Gender impact assessment: theoretical challenges

Abstract

The need for impact assessment practitioners to pay attention to gender in social impact assessment (SIA) is gaining traction in the literature. The importance of understanding the impact of projects on men and women is believed to offer projects the ‘social license’ to operate. Usually argued from a feminist perspective, incorporating gendered ideation into SIA procedures emanates from the gender and development framework. Given that 1) gender is experienced in context, 2) the situations of women in different parts of the world are not the same, and 3) gender can be non-binary, this paper cautions against ‘one-size-fits-all’ gender approaches in SIA. Drawing on a case study of a community-based rural development project in Ghana, we advocate for context-specific and particularised gender analysis of the impacts of projects, policies, events and phenomena