(Photo: Kristin Sampson, IGTN)"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" (Audre Lorde)
Banúlacht's decision to send a representative to the WTO was not taken lightly. As a feminist organisation we had to consider the possibility that engaging with the process and participating in the ministerial meeting as an NGO actually legitimates, rather than challenges, the WTO. On the other hand, as an organisation working on women's economic rights, the WTO ministerial is hardly something we could ignore.
Banúlacht participated at the WTO ministerial meeting as a representative of Women in Development Europe (WIDE), which is a member of the International Gender and Trade Network (IGTN). Each network had a sizeable presence at the WTO, with representatives from all the major regions of the world. Both networks engaged in following the negotiations. WIDE Director, Meagen Baldwin, was a gender adviser on the EU delegation (one of four NGOs in an advisory capacity), and was involved in daily or twice daily briefings at the NGO centre. The IGTN held daily briefings, with inputs and analysis from IGTN analysts and from officials and NGOs on national delegations. Outside of the main venue for official negotiations, WIDE and the IGTN also held workshops and participated in alternative events, including various marches and protests, as well as discussions, panels and other events.
However, unlike feminist engagement in UN spaces (CSW, CEDAW and even UNCTAD, the UN Convention on Trade and Development) where a gender perspective is integral to the processes, feminist analysis is an outsider position in the WTO. The WTO is explicitly about trade liberalisation and nothing else, there is no room for human rights and gender justice arguments within its discussions. Such arguments contest easy understandings and challenge neoliberalism, and would introduce cracks into the WTO logic that trade liberalisation is always good for development. So there is a kind of political screen around the WTO negotiations which it is virtually impossible for WIDE’s, the IGTN’s and other feminist analyses of gender and trade, or critiques from a human rights, labour or environmental perspective to penetrate: we are forced to leave many of our tools outside the master's door.
Women create a 'Junk WTO' tapestry as part of the alternative events held by NGOs in parallel with the WTO ministerial
(Photo: Kristin Sampson, IGTN)
Inside the official spaces at WTO meetings, WIDE and the IGTN don’t focus on mainstreaming gender into trade policy so much as act as trade policy advocates articulating positions in solidarity with countries of the South from a justice and human rights persepctive, aiming to highlight a gender focus in statements, declarations, press releases and on websites.
And to a degree, participating in this way can legitimate the WTO process, in the sense that in order to engage at this level, as insiders, organisations have to use the language of WTO discourse, and focus their policy advocacy at the micro level of technical discussions based on documents produced by the WTO. For Banúlacht, for example, it means deviating from our policy of using the term 'countries of the South', because the WTO documents are phrased in terms of 'developing countries'and 'least developed countries'-the master's language, the master's tools.
But only to a degree, perhaps, because feminist organisations, justice based groups, environmental NGOs, development agencies not only move between the NGO spaces and the official spaces inside the convention centre where the ministerial is held, but can also move between the official spaces and the alternative speaces, swapping colour-coded identity badges for NGO banners. In those spaces the focus is on the bigger picture and the discussions focus not on the minutiae of technical wording, but on the lived experience and detail of people's lives. In those spaces the lived experience, the local and the personal, become political and international through exchange, debate and protest.
And the presence of women farmers, women activists and epecially migrant women in all the alternative venues and in all the protests and demonstrations powerfully illustrated that although the WTO may not think there's any connection between gender equality and trade, women living with the impacts of trade liberalisation have no doubt that it does.
For more reports on the alternative events see earlier reports entitled 'A Walk through Victoria Park' and 'The Elasticity of NGO Women's Time'.
