The politics of international intervention into rural areas is the subject of this insightful study. Using concrete cases drawn from fieldwork in rural Burkina Faso, Engberg-Pedersen shows how nongovernmental organizations' activities with women's groups, natural resource management projects, decentralization policies, and rural democratization advocates must enter an arena of local struggle for resources and status. He maintains that activists often seriously contradict rural people's practices and understandings of particular issues and how they should be organized. Thus, while societal conflicts and institutional contradictions are inescapable features of rural development, development assistance agents and scholars of democratization and political change in Africa largely ignore them.

"A very valuable and much needed book on a central element in the processes of social change: the construction and reconstruction of social norms as they move between global and local levels." -Naila Kabeer, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK "This book explores how gender equality norms are ever-evolving and argues convincingly that we cannot take their effectiveness, nor their acceptance, for granted." -Judith Kelley, Duke Sanford School of Public Policy, USA "In an era of increasing resistance to gender equality, this is a much-needed volume that attends to how gender equality norms are interpreted and contested in governance organisations ranging from the UN and the EU to Mercosur and women's NGOs in India and Uganda." -Ann Towns, University of Gothenburg, Sweden This edited collection provides a new theoretical approach to the study of how global norms influence social processes. It analyses the institutional and highly political processes whereby actors - be they local, national, regional or trans-national - engage with global norms of gender equality. The editors bring together key thinkers who emphasise how context and history effect norm engagement and how particular groups and actors tend to be marginalised from discussions of global norms. By proposing a situated approach that underlines the contingent, multi-level processes that occur when actors interpret, use, manipulate, bend, or betray norms, notions of norm diffusion are fundamentally challenged. This book makes a further crucial contribution to the study of norms and gender equality in global governance by analysing very different empirical contexts, from New Delhi and St. Petersburg to the Organisation of American States, and from Kampala and New York to the European Union.

Current development discourse on poverty reduction mainly emphasises the respective roles of the state and the market. This book argues, via a series of original fieldwork investigations, for the importance of exploring and understanding the poor's own actions. These actions may seek to change their poverty directly. Or the poor may seek to effect change with respect to the formulation and implementation of public policy. The notion of political space is critical to understanding the possibility and potential for such actions for poverty reduction. The authors develop a concept of political space comprising institutional channels for accessing policy formulation, the content of political discourse, the degree to which it emphasises poverty as an issue, and the skill and strategies of the poor themselves. They demonstrate that the relationships between the actions of the poor and the organisations and institutions of the political arena are neither simple nor predictable. Instead the studies in this volume detail the the complex realities of political agency of the poor, the strategic use of discourse, the limits of institutional reform, the contested nature of poverty reduction, and the significance of political space for challenging conditions of marginalisation.