Susan P. Murphy

This chapter shares methodological insights from GEOFORMATIONS, a European Research Council-funded project exploring governance relations in international development cooperation. We apply transdisciplinary research (TDR) principles and assemblage thinking (AT) to track and analyse the distribution of power, decision-making, and funding across civil society partnerships involved in development interventions. Since 2016, key stakeholders have committed to fostering localisation, ensuring that local voices and actors are central in decision-making processes and funding allocations in development efforts. However, data show little change in practice, and the underlying structural barriers to transformation remain poorly understood. Through critical policy analysis and stakeholder engagement, this chapter offers insights into the obstacles and opportunities for improving localisation. It reflects on the methodological implications of employing TDR and AT, outlining why and how crossing disciplinary and professional boundaries, along with the active co-production of knowledge, can generate new insights with the potential for broader societal impact.

As the polycrisis of global ecological, political, economic and societal breakdown interacts and unfolds across sites and scales, the need to reform and reorient the international development cooperation regime is urgent. Locally led development (LLD) emerged as a panacea for development ineffectiveness across successive policy paradigms from the Washington Consensus to the Wall Street Consensus. Why such a scalar reorientation is gaining renewed traction, whether this signals a substantive shift towards transformative change in how development is conceptualised and practiced, and how this will influence the development paradigm, remains underexplored. To address these questions, this paper critically analyses the policies and practices of thirty-two institutional donors to assess the extent to which localisation and LLD are recognised and operationalised, enabled and constrained in practice. We offer insights on the current conjuncture and the potentialities within LLD to catalyse disruptive rather than destructive forces and transform development in a post-consensus era.

In the context of interconnected crises and shifting geopolitical dynamics, the imperative to reimagine how development is practiced and studied has grown increasingly urgent. This paper advances a methodological intervention in development research by drawing on insights from multisited empirical work that examines development governance through the lens of assemblage thinking. Using illustrative cases from studies from Ukraine and Costa Rica, we demonstrate how assemblage approaches can illuminate development governance as a dynamic, relational, and multi-scalar field of practice. Assemblage thinking pushes analysis beyond fixed spatial, temporal, and institutional frames by foregrounding the contingent configurations through which development interventions are continually assembled and the shifting relations of power and knowledge that underpin decision-making. The paper highlights both the possibilities and methodological tensions of operationalising assemblage thinking in empirical development research. The empirical cases engaged serve to illustrate how assemblage-oriented inquiry can help trace emergent and uneven forms of coordination and cooperation, while bringing issues of positionality, coherence, and contextuality into view. By engaging assemblage thinking as both an analytic and methodological orientation, the paper contributes to ongoing dialogue on advancing more situated, plural, and reflexive methodological approaches to studying development governance.

Following decades of global commitments, pledges, high rhetoric, grand commentary and global strategies in international and global development policy, politics and practice promising gender equality, empowerment of women and girls, and an end to gender-based violence, have you ever wondered why progress seems to be so pitiful? Niamh Gaynor’s brilliant account of the relationship between women, democracy, and development helps us understand why things are the way they are and how we might make some tangible advancements in deepening and broadening women’s participation in the public sphere and everyday political decision-making. Through a robust blend of rigorous academic scholarship, empirical analysis, and analytical reasoning, Gaynor explains why the mainstream ‘add women’s issues and stir’ approach to development policy and practice is doomed to failure, if not designed to maintain the unequal, inequitable existing status quo across places, spaces, and scales. This book is a timely, insightful intervention into debates on women in politics, public life, and the public sphere more broadly, as it challenges overly simplistic, essentialist gender assumptions regarding participation and inclusion. It focuses its analysis on the experiences of women in African countries who have received extensive development interventions aiming towards the Millennium Development Goals (2000–2015) and the Sustainable Development Goals (2015–2030) with a particular focus on everyday politics in informal spaces.

Whilst there is an extensive body of research exploring the barriers to gender equality and female empowerment in high-income states, there are far fewer systematic analyses within lower-income settings. This book draws on extensive empirical data to analyse gender mainstreaming and gender transformative actions in Tanzanian higher education. The book maps the practical landscape of gender mainstreaming across 14 universities in Tanzania, and the theoretical landscape of African theories of masculinities and femininities underpinning educational institutions and practices. It then assesses the Gender Awareness and Transformation through Education project, which was designed to support the development of gender expertise and capacities in research and education at one specific institution, across both its administrative and academic units. Current and future academics at Dar es Salaam University College of Education were trained in gender-based research and education, and a strategic plan was developed to guide in the establishment of a Gender Research Centre that will provide gender expertise in research and teaching to the College; and, over time, to other HEIs nationally and regionally. By bringing together real-world insights from action-based research, the book demonstrates the impact of real-time social change and gender transformation, with implications both for Tanzania and beyond. Bringing novel empirical insights and policy recommendations, this book will be of interest to researchers and policy makers across the fields of gender studies, education, and African studies.

Despite the progress made by women and girls in accessing education over the past decade, there are still concerns in terms of achieving meaningful participation in Higher Education. Meaningful participation can involve the abilities of students to activate capabilities and freedoms such as affiliation, practical reason and bodily integrity, and the exercise of agency in pursuit of objectives and goals that are valued by students. This chapter examines students’ internalised ideas of gender and the degree to which internalised gender norms influence student participation in Higher Learning Institutions (HLIs). Drawing upon student voices and lived experiences gathered through interviews and focus groups at a teacher-training college in Tanzania, the chapter provides an original epistemic and empirical contribution to the research on Gender and Education. The Capability Approach (CA) is used to examine the lived experiences of students and the degree to which they can access meaningful participation in their learning journey. The findings indicate that there are shifting perceptions, growing frustrations, and a challenge of traditional gendered views. The chapter provides valuable recommendations that call for the need to understand and listen to student voices, which can help to unpack their lived experiences and how it affects their participation in HLIs.

This chapter explores the journey of a higher education institution as it mainstreams gender equality into its core policy architecture. It examines the relationship between institutionalisation and internalisation of equitable gender norms through a comparative analysis of academic staff experiences and attitudes over the course of three years. The chapter shares empirical insights from a representative sample of academic staff surveyed at baseline and end line on their experiences of academic life, their work-life balance, professional experiences, and career progression. The findings point to persistent gender gaps in promotion duration, research outputs, and experiences of bullying and harassment. There are indications of significant change in experiences of sexual harassment and bullying, with decreasing numbers of incidents and an increased likelihood of reporting. Further, gentle shifts in attitudes and expectations were detected in areas related to recognition and belonging, with increasing levels of female satisfaction, but declining levels of male satisfaction.