Abstract

Since the late 1990s and into the new millennium, the World Bank has launched a series of initiatives that it claims demonstrates its commitment to gender equality through 'gender mainstreaming'. Gender mainstreaming is part of the 'human development' framework, and is supposed to be undertaken for the purpose of promoting greater poverty reduction and gender equality. There are, however, often discrepancies between stated objectives and concrete policy prescriptions. As pertaining to the tension between stated objectives and realities, in this thesis I investigate the friction between, on the one hand, the World Bank's commitment to poverty reduction and gender equality through mainstreaming and, on the other, its' overarching neoliberal framework for development initiatives. I trace the colonization process and draw parallels from this historical advancement and the current 'development framework' in the form of neoliberalism. The main goal is to facilitate an understanding to the extent to which gender mainstreaming within the workings of the Bank is capable of making improvements to the lives of girls and women in El Salvador, and in what shape and form these advancements are made. I employ the use of a feminist-Gramscian framework to analytically deconstruct the World Bank's proposals, its policy prescriptions and the theory of neoclassical economic theory that informs neoliberalism. I supplement these deconstructions with observations drawn from field research on mainstreaming initiatives in El Salvador. I conclude that gender mainstreaming is being embraced so as to silence opposition to the neoliberal model of development