Local government and women’s rights in Bangladesh: navigating donor agendas and grassroots realities – a case study of the SWAPNO project

This article examines how local government institutions in Bangladesh mediate women’s rights within donor-driven empowerment programmes. Focusing on the SWAPNO project, a joint initiative of the Government of Bangladesh and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), it investigates how donor priorities, local governance structures, and women’s lived experiences interact in the implementation of gender-responsive livelihoods and social protection interventions. The analysis draws on discourse analysis of project documents and the author’s embedded practitioner-informed experience supervising programme implementation, using an integrated framework that combines feminist, decentralisation, rights-based, and decolonial perspectives. The article argues that donor-funded empowerment initiatives often produce a form of governed empowerment shaped by donor accountability requirements, bureaucratic management, and local mediation. While SWAPNO has contributed to improvements in women’s financial literacy, mobility, and confidence, its output-oriented design limits deeper transformations in political agency and structural inclusion. Union Parishads, despite being local partners, frequently remain excluded from meaningful planning and decision-making processes, reinforcing top-down programme delivery. Concurrently, local officials and beneficiaries adapt programme boundaries, demonstrating the contested nature of development practice. The article contributes to debates on gender, governance, and development by showing how empowerment is shaped through struggles over power, accountability, and recognition within hybrid governance arrangements.