A launch Webinar for the Gender and Development Journal’s November 2025 Special Issue on “Beijing +30” took place on March 5. Mercy Makpor, Junior Research Associate at the United Nations University – Operating Unit on Policy-driven Electronic Governance (UNU-EGOV), participated in the panel as one of the contributors to the Issue.
Mercy Makpor presented her paper, “Bridging the gender gap in the digital age: The role of digital governance in advancing feminist futures post-Beijing +30,” outlining concrete steps that different stakeholders can take to meet the promise of Beijing +30.
She emphasized the importance of the voices of marginalised communities, stressing that without them “no amount of policy language will bridge the gap between commitment and reality”.
The paper examines how digital governance (the policies, regulations, and institutional arrangements that shape how digital technologies are developed and deployed) can promote or undermine the gender equality goals set out thirty years ago in the Beijing Platform for Action.
The November 2025 Issue on “Beijing +30”
The Beijing +30 special issue of the Gender and Development Journal builds on a 2020 issue published to mark the 25th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women and the adoption of the Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA).
While the earlier issue assessed progress and challenges for gender justice at the time, amid the global COVID-19 pandemic, the new issue revisits these questions five years later in a rapidly changing global context.
The Beijing +30 issue reflects on how crises such as wars, climate change, rising conservatism, and growing inequalities are affecting the implementation of the BPfA. It explores how feminist movements and marginalised groups are responding to these challenges and how the BPfA is being reinterpreted and mobilised to advance more just and equitable futures.
The special issue will be guest edited by a group of reputed gender experts, including Lina Abou-Habib, Hashem Hashem, and Deniz Alca, who have been involved in decades of feminist activism and knowledge generation.
The Gender and Development Journal was founded in 1993, and it is co-published by Oxfam and Routledge/Taylor & Francis.