ABSTRACT
In 1985, with much rhetorical noise, Nigeria became a signatory to the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). It has been highlighting this as a landmark step towards more gender equality ever since. Yet, beyond verbal commitment on the international stage, the Nigerian government has shown little dedication in truly carrying out the convention’s provisions. CEDAW has never been implemented into domestic law. The document appears to be little more than a paper tiger.1 Nonetheless, and despite lack of legal power, small things have changed. CEDAW norms have become established as points of reference within the Nigerian debate. While the respective norms continue to be highly controversial and far from widely internalized, they have incrementally become part of the Nigerian debate on gender equality. Not specific provisions, but the contentious nature of gender representation in the wider normative context of development has become localized as part of a broader domestic normative struggle. As a result, government actors have begun to engage those norms. While external knowledge about the meaning of ‘development’ has been perpetuated through discursive filters and affected the country’s legal framework, the Nigerian government has managed to devalue the meaning of gender rights and dissolve semantic resistance by appropriating pivotal concepts. Ultimately, the penetration of United Nations (UN) gender norms into the Nigerian discourse has not challenged long-established value orders, but rather ultimately has led to their stabilization, minimizing the transformative challenge posed by the norms originally promoted. How can we make sense of such multifaceted and seemingly contradictory out-
comes of development policies promoted internationally? In this chapter, I propose the concept of appropriation as a suitable analytical framework. Appropriation describes productive processes of adaptation that embed international norms and developmental scripts into existing sets of values. It sheds light on subtle processes of normative change that are neither adoption nor rejection. Consequently, appropriation is neither necessarily a ‘positive’ nor a desirable process that can lead to both order transformation and order stabilization.
