Paper short abstract:

Using a political settlement lens the paper investigates what factors influence political elites to promote gender equity concerns in a competitive-clientelist context, where informal relations and patronage based politics play key roles.

Paper long abstract:

Recently, Bangladesh has made significant gains in advancing women's rights and promoting gender equitable policy changes. The adoption of a law addressing domestic violence is an important part of this change. How and why were the political elites motivated to adopt legal reforms addressing domestic violence in a country where gender equity concerns have very little currency in mainstream politics? Using a political settlement lens (Khan 2010) and based on empirical research, this paper explores the following questions: a) what led the political elites to enact a domestic violence law?; b) what role did women and their allies play in this process?; and c) why do some of the failures in implementation persist? The paper goes beyond the usual focus on the role of women policymakers or women's ministry or women presence in formal politics by investigating what influences political elites to promote gender equity concerns in a competitive-clientelist context. The paper explores how the informal relationships between the members of the policy coalition formed by civil society groups and the political elites and the strong international pressure at a time when the government needed support of secular groups created 'windows of opportunity' (McAdam, 2011) for enactment of the law. The paper illustrates how subversion of the formal rules may work to advance women's rights in policy spaces and how gains made in implementing gender equity policies are linked to the patronage- based resource distribution issues for policy actors.