ABSTRACT
This chapter critically analyses gender mainstreaming (GM) practices in the agriculture and food security sector in Cambodia. Cambodia’s political system combines elements of liberal democracy alongside patronage-based politics and thus has been called a ‘hybrid state.’ It provides us with a case for exploring GM in a non-democratic context, starting to fill a major gap in the GM literature. We demonstrate how GM in the Cambodian food security bureaucracy is hampered by processes that entangle political order and patriarchal politics. Drawing on interviews with relevant actors in the Cambodian government and civil society, we first examine the way in which this entanglement undermines efforts to correct the disproportionately male staffing of the state and the associated dearth of gender expertise. Second, we show how the egregious underfunding of GM is ensured through masculine patronage networks that marginalize women while using their work to garner donor support. Finally, we discuss how GM yields ambiguous spaces for partnerships between state bureaucracies and civil society.
