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Policy Recommendations of the International Conference on Decentralization, Local Power and Women's Rights: Global Trends in Participation, Representation and Access to Public Services

Author: International Development Research Centre (IDRC)
Date: 2008
Size: 12 pages (600 KB)

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Summary

How can equal, equitable, and effective citizenship be promoted in relation to decentralisation? This conference report defines a global agenda on gender and decentralisation. Decentralisation has the potential to empower citizens, including excluded groups such as women. However, it can also reinforce elite power and discrimination against women. It frequently fails to address not only gender discrimination, but also other structural divisions and inequalities. Women’s effective participation must be facilitated through measures that include quotas and reserved seats in political bodies, and support for women’s capacity development and networking.

Local participation is often shaped by market-oriented policies, formulated at higher levels and associated with an increasing transfer of the burden of payment and care for families and communities to civil society, especially to women. This reinforces traditional gender roles and extends women’s unpaid domestic and caregiving responsibilities into the public sphere.

Political and sectoral decentralisation are often poorly linked. The governance of decentralised sectors tends to bypass democratic local political institutions, and fails to respond to the needs and rights of local people, including women and the most disadvantaged. Further findings are that:

• Sectoral decentralisation systems are often closely tied to the privatisation of natural resources and services, which can lead to pricing systems and user fees that are prejudicial to the most marginalised citizens, including poor women.
• Promoting gender equality and equity in decentralisation involves political processes such as advocacy, negotiation, networking, constituency building, collective mobilisation, and contestation by grassroots groups, non-governmental organisations, local authorities, and others.
• Resources must be provided to respond to local women’s priorities, and structures, practices, and beliefs that disempower many women must be addressed.
• Central governments must promote and protect women’s access to local governance, ensure the availability of financial and other resources to meet women’s practical and strategic needs, and create structures of accountability that enable women to exercise their rights.
• Local levels of government must also adopt specific practices and mechanisms to support and facilitate women’s participation.
• The importance of women’s movements in promoting women’s rights, political participation, and access to services must be recognised and resourced.

Gender equality and equity must be explicit goals in all legislation, policy, and other mechanisms related to decentralisation and local governance. Decentralised systems need to respond flexibly and accountably to the diversity of women’s identities, needs and interests. They also need to include transparent, gender-responsive indicators and monitoring and evaluation mechanisms. Other recommendations include the following:

• Convene gender-inclusive, multi-stakeholder reviews to contribute to the design, monitoring, and evaluation of decentralisation policies and mechanisms.
• Allocate responsibilities for promoting gender equality among various tiers of government and institutions, balancing sub-national autonomy against the national state’s constitutional and international obligations to protect and promote women’s rights.
• Promote gender inclusiveness within political parties through quotas, incentive systems, or other mechanisms. Support the formation of cross-party associations of locally elected women and support federations of municipalities through training in gender equality.
• Adopt a rights-based approach in sectoral decentralisation and protect women’s land and property rights in local systems.
• Adopt practices such as meetings timed conveniently for women, women-only meetings, compensating women for attendance, and establishing gender quorums in local services committees.
• Implement gender-responsive fiscal policies, including compensatory measures to guarantee equity across territories.
• Address social and cultural norms inhibiting women’s effective participation through mandatory gender-awareness education.

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Source: IDRC, 2008, 'Policy Recommendations of the International Conference on Decentralization, Local Power and Women's Rights: Global Trends in Participation, Representation and Access to Public Services', International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Ottawa
Author: International Development Research Centre (IDRC), http://www.idrc.ca