The event brings together scholars and practitioners to discuss new insights into the global governance of harmful practices affecting women and girls worldwide. The event’s timely debate will focus on how global gender policy gets produced and how knowledge-to-policy processes work.
Hundreds of millions of women and girls worldwide continue to face practices that violate their rights and undermine their physical and emotional well-being. While gender-based violence is not new, it has only recently come to the centre of global policy efforts. Who sets the global agenda over what is considered harmful or not? Which actors and networks are engaged in policy formulation, and what knowledges are being transferred and mobilized for policy legitimation? How are global gender programmes implemented, monitored, and ultimately evaluated?
The Global Governance of Harmful Practices is the first comprehensive monograph to address these questions. Drawing on political sociology, demography, anthropology, gender studies, and science and technology studies, it offers an interdisciplinary analysis of how policies are framed, contested, and translated across contexts. Using Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the book maps the complex webs of bureaucrats, donors, experts, and technologies that produce and circulate knowledge in global campaigns against harmful practices. By examining successes, failures, and unintended consequences, it reveals the dynamics of transnational knowledge transfer and the politics of changing 'sticky' social norms. This book provides both a critical scholarly contribution to global gender governance and a practical resource for academics, policymakers, and international organisations engaged in the pursuit of gender equality.
Open access available at https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/the-global-governance-of-harmful-practices
Moderator: Prof. Gaby Umbach, Part-time Professor, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
Author: Dr. Laura Rahm, Policy Leader Fellow, School of Transnational Governance, EUI
Discussant: Dr. Ramya Subrahmanian, Chief for Gender, Rights and Protection, UNICEF Office of Strategy and Evidence - Innocenti
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