New dynamics for gender equality in a changing context

Wendy Harcourt delivered this keynote address at the UN Development Cooperation Forum (DCF) Vienna Policy Dialogue, the aim of which was to make policy recommendations for more effective and coherent international cooperation to achieve gender equality in the post-2015 development agenda. In her address, Harcourt highlights major threats to gender equality posed by the current context; then she talks about the strategic narrative points for participants to thread together themselves.
 
The biggest threat that she sees is carrying on with ‘business as usual’, which is not working. She emphasises the need to look at the underlying problems that are causing increasing inequalities and the crises we are facing, and to recognise that the world has changed in ways that the old MDG framework cannot address.
Harcourt names three ways in which the world has changed and is challenging business as usual:

1. The BRICS are powerful countries that do not have the same colonial narrative and history as that which formed the OECD development agenda of today. The OECD is also a very different player now on the global stage as it faces its own internal crises.

2. New types of political citizens, netizens, hold promise for new forms of governance, citizenship and democracy. There are questions regarding how they will engage in the development agenda, and what kind of gender equality is informing their organising.

3. Amidst of numerous crises (climate, energy, etc.), there is general agreement that the sustainable development debate needs to be revisited, and that sustainability must be at the core of the post 2015 agenda. Questions as to how this will be done include the incorporation of non-Western knowledge and the participation of women.

Among the discussion threads Harcourt names are that patriarchal patterns and gender inequalities are replicated from the most micro to the most macro levels. Masculinity in development must be part of the gender equality agenda. Also, we need to answer why there is a lack of adherence to the agreed human rights frameworks. She says that one answer may be the reductionism of the MDGs, which “missed the insights of those agreed norms”.

Additional information:

During a series of consultations in preparation of the 2014 DCF, the Vienna Policy Dialogue brought together senior representatives, experts from national and local governments, civil society organisations, parliaments, women’s organisations and the private sector with representatives of international organisations.
For more information, visit the UN webpage for the Vienna Policy Dialogue on Gender Equality: http://www.un.org/en/ecosoc/newfunct/dcfviennadialogue.shtml