Engendering Development

Capitalism and Inequality in the Global Economy

Amy Trauger, Jennifer L. Fluri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351819800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze fisiche
• Subtopic: Geografia

Engendering Development demonstrates how gender is a form of inequality that is used to generate global capitalist development. It charts the histories of gender, race, class, sexuality and nationality as categories of inequality under imperialism, which continue to support the accumulation of capital in the global economy today.

The textbook draws on feminist and critical development scholarship to provide insightful ways of understanding and critiquing capitalist economic trajectories by focusing on the way development is enacted and protested by men and women. It incorporates analyses of the lived experiences in the global north and south in place-specific ways. Taking a broad perspective on development, Engendering Development draws on textured case studies from the authors' research and the work of geographers and feminist scholars. The cases demonstrate how gendered, raced and classed subjects have been enrolled in global capitalism, and how individuals and communities resist, embrace and rework development efforts. This textbook starts from an understanding of development as global capitalism that perpetuates and benefits from gendered, raced and classed hierarchies.

The book will prove to be useful to advanced undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in courses on development through its critical approach to development conveyed with straightforward arguments, detailed case studies, accessible writing and a problem-solving approach based on lived experiences.

Part I
Understanding development and inequality

1
Understanding development and inequality

Introduction

At the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 2017, world leaders and other officials gathered to discuss some of the gravest and most difficult challenges facing the world, specifically those facing the world’s poorest people. The UN group known as “Project Everyone” seized an opportunity to have a captive audience, and proposed to the Mars Corporation that they develop and donate candy printed with symbols representing seven of the seventeen newly adopted Sustainable Development Goals. These goals include efforts to eliminate poverty and inequality and improve the environmental sustainability of development projects. Chocolate multinational corporations have long been implicated in perpetuating both poverty and inequality, particularly with respect to cocoa extraction in West Africa. This includes the trafficking of child slaves, especially girls as plantation laborers (Dottridge 2002). Reporting on the UN event neglected to mention the source of the cocoa or its effects on workers, focusing rather on bringing a little “fun” to heavy topics (Gharib 2017). Media coverage of this event did not address the way multinational corporations (such as Mars) and their relationship to supranational organizations like the United Nations perpetuate inequality.

The United Nations is the world’s leading development organization and is responsible for setting targets and implementing them in every country in the world. The Sustainable Development Goals were drafted in 2015, to be met in 2030, because it was clear that the very similar Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), aimed at reducing poverty, improving health outcomes and increasing gender equity, established in 2000, would not be met in time. The UN’s own reports on MDGs identifies several successes as well as enduring challenges, specifically that the most vulnerable and poorest people, often women and girls, continue to be left behind. The example above indicates the uphill battle against the influence of multinational corporations who seek to profit from inequality, and perpetuate its existence by currying favor with supranational assistance organizations, such as the UN. We argue that political and economic relationships between the UN, multinational corporations and powerful governments have more to do with the problem of producing economic inequality than solving it. Capitalism is a global economic system that produces and perpetuates both poverty and inequality and accumulates capital for the already wealthy and privileged (Harvey 1990). We argue that actually meeting the Millennium Development Goals (and the subsequent Sustainable Development Goals) (i.e., reducing inequality) would be troubling for capitalist logic and would undermine, rather than increase, profits. As such, in a system governed by global capital, development follows capitalist logic, and therefore does not produce equity, social welfare or better lives. In this book we aim to illustrate how inequality, of which gender is one form, is composed of many interlocking oppressions perpetuated by multinational corporations (firms which operate across state boundaries) and supranational organizations (those that operate at the scale of individual country governments).

While this book tackles the enormous problems associated with the gendered impacts of development, it takes its title from the concept of engendering, which means “to give rise to.” We choose this framing instead of the more traditional “gender and development” because development, like imperialism, which is the direct or indirect political-economic control of external territories, and (settler) colonialism, are not past events that have happened and now exist in a historical and apolitical context to study. It continues to happen, and it continues to produce inequality. We emphasize the way “engendering” suggests both an embodied and lived experience that intersects with power, while signaling something new and different from what has come before it in the literature. While gender is in the title, we do not limit our analysis to one form of inequality. We view gender as just one of many intersecting oppressions that are produced and experienced in and through patriarchal and capitalist social relations (Crenshaw 1991).

As such, we take an intersectional approach to the study of gender and inequality, which views the ways in which power and subjects are produced at the intersection of many forms of identity: race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, ability, religion, etc. (Combahee River Collective 1983, Hill-Collins 2000, Mohanty 2005). Gender is the socially mediated meaning attached to anatomically sexed bodies, which re/produces ideas of femininity and masculinity and the differences and hierarchies between men and women that are perpetuated by the social relationship of patriarchy, or male supremacy (McDowell 2018). Intersectionality as a concept emerged from black and queer feminist critiques of white feminisms in the US. Black feminists argue that the embodied experience of raced, classed and gendered individuals is shaped in part by an ongoing “matrix of domination” (Hill-Collins, 2000) that contributes to the dehumanization of entire groups of people (McKittrick 2014). We subscribe to the view that everyone experiences varying forms of overlapping oppression and advantage in which we are all complicit (hooks 1997). While we further discuss and define feminism later in the book, we want to signal here that we take a materialist feminist approach, which roots our understandings of the production of gender, difference and inequality in capitalist processes (Mohanty 2005, Hartsock 2011, Hennessy 2017).

As suggested above, there are multiple forms and expressions of feminism. Therefore feminisms (plural) rather than feminism (singular) more accurately captures this diversity. Throughout this book we will discuss different forms of feminisms such as liberal-capitalist feminism, which seeks to empower or emancipate women from patriarchy through economic and political participation within capitalist democracies (Scott 1994). Conversely, materialist feminism seeks to add a gendered understanding of the works of Karl Marx and empower women within societal structures associated with socialism or communism (Hartsock 2011). Radical feminists view women’s oppression and general inequality as linked to hierarchal systems of governance, and therefore call for the dismantling of unequal systems of governance in order to have gender equality (Mohanty 2005). Ecofeminists seek a direct link between the subjugation of women and the environment (Shiva 1991). These various feminist viewpoints have had differential influences on development policies, programs and projects from the 1970s to today.

The diversity of feminist theory also indicates that patriarchal domination is not a single form of oppression that all women (or all men) experience in exactly the same way. Rather, patriarchy is a social relationship defined by one’s ability (or lack thereof) to support, perpetuate and benefit from certain kinds of privileged positions that vary across space and time. For example, current systems of economic assistance and development do not regularly incorporate the voices of people in need. Naila Kabeer, a scholar and development consultant, argues that in order to properly address and end poverty, women of color need to be part of economic planning and decision making. However, poverty reduction programs continue to exclude these voices because they are designed by social and economic elites who do not live within spaces of poverty. We take this analysis a step further to assert that economic development requires the creation and perpetuation of intersectional gendered oppressions and inequality, rather than alleviating them (Gibson-Graham 1996). We argue that the modernist notions of social personhood (the bestowal of human rights and citizenship) are denied to most of the world’s people under conditions of global capitalism in order to further increase surplus and accumulate capital (Tsing 2015).

We assert that development relies on perpetuating the myth that market forces are mechanisms that can provide public goods and that development will make life better for everyone (Peet and Hartwick 2009). Discourses of development tell comforting stories that obscure how inequalities are produced (Wainwright 2011). For example, why do some people prosper while others do not; and who makes decisions that inform uneven development strategies? Popular notions of development, often in the form of humanitarianism, assume that poor people exist in an ahistorical and far-off place and it is the duty of the wealthy to help them on their way to a better life. These assumptions are rarely questioned; rather they are repeated as part of public discourse. Thus, dominant forms of global capitalism reinforce and support the myth that wealth trickles down to the poor, and corporations are capable of providing public goods to workers, the poor and society in general (Gibson-Graham 1996).

In this book, we take a post-structuralist intersectional gender analysis of development. A post-structuralist approach means that we view socioeconomic processes as socially produced by human actions (and not externally imposed by structures). Our intersectional gender analyses focus on how development is productive of certain kinds of sex–gender identities, and people whose subject positions as raced, classed, sexed and gendered individuals make them more or less vulnerable to the logic of capitalism. Previous approaches to gender and development addressed the issue of neglecting women from development studies, but often ignored other dimensions of identity (i.e., sexuality, race) or did not critique development as a project and process that has the potential to further entrench rather than alleviate inequality (Benería, Berik and Floro 2003). We argue that an intersectional gender analysis of national and international economic development is important because it pulls back the veil of “goodness” that shrouds much of aid and humanitarianism to reveal how it both functions through capitalism and exacerbates existing inequalities.

We also advocate for decolonial approaches to solving the problems of capitalism, which means freeing people from governance that proliferated in the wake of colonialism and that support and perpetuate systems of capitalist accumulation which oppress and dispossess (Tuck and Yang 2012). Mohanty (2005, 7) writes, following Fanon (1963), that decolonization is a process that must happen from the ground up with “transformations of the self, community, and governance … through active withdrawal of consent and resistance to domination.” We argue that the profoundly negative effects of development on intersectionally and socially constructed subjects everywhere in the world cannot be changed without a systemic reworking of governance and economic systems.

What is development?

Development is a specific socially mediated process through which myriad forms of power work, and through which inequality is produced to generate surplus and capital for the wealthy (Roy 2010). Capitalist economic development takes two general forms: the building and maintenance of an economy, usually a national-scale project, and aid and humanitarianism, usually international in scope and scale. Some mainstream advocates try to distance development from capitalist processes by identifying it as a form of charity that is intended to use economic development as a method of assistance. Geographers have further distinguished big “D” from little “d” development. Big “D” development refers to planned and predetermined interventions with the intention of achieving some type of “progress” or improvement. Little “d” development refers to global capitalist structures that create broad forces or influences of economic change (Hart 2001, Lawson 2007).

Capitalist development exemplifies both forms of development and is favored by many organizations. Capitalism remains integral to North American and European development organizations, and is premised on the belief that this form of economic structuring will ultimately improve countries and the lives of their citizens. Economic development identifies improvement in various sectors such as agricultural production, health-care, increased access to technology and mechanization, mitigating poverty, preventing conflict and empowering women. Some projects have indeed helped to improve some people’s lives and livelihoods. However, the over-arching practices of capitalist development have not adequately addressed power imbalances, the exploitation of places and people, or its effects, which benefit the few at the expense of the many. For example, as middle-class livelihoods grow in some spaces, they are actively eroded in other spaces, and the global division between the world’s wealthiest and poorest (countries and people) continues to expand. Additionally, stereotypes about people living in poverty (i.e., as lazy, uneducated, criminal, weak, etc.) continue to dominate capitalist narratives about poverty, thus perpetuating myths about poor people along with incorrectly viewing wealth as aspirational rather than exploitative.

Capitalist development has taken advantage of the vulnerabilities experienced by former colonized spaces by enrolling peasants and working-class people into circuits of capital through the mechanisms of debt and dispossession (Harvey 2003). The machinery of development relies on crushing nonviolent resistance to capitalism through monopolies on coercive force employed by Western countries (mostly former or current imperial powers), and on whose behalf the system of contemporary international economic development has been established, and whose favored allies have benefited enormously (Agnew and Crobridge 2002). In this story of development, we see a clear and necessary intersection with colonialism, which is the direct control of people throughout an empire through settlement, land theft, military intervention and/or enslavement. Widely practiced by European empires in the 1400–1800s, colonialism set the stage for capitalism by dispossessing indigenous people of their lands, enslaving workers on multiple continents and using plundered imperial wealth to build an industrial economy for Western elites in the 19th century, also known as accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 1990).

The power of Western European nations through colonialism was significantly challenged after World War II. Most European powers concentrated on rebuilding their own countries and economies. Subsequently, colonialism began to fade as independent countries took more dominant roles in managing economies and populations. However, at the same time, a new reorganization of political and economic power occurred through the respective (and oppositional) leadership of the United States and the Soviet Union (also known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – USSR). At the end of World War II, a “Cold War” (based on an arms race) began between the United States and Soviet Union. By 1955, new allegiances were formed and became known as the First, Second and Third Worlds as part of the reorganization of global power. The capitalist economies of Europe and the United States were referred to as the “First World,” while the socialist countries of the Soviet Union, China and their respective allies were known as the “Second World.” The “Third World,” or the “nonaligned” countries, sought a third way or different path for their economic development. Both capitalist and socialist powers sought to influence these countries through economic development programs. Former allies, the United States and Soviet Union, as new “superpowers,” competed for economic and political influence throughout the globe. The divergent political-economic ideologies of these powers (capitalism and socialism) sought influence through development projects in various countries.

The Bretton Woods agreement, established in the mid-20th century in the wake of World War II, formed new economic development institutions (i.e., World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF)) based on market-based logics of supply and demand (Leyshon and Tickell 1994). These new economic forms required huge inputs of capital, which were out of reach for the poorest countries, many of which were newly independent states. Beginning in the 1980s a new development strategy was created by leaders of the US and UK, known as the Washington Consensus. This new strategy sought to manipulate development through granting high interest loans to countries, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• PART I UNDERSTANDING DEVELOPMENT AND INEQUALITY
• PART II PROCESSES IN DEVELOPMENT
• PART III MOMENTS IN DEVELOPMENT
• Index