Handbook of Feminist Governance

Since International Women’s Year in 1975, the existence of governmental machinery for promoting gender equality has become a marker of good governance across the world. As Anne Marie Goetz shows elsewhere in this Handbook (Chapter 10), the UN has played a key role in promoting such machinery, monitoring its development and identifying good practice. Interestingly, at first the UN’s emphasis was on machinery within executive government. However, by the 1990s, gender-focused parliamentary bodies (GFPBs) had begun to multiply. By 1997 there were enough of them in Europe for a European Network of Parliamentary Committees for Equal Opportunities to be established. The UN began including parliamentary bodies in its monitoring of national mechanisms for promotion of gender equality and by 2010 found that their establishment was a growing trend (Jahan, 2010: 24). The main international body to champion these new parliamentary bodies was the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) and their creation and operation became the subject of an IPU data collection from 2006. The IPU began holding annual seminars for members of such parliamentary bodies as part of its efforts to strengthen parliamentary capacity to promote gender equality. The role of the IPU in developing the concept of ‘gender sensitive parliaments’, in which GFPBs play their part, is analysed by Sarah Childs and Sonia Palmieri in Chapter 14 of this Handbook. The IPU, together with the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) commissioned studies of these new parliamentary bodies and of the factors contributing to their effectiveness (Gonzalez and Sample, 2010; Palmieri, 2011, 2013). The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has likewise included them in its gender equality tool kits.