The politics of engendering the policy process : case studies of two campaigns in China - the anti domestic violence campaign and equal retirement age campaign

The aim of my thesis is to investigate the politics of the civil society organizations in policy advocacy for gender equality in China. It adopts an agency-oriented approach to illustrate how women civil society organizations of various kinds actively negotiated gender interests in policy change within limited space and access. Through two advocacy activities, I seek to understand why the desired outcomes were different in these two cases by identifying the variables that either hindered or enhanced the realization of their goals. I focus on two policy issues, namely the equal retirement age in the development of the Civil Servant Law (2005) and domestic violence in the revision of the Marriage Law (2001) and the Women’s Law (2005). These two cases are of interest because the actors of the CSOs involved in advocating policy change met with different success in their efforts. In the case of domestic violence issues, the women’s organizations were able to bring about a change. In the case of the retirement age issue, however, the women’s federation was unable to bring about any desired change. The assumed variables include legitimacy, leadership, organizational forms, organizational learning and sources of funds. These conditioning factors are drawn from previous scholarship in civil society, public policy and social movements. I integrate these factors into a pentagon shaped framework that serves as a road map to guide my discussion throughout the thesis. The theoretical purpose of this study is to enrich understanding of the conditioning factors that are responsible for the results of CSO advocacy in China. On the other hand, it also contains a practical purpose, namely to provide implications for civil society actors seeking to influence policy process in China.