Gender Justice and Development: Local and Global

Volume I

Christine Koggel, Cynthia Bisman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317527886
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

It is now generally accepted by development theorists and policy-makers that the popular policies of reducing or eliminating social welfare programs over the past several decades have increased inequalities and injustices throughout the world. The authors in this collection focus on the gendered aspects of these inequalities and injustices. They do so by exploring the ethics, values, and principles central to understanding and alleviating real-world problems resulting from a lack of gender justice locally and globally.

Some of the authors offer new theoretical and conceptual frameworks in order to analyze connections between gender norms and inequalities, to devise strategies to empower women and strengthen communities, to challenge mainstream understandings of justice and responsibility, to promote caring and just relationships among people within and across borders, or to shape more adequate accounts of development and global ethics. Other authors apply new theories and concepts in order to explore gender justice in the context of issues such as climate change, land ownership rights in Cameroon, or empowerment strategies in places such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Ghana, Columbia, and Indonesia.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethics and Social Welfare.

INTRODUCTION

Gender Justice and Development: Local and Global

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Cynthia Bisman and Christine M. Koggel

The past several decades have brought worldwide agendas about rights and justice to the forefront of international policy debates. Throughout the 1990s, UN conferences reflected these areas in opening space for discourse on issues such as women’s rights and the environment. While the economic and political crises of the new millennium have slowed the pace of commitments to the pursuit of equality for all, debates about how best to promote equality and justice continue with increasing awareness at local, national and global levels that gender theory and policy is critical in alleviating poverty and promoting economic growth. These features of the global context led to ‘Gender Justice and Development: Local and Global’ as the theme for the biennial conference of the Ninth International Development Ethics Association (IDEA) hosted 9–11 June 2011 at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, USA, at which about 100 papers were presented by participants from around the world. This special issue of Ethics and Social Welfare collects a small number of the conference papers, many of which were keynote addresses and all of which address the theme of Gender Justice. The authors reflect diverse theoretical, conceptual, empirical and practical perspectives from research areas that include the humanities, social sciences, law and policy.

The theme, ‘Gender Justice and Development: Local and Global’, is especially timely with recent trends toward diminishment of social welfare and social justice, continuing oppression of women and increasing attention to global issues. In addition to discussions of ethics, values and principles this issue covers practical applications and highlights the at times tragic real-world problems resulting from lack of gender justice locally and globally. The authors in this issue offer new ways of thinking for a discourse to reduce discrimination against women, to strengthen communities toward sustainability and development and to promote caring relationships among people within and across borders even while some nations are reducing supports toward these ends.

The issue opens with three papers that make use of theoretical and conceptual frameworks for understanding gender and analysing injustices. In each case, the authors move between the global and the local to examine possibilities for promoting women’s empowerment in specific areas of the world. Naila Kabeer examines the concepts of empowerment, citizenship and gender justice to argue that citizenship, in conferring legal status and making activism possible, can bridge the gulf between institutional change at the level of entrenched gender norms and individual change at the level of empowering particular women. She draws from empirical research of women in Afghanistan and Bangladesh to explore what development organizations can and should do in their efforts to empower women.

The notion of entrenched gender norms is pursued in the second paper by Patti Petesch, who uses the concept of ‘stickiness’ to delineate bad and good aspects in development projects designed to empower women. The ‘stickiness’ of gender norms is bad because norms entrench power relations and injustices in ways that are difficult to remove or change. However, the ‘stickiness’ of innovations is good when they result in development projects that are successful and can take hold. By examining two development projects, one of health in Ghana and the other of microfinance in a conflict-ridden region of Columbia, Petesch shows how attention to the ‘twin stickies’ can highlight ‘local and global pathways to women’s empowerment’. The third paper, by Jan Newberry, complicates the analysis of women’s empowerment by turning our attention to the ways in which a global context of neo-liberal policies can give meaning to and have a detrimental impact on women in specific contexts. While Indonesia ended its 32-year authoritarian rule in 1997, democracy came with global neo-liberal reform that emphasized the removal of social welfare programs. In Indonesia this now means that the current emphasis on children’s empowerment (by the United Nations and NGOs) has childhood care and education programs continue to exploit women’s work, as the government did during the period of authoritarian rule, to provide social welfare at the community level.

Lotsmart Fonjong, Irene Sama-Lang and Lawrence Fombe further the gender justice discussion by exploring local land rights in anglophone Cameroon within a global context of women’s rights to land. Drawing from empirical data they explore the historical development of customary laws against women’s rights to land while considering the societal implications of this custom of gender discrimination with its negative effects of inadequate food, increasing poverty, decreasing choice, impeding sustainable development and perpetuating violence against women. They argue for an inclusive process of broad-based consultation to develop ethically informed gender-based reforms.

In their argument that gender justice must go beyond a rights perspective toward one of transformative change, Petra Tschakert and Mario Machado advocate use of a human security lens to address the power imbalances that enable inequality around gender, as well as of class and other differences. To alter the climate change dialogue, emphasis on caring and connectedness is necessary in encouraging wider participation, thereby increasing the overall potential of individuals, communities and societies. Shifting from studies of vulnerability to assessments of inequality can better connect people in their shared experiences, impede the perpetuation of injustices and fill a critical need in the work toward climate justice.

The final two papers focus on theory, and specifically on relational theory and its challenge to mainstream liberal accounts of justice and responsibility. Jennifer Llewellyn develops a feminist relational theory of justice—what she also refers to as restorative justice—to argue that in its focus on relationships and the goal of building relationships of equal respect, concern and dignity, restorative justice highlights the importance of addressing peace, justice and development as integrated and interconnected aspects of what it means to address injustices and build lasting peace. Restorative justice, she argues, is in stark contrast to retributive justice and its focus on individualized punishment of wrongdoers as the way to address past injustices. In the final paper, Joan Tronto develops an account of relational responsibilities, one that departs from standard accounts of partiality to sketch a partialist and rich account of the complex nature of relationships and to defend a robust account of our responsibilities to others (Koggel & Orme 2010, 2011). The result is an argument for a global ethics that explains the responsibilities of people in rich countries to those in poor countries in relational terms. An account of partial connections of relational responsibility asks us to do the hard work of assessing values and relationships in order to determine our concrete responsibilities to others in a global context.

References

International Development Ethics Association (IDEA) Available at: <http://developmentethics.org/> (accessed 25 May 2012).

Koggel, C. & Orme, J. (2010) ‘Care Ethics: New Theories and Applications’, Ethics and Social Welfare, Vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 188–200.

Koggel, C. & Orme, J. (2011) ‘Care Ethics: New Theories and Applications: Part II’, Ethics and Social Welfare, Vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 107–9.

Empowerment, Citizenship and Gender Justice: A Contribution to Locally Grounded Theories of Change in Women’s Lives

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Naila Kabeer

Struggles for gender justice by women’s movements have sought to give legal recognition to gender equality at both national and international levels. However, such society-wide goals may have little resonance in the lives of individual men and women in contexts where a culture of individual rights is weak or missing and the stress is on the moral economy of kinship and community. While empowerment captures the myriad ways in which intended and unintended changes can enhance the ability of individual women to exercise greater control over their own lives, it does not necessarily lead to their engagement in collective struggles for gender justice. This paper argues that ideas about citizenship, as both legal status and potential for action, can help bridge this gulf between institutional and individual change. It draws on empirical research from Afghanistan and Bangladesh to explore the extent to which efforts to empower women by development organisations have also encompassed discourses of citizenship which allow them to articulate, and act on, their vision for a just society.

Introduction

This paper is concerned with the relationship between empowerment, citizenship and gender justice. I see these as signposting distinct but interrelated pathways of social change in women’s lives which can, but do not necessarily, overlap. I understand women’s empowerment to have an irreducibly subjective component. Whatever else, it must entail changes in women’s consciousness, in the way they perceive themselves and their relationships with others. It thus begins with individual change. Gender justice concerns the institutional arrangements that govern society including, but not only, its legal system—and the extent to which these promote the fair treatment of men and women. Struggles around gender justice are then struggles around notions of fairness at the institutional level. I will be arguing that ideas about citizenship offer an important bridge between these two processes of change because they help to mediate the translation of individual notions of selfhood into socially recognised identities.

In formal terms, gender justice refers to international norms and conventions relating to women’s rights as well as various forms of national legislation seeking to promote gender equality. While there are various factors behind this emerging architecture of rights, a major driving force has undoubtedly been the efforts of feminist activists who see the formal recognition of women’s rights as a critical pathway to substantive gender justice. However, legal gender equality has not necessarily translated into gender justice where it matters most: in the everyday life of millions of men and women, most of whom have not taken any part in these efforts and many of whom may not even know that they exist.

At the same time, various intended and unintended forces have been acting on some of the long-standing patriarchal constraints that limit women’s agency in everyday life: these include rising levels of education, increasing rates of labour force participation as well as a variety of development interventions, many targeted explicitly at women such as microcredit, cash transfers and reproductive health. Yet, as various studies have shown, women’s individual empowerment has not translated everywhere into greater awareness of their rights or greater willingness to act on them.

This paper explores how interactions between women’s empowerment, citizenship and struggles for gender justice play out in societies in which ideas about gender equality and women’s rights have very shallow roots because individuality itself as a way of life has little or no place. I begin in the next section by discussing efforts to formulate these concepts in ways that take account of the challenges posed by such contexts, starting with my own effort to conceptualise women’s empowerment.

Empowerment, Citizenship and Gender Justice: Conceptual Approaches

My definition of empowerment takes choice as its central concept (Kabeer 1999). I defined empowerment as the processes of change through which those who have been denied the capacity to exercise choice gain this capacity. However, I qualified the notion of choice in a number of ways to make it relevant to the analysis of empowerment.

My first qualification related to the conditions in which women make their choices. For choice to be meaningful there have to be alternatives, the possibility of having chosen otherwise. My concern here was with women’s apparent compliance with, or at least failure to protest against, norms and values which assigned them an inferior status to men in their society. Such compliance can be variously interpreted. It may reflect an unquestioning acceptance of these norms and values, the belief that they represent a satisfactory, even valued, way of organising social relationships. It may reflect the material costs associated with protest. Where women are economically dependent on those with power and authority over them, attempts to question the status quo can undermine their primary source of survival and security in their society. Or there may be social costs. If there are strong pressures within society to conform to given norms and values, transgression risks harassment or ostracism.

There is also the question of perceived alternatives. To what extent is it possible for women to conceive of having chosen or acted differently? In societies where gender inequalities of personhood are so deeply embedded in the family and kinship relations, so intimately bound up with constructions of the self as gendered subjects, that to question them would be to question the meaning of one’s existence, there is little scope for imagining other ways of organising social relations. This touches on Bourdieu’s idea of doxa, aspects of traditions and norms that are so taken for granted that they take on a naturalised and unquestioned quality.

Two other qualifications related to the consequences of choice. The first concerned the distinction between trivial and significant choices, between the choices that we make on a mundane basis every day of our lives and the more strategic life choices that have profound consequences for the quality and direction of the lives we are able to lead.

The second related to the consequences of choice for the broader structures of inequality that prevail within a society. To what extent do the choices in question undermine, and even transform, these structures, and to what extent do they merely reproduce them? Choices which embody the fundamental inequalities of society, which systematically devalue the self or undermine the capacity for choice of others, are not compatible with most feminist understandings of empowerment, however active the agency underlying these choices may appear.

Let me now turn to O’Neill’s work (1990) for a conceptualisation of gender justice that attempts to take account of the kinds of patriarchal constraints that I am talking about. O’Neill seeks to steer a course between the idealised and relativist approaches which have dominated recent debates on this topic. Idealised approaches, exemplified by much of liberal theory, claim universalism by abstracting from the particularities of persons, such as gender or ethnicity, in favour of the abstract individual as bearer of rights and responsibilities. The problem with this conceptualisation of the individual is that it idealises a free-floating agency that is more easily exercised by men than women because it assumes away the relations of dependence and interdependence which are central to the lives available to most women in the real world.

Relativised approaches, exemplified by much of communitarian theory, explicitly acknowledge differences between people and seek to ground ideas about justice in the discourse and traditions of actual communities. The objection here is that most communities relegate varying portions of women’s lives to the domestic sphere. Not only do such approaches fail to take account of women’s productive capacities and the practicalities of earning a living that many face but they also endorse the exclusion ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Gender Justice and Development: Local and Global
• 2. Empowerment, Citizenship and Gender Justice: A Contribution to Locally Grounded Theories of Change in Women’s Lives
• 3. Unlocking Pathways to Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality: The Good, The Bad, and the Sticky
• 4. Empowering Children, Disempowering Women
• 5. Implications of Customary Practices on Gender Discrimination in Land Ownership in Cameroon
• 6. Gender Justice and Rights in Climate Change Adaptation: Opportunities and Pitfalls
• 7. Integrating Peace, Justice and Development in a Relational Approach to Peacebuilding
• 8. Partiality Based on Relational Responsibilities: Another Approach to Global Ethics
• Index