Taking Stock

At the Fourth World conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 gender mainstreaming was put on the agenda as the core strategy to ensure and promote gender equality. The optimism of that time, has seemed to vanish when one looks over the publications that questions the success of the gender mainstreaming strategy. Practice shows a mixed picture, with on the one hand successes and breakthroughs, and on the other hand problems and shortcoming, such as the evaporation of gender policies within organizations and resistance of staff to implement gender.

For the first phase of the On Track with Gender trajectory, five papers are being written in response to the Call for Papers published late 2008. This first phase is entitled Taking Stock and seeks to generate an overview of the formulation and implementation, and lessons learned, of policies on gender, women and development of Dutch development organisations and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It places this overview in the context of the position of gender and development issues within academic institutions (particularly educational curricula), and theoretical debates about gender mainstreaming in relation to thinking about gender and development. Particular attention is being paid to the international context and the changing aid architecture.

The Taking Stock exercise encompassed two closing events at the end of May 2009. On May 28th, an Expert meeting took place at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. An open seminar was organized on May 29th at the Institute of Social Studies.

The report on the Taking Stock phase as well as the summaries in pdf from the five papers are available here.