Global campaigns for girls’ and women’s education, 2000–2017: insights from transnational social movement theory

ABSTRACT

Recent decades have witnessed a growing number of global campaigns on girls’ and women’s education, including major global policy initiatives such as the MDGs and the SDGs. While scholars have critically analysed the conceptualisations of gender, equality and development in such campaigns, and their significance for national level policy and practice, less has been written about why and how girls’ education came to be such a high profile feature of international policy frameworks. This paper draws on perspectives from transnational social movement theory, which has been used by gender scholars to explore the activities and significance of non-governmental organisations for agenda-setting at the global level. In this paper these perspectives are applied to the field of global education policy, through an analysis of evidence from international conferences, data on aid flows and interviews with key policy actors, to explore the factors behind rise of the global agenda on gender equality in education. In doing so, it suggests that the current dominant framing around girls’ education, access and quality, may be explained by the relatively weak involvement of non-governmental women’s groups in proportion to the strong involvement of multilaterals, bilateral agencies, national governments and more recently, private sector organisations.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• education
• social movements
• United Nations
• international women’s movement
• Sustainable development goals
• civil society

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the UCL IOE Seed Funding scheme for supporting subsequent work which also informed this paper; and to thank Elaine Unterhalter and two anonymous referees for their comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Rosie Peppin Vaughan is a lecturer at the Centre for Education and International Development, UCL Institute of Education, and conducts interdisciplinary research around the topics of gender, education, and global governance.

Notes

1 UNIFEM was merged into UN Women in 2011, along with the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW) and the UN Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW).

2 The UN Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI) was launched at the 2000 Dakar Forum.

3 Analysis using data from the OECD’s CRS database, accessed April 2019. Figures are in 2016 USD million. Note that these figures cover only aid that has been screened and marked for specific purposes (such as gender); here I have chosen to report the allocated amount as a proportion of total screened aid only, to give a clearer picture of shifts in priorities; but it should be noted that this is only part of the total aid allocated. For further discussion please see OECD (2016).

4 One example of this could be seen in DfID’s Girls’ Education Challenge, where in Phase 1 resources were largely directed towards non-governmental groups.

5 Moghadam (2015) reports that some authors differentiate between professionalised women’s lobby groups / women’s INGOs, and ‘grassroots’ local women’s groups, although she argues it is more useful to view an overall movement which is diffuse and diverse.

6 It is important to note that the international women’s movement is characterised by diversity and political heterogeneity. Divisions in international women’s organising were deeply apparent during the cold war due to the East-West divide (de Haan 2010; Garner 2010; Laville 2002). Disagreements between feminists in the North and South came to the fore in the UN Decade for Women (1975–1985); with many Northern feminists prioritising legal equality and reproductive rights, and Southern feminists emphasising underdevelopment, colonialism and imperialism as obstacles to women’s advancement. Many have voiced concerns about how effectively and realistically feminists can work together internationally, overcoming huge divisions both at the national level and between the North and the South, and negotiating the unwieldy structures of the UN (Basu and McGrory 1995; Spivak 1996). However, it is also widely recognised as achieving many successes; for example, Friedman (2003) examined how the transnational women’s movement was able to effectively lobby for change in various areas of global policy in the 1990s.

7 Magrath (2015) also warns that we need to be aware of the power relations that are often exerted through the commissioning of education advocacy research which may privilege Northern NGOs and INGOs at the expense of southern civil society groups. Similarly, Menashy and Shields (2017) explore how power manifests and works in networks on education and aid, and how partnerships perpetuate rather than transform the existing unequal power relations between North and South, ‘under the ideological guise of apolitical or consensual relationships’. Other studies, such as Auld, Rappleye, and Morris (2018) have examined how the increasing involvement of organisations such as the OECD in education in low and middle income countries may be bringing regimes of governance that are less receptive to local agency.

8 Beijing +20 was held in New York from 9th-20th March 2015.

9 The total of 417 events does not include caucus meetings, or morning briefings.

10 This may not be restricted to the issue of gender; in her study of the Global Partnership on Education, Menashy and Shields (2017) found that these had not developed, and identifies a number of factors affecting groups working together within the Global Partnership on Education.