Book: "Feminist Institutionalism in South Africa: Designing for Gender Equality". Amanda Gouws (editor) Rowman and Littlefield 2022.
Limited research has been done on feminist institutionalism in Africa to document what national gender machineries look like, whether they are functional and to what extent they contribute to substantive representation for women. This book aims to fill the gap with research on the South African national gender machinery, with a specific lens on the South African Commission for Gender Equality (CGE) and its functioning over the past nearly 30 years. The book engages both theory and empirical research. It carefully documents the history of the CGE (chapters written by commissioners for the CGE, serving at different times), as well as chapters by scholars who engaged the NGM as practitioners and researchers.
The aim of the Roundtable is to critically engage the book and feminist institutionalism in Africa on the following points:
• Theorization of state feminism from the Global South
• Successes and failures: what we can learn from the South African case
• What contribution the book makes
Dr. Swarna Rajagopalan
A Cross-Regional Take on "Feminist Institutionalism in South Africa"
"Feminist Institutionalism in South Africa: Designing for Gender Equality," edited by Amanda Gouws, offers a fascinating view of how gender mechanisms worked in post-apartheid South Africa. Reading the book from South Asia, in a time when the terms and conditions of the state-civil society interface are being amended, this presentation will highlight commonalities and differences, and identify the questions--for both researchers and those engaged in gender equality activism--that follow.
Prof. Marian Sawer
From Femocrats to Feminist Foreign Policy and Back: The Life and Times of Feminist Institution-Building 1975–2025
From the adoption of the World Plan of Action at the UN's World Conference on Women in 1975, there has been an expectation that governments will establish machinery to ensure their policy and programs promote the status of women (later 'gender equality'). By 1985, 123 countries had established some form of such machinery and 192 countries by 2018. This discussion will review progress in developing new governance norms and instituting international forms of oversight.
