Education, Poverty and Global Goals for Gender Equality

How People Make Policy Happen

Elaine Unterhalter, Amy North

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351597456
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Drawing on case-study research that examined initiatives which engaged with global aspirations to advance gender equality in schooling in Kenya and South Africa, this book looks at how global frameworks on gender, education and poverty are interpreted in local settings and the politics of implementation. It discusses the forms of global agreements in particular contexts, and allows for an appraisal of how they have been understood by the people who implement them.

By using an innovative approach to comparative cross country research, the book illuminates how ideas and actions connect and disconnect around particular meanings of poverty, education and gender in large systems and different settings. Its conclusions will allow assessments of the approach to the post-2015 agenda to be made, taking account of how policy and practice relating to global social justice are negotiated, sometimes negated, the forms in which they are affirmed and the actions that might help enhance them.

This book will be valuable for students, researchers, academics, senior teachers, senior government and inter-government officials and senior staff in NGOs working in the field of education and international development, gender, poverty reduction, and social development.

1
Introduction

As the new millennium dawned a chorus of voices asserted that linking policy and practice on gender, education and poverty might be, if not easy, largely a matter of political will and efficient planning.¹ As demonstrated in this book, analysis of practice indicates the frailty of this simple assertion. We examine some of the complex relationships entailed in the translation of global policy frameworks concerned with gender equality to national and local contexts, and whether, and on what terms, any authority is given to local actors. In charting the relationships entailed in taking global policy from a space of ideas, ideals and interpretations of experience, into action, we document how changed practice does and does not happen, and the ways in which people and the relationships they make are central to any process of change.

In September 2000 all the world’s leaders gathered in New York for the Millennium Summit of the United Nations (UN). A decade of unprecedented collaboration in the afterglow of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the end of the Cold War, had generated Declarations and cross-national working groups on pressing problems associated with poverty, climate change, inequalities, health, education, women’s rights and many more. The importance of addressing the question of rights not just through states, transnational bodies and formal institutions, but through civil society and culture was widely acknowledged. The significance of gender in all the areas in which change was needed had been noted in many circles. The Beijing Declaration and Platform of Action from the World Conference on Women in 1995 had been agreed by virtually every government and a huge gathering of NGOs. High levels of economic growth in many countries meant there was no shortage of money for development assistance and the proliferation of information technologies pointed to a future where communication and information problems could be easily surmounted. It seemed there was a perfect alignment for addressing questions of gender, education and poverty and connecting policy and practice in these areas. A number of commentators remarked on the potential of this moment (Unterhalter, 2007; Kabeer, 2015; Mukhopadhyay, 2015).

In this climate, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were agreed with a fifteen-year stretch to reaching targets which, in 2000, appeared achievable. The first three MDGs were concerned with poverty, education and gender (Appendix 1). MDG2 on education, and elements of MDG3 on gender, echoed goals set out in the Dakar Framework on Education for All (EFA), which had been agreed in June 2000, also with an achievement date set for 2015 and with goals on addressing education access, quality and gender equality. The MDGs and EFA as policy frameworks were formulated to guide and accelerate processes that were already in train internationally, in the reformist agendas of many governments, and echoed some, but not all, of the demands of feminist activists. Gender and education had been centrepieces of global policy making for thirty years, while the expansion of schooling and strategies to engage with poverty had figured prominently in post-colonial policy discussions across the world since the end of World War 2. However, there were divided views amongst feminist activists and women’s rights campaigners with regard to whether the location of gender equality reform in the MDG and EFA agenda was a good move, or, in the words of Peggy Antrobus, a most distracting gimmick (Antrobus, 2005). This book attempts to address this question, drawing on empirical data collected in Kenya, South Africa and in international organisations.

An unexamined assumption held by many, who agreed the MDGs and EFA, and went on to monitor and analyse them, was that policy rather than people made change happen in relation to gender equality. In this book, we question this. The argument we make shows that people, shaped by and shaping social relations under particular historical conditions, inside and outside government, take policy and re-make it through practice. The locations and relationships of people are an important part of how policy comes to be realised. The significance of this insight, long remarked in national studies of gender mainstreaming (Mkenda-Mugittu, 2003; Van Eerdewijk & Dubel, 2012; de Jong, 2016) is of particular salience when we need to understand gender equality policy and its transformation between global, national and local sites and the complexities of the relationships entailed. The settings, which comprise a mixture of physical, institutional and interpretative contexts, and the relationships of the people who inhabit these, have consequences for how policy is enacted as practice. People do not passively implement policy. They have views about the policy, even if they have not been directly involved in making it. Understanding the historically situated relationships of practices around gender equality policy is a key feature of understanding whether, or under what circumstances, global policy goals, like the MDGs, EFA and the current Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) may be realised. An appreciation of these contexts can contribute to understanding how the critiques of these frameworks by feminist activists can chart some alternative ways forward. In this book we are concerned to trace these relationships and processes of enactment across the boundaries of what is deemed global, national and local. We look at how we can better understand the interconnection and separation of people, groups and organisations working in differently located sites of practice.

We focus on practices in what Chege and Arnot (2012) have called a gender, education and poverty nexus. Their framing joins sites of economic and gender inequalities with attempts to address these through education. They stress that through ‘complex interactions’ the three elements shape each other (2012, p. 196). Gender, education and poverty, the three areas of social development we are looking at, have all been the focus of scrutiny and debate regarding what they mean and the implications of different forms of understanding. Gender inequality in education and some aspects of poverty featured prominently in the planning for implementing the MDGs and EFA, for example, and they were monitored in the annual UNESCO EFA Global Monitoring Reports (e.g. UNESCO, 2004; UNESCO, 2010). However, gender is a term that encompasses many meanings (Connell, 2014; Henderson, 2014; Harcourt, 2016; Unterhalter, 2016) as is poverty (Chambers, 2006; Desai and Potter, 2013; Beneria, Berik and Floro, 2015) and while education is conventionally associated with schools, and the learning and teaching that takes place within them, the term itself has very wide connotations and many modalities that exceed this narrow setting (Brighouse, 2006; Cowen and Kazamias, 2009). The fluidity of meanings and the challenges entailed in building connections across areas of social development highlight some of the potential and some of the difficulties of engagements for gender equality reform.

In a key article, Grindle and Thomas (1991) defined the policy space as a site of process in which key decision-makers in government departments used choice, research, information and affiliation to take particular positions. They highlighted that a policy reform initiative may be altered by pressures and reactions from those who oppose it. ‘Unlike the linear model, the interactive model views policy reform as a process, one in which interested parties can exert pressure for change at many points…. Understanding the location, strength and stakes involved in these attempts to promote, alter, or reverse policy reform initiatives is central to understanding the outcomes’ (1991, p. 126). The work generated enormous attention to interactions around policy, and a number of studies looked at some of these in relation to education (Dyer, 1999; Riddell, 1999) or gender issues (Crichton, 2008; Walt et al., 2008; Moser, 2012). However, this work focuses on governments and institutions and we widen our scope in a number of directions: first to take account of global, national, and local processes; second to investigate relationships amongst particularly situated people within and beyond government concerning policy; and third to take account of the fluidity of the concepts under negotiation regarding gender, education and poverty policy, each of which is not just one ‘thing’.

A prevalent feminist interpretation of the decade of the MDGs is that, for women’s rights activists, it was a period of loss and diversion from the vision outlined at Beijing in 1995 (Sen and Mukherjee, 2014; Kabeer, 2015; Sandler, 2015). Our aim is to document whether this perception was shared by people working on gender equality, poverty and education issues in particular global, national and local settings. We investigate the practices and perspectives of reformers and those who refused change.

Central to our investigation and analysis is differentiating a number of overlapping terrains for gender equality reform, which we have identified as constituting a middle space and which stretches between a policy and its realisations. This space, positioned between the global and national/local is crucial for flows of ideas, and practices, which can facilitate or impede the realisation of international gender equality policy, and any appreciation of local contexts. We see this middle space as extensive. It stretches between two poles. One is constituted by a text, which articulates a policy, such as the list of MDG targets. The other comprises a series of finished actions signalled by the text such as enrolling girls and boys in school without discriminating on grounds of poverty or gender. The middle space is a large ‘area’ of institutions, intentions, opportunities, relationships and enactments, all of which shape gender equality reforms differently. We differentiate this space from particular sites of origin and realisation for policies. Sites of origin fix the relationships which ensure a policy text is agreed or money is allocated for implementation. Sites of realisation delineate the relationships when, in accordance with the policy aim, a child attends school, learns, is examined and awarded a qualification. Between these two are myriad settings for what Ball, Maguire and Braun (2012) call policy enactments. We argue that these enactments are all situated in a middle space, and that it is on this terrain that gender equality reform is worked out in practice. Practices take place in contexts where relationships are already set up by history, politics, economics or culture. But these can change, and how they do and in what directions is both a normative and an empirical question.

This middle space has a number of different contours and is occupied by diverse groups. This means that perspectives on gender equality are not just articulated in one terrain. The middle space comprises what Habermas (1989, 1996) and Taylor (1992) have called the public sphere. This is a fluid space of media, local public meetings and lectures in which public reasoning is aired. Seyla Benhabib (2011), in her writing on political philosophy and her theorisation of political membership, develops a notion of the public sphere that mediates some of the tensions between the universal and the particular, and which can be used to think about reflections on gender equality reform. She has also sought to theorise what she calls the challenge of global constitutionalism, that is the architecture of global policy frameworks. While these frameworks draw critiques both from theorists who stress the importance of state sovereignty and from those who highlight the significance of forms of communitarianism, Benhabib characterises a form of engagement with these processes that she terms democratic iteration. This is a process of public argument, deliberation and evaluation. It is Habermasian discourse ethics in action. While this is particularly appropriate to Habermas’ idea of the public sphere, in Chapter 2 we develop an analysis that links democratic iteration with some of the ideas about the connection between different global and local spaces with regard to gender equality reform, and the practices of negotiating global policies.

A second terrain of this middle space is that of institutions, which frame, for example, the content and conduct of laws and regulations on gender equality, the organisation of a civil service, and assumptions about the exchange of money and services. A key perception of some of the work within national settings on gender mainstreaming, gender budgeting and getting institutions to respond to women and different facets of gender inequalities, had been that institutions were not sites where equality, rationality or efficiency could simply be imposed (Goetz, 1997; Moser and Moser, 2005; Waylen, 2007a). But the complexities of education institutions addressing gender inequalities across global, national and local boundaries have not been investigated very much, beyond documenting the difficulties of taking global gender equality policy into national settings (Greany, 2008; Manion, 2012; Russell, 2016). The ways that institutions concerned with gender reform may open or close down the terrain of the public sphere, and reflections from this terrain on gender and poverty, have not been much studied.

A third terrain of a middle space concerned with gender reform encompasses areas where institutions do not govern all aspects of social relationships. For example, relationships of professional conduct are sometimes regulated by official bodies. But they may also be guided by trade unions or more informal associations and by tacit codes of conduct. The relationships of professional associations most central to our investigation concern teachers, education officials, community workers and academic researchers, and hence we consider the extent to which gender equality was or was not part of their training, and practices of constitution, reflection and evaluation.

A fourth terrain of a middle space where gender equality reform is negotiated comprises other kinds of ‘non-professional’ relationships of sociability, such as the networks of friendship, the normative practices of NGOs around a common set of values or other types of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Contested meanings of gender equality in education
• PART 1
• PART 2
• Appendices
• Index