A review of the unintended gender effects of international development efforts
| Published date | 01 October 2023 |
| Author | Maria Harst,Dirk‐Jan Koch,Marieke Brink |
| Date | 01 October 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.2023 |
Received: 16 December 2021
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Revised: 23 April 2023
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Accepted: 21 May 2023
DOI: 10.1002/pad.2023
REVIEW ARTICLE
A review of the unintended gender effects of international
development efforts
Maria van der Harst
1
|Dirk‐Jan Koch
2
|Marieke van den Brink
3
1
Faculty of Law, Economics and Governance,
Utrecht University Centre for Global
Challenges, Utrecht, Netherlands
2
Radboud Social Cultural Research, Cultural
Anthropology and Development Studies,
Nijmegen, Netherlands
3
Gender and Diversity Studies, Radboud
University, Nijmegen, Netherlands
Correspondence
Dirk‐Jan Koch.
Email: d.koch@maw.ru.nl
Funding information
Ministry of Foreign Affairs Netherlands
Abstract
There is widespread recognition among scholars, international aid providers and
evaluators of the need to take into account the unintended outcomes of interna-
tional development efforts. Practitioners have also signed on to charters that
promise they will do their utmost best to ‘do no harm’. This article focusses on the
often overlooked unintended gender effects. A rigorous literature review was
conducted to reveal some of the most prominent unintended consequences as
documented in primary research in development studies. Five prevalent unintended
gender effects were identified: (1) household dynamics, (2) anti‐foreign backfire, (3)
overburdening of women, (4) human trafficking and sexual exploitation and (5) hype.
While not all of the unintended gender effects are negative, most of the reported
unintended effects jeopardise the intended outcomes of the interventions. This
research provides both a call and a tool to analyse more systematically the unin-
tended gender effects of international development efforts.
KEYWORDS
gender, global development, international aid, international cooperation, international
development, systematic review of literature, unintended effects
1
|
INTRODUCTION
‘Oxfam staff paid prostitutes for sex in Haiti during earthquake
recovery—then charity covered up scandal’, read the headlines of The
Daily Mirror, the largest newspaper in the United Kingdom, in
February 2018 (Robson, 2018). Subsequent research confirmed that
the male humanitarian staff had engaged in sexually abusive prac-
tices. This is an unintended effect of international development ef-
forts: without the presence of international aid agencies (and the
staff members' misconduct) this would not have happened, and it
surely was not an intended objective. Many organisations have
signed up to charters, such as the Core Humanitarian Standard, in
which they commit themselves to ‘Do no harm’. Through these
standards, organisations sign on to commitments to provide high‐
quality and accountable support and to ensure people will not be
negatively affected by humanitarian action. But what do we know
about the broader range of unintended consequences, and what is
done to anticipate and prevent them in order to do no harm?
Broader attention to and more sophisticated analysis of unin-
tended gender consequences are needed because knowledge of and
rigorous data on unintended effects are still scarce, especially with
respect to gender effects. In recent (grey) literature reviews, quite a
few of the described unintended effects were gendered effects (Koch
et al., 2021; Koch & Schulpen, 2018). These reviews covered all types
of unintended effects, so their treatment of unintended gendered
effects was rather cursory and did not provide a deeper
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, pro-
vided the original work is properly cited.
© 2023 The Authors. Public Administration and Development published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
280
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Public Admin Dev. 2023;43:280–292. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pad
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