While school-related gender-based violence (SRGBV) is increasingly on the agenda of international development agencies and national governments, there is little evidence on the policy processes that can more effectively address violence. Drawing on data from studies conducted during an innovative three year action research project with UNICEF and governments in Ethiopia, Togo, Côte d'Ivoire and Zambia, this paper explores the struggles of actors and organisations engaged in developing and implementing policies linked to SRGBV at national, mid and local levels. We examine interlinked political, conceptual and resource challenges that frequently hinder the multi-dimensional work needed to respond to and prevent the many forms of everyday violence in girls' and boys' lives. Finally, we explore the potential for strengthening government structures, and networks across sectors and state and non-state organisations, that are able to support the creative work of school communities to recontextualise policies, in order to generate more effective multi-dimensional policy enactments.

School-related gender-based violence (SRGBV) has received growing attention in policy and practice over the past decade, increasingly attended to in national and international contexts.Yet there remains a need to understand more fully the processes and actors, through which this policy enactment takes place. Drawing on theoretical work on policy discourse in education (Ball et al, 2011) and gender (Lombardo et al, 2009) this article analyses understandings of SRGBV by policy stakeholders in Ethiopia and Zambia. The analysis shows how the concept is discursively stretched by actors in positive ways, as well as shrunk and fixed in ways that limit its application, in gendered and political processes. We also extend Lombardo et al's conceptual framework to propose a new dimension of making 'bold' that involves contextualising and revealing less visible dimensions of SRGBV. We propose SRGBV offers a point where contestation between policy actors and sectors, and between contrasting understandings of violence, gender and socio-cultural norms, is inevitable.Opportunities for dialogue that include recognition of the everyday and gendered manifestations of violence may offer a contribution to facilitating policy enactment that moves towards a holistic and inclusive account of SRGBV, with the potential to have positive material impacts on equality.

Gender equality work in local government carried out during the 1980s presents a valuable site to explore the interaction between professional and feminist working. In the history of the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM) and feminist organizing more broadly in the UK, professional working has often been positioned as antithetical to feminist working, and relatively little scholarship has examined the interface between the two. This article argues that the individuals involved should be considered ‘professional feminists’ as opposed to ‘femocrats’, drawing from across feminist, social movement and organizational theory, and interviews carried out in 2011 and archival texts from three UK councils. It also suggests their work (undertaken between the beginning of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s) serves to blur the boundaries usually marked between social movement and state. This contributes to the existing literature by exploring the specific understandings and practices put to work by those working on gender equality professionally, but not in an elected capacity, within local government, and how their work can be positioned in relation to feminist organizing more broadly.

For decades local government has been an important site for the development of gender equality practice, and the implementation of legislation attempting to address inequality in the UK. The rise of 'municipal feminism' during the 1980s marked a particular instantiation of gender equality work. Yet at the time the relationship between this phenomena and legislation was not given significant attention. The Equality Acts of 2006 and 2010 have been key milestones for local government gender equality work subsequently, yet little work has considered the detail of their implementation at the ground level by council employees. This article contributes to addressing this gap by examining the influence of legislation on local government gender equality practice at this level, and how this has changed over three decades. It draws on findings from a comparative historical study of three sites within the UK.