ABSTRACT
A recurring thread that weaves through critiques of gender mainstreaming in international development organisations has been the charge that those tasked with ‘doing gender’ have been complicit in its bureaucratisation, inadvertently stripping out the possibility of transformative change. As a specialised agency of the United Nations, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has placed gender equality centrally within its mandate to achieve global food security for all by raising levels of nutrition, improving agricultural productivity, natural resource management, improving the lives of rural populations. The mechanism for implementing FAO’s gender policy is through its Gender Network system, a network of officers, Gender Focal Points at headquarters and decentralised offices who devote the work or a percentage of the time to promoting gender equality in their technical areas of work. The use of instruments, tools to mainstream gender described feels distant from the academic literatures, practices of academic feminist political ecology that Clara has deployed in her research outside the FAO.
