From Development to Empowerment: The Self-Employed Women's Association in India

Since the 1970s, development experts have increasingly focused on how development policies and strategies affect women in developing countries. In recent years, the emphasis has included empowerment, which increases women's decision-making capability and well-being. This essay is an account of the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) in India, a trade union for self-employed women since 1972. It analyzes the strategies that SEWA has used to mobilize and empower self-employed women in India, using materials and data collected on a field visit in 1998.     

Joint Land Certification Programmes and Women’s Empowerment: Evidence from Ethiopia

This paper connects two important development policy issues: women’s empowerment and land certification. We use propensity score matching to study the impact of the Ethiopian joint land registration and certification programme on women’s empowerment. Data are collected using surveys and a field experiment, enabling construction of complementary indices for empowerment. Our main result is that joint land certification has significant effects on women’s empowerment, particularly on dimensions that indicate female participation and roles outside the home. This result is robust to various sensitivity checks and alternative model specifications.     

The Military as a Split Labor Market: The Case of Women and Religious Soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces

A conflict between religious male soldiers and secular female soldiers has emerged since the 2000s within the Israel Defense Forces. This clash has gradually taken the form of religious rhetoric, articulated by rabbis and other religious activists, that has moved from refraining from publicly questioning the fitness of women as combatants to discourse that gradually delegitimized women’s service. Based on the theoretical theme of the split labor market, I will argue that there is a link between the extent to which the growing introduction of women into field units threatens to devalue the religious youth’s symbolic rewards and the escalation in anti-feminist rhetoric, whose ultimate goal is to exclude women from the military.     

Vulnerability and resilience: critical reflexivity in gendered violence research

South Asian women are a focus area for organisations such as the UN, World Bank and WHO, where violence against women severely constrains policy instruments such as the Millennium Development Goals. The field researcher is often invisible in research space, which informs policy in practice. Through critical reflexivity we rupture the silence on researcher vulnerability, foregrounding researcher resilience as the ethical compass in the research space of gendered violence. Through narratives of researchers as development actors in the river of corrosiveness involved in acid violence research, we offer a typology for researcher resilience for consideration in research designs for policy development.     

Women’s work and development in Latin America

The discussion explores the problem of women's employment patterns under capitalist development in Latin America, first by analyzing the way in which women's work has been conceptualized within modernization theory. It then goes on to examine the 2 types of work in which most Latin American women are engaged -- domestic service and informal work such as selling produce and taking in laundry -- to provide evidence for challenging modernization theory and for developing a more useful approach. Subsequently, the discussion considers women's domestic and informal work within the context of capitalist development, which provides some insight into the broader structures shaping women's employment. Finally, the discussion proposes some reconceptualizations of women's work and development. Modernization theorists analyze women's work in the cities within a variety of constructs, interpreting it as a backward manifestation of traditional society, a reflection of women's inadequate training for the modern sector, an indication of women's primary orientation to the family, or as a phenomenon that is too tangential to warrant examination. The primary assumption is that modernization improves women's status and the conditions of their lives as it brings greater productivity, more advanced technology, and more highly differentiated institutions. Assumptions concerning women's absorption into the modern sector and the equalization of work roles between men and women are not borne out by actual employment trends, which reveal the persistent concentration of women in domestic work, informal jobs, and the lower-paying service jobs. Despite their predominance, domestic service and informal jobs are infrequently included in employment statistics and are virtually ignored in studies of development, yet these 2 types of work are the primary forms of work for Latin American women. Even when modernization theorists recognize the proliferation of informal and domestic service jobs, they see it as part of a progressive development stage, with displaced rural laborers becoming incorporated into the modern sector by way of informal jobs. In most Latin American countries, rural women become a permanent part of the services and the informal labor market when they move to the cities. There is little sign of their transition to industrial employment. In general, capitalist development marginalizes Latin American women, who in several important ways lose status. The range of pursuits considered women's work should include their activities within the infromal labor sector. Informal work is still virtually unexplored, especially as it relates to wage work in underdeveloped countries. Informal labor is not registered in the census, nor is it included in the gross national product. Yet, it is a major component of women's work. Domestic service and infromal jobs should be seen in relation to other forms of labor and to total social production.     

Women’s Participation in Communal Activities in Rural Bangladesh

This article seeks to examine the extent of women’s participation in communal activities in rural Bangladesh, based on an analysis of a development programme, namely REFLECT (Regenerated Freirean Literacy through Empowering Community Techniques). This article evaluates the REFLECT programme with regard to its stated goal of enhancing female participation in local community affairs. Using Michael Mann’s classification of sources of power, the study emphasises the importance of participation as a contribution to political as well as ideological power in the community of Monsurabad Island in rural Bangladesh. To that end, this article aims at analysing women’s participation in community decision-making processes through voting behaviour, traditional village court (Salish) involvement and other civic activities. This study also reviews the views of village elders (matabars) on women’s participation at the communal level and the resulting empowerment. Based on the views of participant women themselves, the study concludes that the implementation of the REFLECT project in the local community under investigation has indeed resulted in empowering women, but this effect remains confined to their families and the handling of women’s issues. As the effect of the REFLECT project has not reached out to the realm of community politics, its impact on women’s participation in the community has been limited. This study argues that without any change in the existing social fabric of Monsurabad, women’s ideological power in that community could not be transformed into political power in accordance with Michael Mann’s theory.     

What a Feminist Curiosity Contributes to the Study of Development

This essay explores the various ways that women and gender have been included in international development thinking and practice by tracing the origins of the field of gender and development alongside its central debates, concepts, and accomplishments. This overview demonstrates that feminists have expanded the scope of development research and practice to include issues previously ignored but now recognized as central to development, and have provided more nuanced accounts of development by probing the underlying assumptions of development policy. In so doing, it argues, feminists have exposed the gendered nature of transnational flows and transformations, and have tracked their effects down to the level of diverse women and men’s daily lives. Drawing on the contributions in this special issue, this essay then highlights the multiple advantages of applying what Cynthia Enloe labeled a “feminist curiosity” to the study of development. By refusing to take the current state of affairs as natural or given, and refusing to accept as trivial women’s diverse lives and experiences, the papers in this special issue go beyond highlighting how international development efforts differentially affect women and men to demonstrating how women, men, and gender ideologies in particular places—whether development agencies, academic institutions, or local communities—critically shape international development itself.     

中国共产党的科学发展观与中国外交

科学发展观对中国外交的影响主要体现在两个方面,一是外交如何为科学发展服务,二是外交如何实现科学发展。科学发展观不仅是指导中国外交实践的基本理论依据,而且也是中国外交理论创新的指导思想。在科学发展观的指引下,中国外交理论创新包含以下六点：完善了以和平、发展、合作、共赢为核心的中国外交理论体系;树立了以人为本的外交思想和基本原则;倡导文明对话与合作,推出＂和谐世界＂新理念;注重利益和责任均衡的负责任外交;积极开展公共外交,树立中国发展崭新形象;科学发展观为新时期外交注入了全新的发展理念。     

Regional Integration and Africa's Development Trajectory: meta-theories,expectations and reality

Regional integration remains an integral part of Africa's development strategy and has underpinned most pan-African development policies for the past 50 years. This paper explores the issue of regional integration in the context of ‘development’ theory and the neo-patrimonial state system in Africa. A central contention of the paper is that Western, Euro-centric conceptions of regionalism, particularly those centred on the market integration approach, have promoted a very biased understanding of regional integration in many parts of the developing world. Using southern Africa as an exemplar case study, the paper argues that the various meta-theories focused on explaining the political economy of regionalism, often closely allied to a development theory paradigm, fail to account for the nature, character and evolution of regional integration. Regional integration in sub-Saharan Africa has been conceived and analysed in the light of the market-led approach, modernity and development. Thus far, it is has failed. This paper therefore explores why market-led regional integration has failed and why, for the foreseeable future, it will continue to do so.     

Latin America’s think tanks: The roots of nonprofit privatization

Conventional development models refer to two sectors, public and for-profit private. Massive growth of nonprofit private activity undermines that picture. Latin American tyink tanks exemplify a nonprofit privatization that has an enormous impact on development and remolds inter-sectoral relationships overall. Four major dynamics account for the spectacular growth of the region’s nonprofit think tanks. Three push factors are state repression, state weakness, and public university problems, and, as epitomized by financial supply, a pull factor is also crucial to attract nonprofit growth. To conceptualize its findings, this article considers public failure theory. Unhelpful regarding the pull factor, the theory otherwise works reasonably well, especially where there is visible movement from the public to the nonprofit sector. Beyond that, the evidence suggests ways to broaden the theory. Even a broadened formulation cannot fully capture the remarkable diversity and vitality of the growth in Latin America’s think tanks. But we are able to identify and analyze the key growth factors that blend together to produce particular institutional and national configurations. Daniel C. Levy is a professor at SUNY-Albany. After earning his Ph.D. in political science at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, he was research associate for five years at Yale University. He has published five books and roughly seventy articles on politics and higher education, especially on Latin America, and on Mexican politics. Levy has done field research in most Latin American countries and has presented lectures and been published on five continents.     

试析中国与中南半岛国家地缘文化关系面临的挑战及应对之策

地缘文化已成为中外学界日益关注的研究视角,由此开辟了不同于以往的地缘研究领域。地缘关系的长期发展必须具有地缘文化进行配合与支撑。中国与中南半岛国家地缘文化关系研究,是地缘文化理论联系实践的重点之一。对于中国与中南半岛国家而言,地缘文化关系的机遇与挑战将长期并存。中国当务之急应积极寻求中国与中南半岛的利益交汇点,妥善处理利益分歧与错位。     

Modernist discourse and the crisis of development theory

The field of Third World studies is thought once again to be in a state of crisis, thanks largely to disillusionment with the once-dominant dependency “paradigm.” Amidst renewed interest in developmentalism and the clamor for an alternative to dependency, this article argues, first, that the major achievements of dependency theory remain largely unrecognized because the approach has been so frequently misrepresented or misunderstood. Whatever the ultimate status of dependency’s theoretical claims, it contains elements of a countermodernist attitude which ought to be retained in any new approach to the study of Third World development. Second, the article argues that, despite these accomplishments, dependency remains trapped, along with developmentalism, within a modernist discourse which relies on the principles of nineteenth century liberal philosophy; that it treats the individual nation-state in the Third World as the sovereign subject of development; and that it accepts the Western model of national autonomy with growth as the appropriate one to emulate. The final section of the article discusses the efforts of a number of scholars to ground knowledge in local histories and experiences rather than building theory through the use of general conceptual categories and Western assumptions. Although these ideas currently remain on the margins of Third World studies, it is to be hoped that dependency’s loss of intellectual hegemony has at least opened up a space for them to be taken seriously, in the same way that dependency was itself taken seriously in the late 1960s. Kate Manzo is assistant professor of political science at Williams College in Williamstown, MA 01267. Her research and writing interests focus on theories of development and on the nature of South African change. She is currently at work on a book entitledAfrikanerdom and Race: The Nature of Ideology in a Changing Society.     

Enhancing sustainable development in Sub-Saharan Africa: concepts,recommendations and illustrations

In recent years, the concept of sustainable development has received renewed attention. As global resources shrink and needs continue to grow, the staying power of development impact is becoming central concern of both governments and donors. Recent studies have shown that only a small percentage of projects throughout the world have achieved sustainability, and the need for improving the long-term vitality of development investments is growing. No area in the world has shown more need of this than Africa. This paper outlines a conceptual approach for analyzing sustainability and synthesizes the lessons learned from the application of this model in recent field work. The model is based on the theory that two preconditions must exist before sustainability can occur: 1 ) commitment to long term sustainable development; and 2) beneficiary and stakeholder involvement via incentives which support achieving sustainability . Fieldwork-based recommendations to enhance sustainability include: 1) understand the long-term incentive structure that drives the project; 2) identify performance targets and communicate results early-on; 3) identify long-term recurrent costs and funding options; 4) build in flexibility to the project plan; 5) build-in ways for participants to support and “take ownership” of the project; 6) use local resources, both human and physical, and keep technologies simple; and 7) use marketing strategies to reinforce perceived, satisfactory benefits of the project. Case examples of successful African projects from West Africa, Burkina Faso and Kenya illustrate the application of the sustainability concepts. In the context of these illustrations, the sustainability framework appears useful for understanding and analyzing sustainability and provides a necessary addition to thinking about development projects and programs.     

Women in development: A critical analysis

In the early 1970s a general disenchantment with development efforts in Third World countries led to a search for alternative development strategies and a growing awareness that women, like the poor, were peripheral to the development efforts of major aid donors. In 1972 the United Nations designated 1975 as International Women's Year, highlighting the need to involve women in issues of economic development. During the past 20 years the 'women in development' approach, which seeks to recognise and integrate women in aid policies and programmes, has been incorporated into the aid practice of most development agencies. This paper traces the efforts of large aid agencies over the past two decades to integrate women into their aid programmes and discusses the main limitations and weaknesses of the WID approach.     

Aid and Gendered Subjectivity in Rural Guatemala

Development discourse has focused on gendered dimensions of poverty, demonstrating how parastatal poverty alleviation programmes target women as aid recipients while devaluing their productive and reproductive work. However, seldom analysed is how privatisation of social services and proliferation of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have impacted women. We explore this in a Guatemalan community where we find that although NGOs discursively commit to ‘alternative’ development approaches, on the ground they reproduce elements of a neoliberal subjectivity akin to parastatal programmes. NGOs additionally configure aid disbursement as gift giving, requiring beneficiaries to assume affective postures of gratitude, and facilitating intrusion into women’s lives.     

Conflict resolution classrooms to careers: an emergent theory of change with implications for a strategy in peace education

Peace education provides for the development of knowledge, skills, and dispositions appropriate to effective peacebuilding. Therefore, the development of curriculum in degree programs which builds bridges by which students in conflict resolution/peace studies classrooms may cross over to the field of conflict transformation and peacebuilding may properly be thought of as within the sphere of peace education. This paper describes an emerging theory of change in the context of the peace education offered by a graduate and undergraduate program of conflict resolution. It is argued that employability exists at the nexus of student skills and attributes, and the demands of a labor market which a partnership between experienced practitioners and academics has a responsibility to inform and shape through outreach, education, practice, evaluation, research, and publication.     

Self-rated health and barriers to healthcare in Ukraine: The pivotal role of gender and its intersections

The ongoing health crisis in the Ukraine has persisted for 48 years with a clear division of gender-based outcomes as seen in the decline of male life expectancy and stagnation of female longevity. The purpose of this paper is to investigate differences in self-rated health and system barriers to health care applicable to gender and its intersections because of the differing negative health outcomes for men and women. Intersectionality theory provides an analytic framework for interpreting our results. Utilizing a nationwide sample of the Ukrainian population (N = 1908), we found that low socioeconomic status (SES) women rate their health worse than men generally and any other socioeconomic group. Yet women also face the greatest barriers to health care until older ages when the ailments of men cause them to likewise face the obstacles. In reviewing the barrier to health care scale, one barrier—that of health care services being too expensive—dominated the responses with some 52.5 percent of the sample reporting it. Consequently, the greatest problem in Ukraine with respect to health reform reported by the population is the out-of-pocket costs for care in a system that is officially free. These costs, constituting some 40 percent of all national health expenditures, affect women and the aged the most.     

Orientalism and African Development Studies: the ‘reductive repetition’ motif in theories of African underdevelopment

Contemporary Africa is generally depicted as a ‘failure’. ‘Progress' has eluded the continent throughout the 20th century, and despite new ways of thinking about the reasons for failure and possibilities for success, allusions to the ‘natural weakness and incapacity’ of Africans and their social realities remain evident in theoretical, policy and political discourse on development in Africa. The practice of ‘reductive repetition’, as identified by Abdallah Laroui and Edward Said, has been imported into African development studies from Orientalist scholarship. Reductive repetition reduces the diversity of African historical experiences and trajectories, sociocultural contexts and political situations into a set of core deficiencies for which externally generated ‘solutions’ must be devised. In the field of development studies, the notion of development is introduced to Africa as a deus ex machina. In this article modern conceptualisations of development are challenged in three steps. First, it traces the history of development discourse over the post-Berlin Conference colonial and post-WWII development eras, suggesting that, while rhetoric of racial and cultural inferiority has been transformed, the notion of African deficiency remains at the conceptual and discursive levels. Second, the primarily liberal idea that ‘development for all’ is possible is challenged as being an ecological and economic, and therefore also social, impossibility. Third, given the problems of growth-based development, the article suggests that modern development theory ought to give way to post-developmental thinking which challenges standard a priori assumptions regarding rationality, linearity and modernity, thus offering some modest hope for a move ‘beyond’ the current development impasse.     

Daughters and Displacement: Migration Dynamics in an Indonesian Transmigration Area

This study considers the ways 'indigenous' people have responded to the constraints and opportunities posed by the Indonesian government's transmigration programme in North Lampung, Sumatra. Migration is of increasing importance to the livelihoods of this group; particularly that involving the employment-related movement of young, unmarried women to the export-oriented factory zones of West Java. Female migration is notable in the context of customs confining unmarried women to the house, and negating their working in agriculture. The paper explores how factory migration has developed, drawing on field work conducted in 1994 and during the economic crisis in 1998, and focusing on the shifting terrain of intrahousehold power relations and decision-making in the community. Key to understanding migration dynamics in this area is the emergence of a culturally-conditioned social network linking village and city. This network has altered the terms upon which migration decisions and remittance practices are made, and may have cushioned.     

Fertility and childbearing practices among poor Gypsy women in Hungary: the intersections of class, race and gender

This article explores changes in childbearing practices among Gypsy (Roma) women in a small village in Northern Hungary. The author benefited from several years of ethnographic field research and data collected in this village, where the proportion of the out-of-wedlock births and births to teenage—mostly Gypsy—mothers have increased by a factor of three in the past 10 years as the population of the village has become more and more impoverished and the opportunities for geographic or social mobility declined sharply for the ethnic minority. The author argues that bearing children early is a sign of passage to adulthood in this group of women, a function which had been assigned to other social institutions before 1989. Early childbearing at the same time exacerbates the problem of Gypsy women: this is the first study which documents the consequences of poverty on women’s and children’s health by showing an increase in low birth weight babies in the community since 1989.