New Gender Machinery at the Local Level in Latin America

Local governments in Latin America have not been characterized by their capacity to design their own public policies - beyond the service-delivery and infrastructure functions traditionally assigned to the local level – which do not leave much room for a holistic view of gender concerns. This working paper is part of the first phase of the project: Strengthening governance from a gender perspective and women's political participation at the local level in Latin America, and contains information, analysis and conclusions synthesized from various sources with the aim of providing a panoramic view of the status of the new gender machinery which has been established at the local level as a result of recent decentralization processes in the Latin American context.