Paper short abstract:

Because today's G&D discourse is an incoherent one, it opens up windows of opportunity for Southern-borne resistance to development. The paper shows how these opportunities are ceased by Jordanian women's organisations to claim equality in their cooperation with their Northern-based donors.

Paper long abstract:

During the past decades, the international development cooperation, which functions through a Western-dominated neo-liberal global discourse, was the target of various critiques. Among others, from the 1970s onwards, especially feminists reproached the development cooperation for the unequal North/South divide and global patriarchal structures it has been relying on and which it continues to reproduce.

Instead of rejecting the feminist critiques, the development discourse incorporated some of their main concepts such as gender equality, gender mainstreaming and women empowerment and evolved into a G&D discourse. As the development discourse has absorbed, but not neutralized its feminist critique, this has led to a certain discursive incoherence. This incoherence provides windows of opportunity for further critique and subversion of, as well as resistance to development.

Up to now, there are no studies available that show how especially Southern development actors use these feminist windows of opportunity to challenge the inequalities and power imbalances of the international development cooperation. This paper aims to fill that gap. It uses the example of the cooperation between Jordanian women's organizations and their Northern-based donors, studied during several months-long field visits in Amman between 2017 and 2021.

The paper illustrates how Jordanian women's organizations and their staff members use the opportunities opened up by the incoherencies of the G&D discourse in order to gain spaces of independence, claim equality in development collaboration as well as to influence donor strategies and even international development policies.