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Abstract
This article contributes to critical policy analysis scholarship from a post-structuralism perspective. Employing the ‘What’s the problem represented to be’ (WPR) framework, a Foucault-influenced post-structural approach, we investigate what is the problem of Gender Inequality (GI) represented to be in development in Burkina Faso. Based on systematic analysis of selected (inter)national development policy documents and in-depth stakeholder interviews, our results show two main categories of problem representations: a) local culture/ informal structures that strengthen and are strengthened by patriarchy, and b) women’s weak agency that undermine their effective participation. These problem representations are framed from two different but overlapping standpoints: rights and development. Furthermore, the informal structures are presented as the source of the problem of GI while formal structures are portrayed as the solution. The underlying assumptions ignore the gendered impacts of history, colonial legacies, the interconnectedness and often-conflicting state policies and globalisation. Consequently, the problem of GI is depoliticised, rendered local, technical, and static. This deflects responsibility in solving the problem, limits local agency and the exploration of effective cultural and bottom-up policy responses. Alternatively, GI could be represented as a problem of structural unequal power relations – rather than a simplistic blame of local culture.
Acknowledgment
The authors are grateful to the informants for their engaging participation to the study as well as the University of Helsinki and the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) for diverse support.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 LGBTQ2S+ stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning, and Two-Spirit.
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Notes on contributors
Mawa Karambiri
Dr Mawa Karambiri is a policy scientist at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), member of the Helsinki Sustainability Centre (HELSUS), and visiting scientist at the University of Helsinki. Her work is about gender, local democracy, community forestry, land restoration and forest policy translation into the local level.
Alizée H. G. Ville
Alizée H. G. Ville is a PhD candidate at the University of Helsinki, investigating the inequalities stemming from the forestry sector in the Congo Basin. With a background in economics, her work focuses on the impacts of international trade and investment on forest management and international forest policy.
Grace Y. Wong
Dr Grace Y. Wong is a researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre of Stockholm University and an Associate Professor at the Research Institute for Humanities and Nature in Kyoto, Japan. Her current research examines issues of social and environmental justice in changing forest-agriculture frontiers, with a particular emphasis on the politics of forest and land, intersectionality, and agency.
Amanda Jimenez-Aceituno
Dr Amanda Jiménez Aceituno is a researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre and managing director at the ISDL in Leuphana University of Lüneburg. From 2017 to 2019 she worked as a postdoctoral researcher on Sustainable Transformations and the Seeds of Good Anthropocenes project. Her research seeks to explore ways to operationalize transformations theory into analytical frameworks and participative methods that can contribute to improving sustainability practice. She uses gender and equity as lenses for approaching her work.
Andrea Downing
Dr Andrea Downing is a researcher and leader of the Stewardship and Transformative Futures theme at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and researcher on the Global Economic Dynamics and the Biosphere program at the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences. Her research links global perspectives on resilience thinking and social ecological systems to sustainable development needs at sub-global scales. Her research focuses on differentiating and specifying interlinked environmental-human dimensions of global sustainability, and on understanding how sub-global processes combine and influence each other across scales to shape dynamics at a global scale.
Maria Brockhaus
Dr Maria Brockhaus is Professor and Chair of International Forest Policy at the University of Helsinki, and a member of HELSUS, the University's Sustainability Centre. Her main research themes are forest policy and governance in climate change mitigation and adaptation, the political economy of tropical deforestation, policy and institutional change, and related policy networks and discourses.