The World Bank is the most important global agency involved in international development. This paper looks at the World Bank’s efforts in achieving gender equality in developing countries. Despite...Show moreThe World Bank is the most important global agency involved in international development. This paper looks at the World Bank’s efforts in achieving gender equality in developing countries. Despite the implementation of Gender Mainstreaming policies aimed at bringing a gender perspective into every department of the organisation, the gender gap is still present in many member countries, particularly in non-social sectors like agriculture, energy, finance, and transport. Because international organisations like the World Bank derive much of their authority from their expertise, the aim of this research is to investigate the technocratic approach to gender mainstreaming adopted by experts in the above-mentioned non-social sectors, and how such an approach influences the implementation of gender mainstreaming policies. More specifically, the research argues that the adoption of a technocratic approach stems from the gendered nature of the World Bank and its neoliberal nature. The analysis adopts a Feminist Institutionalist framework to test the hypothesis that informal institutions like the technocratic approach adopted by experts hinders the performance of formal institutions, namely gender mainstreaming practices. After an in-depth qualitative discourse analysis of relevant documents, reporting on the Bank’s gender mainstreaming efforts since the implementation of the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals, this research finds that in those sectors where a technocratic approach to gender mainstreaming is predominant, the adoption of technical solutions is privileged to achieve gender equality. However, these solutions significantly limit the effective implementation of gender mainstreaming policies in developing countries.Show less
