Feminisms in Development asks what happens when feminism enters the machinery of international aid: NGOs, donor agencies, government departments, policy conferences and the bureaucratic ritual known as “gender mainstreaming.”

Its answer is not especially comforting. Feminist demands for structural change are often translated into measurable targets, approved vocabulary and programmes that can discuss women endlessly while leaving the distribution of power largely untouched. The collection brings together thinkers and practitioners from the Global South and North to examine the myths development policy builds around poverty, trafficking, political representation and the supposedly universal category of “women.”

Particularly sharp are its accounts of whose knowledge becomes policy: Northern academics are treated as theorists, while African and Asian feminists are more often admitted as local testimony, grassroots evidence or a useful human-interest story. Rather than abandoning development, the book argues for feminism to recover its political teeth inside institutions remarkably skilled at converting dissent into paperwork.

Zed Books paperback, 2008 digital reprint. Very good condition with light shelfwear.