Feminists in Development Organizations by Rosalind Eyben

Author:Rosalind Eyben [Eyben, Rosalind]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781853398056
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Practical Action Publishing
Published: 2013-12-28T00:00:00+00:00

This eBook is licensed to [email protected], Stacey Davies

Chapter 8

Finding our organizational way

Rosalind Eyben

Meeting at a weekend-long retreat, the five women discuss what ‘success’ is for a feminist bureaucrat, and the challenges of gender mainstreaming. They agree on the importance of analysing and understanding the organizations they work for, and of finding opportunities to influence by ‘working with the grain’. However, this carries its own risk – of becoming over-institutionalized and no longer being able to see where change is possible. This is the continuation of a series of fictionalized conversations begun in Chapter 4, in which the author is a participant observer.

After New York (Eyben, 2013) we have decided to next meet in our own time – rather than that of our organizations. We are going to a house in the country – but located conveniently close to an airport – that Marianne has borrowed from a friend. Ratna emails us the week before we meet. Despite what is shaping up to be a crazy few months as we hurtle towards the end of the year, I certainly plan to be there to fill up the tanks! Too often we do this work running on empty!

We meet over a weekend – because of our very busy schedules, but also the doubt in some minds as to whether our employers would have agreed to us participating in such a meeting, if organized during working hours. Ratna and Gillian are able to charge travel costs to their organizational budgets, but the others have to pay from their own pockets.

Two whole days together provides the luxury of getting to grips with the challenge of transforming our organizations. We start by looking at our definitions of success – answering the question Ratna posed in New York. Is success about effective gender mainstreaming? What do we think about gender mainstreaming? We agree there has been some slow progress over the last ten years or so, and we consider how this has come about. It is about what Marianne calls ‘working with the grain’: taking advantage of an organization’s instruments, discourses, and procedures, and being able to assess when the opportunities are available to use them.

So what is success?

After breakfast, we gather in a large, light-filled room that looks out onto a forest glade. We sit quietly for a few minutes, appreciating the stillness. Ratna breaks the silence.

‘It’s very easy to write a radical document’ she says. ‘You can look at it and think – doesn’t that show how radical I am? But actually, it can be entirely ineffectual. Because if you’re not carrying anybody with you, it will just sit on a shelf. And yes, you might get brownie points from all the people who are judging your feminist credentials, and it will look great. But in terms of what it achieves in total – it achieves very little. And actually, something that is more pragmatic, but has got a much wider kind of acceptance and understanding, is likely to go much further. Even if it looks a lot less radical in terms of what it’s trying to achieve.

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