Latin America, Africa, Asia) countries. Like Leonard (1989), this collection foregrounds AWID's trialogue, airing a wide variety of voices. While a few chapters focus on institutional strategies, most illustrate outcomes that women construct themselves in self-employment, housing, and health/environmental activities. As this collection makes clear, women are already at the center of a gendered development process. To illuminate this gendered development however, a shift in policy agendas to focus upon people's everyday lives is required. The editors note that such a shift will not occur without political struggle. The gendered dimensions of policy cannot be understood unless greater attention is paid to all facets of the policy process - political environment and pressure group activity-, as well as policy adoption, implementation, and outcomes for everyday life. To date, analysts in the U.S. have tended to focus on electoral/legislative participation and policy adoption, rather than implementation, bureaucratic politics, and outcomes. Yet domestic women's program initiatives face some of the same dynamics encountered in international agencies and outside the U.S. Although these gendered bureaucratic politics occur, they remain less visible given intellectual agenda preferences in the U.S. Analysts outside the U.S. have tended to downplay political struggle, particularly outside the realm of agency-clientele-NGO-interaction. Cross fertilization between these two intellectual traditions will connect parts of the whole, the entirety of which is essential to make further connections from analysis to action.

References Charlton, Sue Ellen et al. (1989). Women, The State and Development. Albany: SUNY Press. Gelb, Joyce and Marian Lief Palley (1987). Women and Public Policies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2nd ed. Guy, Mary E. ed. (1992). Women and Men of the States: Public Administrators at the State Level. New York: M.E. Sharpe. Leonard, Ann, ed. (1989). Seeds: Women and Work in the Third World. New York: Feminist Press. Rao, Aruna, et al. (1991). Gender Training and Development Planning: Learning from Experience. New York: Population Council. Sen, Gita and Caren Grown (1987). Development, Crisis, and Alternative Visions: Third Worm Women's Perspectives. New York: Monthly Review Press. Staudt, Kathleen (t985). Women, Foreign Assistance, and Advocacy Administration. New York: Praeger. Staudt, Kathleen, ed. (1990). Women, International Development and Politics: The Bureaucratic Mire. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Stetson, Dorothy (1991). Women's Rights in the U.S.A.: Policy Debates and Gender Roles. Pacific Grove, CA.: Brooks/Cole.