Aiding Empowerment Democracy Promotion and Gender Equality in Politics

In recent decades, women's political empowerment has become an important foreign policy and assistance objective. Every year, donor governments and multilateral organizations partner with hundreds of civil society groups around the world to train women to run for office, support women legislators, campaign for gender quotas, and bolster women's networks in political parties and parliaments.

What ideas about gender, power, and political change guide these aid programs? What have practitioners and advocates learned about their strengths and weaknesses, and how might they improve their work going forward?

Drawing on extensive interviews with aid officials, women's rights advocates, and women politicians in Western donor countries and across Kenya, Morocco, Myanmar, and Nepal, Aiding Empowerment investigates how democracy aid actors promote gender equality in politics. Saskia Brechenmacher and Katherine Mann argue that international assistance for women's political empowerment has evolved significantly over the last three decades, from a first generation of aid programs aimed at integrating women into nascent democratic institutions to a second generation focused on transforming the broader political ecosystem hindering women's equal political influence. However, this evolution is still unfolding, and changes in thinking have outstripped changes in aid practice. Several challenges threaten future progress, from the persistence of patriarchal norms to rising concerns about democratic erosion and backlash. In the face of these hurdles, the book presents practical recommendations for policymakers, practitioners, and advocates fighting for women's political empowerment globally.

Saskia Brechenmacher is a Fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a PhD candidate and Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on gender, civil society, and democratic governance, with a particular focus on women's political participation in new democracies. She has advised major governmental and private funders on strategies to promote women's political empowerment and support civil society activism and currently serves on the board of the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law. She is a 2017 Atlantic-Brücke Young Leader and previously worked for the World Peace Foundation, Carnegie Europe, and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in London. Her writing has been published in Foreign Policy, Just Security, World Politics Review, The National Interest, The Hill, Open Democracy, and other outlets.

Katherine Mann is a PhD candidate and Cambridge Trust Scholar at the University of Cambridge. Her research examines the role of gender in conflict, armed group behavior, and conflict-related sexual and reproductive violence. Previously, she was a Research Analyst in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She has also held positions as a Junior Fellow at the Conference of Defence Associations Institute, a Managing Editor at the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, and a Visiting Researcher at the Universidad de los Andes. Alongside her research, she has worked with non-governmental organizations to prevent political violence and support civic activism. She received her MPhil from the University of Oxford and her B.A. from the University of Georgia. Her writing has been published in Foreign Policy, Just Security, and other outlets.