This is also complicated by the fact that many women of both South and North have now built professions in the arena of gender and development, women and reproductive rights, or women and violence, in universities, NGOs, government agencies, and multi- lateral institutions. In some regions women have effectively demanded that their governments incorporate gender perspectives into national policy-making, and the Beijing process established national women's desks. In some cases, women professionals move back and forth between government posts, NGO agencies and multi-lateral institutions. While this can enhance women's power and effectiveness, it can also compromise political change agendas if accountability is not part of the equation.

The concept of gender mainstreaming began as a victory for women activists. Instead of boxing women into sidelined projects, the concept emerging from Beijing was that gender analysis must be integrated into all policy and programming in all areas. In practice, this has created a gender industry, and for many governments and UN, IMF or World Bank officials it continues to mean adding "women" to the current neo-liberal policies. It is used as an excuse to cut women-specific programs. It some cases it has led to instrumentalist arguments that women should be considered in the economy in order to enhance growth-not because of basic rights. It has meant involvement of women but limited advances towards gender equality or economic justice.

The agenda has also become blurred for women's NGO activists as institutions such as the World Bank seek to embrace terms such as gender equity, participatory development and pro-poor policies, and co-opt them. Emerging from an encounter with World Bank president James Wolfensohn in Beijing in 1995, women succeeded in establishing internal gender monitoring mechanisms within the World Bank as well as an external NGO monitoring group. The outcome has been a flurry of studies, new offices and bureaucracies, and new resources to women at the local level (particularly through micro-loans), but negligible change in the macro-economic policies of the World Bank or the borrowing countries.

The gender mainstreaming debate again surfaced regarding women's strategy at the WTO ministerial in Cancún, 2003. One group of Latin American women proposed creating similar mechanisms for gender monitoring within the WTO, with NGO watchdogs. Other women vociferously opposed this strategy, noting that the WTO was actively courting NGOs to legitimize its role and activities. These women seek to reclaim the concept of gender mainstreaming arguing that it does not mean integrating gender into illegitimate institutions and policies. Gigi Francisco of IGTN suggests what a transformative understanding of gender analysis should look like:

Gender perspective and politics applied to trade, development and governance cannot but fundamentally challenge paradigms and models that continue to promote in an inter-linked fashion the invisibility of social reproduction in the economy; re-creation and consolidation of processes of accumulation that result in massive poverty for certain groups of people the world over, and the instrumentalisation of democracy and human rights. A set of rules that insists on the centrality of market forces above persons, communities and governments and continues to overlook the structural, institutional and cultural barriers to women's self autonomy is immediately and fundamentally in discord with the visions and politics of gender transformation.⁴¹

Zo Randriamaro comments: "'engendering' economic policies is different from institutionalizing compassion towards women. A feminist approach would posit that sound and equitable economic policies require men and women to have equal access to and control over, productive resources, equal participation in decision-making, and equal distribution of the benefits of their work.(giving) each country enough flexibility to meet the needs of their peoples, giving primacy to human rights and developmental needs."⁴²

With a growing demand by governments and institutions for "gender experts" to work within the official framework, along with the absence of direct accountability of women's movement leaders to a grassroots base, there are real concerns about co-optation, often even of the most well-meaning activists. In project or event-driven activism, the lack of clarity regarding the political task makes it even harder to judge how women's agendas are being manipulated.

Julia Elyachar gives a powerful account of how the World Bank manipulated pro-poor NGO agendas in Egypt. In an urgent need to address social unrest in the wake of structural adjustment programs (SAPs), the World Bank began to emphasize "people's empower- ment" and gender equality. She observes that "disenfranchisement is seen as a global security problem."⁴³ Elyachar points out that a development program directed toward the informal economy "expands the social space over which the state is not sovereign. Such a development approach thus accords well with neo-liberal ideology," by advocating a shrinking state with less control over economic activity. This meant that many antiglobalization activists with a procommunity agenda were inadvertently serving the neo-liberal agenda. In the case of Egypt, NGOs often played the role of "enforcing financial discipline just as SAPs have done on a macro scale." The main focus of local programs was the "empowerment of women," leading to a scramble for sisters and wives who could be recipients of donor dollars. The process built on and coopted social networks in communities and people's strategies for survival. Put bluntly, "SAPs discipline naughty states. When infused with NGO-mediated finance, social networks can serve as a mechanism for ensuring that the poor discipline themselves."

A conversation with a woman from the Global South working for a European government donor agency was very telling. She was interested in putting money into "economic literacy" for women and women's participation at the grassroots level. She wanted to "mainstream gender" into current World Bank economic reforms (known as poverty reduction strategy papers) that have now incorporated local NGO input. She wanted to enhance women's bargaining power vis-à-vis local authorities, and saw women's knowledge of macro-economic issues as crucial to their ability to negotiate. She saw the role of development assistance as a transfer of knowledge and skills, rather than hard cash. She saw "gender- budgeting" as a good way of engaging women at the local level. When asked why this interest in women's participation, she candidly answered that the donors' goal is to "reduce tensions by providing basic services and enabling women to become players at the local level so that they won't destabilize political systems." She expressed concern that if people did not feel engaged they could become bomb-throwing fundamentalists. While wanting to promote pluralism and "democracy" in the global South, she acknowledged that little would actually change in terms of these grassroots women's economic realities.

A major continuing challenge for global women's movements is the need to effectively integrate race, ethnicity, caste, class, sexual orientation, national origin, age and other identities that define particular women's lived realities and shape their politics-in both theory and practice. This issue became an important part of global feminist discourse in the preparations for the UN World Conference Against Racism that took place in Durban, South Africa in September 2001. That conference was a remarkable event, which gathered racially and ethnically marginalized activists from around the world in an intense forum demanding redress for racialized oppressions.

The women's caucus included women rarely involved in feminist or NGO circles, from Dalits and Roma to Indigenous women and Afro-Latinas. In Durban, beyond a women's caucus and regional caucuses, women activists also participated actively in a "Race, Poverty and Globalization Caucus," that developed a racial and gender analysis of colonialism and neo-liberal globalization, calling for global shifts in wealth from North to South in reparation for this legacy, via debt cancellation, currency transaction tax, and other direct mechanisms. This represented efforts to link gender justice and economic justice through a historic lens of race, class and geography. This caucus continued into the UN conference on Financing for Development, where women worked (in vain) to bring a gender, race, class and human rights framework into those deliberations.⁴⁴

Some of the intellectual and political work done in this period built on long-term demands to reconceptualize the feminist project, given the intersection of multiple oppressions.⁴⁵ The challenge is both analytical-how to develop an integrated feminist analysis that considers women's multiple oppressions, their differential experiences, and the political implications-and also practical. That is, how can global women's movements give leadership to women who have been marginalized, incorporate their agendas, and thus equalize power relations among women within these movements?

These Durban discussions were easily diverted by 9-11 (which occurred only days after the UN conference) but are no less urgent for women's movements to address. It is essential to take seriously women's different lived experiences, as well as racism, classism and North/South power imbalances within women's movements. How can a focus on significant differences and power relations avoid letting identity politics overwhelm a potentially unifying agenda of women's equality, rights, racial justice and economic justice? This is equally important at the national level-from the US to South Asia¾and at the global level within North/South debates.

Two decades of women's organizing in UN conferences have created seasoned international advocates and activists in the UN arena. Yet the era of UN conferences appears to be over, as well as the current potential for making gains through inter-governmental negotiations. The post cold-war opening for a multilateral development agenda based on a system of common, rights-based commitments has been undermined by the current US administration's unilateralist policy, most evident in its invasion of Iraq despite global opposition and the intensification of inter-imperialist rivalries. The most recent UN conferences since 2000⁴⁶ indicate the consolidation of mutually reinforcing agendas among the IMF, World Bank and WTO, the growing power of these institutions vis-à-vis the UN, and the strength of the global corporate agenda.