Troubling gender in international development

This article revisits the trajectory of Gender and Development (GAD) from the vantage point of a moment in which gender has become the object of intensified contestation. Engaging scholarship on policy narratives, discourse coalitions and processes of discourse capture, it examines how gender has been reshaped and redeployed in development discourse, including through what is termed here discourse doubling, whereby concepts are detached from their original critical moorings and put to work to different ends. Situating these dynamics within the longer institutional history of GAD, the article reflects on what has been lost, as well as what might yet be recovered. Rather than abandoning gender as an analytical lens, it suggests the need to re-ground gender analysis in attention to lived social relations and material inequalities, returning to concerns that initially animated the GAD agenda.