The long run and the short run: temporalities of gender and development

Abstract

This article examines the multiple temporalities of gender and development work through the experiences of gender experts in international institutions of governance. It delineates the immediate encounters between different actors involved in negotiating international conventions and the short-term accountabilities built into development projects and humanitarian assistance. It then maps them onto narratives of the future to show how they produce the appearance of a linear connection between the present and the future, and generate hopes for a long-run future while blurring the fact that the latter never seems to arrive. What holds this multiplicity together is a politics of hope and waiting, which reveals and sustains the power dynamics in these organizations and give clues about the ambivalent relationship between gender and development planning, and large-scale progress toward gender equality.