Power, Gender and Social Change in AfricaGender plays a hugely significant and too often under-considered role in predicting how accessible resources such as education, wage-based employment, physical and mental health care, adequate nutrition and housing will be to an individual or community. According to a 2001 World Bank report titled Engendering Development—Through Gender Equality in Rights, Resources, and Voice, enormous disparities exist between men and women in terms of basic rights and the power to determine the future, both in Africa and around the globe. A better understanding of the links between gender, public policy and development outcomes would allow for more effective policy formulation and implementation at many levels. This book, through its discussion of the challenges, achievements and lessons learned in efforts to attain gender equality, sheds light on these important issues. The book contains chapters from an interdisciplinary group of scholars, including sociologists, economists, political scientists, scholars of law, anthropologists, historians and others. The work includes analysis of strategic gender initiatives, case studies, research, and policies as well as conceptual and theoretical pieces. With its format of ideas, resources and recorded experiences as well as theoretical models and best practices, the book is an important contribution to academic and political discourse on the intricate links between gender, power, and social change in Africa and around the world. |
From inside the book
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With independence in Namibia, democratic rule in South Africa and an end to war and transition to multiparty politics in Mozambique, PR electoral systems were adopted in all three countries for national legislative elections.
It is possible that the persuasive power of state-enacted laws and the legitimacy of state laws to set norms are tied to American legal culture but are not compatible by comparison with the way many Africans establish norms and rules, ...
... risk that they are not facing the problem squarely: that they still emphasize high-level institutions, focus too much on courts, and assume an evolution toward a liberal-legal model as the mechanism for defining and enforcing rules.
... on access to justice, rule of law and democracy-building—this chapter posits that perhaps the standardized approaches to women's legal rights advocacy are more rooted in American/western legal culture than is generally recognized.
The result, in part, was a period of little work on law followed by a sort of resurgence within work in Central and Eastern Europe, but now with the label “Rule of Law” instead of “Law and Development.” Twenty years later, and now based ...