login

Building Constituencies for Equality and Justice

Woman Participant at World Social Forum 2007

Photo/Laura Turquet

How can commitment to greater fairness to women be built amongst voters, policy makers and public and private sector institutions? What does it take to successfully build constituencies for a commitment to equality and justice - and to hold those who make these commitments to account?

Work under this theme will explore:

    • how to create more demand for women’s empowerment, and how coalitions seeking to build commitment work effectively to influence and change the institutions that exercise public power and dismantle obstructions to women’s empowerment;

    • how to institutionalise and legitimise women’s empowerment in the policies, actions and populations (staff, members, leaders) of these institutions, and how to create greater accountability within them, so as to promote social justice and wellbeing for all.

    Latest

    From 22-24 January 2008, the Building Constituencies for Equality and Justice Theme Group held a meeting in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The main purposes of the meetings were to:

    • Exchange research findings
    • Identify cross-RPC links, commonalities and differences, and
    • Identify areas for further research and analysis

    Participants included RPC researchers from Bangladesh, Brazil, Ghana, India, Pakistan, Palestine, Sierra Leone and the UK. Some emerging issues from the research included:

    • Quotas - which often exist alongside free elections - can work if properly conceived and implemented, but should be viewed as short-term aids
    • There is a gap between legislation and implementation. In the case of laws on domestic violence, what can overcome women's reluctance to use them? Do situations have to develop to a critical point before women will be willing to use the law?
    • Religion is becoming more popular worldwide. Is it affecting some women's efforts to empower themselves? Fundamentalism is on the rise in both North and South. What can this mean for women? How can secular women relate to this phenomenon?
    • Women have been able to pressure party systems deeply hostile to women to pass good legislation.
    • Getting women into government does not mean they necessarily care about or work for issues relating to women. How can we encourage this?
    • What role, if any, do civil society organisation, in particular NGOs, play in women's empowerment? Can NGOs be useful if their activities are project-based, time-bound?
    • Is there a relationship between women's participation in local government and their participation in national government bodies? Can what happens at the local level affect what happens at the national level?
    • Different factors may be important to women's entry into political life - backing of NGOs or the state; quotas; political (elite) families; even, perhaps the type of neighbourhood the women come from; whereas other factors, such as education, which might be thought to make a different, in some cases do not. The party system, male unwillingness to surrender control, on the other hand, can work against women's empowerment. To what extent do women's movements empower women?