ABSTRACT
This book is the product of an experiment. It brings together scholars with firsthand knowledge and experience of developing/transition countries to reflect on approaches to gender equality in Norway and Sweden. The country experiences that are represented in the book are wide-ranging: Pakistan (Gazdar), Argentina (Jelin), Iran (Razavi), Hungary (Nagy), Mexico (CosMontiel), Nigeria (Akanji), South Africa (Hassim) and India (Subrahmanian; Arora-Jonsson). These are countries that have very little in common with the Nordic countries or indeed with each other. Nevertheless, the idea that there is value to be added, analytically and in policy terms, by a comparison between countries with very different historical trajectories, institutional configurations, and resource constraints is not entirely new. After all, a great deal of development assistance has consisted of attempts to transfer the lessons from experiences of advanced industrialised countries to the “south” and, more recently, to the transition economies of Europe. These attempts have been largely guided by the work of researchers and consultants who were drawn mainly from the donor countries and hence tended to interpret the realities of developing countries from the perspectives provided by their own values and experiences.
