Empowering Women Leaders at the Local Level: Translating Descriptive Representation to Substantive Representation through ICT’s in Kerala, India is part of a larger research programme on Gender and Citizenship in the Information Society (CITIGEN), an Asia wide initiative that aims to examine the opportunities and challenges for women’s empowerment through the exploration of gender and citizenship in the emergent socio-technological paradigm of the information age. It seeks to build a theoretical framework and generate policy directions from the perspective of marginalised women in the region by calling for a politicisation of the discourse around gender and ICT’s to include feminist questions of equity, power and justice. The present project is an effort towards building an ICT enabled community of women elected representatives of local governments in Kerala in which women serve both as creators and users of knowledge pertaining to varied aspects of governance and also reflect upon their own positioning within. Through the politicization of this knowledge network it is envisaged that women will be able to challenge patriarchal power and the domination they experience within self-governing institutions and local political structures. The digital platform www. gramamukhya. in has been designed to facilitate free articulation and sharing of experiences, concerns and knowledge within the network while at the same time opening up the possibility for women to critically engage with issues pertaining not only to governance but also to wider public life.

Ours is an action research project placed within the framework of what Miraftab has termed ‘invited and invented spaces of participation’after Cornwall’s (2002) formulation of ‘invited spaces’ in the context of her critique of participatory development. It has been argued by Cornwall and Goetz that women’s political effectiveness can be gained through their “political apprenticeship-their experiences in political parties, civil society associations and the informal arenas in which political skills are learned and constituencies built”(2005). But can apprenticeship in gendered formal and informal spaces of politics, however extended, actually lead them to be politically effective in ‘invited spaces’?