Concepts are not innocent. On the contrary: concepts and categories are hugely important in determining what is seen and understood, as well as what is marginalized and/or made invisible. This is true in any field of knowledge, and very much so in development studies and development discourse – fields in which African cases figure prominently. In this chapter, I look critically at conceptions of gender as produced in and by the development establishment, with a particular focus on the World Bank, which ranks highly on a global level in terms of both the production and dissemination of knowledge.

My intention is to map some important struggles in the discursive field regarding how to think and talk about gender and power in development contexts. Of course, the power differential between an exceptionally well-resourced institution such as the World Bank on one hand, and women’s organizations on the other, is clearly unequal. Nevertheless, during the two UN Decades for Women (1975-1985 and 1985-1995), women’s organizations succeeded – particularly during the series of UN conferences held in the early 1990s – in influencing development discourse regarding women and gender on a global scale. This resulted in the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action (PfA), which still – almost 20 years later – serves as ‘the Bible’, or bottom line, for development NGOs working with issues of women and gender. As noted by Annelise Riles in her anthropological study of transnational network processes leading up to the Beijing conference:

This has indeed happened. Yet, as discussed in this chapter, this very success is problematic on at least two accounts. First, in the process of formulating concepts, problems arose between feminists from the North and the South in terms of ambiguities and divergences. Second, some discursive victories are being co-opted and reused in different contexts by powerful donors.