ABSTRACT
Gender mainstreaming in Indian development policy is under-explored in the literature. National initiatives undertaken in India since the 1990s should be better understood. The analysis of national policy showed how national plans increasingly paid attention to the gendered dimensions of development, although not unproblematically. Several national gender mainstreaming initiatives from the 1990s attempted to transform national development institutions to produce gender-responsive development policy, albeit with varied success. Political leaders were positioned differently both through wider reformist and populist discourses of development and specifically gendered discourses of development, all of which offered different opportunities for agency, both enabling and constraining. For studies of federalism and multilevel governance, the book also provides further encouragement for systematic studies of the national- and the state-level machineries for women in India. Comparing two Indian states brought greater insights than could have been achieved with one.
