PhD defence: The Policies and Practices of Gender Mainstreaming in Transnational Environmental Interventions

This thesis explores how gender mainstreaming in International Governance Organisations (IGOs) transnational environmental interventions is translated from policy to implementation practices, and the potential implications for gender equality.

This thesis analyses policy discourses and gender mainstreaming interpretations at the policy-design level (article 1), how development practitioners translate and implement gender mainstreaming goals and guidelines (article 2), and how interventions’ recipients proactively interact with the project to further their own goals (article 3).

This thesis takes the EU-funded development project ‘Participatory Rangeland Management (PRM)’ as a case study. The project is mandated by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), overseen by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), and implemented by the local non-governmental organization (NGO) RECONCILE in Kenya. The overall stated objective of the PRM project is to improve livelihoods of pastoralists by enhancing their rangeland management systems and practices.

The project also includes a gender component, but achieving gender equality through gender mainstreaming is not the main objective. As such, the project exemplifies many other environmental interventions in Kenya, which aim at supporting sustainable natural resource management and generally improve the resilience of livelihoods in a context of climate change and resource scarcity. As a substantial intervention with a range of activities, the project constitutes a “rich case” within which to examine gender dynamics.

This thesis highlights the critical role of ILRI personnel as mediators between broad gender mainstreaming discourses and often challenging on-the-ground implementation processes. In fact, their efforts in translating and interpreting gender mainstreaming discourses create the space for policy implementers to bring gender issues to the forefront and, in the long run, potentially improve gender equality (article 1).

This thesis also reveals that the PRM intervention – because of project implementors’ interest and strategies to promote gender equality – creates a platform from which dominant narratives and discourses on gender in customary institutions, organizations, communities, and households, are challenged and destabilised (article 2). Additionally, studying women’s agency in environmental interventions and how they navigate gendered spaces and relations in Kenya (article 3), it is revealed that women’s ability to pursue their livelihood priorities and challenge gender norms within the project constitutes a potential force for positive change, despite persistent constraints. In fact, by exercising their agency, women move beyond the conventional gender-inclusive activities and narratives of the project and expand their room for manoeuvre and spaces in decision-making processes.

This thesis’s comprehensive embedded analysis of gender mainstreaming in a specific transnational intervention finds that individual interpretations, agency and efforts to push for a gender-inclusive agenda are essential when translating gender mainstreaming policy into practice. This highlights that, given the current constraints and structures, a real potential for change lies within actors’ agency in challenging gender norms within institutional and societal structures.

This thesis contributes to the academic debate about the potential of gender mainstreaming as a strategy for achieving gender equality in the context of IGOs and their transnational interventions.

It offers three main contributions, adding nuances to the existing discussions on the efficacy and potential of IGOs and gender mainstreaming as a framework in advancing gender equality: 1) actors within institutions and organizations utilize the vagueness of the concept of gender mainstreaming to further gender agendas, 2) women’s agency challenges existing structures of inequality, and 3) recognising and exploiting the interlinkages of different levels of transnational interventions is paramount to fully understand their effects and potentials, and to better design and implement policies.

Given that gender mainstreaming continues to play a significant role in transnational intervention policies, this thesis’s findings underscore the need for renewed debate on how to define and contextualise gender mainstreaming and gender equality. By doing so, transnational interventions can better align with their stated objectives and achieve meaningful progress in gender equality.