Introduction

Abstract

In 1979, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Some sixteen years later, in 1995, 30,000 representatives from women’s movement organizations from all parts of the globe gathered at the Fourth UN World Conference on Women in Beijing, successfully influencing the international agenda by formulating the Beijing Platform for Action (Friedman, Hochstetler and Clark 2005). As Suzanne Zwingel noted, ‘over the last four decades, gender equality norms have been integrated into international law and multilateral institutions to an unprecedented degree’ (2012: 115). Landmark achievements in the gendering of global governance have generated academic interest in how ‘global’ norms on gender equality have developed and are spreading (Ferree and Tripp 2006; Joachim 2007; Marchand and Runyan 2011; Meyer and Prügl 1999; Moghadam 2005; Zwingel 2005, 2012). These studies provide us with important insights into how ‘norms beyond the level of the nationstate’ come into being. The role of transnational feminist advocacy in creating, implementing and monitoring such norms and the degree of compliance by the ‘receivers’ of norms have also been highlighted and investigated (e.g. Keck and Sikkink 1998). However, in certain respects, the predominant focus on top-down processes can obscure how norms, and in particular gender equality norms, travel and are negotiated across different levels of governance (international, regional, national and subnational).