Missionaries and Mandarins.

• Author: Leslie, Alison
• Position: Review

Edited by Carol Miller and Shahra Razavi

Reviewed by Alison Leslie

This volume brings together research which was carried out in connection with a UN Research Institute for Social Development/UN Development Programme project designed to look for ways of strengthening the impact of women's concerns on economic policy-making.

Thanks, however, to the admirable scope of the contributions, "Missionaries and Mandarins" not only explores specific organizations' efforts to "mainstream" gender concerns into their public policies, but also provides a truly enlightening introduction to the more general debate over the pros and cons of feminist "engagement" with development institutions, whose own gender bias often makes them resistant or insensitive to women's interests.

Given the unquestioned, and indeed unavoidable, importance of the established institutions through which women in development (WID) must pursue their agenda, the writers' central focus remains largely fixed on alternative, yet complementary, strategies of "entryism", with attempts to enter and transform these institutions' gender inequalities from within (as missionaries), balanced by an acknowledgement of the constraints imposed by democrats working, mandarin-like, inside potentially intractable bureaucracies.

As a result of the editors' inclusive approach, the seven chapters of the book provide a wide variety of perspectives and methodologies, with case studies of WID efforts in Morocco, Australia and Viet Nam, for example, sharing space with more general investigations of gender advocacy difficulties common to both national and State governments, international organizations such as the World Bank, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Given the book's scope, one of its most remarkable, and sobering, revelations is the extent to which WID strategists appear to face the same difficulties the world over. In keeping with the volume's overarching focus on economic policy-making, many of the obstacles are shown to be budgetary, with gender concerns paid lip-service at the planning stage without ever being firmly tied to...