The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development's Gender Action Plan and the Gendered Political Economy of Post-Communist Transition

In this article we explore the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development’s (EBRD) place in the gendered political economy of Eastern Central Europe’s post-communist transition. We document the gendered modalities surrounding the EBRD’s policy strategies for post-communist transition suggesting that they help to naturalise certain gendered constructions of neoliberal development and market-building. To elaborate these claims we show first, how the EBRD largely ignored gender until the “global financial crisis” when it discovered gender mainstreaming by mobilising the Gender Action Plan (GAP); and then second, how the 2013 revision of the GAP, the Strategic Gender Initiative extended the EBRD’s gender aware activities. Both policies illustrate how the EBRD’s understanding and application of gender fit firmly within a neoliberal framework promoting transition as a form of modernisation where gender inequality is always posited as external to the market and reproduces uneven and exploitative social relations.