Local Meets Global: Engaging with International Development Research, Policy and Practice around Gender and Social Transformation

International development, focused on gender, sets out to tackle unequal structures between and among women and men and thus works towards the long-standing feminist claim for equality, aimed at building an equal society. Gender and development (GAD) programmes, and policies, have moved from gender-neutral, to gender sensitive and, most recently, to gender-transformative approaches (Hochfield and Bassadien 2007; Espinosa 2013).

The latter has the potential to drive and support changes that can tackle unequal structures, including access to education, economic possibilities, political participation and gender-based violence as a phenomenon and outcome of inequality (Cornwall and Rivas 2015). While tackling unequal structures with a focus on gender equality and women's empowerment has been a defined focus of international development work since the 1980s and forms a key component of current international and national development agendas such as Sustainable Development Goal 5, as a global society, we have not yet resolved gender-based discrimination (OECD 2023).

My PhD thesis argues that this failure to eradicate gender inequality globally is rooted in the limitations, or a complete absence, of incorporating an ethics and politics of engagement within mainstream international development institutions based on co-production of knowledge around gender and social transformation in line with a postcolonial feminist critique (Mama, 2004).

I examine in my doctoral research the implementation of a specific international Non-Governmental Organisation (INGO) programme in selected communities in Ghana, West Africa. I argue for the necessity to adopt a transformative transnational feminist lens in development research, policy and practice informed by scholarly work closely aligned to an activist realm around feminist 'knowledge communities' (Assiter 1996; Nnaemeka 1998; Yuval-Davis 2010; Radcliffe 2015).

This lens necessitates that socio-cultural values at community level such as respect and harmony receive equal weight as values expressed and enacted as part of an international GAD programme, informed by a global right-based approach. Such reciprocal inspection of values transforms our scholarly and policy understanding as it argues that we need to apply the same critical lens of transformative gender thinking to culture and rights of stakeholders from the Global North and the Global South.

This shifts the focus away from a 'traditional' (sic!) focus of international development on harmful traditions in poverty-stricken communities in the Global South and asks questions about the structural violence that mainstream international development continues to inflict on post-colonial spaces including the work of local women's organisations.

The Fellowship will allow me to strengthen the impact of my doctoral research through publishing findings in peer-reviewed academic journals. To maximise this impact, I set out to disseminate research findings in an academic, policy and practice sphere within and across the Global South and Global North. I aim to carry out further limited research on the role of feminist development practitioners which, I argue in my PhD, is central to the much-needed restructuring to the ethics and politics of collaboration.

The School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS) at the University of Bristol is the ideal host organisation for my fellowship through the Politics and International Studies Pathway. My primary mentor, Dr Peace A. Medie, brings substantial expertise to the project on the nexus of Gender and Politics with a focus on sub- Saharan Africa and global knowledge production.

My secondary mentor Prof Mhairi Gibson has successfully mentored post-doctoral students and adds a focus on critically studying socio-cultural norms with potentially 'harmful' effects on women and girls. At wider university-level, my fellowship can inform current initiatives on Decolonising the Curriculum.