Introduction Non-Governmental Organisations working in development have increased their profiles at local, national and international level. NGOs have come to be recognized as important actors in the landscape of development. NGOs tend to be best known for undertaking one or other of these two main forms of activity; the delivery of basic services to people in need and organizing policy advocacy and public campaigns for change. NGOs have also become active in a wide range of other more specialized roles such as emergency response, democracy building, conflict resolution, human rights work, cultural preservation, policy analysis, research and information provision.

Recent history has seen a large degree of worldwide activity surrounding the category of women and women’s incorporation into social institutions, such as education and government. International organizing around the category of women continues to flourish in the form of women’s international non-governmental organizations (WINGOs). Alongside this increasing international civil society activity, the period since 1960 has seen increasing foci on gender equality and empowerment as ideological goals informing mechanisms of national development around the world. In this dissertation, I bring together findings from research in social movements, political sociology, international relations, and cultural sociology in arguing a neo-institutional approach to the following questions: how has the structure and discourse of women’s global civil society evolved over time, what is the effect of women’s global civil society on the structural expansion of governments to include women globally, and what influence do women’s global civil society and structural expansion in government have on women’s institutional power outcomes cross-nationally? Based on world society theory, I argue that world society is a locus of messages regarding women which are diffused to nation-states through linkages to international organizations. Furthermore, both women’s empowerment and national institutional incorporation are cultural constructions from world culture that diffuse to nation-states through international organizations and have increasingly come to define legitimacy of nation-states, leading to expansion in social concerns of the state to include women. Chapter 1 traces WINGO structure and discourse across time as demonstrated in analyses on increases in WINGO foundation over the period since 1888, increases in national WINGO memberships since 1965, and an exploratory factor analysis of sixteen non-mutually exclusive WINGO categories (UIA 1960-2014). Chapter 2 analyzes expansion in state structure towards women, supporting a world society argument through empirical tests employing event history regression methods to explain rate of women’s ministry establishment as a function of linkage to WINGOs and United Nations-designated Least Developed Country status. Finally, Chapter 3 analyzes the effects of world society and national government structural expansion to include women on women’s institutional power outcomes cross-nationally since 1960, considering women’s labor force participation, women’s tertiary education enrollment, and women’s parliamentary representation.

Theorizing NGOs examines how the rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) has transformed the conditions of women's lives and of feminist organizing. Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal suggest that we can understand the proliferation of NGOs through a focus on the NGO as a unified form despite the enormous variation and diversity contained within that form. Theorizing NGOs brings together cutting-edge feminist research on NGOs from various perspectives and disciplines. Contributors locate NGOs within local and transnational configurations of power, interrogate the relationships of nongovernmental organizations to states and to privatization, and map the complex, ambiguous, and ultimately unstable synergies between feminisms and NGOs. While some of the contributors draw on personal experience with NGOs, others employ regional or national perspectives. Spanning a broad range of issues with which NGOs are engaged, from microcredit and domestic violence to democratization, this groundbreaking collection shows that NGOs are, themselves, fields of gendered struggles over power, resources, and status. Contributors. Sonia E. Alvarez, Victoria Bernal, LeeRay M. Costa, Inderpal Grewal, Laura Grünberg, Elissa Helms, Julie Hemment, Saida Hodžic, Lamia Karim, Sabine Lang, Lauren Leve, Kathleen O'Reilly, Aradhana Sharma

In the seven years since the first edition of this book, global attention has focused on some remarkable transitions to democracy on different continents. Unfortunately, those transitions have often failed to improve the situation of women, and democratic practices have not included women in government, homes, and workplaces. At the same time, non-governmental organizations have continued to expand a policy agenda with a concern for women, thanks to the Fourth World Congress on Women and a series of United Nations-affiliated meetings leading up to the one on population and development in Cairo in 1994 and, most important, the Beijing Conference in December 1995, attended by 50,000 people. Two new essays and a new conclusion reflect the upsurge of interest in women and development since 1990. An introductory essay by Sally Baden and Anne Marie Goetz focuses on the conflict over the term "gender" at the Beijing Conference and the continuing divisions between conservative women and feminists and also between representatives of the North and South.

The contributors contrast this world-polity perspective to other approaches to understanding globalization, including realist and neo-realist analyses in the field of international relations, and world-system theory and interstate competition theory in sociology.