Policy Approaches to Dis/ability Inclusive Development

Sammanfattning: Dis/ability rights have for a long time been excluded from the discourse and practice of international development. This has taken a turn with the creation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. International organisations have extended their policies on dis/ability, and some development agents now explicitly mainstream dis/ability. Sweden, however, does not have a specific policy on dis/ability mainstreaming. This thesis aims to examine how the Swedish international development cooperation agency (Sida) deals with the inclusion of dis/ability in policy and practice. A textual analysis in combination with interviews has been thematically applied to a framework of dis/ability mainstreaming in order to study this question. The findings present an analysis of to what extent the current Sida approach to dis/ability resembles dis/ability mainstreaming, as well as some indicators of the implications of using the current approach in terms of including dis/ability perspectives. The results indicate that Sida has a comprehensive framework that allows for dis/ability inclusion, but this framework is not implemented evenly and is highly dependent on context.