Coloniality in Gender and Development Proposing an Epistemology of Disagreement

This book challenges us to rethink the foundations of gender and development and how a genuinely pluralistic approach to gender justice might be built. Written against the backdrop of shrinking aid budgets, political disillusionment and renewed calls for localisation, it argues that the central challenge facing gender and development is not simply conflict between feminism and its critics, but a deeper epistemological and ethical problem rooted in the dominance of Euro-North American frameworks and their encounter with diverse religious, cultural and gender worldviews.

Drawing on fifteen years of interdisciplinary ethnographic research in East and West Africa and migrant communities in Europe, the book examines how a transnational epistemic community—spanning academia, consultancies, NGOs and state actors—has shaped and sustained dominant gender paradigms in international development. It shows how these paradigms have marginalised non-Western, religious and tradition-oriented perspectives, while also tracing how grassroots actors, faith communities and feminist movements negotiate, adapt and sometimes subvert their coloniality. At the same time, the book acknowledges the persistence of gender inequalities and abuses, often justified in cultural or religious terms, alongside the continuing importance of feminist and human rights interventions in cross-cultural responses. Rather than advocating either universalist or culturally relativist solutions, it proposes an Epistemology of Disagreement as a practical and ethical framework for engaging divergent gender worldviews through reflexivity, humility and sustained deliberation across difference.

Drawing on insights from Project dldl/ድልድል, the book offers both a critical reappraisal of the contemporary gender and development apparatus and a practical vision for more equitable partnerships, rebalanced knowledge production and context-sensitive approaches to gender justice in a rapidly evolving global landscape.