Genderizing the European Union: the Case of Development Policy.

This paper explores the issue of making the EU a gender-aware or gender-sensitive organization, i.e. genderizing it in the gender consultants’ parlance. Such a transformation would have a significant impact in making the EU not only post-hegemonic, but also post-patriarchal. Considerable steps have been taken to genderize the EU, but so far these have suffered from being largely based on a limited and top-down perspective. Nevertheless, the paper argues, there has been a significant developing country input into the EU’s gender agenda. In terms of development policy, gender made its first appearance in the l984 Lome III Convention, often taking a traditional ‘welfare approach’. The Cotonou Agreement of 2000 showed huge strides forward in gender awareness, including the ‘gender and development approach’ and efforts at mainstreaming gender. However, ngos and others have been extremely critical of the EU’s lack of commitment on the ground to implementing a gender-aware approach to development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]