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The role of national machineries, as a way to promote the status of women, acquired international relevance during the World Conference on the International Women's Year, in Mexico City in 1975. This book reflects Division for the Advancement of Women's (DAW) long-standing interest in the area of national machineries, bringing together the experiences, research and insights of experts. The first part of the book sets out the major issues facing national machineries at the conceptual level. It reflects upon five aspects of democratization: devolution or decentralization; the role of political parties; monitoring and auditing systems; and the importance of increasing the presence of women within institutions of the state and government. The second part is a comparative analysis and sets out the major issues facing national machineries at the political level. A combination of factors, including civil society, state bodies and political actors, need to come together for national machineries to function effectively in the interest of gender equality. Next comes the 'lessons learned' by national machineries in mainstreaming gender. National machineries should have an achievable agenda, an important part of which must be 'a re-definition of gender issues. The third part contains case studies that build upon the specific experiences of national machineries in different countries. The successful experience of Nordic countries in gender mainstreaming is also discussed.
without anybody to look after them or give them proper meals and as a result Irish bodies contain a higher percentage to the square inch of the microbes of insanity, tuberculosis, typhoid, and such like diseases than bodies born in other countries which are properly looked after’. True to its cooperative spirit, the Homestead placed little faith in state bodies to satisfactorily oversee food distribution should war erupt. Instead, if Ireland were to be shielded from the domestic ramifications of conflict, then local societies needed to form whose members could feed the
As the tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire of 14 June 2017 has slowly revealed a shadowy background of outsourcing and deregulation, and a council turning a blind eye to health and safety concerns, many questions need answers. Stuart Hodkinson has those answers. Safe as Houses weaves together Stuart’s research over the last decade with residents’ groups in council regeneration projects across London to provide the first comprehensive account of how Grenfell happened and how it could easily have happened in multiple locations across the country. It draws on examples of unsafe housing either refurbished or built by private companies under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) to show both the terrible human consequences of outsourcing and deregulation and how the PFI has enabled developers, banks and investors to profiteer from highly lucrative, taxpayer-funded contracts. The book also provides shocking testimonies of how councils and other public bodies have continuously sided with their private partners, doing everything in their power to ignore, deflect and even silence those who speak out. The book concludes that the only way to end the era of unsafe regeneration and housing provision is to end the disastrous regime of self-regulation. This means strengthening safety laws, creating new enforcement agencies independent of government and industry, and replacing PFI and similar models of outsourcing with a new model of public housing that treats the provision of shelter as ‘a social service’ democratically accountable to its residents.
women’s organizations.2 The national political context CPME was formed at a time when the state body responsible for women’s issues was in transition. The Direccion Nacional de la Mujer, DINAMU (National Office for Women), was one entity among many within the Ministry of Social Welfare. It had a weak political presence and a limited budget, and was dependent, in administrative and THE ECUADORIAN EXPERIENCE 119 financial terms, on the Ministry. The marked political instability that has characterized Ecuador’s recent history was also evident in DINAMU, especially
critiques of Irish culture made by political economists. Political economists foresaw the dislodgment of the ubiquitously popular potato as a key to effecting national transformation. Unusually, the Famine prompted state bodies to attempt to intervene. Members of the Scientific Commission and the Central Board of Health held deep faith in their medico-scientific – specifically nutritional – understandings of what modes of production and consumption ought to replace a monotonous mono-crop culture. However, between 1845 and 1847, nutritional knowledge became entangled with
, preferably at the top of the state hierarchy • Increasing levels of women’s participation in political institutions through quota or other appropriate policies • Administrative infrastructure • Access to the highest policymaking bodies • Access to information needed to monitor state bodies • Transparency of bureaucratic/ state procedures in gender mainstreaming • Lobby the government to establish a national machinery for women in order to mainstream gender equality issues in policy at all levels • Monitor the government’s work on gender mainstreaming from the outside
construed as beneficial, if not pivotal, to Irish national vitality. Broadly analogous processes, I suggest, occurred in food production. The application of new scientifically focused understandings of animals, crops and other foodstuffs in food production was equally understood as a likely harbinger of personal, economic and national development. Regulating consumption and production The governance of food and diet by state bodies and the medical profession in the modern period is often presented as an all-pervasive mechanism. Sociologists, in particular, depict
320,000 in 2008 (Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, 2011). However, the actual number of individual employees in the public service is substantially higher. As shown in Table 5.1 in the first quarter of 2012, the Table 5.1 Changes in public sector employment, 2008–2012 (CSO) Civil service Defence Garda Siochana Education Regional bodies Health Semi-state Total public sector including semi state bodies Total public sector excluding semi state bodies 2008Q4 2012Q1 Change % change 42,700 11,200 15,300 120,500 40,200 139,600 57,800 427,300 39,800 9
competition’ are supportive of their agendas, and if ‘the state and its bureaucracies . . . [have the will] and capacity to enforce change in the culture and practices of [their] bureaucracies’ (pp. 91–2). A combination of factors, including civil society, state bodies and political actors, need to come together for national machineries to function effectively in the interest of gender equality. In chapter 4, Nuket Kardam and Selma Acuner focus on ‘lessons learned’ by national machineries in mainstreaming gender. Linking this assessment to the debates on ‘good governance
presence of women within state bodies at all levels. Defining issues What is gender mainstreaming? It can be defined as ‘the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes, in all areas and at all levels. It is a strategy of making women’s as well as men’s concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not