Women and Development

Summary

Gender and Development (GAD) originated as a feminist response to earlier development frameworks, including the welfare approach, Women in Development (WID), and Women and Development (WAD). GAD challenged the idea that simply including women in existing development structures would be enough to produce equality. Instead, it shifted attention to gender relations, power, institutions, social reproduction, and structural inequality. It was shaped by feminist political economy, intersectional theory, and transnational feminist organizing, especially through debates over gender mainstreaming, empowerment, and development policy in the 1990s and early 2000s. GAD has influenced research methods, gender-responsive budgeting, humanitarian and postconflict programming, and institutional policy frameworks. Scholars and activists have also critiqued the ways its transformative aims have been diluted through neoliberal “smart economics,” NGO-ization, donor-driven implementation, and earlier exclusions of queer, trans, disabled, Indigenous, and postcolonial perspectives. These critiques continue to reshape GAD, pushing it toward more reflexive, intersectional, decolonial, and collaborative approaches to gender justice in development.