Gender justice, citizenship and development

"This book is a contribution to current efforts to re-energize and re-politicize the gender equality agenda in international development. It brings together leading scholars in the gender and development field, who were asked to interrogate the concept of 'gender justice' from conceptual, contextual and strategic angles. The result is a stimulating multidisciplinary collection that brings feminist analysis to bear on current debates on development and citizenship. As an organization devoted to 'empowerment through knowledge', for a long time the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) has been interested in women's empowerment. Its various programmes of support to research make use of gender and social analysis. However, anticipating the current wave of reassessments of 'gender mainstreaming', in the early 2000s several of us at IDRC began to feel that in addition to systematizing the consideration of gender equity and equality issues in all projects, a specific programme of support to research on gender and development per se was needed. The chapters in this book started their life as commissioned papers to inform the development of such a programme. Several of the authors joined IDRC staff, along with gender and development practitioners from around the world, at a stimulating workshop in Ottawa at the end of 2003. During that time, the contours of a new IDRC programme on issues of gender injustice, citizenship and entitlements began to emerge."--Excerpted from Foreword.