Feminisms in Development

Contradictions, Contestations and Challenges

Andrea Cornwall, Elizabeth Harrison, Ann Whitehead, Andrea Cornwall, Elizabeth Harrison, Ann Whitehead

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781848136694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection of essays by leading feminist thinkers from North and South constitutes a major new attempt to reposition feminism within development studies. Feminism's emphasis on social transformation makes it fundamental to development studies. Yet the relationship between the two disciplines has frequently been a troubled one. At present, the way in which many development institutions function often undermines feminist intent through bureaucratic structures and unequal power quotients. Moreover, the seeming intractability of inequalities and injustice in developing countries have presented feminists with some enormous challenges. Here, emphasizing the importance of a plurality of approaches, the authors argue for the importance of what 'feminisms' have to say to development. Confronting the enormous challenges for feminisms in development studies, this book provides real hope for dialogue and exchange between feminisms and development.

1 | Introduction: feminisms in development: contradictions, contestations and challenges

ANDREA CORNWALL, ELIZABETH HARRISON AND ANN WHITEHEAD

This book explores the contested relationship between feminisms and development and the challenges for reasserting feminist engagement with development as a political project. Its starting point is pluralist – there are feminisms, not feminism, and ‘development’ covers a multitude of theoretical and political stances and a wide diversity of practices. Our contributors represent some of this diversity. They include those who have been involved with key conceptual and political advances in analysis and policy, feminist ‘champions’ from within development organizations, and researchers and practitioners engaged in critical reflection on gender generalizations and their implications for policy and practice.

Most of the chapters in the book derive from a workshop held at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, in July 2003. Entitled ‘Gender Myths and Feminist Fables: Repositioning Gender in Development Policy and Practice’, this workshop was designed to encourage reflection and taking stock. It drew together people from across diverse sites of thinking and practice that constitute contemporary engagement with questions of gender in development. One widely shared perspective was the sobering recognition of the enormous gap between feminists’ aspirations for social transformation and the limited, though important, gains that have been made.

Gender inequality has proven to be much more intractable than anticipated. In several arenas women’s capabilities and quality of life have worsened, not improved; legislative reform is not matched by changes in political and economic realities to enable women to use new laws; gains in one sphere have produced new, detrimental forms of gender inequality; women everywhere are having to fight to get their voices heard, despite new emphases on democracy, voice and participation. At the same time, arguments made by feminist researchers have become denatured and depoliticized when taken up by development institutions. For many, what were once critical insights, the results of detailed research, have now become ‘gender myths’: essentialisms and generalizations, simplifying frameworks and simplistic slogans.

This introduction sets out three interconnected themes that our contributors explore to illuminate these disappointments. These are also reflected in the structure of the book. First, we highlight the struggle for interpretive power as a core element of feminist engagement with development. Moves from ‘women’ to ‘gender’ and the creation and critique of specific gender myths signal what has been a continual battle over interpretation – a battle that is embedded in a politics of engagement in which the initial power quotients are unequal. Second, we scrutinize how the way that development institutions function undermines feminist intent. Bureaucratic resistance plays a major role here, but the ways in which this takes place are complex, reflecting power both inside and outside of institutions. Lastly, we explore a major challenge in the project of repoliticizing feminism in gender and development; that of how to achieve solidarity across difference, because there is no simple ‘us’ in feminism, let alone a single diagnosis of either problems or their solutions. This is especially demanding in a context of shifting development policy preoccupations, changing aid modalities and ever more polarized geo-politics.

Thirty years of feminist engagement with development has led to the distinctive and plural field of inquiry and practice of gender and development. This field includes an institutionalized set of practices and discourses within development institutions which goes under the acronym GAD, but it is not confined to this. The wider field of gender and development also refers to the innovations in research, analysis and political strategies brought about by very diversely located researchers and activists. There has been no shortage of reflexive engagement within gender and development research, writing and activism (Kabeer 1994; Goetz 1997; Miller and Razavi 1998). The collection edited by Cecile Jackson and Ruth Pearson (1998), Feminist Visions of Development, critically reflected on changing orthodoxies, and on issues of positionality and representation. And a growing and increasingly sophisticated literature exists on the experience of gender mainstreaming (for example, Macdonald 2003; Rai 2003; Kabeer 2003; Prügl and Lustgarten 2005). This book engages with these debates through a particular lens, that of the narratives that gender and development has done much to popularize. It is situated firmly in the changing global context, in which new myths and struggles for interpretive power are emerging.

Feminists work towards social transformation and in doing so create new political spaces. The influence of forums such as DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era) and AWID (Association for Women’s Rights in Development), and the many international networks of researchers and activists, has been vitally important in stimulating debate and engagement on the challenges of redressing gender inequalities. The contributors to this collection provide several examples of critical struggles for voice, representation and resources through forums such as these. As new forms of political space, they have succeeded in lending visibility to demands for change, creating constituencies that span diverse contexts, and alliances between those working at different sites of development policy and practice. It is through them that many real gains have been made.

The project of social transformation demands not only activism but also engagement with the content and processes of international development policy – not least because, despite the failure of most states to meet the target of 0.7 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for their aid budgets, spending in aid and loans has been rising in the last twenty-five years. For many very poor countries this now constitutes a major source of government revenue. A central element of that engagement has been the development and proliferation of the concept of ‘gender mainstreaming’, discussed in several chapters in this book.

Officially first adopted by the UN at the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing, gender mainstreaming was seen by many feminists as a response to the need more fully to ‘integrate women’ in development policy and practice. However, once adopted within development institutions, the practice of gender mainstreaming has led to further disappointments – as Gouws puts it: ‘While the driving force around gender activism used to be women’s experience, mainstreaming turns it into a technocratic category for redress that also suppresses the differences between women’ (2005: 78). Arguably, the ready adoption of gender mainstreaming by development institutions may itself reflect the fact that working with a technocratic category may be a more attractive proposition than achieving gender justice.

Reflecting these themes, the book is structured as follows. Chapters in the first section explore the origins and status of some of the gender orthodoxies that have become embedded in gender and development advocacy and programming. Some interrogate particular axioms, locating them within struggles for interpretative power that shape policy processes and politics. Others explore how policy fields have been constructed in specific ways in particular places. They address the making and shaping of the language of ‘gender’ in development.

Part two turns its focus more directly on development institutions. Contributors examine the ways in which changing constructions of ‘gender’ have framed the objects of development and set the parameters for debate and intervention. Speaking from different locations within development organizations, contributors analyse the institutional dimensions of efforts at gender transformation. Several look closely at how gender mainstreaming has affected progress towards gender equality and the power of the gender agenda within development institutions. Lastly, Part three moves beyond the often insular world of development institutions and debates to the social and political contexts in which development interventions are located. We consider issues emerging from the new frames through which development has come to be ‘read’ – such as the efflorescence of talk of ‘rights’, ‘citizenship’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘democratization’ in recent years. Contributors set feminist engagement with development on a broader geopolitical terrain, capturing dilemmas, struggles and conquests, as well as new ambivalences and uncertainties.

The struggle for interpretive power

The adoption of the language of ‘gender’ and of phrases associated with feminist activism to address women’s subordination and gender inequality within gender and development policy and practice is a not entirely palatable fruit of a long-run struggle. In the course of it, lessons learnt from particular places have been turned into sloganized generalities: ‘women are the poorest of the poor’, ‘women do most of the work in African agriculture’, ‘educating girls leads to economic development’, and so on. Simplification, sloganization even, have been understood as necessary to get gender on to the development agenda. Some of these gender myths have provided extremely useful Trojan Horses to lever open debates and to mobilize support. Others have been deployed as a kind of catchy shorthand to capture the policy limelight, generating in their wake popular preconceptions that gain an axiomatic quality that becomes difficult to dislodge. Women appear in these slogans, fables and myths both as abject victims, the passive subjects of development’s rescue, and as splendid heroines, whose unsung virtues and whose contributions to development need to be heeded.

The word ‘myth’ is often used as a synonym for ‘not true’. In development writing, articles about ‘myths’ are often concerned with busting them, showing their falsity, enlightening readers to the ‘facts’. Myths may be bolstered by what economists call ‘stylized facts’; they may be nurtured with selective statistics, with case studies, with quotes, with vignettes. In using the term ‘myth’ here, our intention is not to join in the ‘myth busting’. It is, rather, to inquire into how the stories about ‘gender’ have drawn on feminist research in ways that may be dissonant with the original intentions of the authors, or with the realities they describe. These stories are not necessarily based on untruth, nor on faulty data. They might well extrapolate from one setting to another, use partial and cautious findings to make incautious claims. But they may also be based on the soundest of fieldwork, the most scrupulously rigorous research design. This in itself has little bearing on whether or not they make suitable material for myth-making. What makes them ‘myths’ has nothing to do with what they tell us about the world. It is the way in which they encode the ways of that world in a form that resonates with the things that people would like to believe, that gives them the power to affect action (Sorel 1999).

Narratives advocating GAD have done a great deal within development institutions. They have facilitated the dedication of resources, the production of policy spaces, the creation of a cadre of professionals and a body of organizations of various kinds whose work is to deal with issues of gender. ‘Discourse coalitions’ (Hajer 1995) constructed around particular feminist insights (for example, that households are sites of conflict as well as cooperation; that women face a double burden of productive and reproductive work) have involved those working inside development institutions and feminist activists and lobbyists, grassroots practitioners and feminist academics who do not. ‘Gender’ has been foundational, both as an organizing principle and a rallying call, for these discourse coalitions. This concept has been put to myriad uses in attempts to redefine and reshape development intervention. Researchers have used it to generate insights into the relational dimensions of planned intervention that development policy and practice had ignored. Activists and advocates have used it to frame a set of demands and to challenge, and reframe, assumptions.

In many ways, the generalizations that are now part of the currency of GAD therefore represent a success story. Originating in the discourses of a minority of politically motivated advocates, they are now taken for granted and espoused by people occupying many different spaces in a multitude of development institutions. But the extent of change in women’s lives does not match this discursive landslide. The equation of women and poverty does not seem to have had much effect on reducing women’s poverty. And all but the most stoic defenders of ‘gender mainstreaming’ would admit that for all the effort that has been poured into trying to make mainstreaming work, many agencies would be hard pressed to boast much in the way of effects in terms of institutional policies and practices.

There has been an increasing sense among many involved in the feminist struggle to put ‘gender’ on the agenda in development institutions that the term itself has been effectively eviscerated of any of its original political intent. Represented to technocrats and policy-makers in the form of tools, frameworks and mechanisms, ‘gender’ became a buzzword in development frameworks in the 1990s. In more recent times, it has fallen from favour and has a jaded, dated feel to it. Diluted, denatured, depoliticized, included everywhere as an afterthought, ‘gender’ may have become something everyone who works for an aid organization knows that they are supposed to do something about. But quite what, and what would happen if they carried on ignoring it, is rarely pungent or urgent enough to distract the attention of many development bureaucrats and practitioners from business as usual. An aid bureaucrat from a bilateral agency considered by many to be one of the most progressive summed it up: ‘when it comes to “gender”, everyone sighs’ (Cornwall, fieldnotes).

The term ‘gender’ initially offered sufficient scope, despite the potentially disparate meanings that different actors might give to it in practice, to bring them together in a transformative project to which all were able to subscribe. But despite tangible, material positive effects, when taken up and used by development institutions, ‘gender’ has clearly proved to be a double-edged sword. Why is this so? Making sense of these dynamics calls for a closer look at the ways in which development institutions make use of research, and at the politics of the policy process itself.

Development agencies are continually in search of clearly put, policy-friendly stories that tell them what the problem is and how it might be solved. Analysis of policy processes has recently focused on the ‘framing, naming, numbering and coding’ (Apthorpe 1996: 16) that underlies development policy, and on the way particular narratives come to be produced and reproduced in the process, sometimes in the face of glaringly contradictory evidence (Keeley and Scoones 2003; Mosse 2005). What this rich body of work highlights is the extent to which the use of particular representations of those whom development seeks to assist are worked into ‘story-lines’ that come not only to frame, but also to legitimize particular kinds of intervention and forms of knowledge (Hajer 1995; Keeley and Scoones 2003). Emery Roe’s (1991) analysis of development policies as narratives offers important insights into this process. By framing development dilemmas in ways that invoke heroic interventions that rescue those in need and provide the means to a happy ending, policies imbue particular pathways for action with moral purpose. Yet while these narratives encode particular meanings of concepts like ‘gender’ or ‘participation’, other meanings come into play as policies are translated into practice; they may frame, but never completely contain, alternative interpretations.

The struggle over meaning occurs and has occurred in a constantly changing discursive landscape. Cecília Sardenberg’s chapter provides a detailed analysis of the debates among feminists in different geographical contexts that gave rise to the adoption of ‘gender’. The use of particular terminology may represent either depoliticization or repoliticization – which in turn has implications for policy. In Brazil, the concept of gender has been used in ways that fit the perspectives of competing institutions and individuals. This has often had the result of erasing its more radical implications and making women’s interests less visible. Sardenberg argues that redefining and reclaiming the category women ‘may be not only desirable and feasible, but also fundamental to granting greater visibility both to women as well as to the relevance of a gender perspective in development’ (Sardenberg, this volume, p. 49).

Some of the most contested discursive terrain in today’s development discourse is around ‘women’s empowerment’. As associations with collective action and more radical transformative agendas are sloughed away to make the notion palatable to the mainstream, ‘empowerment’ has been reduced from a complex process of self-realization, self-actualization and mobilization to demand change, to a simple act of transformation bestowed by a transfer of money and/or information. Srilatha Batliwala and Deepa Dhanraj’s chapter shows the troubling convergence between certain ways of thinking and doing ‘gender’, and pervasive neo-liberal policy narratives that reduce the complex social and political processes that constitute empowerment to individualized ‘choices’. They take the example of self-help groups in India, favoured for their association with ‘empowerment’, and suggest that they may not only have deepened the immiseration of poorer women, but that they have also deflected their energies away from other forms of engagement, not least the political.

Sylvia Chant offers another powerful example of the use of simple slogans to frame development intervention, analysing the widespread association of female-headed households with poverty. The story-line of the brave, suffering, female household head as poorest of the poor gains its mythical appeal for its capacity to galvanize action, precisely because her image is of someone who exists in a state of lack that development can remedy: lack of a man to look after her, of money to feed her children, of the possibility of a life beyond the everyday struggle to care for her family. As Chant shows, this association is based on some grain of truth: female household heads may well be poor. But the reasons for their poverty may less often be those contingently associated with the myth of the impoverished female head: that they have to cope without the male breadwinner who is the person responsible for the relativ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the book
• About the editors
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: feminisms in development: contradictions, contestations and challenges
• Part one: The struggle over interpretation
• Part two: Institutionalizing gender in development
• Part three: Looking to the future: challenges for feminist engagement
• Notes on contributors
• Index