Anne Marie Goetz, a political scientist specializing in gender and politics in developing countries prior to moving to the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), is uniquely situated to tie together strands of the academic and real-world story concerning women's attempts to advance in the political realm. Over 14 chapters, written by an array of regional experts, this book evaluates women's progress toward meaningful change in a variety of geographical and institutional settings.

In her introductory chapter, Goetz notes three core elements to the development of new public spaces for women. The first section deals with women's activism in the civil sphere, mobilizing to demand that their concerns be recognized and addressed. Section Two acknowledges the central role that political parties, and women's access in political parties, plays in effective representation. The third and fourth sections deal with the most crucial aspect of policies that demand greater consideration of women's concerns and greater representation of women, and with the consequences of enhanced representation and the adoption of “women friendly policies” with respect to policy outputs, first at the local level and then at the national level. Among the strengths of the volume is its geographical breadth; the chapter authors consider a wide array of questions in a wide array of contexts. As such, it is not driven by an attempt to test one specific theoretical model; rather, the chapters provide a mother lode of raw data and information across a panoply of sites, some familiar, some unfamiliar.

In the first section, dealing with women's mobilization in civil society, Virginia Bouvier offers a broad overview of the impact of the women's movement in Latin America over the past 30 years. Marnia Lazreg provides a number of insights in her discussion of how the women's movements in Algeria, Egypt, and Jordan have tried to coexist and come to an accommodation with active Islamist oppositions. Brooke Ackerly and Bina D'Costa look at the consequences, both positive and negative, for the women's movement of strategically relying upon a human rights framework in pushing for women's rights. They note considerable tension between transnational feminist organizations and country-level organizations when trying to deal with women's issues.

The second section looks at the relationship of women, political parties, and access to parliamentary and cabinet positions. These chapters provide a discussion of women and parties across a number of countries in South Asia, Eastern Europe, southern Africa, and Latin America. One of the striking consistencies across these chapters is the description of political parties. On the one hand, parties find women's votes as an attractive resource worth pursuing. On the other, however, they exhibit considerable reluctance, especially in countries where the transition to democracy has been relatively recent, to open up and democratize their internal processes in a manner that might make women's influence and access easier.

Separate chapters in the third section consider the impact of women on local governance in India, South Africa, and Uganda. Unlike the national level where existing research is available, these chapters provide a detailed look at sites that have received limited exposure, using national sources not readily available to the international research community. They present a mixed picture. The decentralization of power, a policy turned to by governments and increasingly demanded by international development agencies, provides the opportunity for women to participate in decision making where they have easier access and often have concrete and specific interests they wish to have acknowledged. On the other hand, especially at the local level, power can be entrenched in the few hands that have held sway historically. These traditional leaders often exhibit an even greater patriarchal mind-set than leaders at the national level. Jana Everett's chapter on the effects of reserving one-third of local council seats for women in India is especially interesting inasmuch as she surveys a large number of studies of the effectiveness of the reservation system associated with the local panchayati raj system. Her results and those of Josephine Abikire, who looks at reservations on local councils in Uganda, are very cautious. They both suggest that there are positive effects, but the overall picture is a decidedly mixed one, with some gains in women's substantive representation through descriptive representation, but with serious obstacles in many places.

In the fourth section, the effectiveness of broader national politics that have been adopted, at least in part, to help women is considered. These final three chapters all contain a heavy dose of realism: The adoption of policies promising smooth sailing toward greater equality often crash on the rough shoals of implementation. Goetz notes the possibility of ties between gender advocacy and the good governance agenda, but notes a whole hosts of ways in which promising policies that would appear to bode well for those concerned about gender are faced with “policy evaporation” in the implementation phase. She presents documented cases of “women's national machineries” that have been completely marginalized and rendered ineffective in providing a voice for women's concerns. The passage in the book that seems most emblematic of the work that needs to be done is in Jie Du's discussion of public administration reforms in China. She notes that laws explicitly forbid discrimination against women in recruitment; yet 94% of the 500 civil service jobs in a Special Economic Zone explicitly requested male applicants only (pp. 263–64); too often legal requirements are adopted and then simply ignored. The last six chapters, which discuss the possible ways in which representation may lead to policy changes are the most exciting of the book, and they clearly indicate the huge barriers still to be crossed.

My view of the book is strongly positive; nevertheless, I do have concerns. Some of the work is dated. While the volume came out in 2009, the book is based on work done in preparation for a UN report published in 2005, and several of the chapters do not appear to have been updated since then. Second, many of the chapters provide more of a review of existing research than the presentation of new results. Finally, many of the authors make assertions without presenting data to back up their claims. While this is perfectly reasonable for ethnographic work, it is less reasonable when describing overall access to political positions across parties, or levels of representation in local councils or national parliaments. Finally, a concluding chapter to draw all the disparate results together would have been helpful. Nevertheless, Governing Women will prove very useful to comparative scholars concerned about women's movements, women's electability, and especially the impact of women on policy outcomes.