BRIDGE Cutting Edge Packs Gender and Participation

The terms ‘Participation’ and ‘Gender’ have become a part of development discourse and practice in the last few decades. Advocates of these concepts have claimed that they allow for representation of the most marginalised groups, such as women and the poor. However both approaches have also been accused of providing only lip service to the interests of those they claim to represent.
Combining gender with participatory approaches can strengthen both gender and participation, grounding gender in the realities of people’s lives, and making participation a more effective channel for the expression of marginalised people’s demands. The mainstreaming of both approaches can increase the redistribution of positive outcomes of projects, programmes and policy.

This Cutting Edge Pack hopes to inspire thinking on these issues - with an Overview Report outlining key debates on gender and participation, a Supporting Resources Collection providing summaries of key texts, tools, case studies and contacts of organisations in this field, and a Gender and Development In Brief newsletter with three short articles on the theme. As a one-off this pack also includes a handy four-page summary of the Overview report.