Background Document - Danish Institute for Parties and Democracy

While contesting the post of an elected representative (as urban councillors and
mayors in towns and cities or as representatives in countries and villages) is the most
visible form of participation in local politics this is not the only means of involvement.
There is a considerable amount of literature that indicates the importance of
women’s informal community work that also amounts to their involvement in local
politics.
Drawing on experiences from Africa, Chabal (1999) has indicated the porous borders
between the personal and the political and the importance of unravelling this
in order to understand the political process. If this is so then informal dynamics at
the community level possibly work in conjunction with formal democratic processes
to enable women to access leadership positions. The by now well-known feminist
articulation that the personal is in fact the political logically led to such a distinction
between formal and informal spaces of politics and the importance of the latter for
women’s political agency.
For instance drawing on case studies from South Asia and West Africa, Purkayastha
and Subramanium (2004) point to a large number of informal networks that foreground
women’s agency – and this would clearly also include political agency – in the
developing world. They point to how local networks from the state of Karnataka in
India have formed informal groups at the periphery and become recipients of development
assistance preventing such resources from being captured completely by
local elites. The participation of women in new social movements across the world,
most of them centred on local issues related to life and livelihoods, has also become
an important instrument of political transformation.
However taking a slightly different line of argument, some scholars have rejected
what they see as the artificial dichotomy between the formal and informal spaces
and modes of local politics pointing instead to the commonality of the underlying
political processes of both. For instance Brownhill and Halford (2004) draw on examples
of women’s community action in London’s docklands and local government’s
women’s committees to indicate there are theoretical and empirical interconnections
rather than disconnects between these two forms of action rendering this dichotomy
between formal and informal politics meaningless in any substantive way.
Having identified the spaces for local politics we now turn our attention to the
reasons that are advanced for women’s inclusion in local politics.
WHY WOMEN IN LOCAL POLITICS
There is a substantive body of literature on why it is necessary and desirable to have
women involved in local politics. The economic conditions of men and women differ
and women must have the opportunity to allocate scarce resources to also benefit
women and bring their perspective to the decision making table. The democratic
component of the system will be strengthened by inclusion of women, and the legitimacy
of decisions taken will increase as women gain equal access to a system largely
dominated by men.
It is also possible to argue as Siddiq and Allen (2011) have done that women councillors
can make a difference for the women they represent, and could introduce a
feminized view to local governance more broadly, something that has the potential
to aid all constituents. That is not to say that women should have to help women in
order to ‘earn’ their place on the council, but that the presence of higher numbers
of women in local politics will make this feminization process more likely to occur.”
Acknowledging this, the role of women in decision making at the local level was
specifically addressed by landmark international agreements and conventions notably
CEDAW and Beijing Platform for Action (1995). The International Union of Local
Authorities Worldwide Declaration on Women in Local Government 1998; Item 9
says:
WOMEN IN POLITICS DANISH INSTITUTE FOR PARTIES AND DEMOCRACY PAGE 25