Although the empowerment of women is a prominent goal in international
development, feminist development professionals, activists, and scholars remain
deeply dissatisfied with the limited extent to which women's empowerment is
actually achieved. Their experiences and analyses raise questions about the
connections and disjunctions between discourse, institutional practices, and
everyday life. A major effort to reform development aid guided by the Paris
Declaration on Aid Effectiveness raises new questions about the place of gender
in development practice. Drawing on recently conducted research on women and
development in Kyrgyzstan and using a range of institutional texts, we
interrogate how development professionals and activists engage with the aid
effectiveness discourse. Our analytic approach, institutional ethnography, shares
with work on governmentality an empirical focus on practices undertaken by
diversely situated people and how these practices constitute a particular field
of action. Institutional ethnography directs analytic attention to the operation
of texts as local and translocal coordinators of people's everyday activities.
The product of this coordinated work is what we call, in this case, the
development institution. For those concerned about women and development, we see
the usefulness of making visible how global governance is accomplished in both
enactments of and resistance to institutional practices, but in ways that do not
necessarily benefit women.