Women's activism, overseas funded participatory development, and governance: A case study from China

Abstract

Since the 1990s, a number of women's non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have undertaken overseas-funded participatory gender and development projects in rural China. Through their efforts to empower women and increase their community participation, these NGOs and the projects they run are introducing new ideas and practices relating to governance, as well as to gender and development. The aim of this report is to understand the dimensions of the new approaches to rural governance, the history and politics of their introduction, the directions in which they are shaping governance in villages across China, and their impact on gender relations. The report focuses on the work of West Women, a large women's NGO based in Xi'an, the capital of the western province of Shaanxi, and on two overseas-funded participatory development projects run by West Women in Danfeng and Ningshan counties, in Shaanxi.