Gender and Economic Policy Discussion Forum XIII:

Venue: Casuarina Hall, India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road, New Delhi


ISST Background Note

Engendering Policies and Programmes through Feminist Evaluation             

In recent years following a surge in public spending in India there has been a growing demand for monitoring and evaluation of public programmes and policy initiatives from government program implementers, international donors as well as civil society. The Eleventh Five Year Plan period (2007-12) sought to give evaluation a boost with the setting up of the Independent Evaluation Office which began functioning in 2013. This was also supplemented with the creation of Performance Management and Evaluation systems by the Central Government.

Evaluation of policies, schemes, programmes and initiatives proves to be especially useful in analyzing and studying its validity and relevance as well as whether or not the outcomes have been consistent with the overall objectives. In this regard, evaluation is also being seen as an essential tool for accountability, learning as well as improvement in relation to gender equality. A need for such an evaluation follows the emphasis on the Gender and Development approach as opposed to the earlier Gender in Development approach.

Feminist evaluation has emerged as an approach to evaluation that exposes and looks critically at gender and other sources of inequity (Hay, Sudarshan, and Mendez: 2012). A feminist evaluation approach seeks to strengthen gender analyses with a richer understanding of the political, economic and cultural challenges to women’s participation. It has also been described as having ‘a central focus on gender inequities that lead to social injustice’ (Seilbeck-Bowen et al: 2002). It emphasizes participatory, empowering and social justice agendas and is based on the understanding that inequality based on gender is systematic and structural. Rather than being a set of methods in the evaluation process, it is a lens that influences the choices made in design and tools. It is an approach that attempts to bring out the nature of gender and social equality and sees evaluation as a political activity.

The aim of the forum would be to have a better understanding of feminist evaluation, its need as well as its value along with its practice in India.