Gender & Development Gender, poverty, and inequality: a brief history of feminist contributions in the field of international development (original) (raw)
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Women and Development- Issues and Challenges
2018
The discourse on development has traditionally constructed women as beneficiaries and not as key players in creating an equitable society. The deep rooted patriarchal structures coupled with the hegemonic tendencies of the neo liberal state have further pushed them to the margins. However, women constitute half of the humanity and any discursive space would offer only a partial account of progress if it fails to take note of their vast potential. It is imperative, therefore, that any development agenda must evolve a nuanced approach that factors in the differentials – whether it be caste, class, race, sexuality and religion or a combination of all three. The writings in this book cover a wide spectrum of issues from a gendered perspective, critically scrutinizing existing policies and attempting to signal towards the alternative models. Among the themes discussed are: • Deconstructing development from a gendered perspective :Ideological debates • The discourse on rights and resisting inequalities • Reviewing and recasting initiatives: Policies and programmes • Women and media • Viewing women as beneficiaries or determinants? With its interdisciplinary character related to the development discourse in the context of women, this collection of papers will be of great interest to sociologists, historians, political scientists, educationists, home scientists, and those interested in gender studies and policy making.
The pre-World War II period saw flourishing movements of various forms of feminism; however, the nexus between (economic) development and women was not clearly articulated until the second half of the 20th century. Women first came into focus in development as objects of welfare policies, including birth control, nutrition, pregnancy, and so forth. [1] "In 1962 the UN General Assembly asked the Commission on Women's Status to prepare a report on the role of women in development. Ester Boserup's path breaking study on Women's Role in Economic Development was published in 1970." [2] These events marked monumental moments in developing liberal paradigm of women in development, and the welfarist approach still remains dominant in development practices today. This article scrutinizes various approaches in gender and development, but primarily covers the dominant liberal approaches starting from WID,
Third World Women in the Development Process: Feminist Thoughts and Debates
Higher Education of Social Science, 2011
Today, the worldwide development concern is going through a new awareness of the importance of women issues in development policies and process which become crucial issue, but most of the time women's are not actual beneficiaries of development policies especially in the Third World countries women. Women are the almost fifty percent of total population in the world, so we have to priority them to development. Otherwise in terms of socio, economic development we can not go far. In this context most of the feminist have criticized the development processes and suggests for an alternative model of development, which should be development from women's point of view and human development. So the main objective of this paper is goes to analyze feminist debate and thoughts about third world women and development process. To discus this issue here I also discuss women and development in the third world and the situation of women in the third world process from South Asian (Bangladesh) and Sub Saharan Africa (Uganda) perspective.
Feminisms in Development: Contradictions, Contestations and Challenges
2008
The contributors to this book are from the North and South and include trainers on development issues, a filmmaker, policy-makers, advisers to large international NGOs (INGOs) and United Nations programmes, as well as academics. In acknowledgement of the frequently uneasy relationship between feminism and development, this book is an attempt to reposition feminism within development studies. Its central argument is that many development institutions function through bureaucratic structures and unequal power differentials that undermine feminist intentions. Maxine Molyneux's powerful concluding chapter challenges the myth, as she sees it, 'that gender has been so successfully mainstreamed into development policy that there is now little need for women's projects and programmes, or indeed for women's policy units' (p. 227). Certainly, there has been significant progress with female literacy, longevity, health and access to political life. [1] Yet Molyneux is concerned about the 'globalization of feminism, ' that is, a process in which 'the transformative agenda has been captured by power, co-opted and instrumentalized, and its political vision has been neutralized, where not excised' (p. 234). Many of the 18 essays explore aspects of this process of neutralization and seek to resist it. Many authors are concerned to reopen questions seen as settled. The book's subtitle, 'contradictions, contestations and challenges' is a testament to the contributors' scrutiny of assumptions concerning gender and development. The editors affirm the pluralist nature of feminism, and argue also that '"development" covers a multitude of theoretical and political stances and a wide diversity of practices' (p. 1). They reflect on the fact that despite the engagement within gender and development (GAD) research and the abundant literature on gender mainstreaming, the project of social transformation that is at the height of feminists' activism and engagement
Critically analyse the contribution of feminism to contemporary development thinking
During the last three decades, sociologists have studied the increasing presence of women in both developmental studies, and practice. At the same time, most international organizations, especially the United Nations development fund for women, have emphasized the empowerment of women, alongside gender mainstreaming in developmental initiatives (World Conferences on Women). The international organizations have focused on the integration of women as a means to increase gender equality in development projects, but have experienced several challenges (Tinker, 2002). The escalations of feminism through debates, protests, intellectual pursuits, and contributions to revolutions, have paved the way for the integration of women in development thinking (Epstein, 2001).
Women/Gender and Development: the Growing Gap Between Theory and Practice
Studies in Comparative International Development, 2017
Briefly reviewing the evolution of the field of women development, the author argues that the field has lost the dynamism characteristic of earlier periods of constructive tension between theory and practice that led to the adoption of the gender and development framework and the incorporation of issues of multiculturalism, human rights, and political participation into a field that had largely been defined in economic terms. Today, however, critical theory is caught in an Banti-neoliberal^position that is increasingly outdated and that has interpreted women's work, individual agency, and the role of the state in ways that hinder rather than facilitate new thinking and better outcomes for women participants in WID/GAD projects and programs. Keywords Women/gender and development. Liberalism. Neoliberalism. Feminist theory Marking the fortieth anniversary of the creation of the Women in Development Office at USAID (in 2014), the twentieth anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action (in 2015), and the continued commitment to gender equality in the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, this essay reflects on the origin, evolution, and future of the field of Women/Gender and Development. I draw on my personal experiences as a scholar, bureaucrat, and activist to argue that the sometimes contentious exchanges between feminist theorists and those
WOMEN AND DEVELOPMENT: REVISITING THE TOWARDS EQUALITY REPORT
This excursus examines the tropes of gendering the trajectories of development and it seeks to do that through an assessment of the Towards Equality Report which was a path breaking attempt to evaluate the range and scope of development through the optics of gender. Equality has been the goal of the women's movements in India through its teleological development. The triggering point can be traced back to the path-breaking report -Towards Equality: Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India, published in 1974 which provides a vantage point to have a parallax view of the women's movement in India vis-à-vis Indian democracy and the building of the modern nation. This publication which is called a 'benchmark' indicated the beginning of the new phase in the women's movement, along with other two factors. One is the oppositional movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the other is the resistance developed towards the Emergency issued by the first female Prime Minister of India. This report not only offered a reality-check on the condition of women in India, it also unravelled the disenchantment of women with the existing models of development and the process of modernisation in the Nehruvian era. It offers a critique of the role of the state vis-à-vis women's development and it uncovers how state policy failed to live up to the constitutional mandates of equality in every field for man and woman. Thus, it necessitated a kind of shift from the egalitarian scientific method of development. It forced a kind of reconceptualisation of the prevalent discourses on development, economic empowerment, policy-making, political