http://hdl.handle.net/1842/159 2013-05-25T02:38:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6595 Title: Gender Mainstreaming as a Knowledge Process: towards an understanding of perpetuation and change in gender blindness and gender bias Authors: Cavaghan, Rosalind Abstract: This thesis locates itself in wider developments in gender theory and examinations of the state’s production of gender inequality. It responds to two research problems in existing literature. Firstly, scholars have developed increasingly complex theorisations of the social construction of gender and the state’s role in it. This body of research has shown how gender blindness and gender bias in state policies produce inequality and how gender structures priorities, hierarchies and roles within state organisations. Fully operationalising these insights has, however, thus far proved difficult. Secondly, whilst existing research provides a nuanced picture of these multiple dynamics involved in the state’s reproduction of gender inequality, we cannot yet fully account for the processes through which these dynamics are maintained. As a result, our explanations of how change could be achieved are also under-developed. This thesis uses gender mainstreaming (GM) implementation as a model to explore these research problems, examining the processes underlying the ‘disappointing’ policy outcomes which existing analyses of GM implementation have documented (Bretherton 2001, Daly 2005, Mazey 2000). Whilst these existing studies provide an essential starting point, this thesis argues that many have applied an implicitly rigid or rationalistic approach to policy analysis, highlighting the disparity between the intended and actual outcomes of GM. This kind of approach fails to operationalise our understanding of the construction of gender as a process and a constantly renegotiated phenomenon. It also fails to exploit the research opportunities which GM implementation provides. To enable such an analysis, this thesis draws together literatures from policy studies, particularly interpretative policy analysis (Colebatch 2009, Pressman and Wildavsky 1984, Yanow 1993) and science and technology studies/the sociology of knowledge (STS/SK) (Latour and Callon 1981, Law 1986) to apply an understanding of policy implementation as a process of negotiation, where we analyse how policy is interpreted, understood and enacted, on the ground. This perspective emphasises how local responses to strategic policy demands emerge through collective processes of interpretation, which are heavily affected by pre-existing policy assumptions, activities and practices (Wagenaar 2004, Wagenaar et al 2003). These concepts are used to operationalise the concept of gender knowledge (Andresen and Doelling 2002, Caglar 2010, Cavaghan 2010, 2012, Doelling 2005) to investigate how shared (non)perceptions of gender inequality are institutionalised and perpetuated, whilst competing notions are marginalised. Thus developed, the gender knowledge concept enables us to grasp and analyse (non)perceptions of the gender inequality issue; the evidence or ways of thinking which underpin them; and the processes, materials and persons involved in institutionalising them to the exclusion of competing perceptions. This approach therefore operationalises the notion that gender and gendering is a process and connects the ‘genderedness of organisations’ (Benschop and Verloo 2006, Rees 2002) to gendered policy outputs. Examining ‘what is happening’ when GM is implemented in this manner provides an opportunity to identify mechanisms of resistance, i.e. the processes through which the production of gender inequality is maintained. By corollary, examining ‘successful’ incidences of GM implementation provides empirical examples of how change has occurred. The project thus aims to produce theoretical insights which can be extrapolated to a wider understanding of the perpetuation of the state production of gender inequality. 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6566 Title: Exclusion and Informality: The Praetorian Politics of Land Management in Cairo, Egypt Authors: Dorman, W.J. Abstract: Since the late 1970s, Western aid agencies, including the US Agency for International Development (AID) and the World Bank, sought to assist the Egyptian government in planning its capital, Cairo. The aim was to foster an administratively competent Egyptian state able to respond, for example, to informal urbanization of the city's agricultural periphery by channelling the city's growth into planned and serviced desert sites. However, these initiatives were almost entirely unsuccessful. Egyptian officials rejected engagement with the informal urbanization process. The projects became enmeshed in bureaucratic struggles over control of valuable state desert land. This article examines these failed planning exercises, first, in order to assess what they indicate about Egypt's authoritarian dispensation of power, in place since 1952 but challenged in the February 2011 overthrow of President Husni Mubarak. It concludes that project failure is diagnostic of the regime's exclusionary nature and the presence of autonomous centres of power such as the Egyptian military. Secondly, the article looks at how this political order shaped Cairo's largely uncontrolled growth by constraining the Egyptian state's capacity to manage it. Thus, urban planning in Cairo reveals how authoritarian power relations have been inscribed upon Egyptian social space. 2013-02-25T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6496 Title: Policy, identity and practice: a study of how policy decisions regarding the welfare of chdren with disabilities are formulated within the Portuguese welfare state Authors: Gulyurtlu, Sandra Sibel Cabrita Abstract: This thesis seeks to explore how key decision-makers within the Portuguese civil service formulate decisions regarding policies orientated at children with disabilities. It breaks the issue down by focusing on three main perspectives - the decisionmaker, the policy framework and children with disabilities. The decision-maker was analysed in the context her/his professional identity. By combining social identity theory (self-categorisation) and identity theory (role-identification) and interview data, this thesis found that the basis for decision-making was the way in which the term "children with disabilities" was identified and conceptualised by the decisionmaker, as well as the associated approaches, rules and guidelines at both the national and international level. It found a variable balance of influences between the concepts of parenting and families, the norms of the Portuguese welfare system and the emergent international thinking regarding children with disabilities. Through the use of a multi-method approach which incorporated interviews, vignettes and documentary analysis this thesis captured the approaches of each decision-maker. This thesis found that children with disabilities were predominantly viewed as dependants. The familialist structure of the Portuguese welfare state introduces the notion of a "disabled family", whereby the family carries the responsibility of addressing the challenges associated with children's disability and state support is directed at the family. In addition, this thesis found that "normalisation" was the predominant approach to disability, regardless of intended approach of each decision-maker. This study concluded that a combination of rehabilitative and integrative policy impulses in a context of limited and incomplete information and guidelines from international organisations have influenced this approach. 2009-07-02T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6465 Title: Retreat of the state and the market: liberalisation and education expansion in Sudan under the NCP Authors: Mann, Laura Elizabeth Abstract: This thesis is an analysis of two concurrent processes - the liberalisation of the economy and the expansion of the tertiary education system - by the National Islamic Front (NIF)/National Congress Party (NCP) in Khartoum, Sudan. It is based on 18 months fieldwork conducted between 2008 and 2010, combining qualitative material from interviews, focus groups and field notes with a questionnaire administered to 300 employees in 14 organisations and 100 other individuals on public transportation. This questionnaire was adapted from Mark Granovetter’s survey of job information in the United States. The thesis makes both theoretical and empirical contributions. It examines the extent to which liberalisation has developed ‘markets’ by looking at communication in the labour market from the point of view of university graduates and managers in different fields. In contrast to Granovetter’s theory of ‘the strength of weak ties’ (SWT), it shows a trend of strong and strengthening ties in the Sudanese labour market. It argues that the combination of politically motivated liberalisation and the drastic expansion of education has plunged Sudan into a state of ‘hyperinflation’ of its qualifications, making public information about candidates untrustworthy and encouraging managers to use more personal sources of information to evaluate candidates. A simultaneous privatisation and internationalisation of opportunity has ensued. Educational expansion and liberalisation have dissolved the national cognitive space of the labour market and have forced actors to construct their own private economic spaces and to draw on transnational spaces in order to deal with uncertainty. The thesis therefore demonstrates an incongruity between ‘liberalised markets’ and the ‘markets’ envisioned by economic models (spaces of communication and coordination between strangers). It concludes by arguing that the retreat of both state and market has contributed to the ethnic fragmentation of Sudan under the NCP. 2012-06-29T00:00:00Z