Indicators as Substitute for Policy Contestation and Accountability? Some Reflections on the 2030 Agenda from the Perspective of Gender Equality and Women's Rights
| Date | 01 January 2019 |
| Published date | 01 January 2019 |
| Author | Shahra Razavi |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12633 |
Indicators as Substitute for Policy Contestation
and Accountability? Some Reflections on the
2030 Agenda from the Perspective of Gender
Equality and Women’s Rights
Shahra Razavi
UN Women
Abstract
Thanks to successful strategizing by women’s rights organizations, attention to gender equality and women’s rights is
remarkably wide-ranging in the 2030 Agenda. But the ambition to have gender equality as a crosscutting issue tends to
evaporate at the level of targets and indicators. This speaks to the difficulties of using quantitative indicators to capture
the largely context-specific and qualitative dimensions of gender equality. Ultimately, some of the concerns about the huge
significance attached to the measurement imperative stems from the inordinate weight that the global indicators frame-
work is carrying, effectively substituting for substantive contestation on key policy issues and meaningful accountability
mechanisms.
Much has been said about the comprehensive nature of
the 2030 Agenda, and rightly so, given the push for hav-
ing a parsimonious set of goals to simplify communication
and planning. What is equally remarkable is the commit-
ment to gender equality and women’s human rights. As
Gita Sen rightly points out in her contribution to this spe-
cial issue, while SDG5 shares one of MDG3’s main limita-
tions, namely, the lack of explicit affirmation of women’s
human rights in the goal itself, unlike MDG3, human rights
did find their way into the targets of the new agenda,
both explicitly as in the target on sexual and reproductive
health and rights (5.6) and implicitly in several other tar-
gets, on ending all forms of discrimination (5.1), violence
(5.2) and harmful practices (5.3). Furthermore, heeding the
call of feminists to address the structural barriers to
achieving gender equality, SDG5’s targets reflect commit-
ments that seek to transform the underlying norms, struc-
tures and practices that hold women and girls back from
enjoying their rights. This is evident in the breadth of
issues covered in the nine targets under SDG5, from end-
ing violence against women and harmful practices, to sex-
ual and reproductive health and rights, from reducing
women’s unpaid care work to realizing women’s full and
effective participation in public life.
The ‘agreement to jointly and separately push for a sep-
arate SDG for gender equality plus targets across other
SDGs’, as Sen reminds us, was probably the single most
important strategic decision which had strong payoffs in
the final decisions on the SDGs. This was not a given, but
hard-won through successful strategizing and advocacy by
a range of women’s rights organizations brought together
through broad-based coalitions such as Women’s Major
Group and the Post-2015 Women’s Coalition on the ‘out-
side’, working alongside feminist ‘insiders’in Member State
and the UN.
The slippage in ambition
These important gains notwithstanding, even a cursory
glance at the details of the agenda would confirm that the
attention to gender equality is far from crosscutting. The
‘slippage in ambition’alluded to by the editors of this spe-
cial issue certainly applies in the case of women’s rights,
with the ambition to have gender equality as a crosscutting
issue sometimes evaporating as the targets were set and
the indicators selected. In the end, while six of the 17 goals
include gender-specific indicators, the indicator framework
under five of the goals can be described as ‘gender-sparse’
(Goals 2, 10, 11, 13 and 17) and for the remaining six critical
areas it is depressingly ‘gender-blind’(Goals 6, 7, 9, 12, 14
and 15) (UN Women, 2018).
How does a goal with clear gender content and implica-
tions –such as ‘ensuring the availability and sustainable
management of water and sanitation for all’(Goal 6) –end
up being gender-blind? Not only are safe drinking water
and sanitation essential for full enjoyment of life and human
rights, they are particularly important for women and girls
who are most often the primary users, providers and man-
agers of water in their households. When safe drinking
water is not available at home, women and girls are the
ones who are forced to travel long distances to fetch the
water. It would thus have been perfectly sensible to have at
Global Policy (2019) 10:Suppl.1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12633 ©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 10 . Supplement 1 . January 2019 149
Practitioner Commentary
To continue reading
Request your trial