Economic Pathways to Women’s Empowerment and Active Citizenship: What Does The Evidence From Bangladesh Tell Us?

Abstract

This paper sets out to explore economic pathways to women’s empowerment and active citizenship in Bangladesh, a country where the denial of economic resources to women, and their resulting status as lifelong dependents on men, has long been seen as foundational to their subordinate status. While empowerment entails change in the lives of individual women and their interpersonal relations, the concept of active citizenship draws attention to women’s capacity to participate in the public life of their community. The paper draws on the existing literature on women’s access to various forms of paid work both to assess their impact in terms of empowerment and citizenship and to understand better the processes by which these changes might occur.     

Mode of Production Analysis and Historical Production

A striking feature of Gambian society is its tripartite social structure composed of nobles, artisans and descendants of former slaves. Among the artisans, the role of the finoo, or Islamic bard, is by far the least understood. While there is hardly any documentation on finoos, indications are that they have specialized in the Islamic traditions. This article records the life story of Mariama Fatty, a successful Gambian female finoo. In addition to sketching a portrait of her profession, it provides an account of a Muslim woman’s involvement in Islamic practices, her engagement in the propagation of Islam, and her understanding of proper Muslim womanhood. By focusing on the female finoo’s manoeuvring between her cultural obligations and her religious tenets, it emerges that she exercises her profession in what is not so much a contradiction as a dialectic between submission and religious empowerment.     

Reconsidering Women’s Empowerment: the Contradictory Effects of Microfinance for Guatemalan Women

In light of changing global trends that connect women’s empowerment and development, this paper extends debates by exploring how projects aimed at empowering women in the Global South intertwine with diverse women’s lived realities in ways that complicate assessments of “success” or “failure.” The article begins by analyzing the incorporation of the concept of empowerment into mainstream development, demonstrating that the conceptual fuzziness of empowerment has allowed it to be associated with vastly different development strategies: some have interpreted it narrowly to promote self-help strategies whereas others have interpreted it broadly to promote structural change. The former has targeted women with “choice-enhancing” resources that are thought to have spillover effects; the latter tends to adopt a more holistic approach. In order to explore how these contrasting strategies affect women’s empowerment experiences and outcomes on the ground, this article then draws on comparative ethnographies of two microfinance non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are emblematic of these diverging approaches. It finds that despite their differences, both spillover and holistic approaches lead to diverse and contradictory experiences that defy easy classification as “empowering” or “disempowering.” This finding reveals the advantages and limitations of relying on the concept of empowerment for evaluating development outcomes and raises questions about our ability to generalize about the effects of the varying approaches encompassed under the current feminization of policy. The analysis also suggests that we should adjust our understanding of women’s agency to include the agency women exercise when they transform, challenge, or reject empowerment projects themselves.     

Budgeting the work force: Influences,elements, disclosure strategies,and roles

Work force budgeting is a comprehensive view of allocating resources recognizing that expenses flow from the use and remuneration of organizational members. The purpose of this essay is to: examine the influences and elements of work force budgeting; enhance the disclosure of such choices; and, isolate the tension in fiscal oversight of personnel decisions. It is incumbent upon managers to acquire, deploy, and control human resources in the production of public goods and services. An humane and ethical bureaucracy has to meet tests of efficiency and effectiveness. This essay supports the proposition that service delivery goals should guide budget decisions instead of simply having decisions premised upon adding up the cost of existing staffing patterns.     

Negotiating Refugee Empowerment(s) in Resettlement Organizations

In-depth interviews with both organizational staff and refugee clients in two American refugee resettlement organizations explore how empowerment is communicated to and understood by refugees being “empowered.” This study found that while organizational staff professed empowerment focused on self-sufficiency as self-determination, in practice their communication to clients defined self-sufficiency a priori in economic terms. Refugee clients instead constructed empowerment(s) in economic, educational, personal, and family terms. These findings highlight the need for changes in U.S. resettlement policy and for theoretical and practical understandings of refugee empowerment to recognize polysemic and conflicting empowerments in different life arenas and from different positionalities.     

(Dis)Empowering New Immigrants and Refugees Through Their Participation in Introduction Programs in Sweden,Denmark, and Norway

This article sets out to critically examine whether and how different ideas of (radical and liberal) empowerment are embedded in policy documents and texts pertaining to the introduction programs in Scandinavia. All three countries have several elements in the program that have the potential of being empowering, viewed from both a radical and liberal empowerment ideology. However, the liberal empowerment ideology is more present in the programs, to various degrees, compared to the radical empowerment ideology, which is more difficult, if not impossible, to live up to within the framework of all three programs.     

The Role of Organizational Social Capital in Increasing Organizational Performance in Public Organizations: Evidence from Kyrgyz National Police (KNP)

Organizational social capital can develop a strong foundation for trusted relationships and committed actions in communities and organizations. This concept was examined in the public organization setting in this study. Organizational social capital is a source for trust-building processes where participative decision-making, feedback on performance, and empowerment are important elements of this phenomenon. Three dimensions of organizational social capital (participation, feedback on performance, and empowerment) and organizational commitment were examined in this study. The influence of organizational social capital on the perceived organizational commitment of the Kyrgyz National Police (KNP) is observed by utilizing structural equation modeling (SEM). The results of this study indicate that the three dimensions of organizational social capital have statistically significant relationships with perceived organizational commitment. Overall, results suggest that organizational social capital, with its dimensions, is a source for the trust-building process which influences perceived organizational commitment. Moreover, by practicing empowerment it is possible to increase the number of committed officers, also an important factor in improving organizational performance.     

Daily identity practices: Belarus and potato eaters

Food cultivation, preparation and consumption are important references for shaping national identity. Food is a crystallization of the history of a national or ethnic group, of its traditions, mentality, and religious adherence and of very pragmatic material elements reflecting the way of life of the group, for instance, climatic conditions and socio-economic levels. All elements of the history of a group are transmitted and experienced in daily rituals relating to food. Food has strong symbolic, quasi-sacred associations in many cultures: for Slavic peoples bread is a very important symbol, and in Belarus potatoes are known as "the second bread".The role played by banal everyday identity rituals is very important in complex political contexts, where identity building processes aimed at the transformation of a community into a nation-state with common identification denominators are not endorsed by political elite. Belarus is an extremely difficult case from the point of view of identity building: a country without a history (Zaprudnik, 1993), without a nation (Marples, 1999), without an identity (Bekus, 2010). In the Belarusian context, food - especially food which is cheap, rustic and simple to cultivate, such as potatoes - is an important identity marker.     

The Impact of Microfinance on Factors Empowering Women: Differences in Regional and Delivery Mechanisms in India’s SHG Programme

Abstract

We examine how the impact on women’s empowerment varies with respect to the location and type of group linkage of the respondent. Using household survey data from five states in India, we correct for selection bias to estimate a structural equation model. Our results reveal that in the southern states of India empowerment of women takes place through economic factors. For the other states, we find a significant correlation between women’s empowerment and autonomy in women’s decision-making and network, communication and political participation respectively. We do not, however, find any differential causal impact of different delivery methods (linkage models).     

Public Participation and Public Service Modernization: Learning from New Labor?

The public participation agenda is a significant element of public service reform in Europe and beyond. This article examines how citizen participation in local public services was conce ived and enacted under successive New Labor governments in the UK during the period 1997–2010. It is suggested that the emphasis on public participation was central to the ethos of New Labor. This accounts for the persistence of the participation agenda even in the face of scant empirical evidence that specific engagement and empowerment initiatives were successful. Significantly, there was no single New Labor participation narrative. There were instead several distinct strands, drawing variously from the Party's received traditions of State welfarism, corporatist central-local relations, municipal socialism, Blairite managerialism, and, lastly, mutual cooperativism. The article assesses the legacy of New Labor and public participation in the UK before drawing wider conclusions relating to international experience.     

Sewing their way up the social ladder? Paths to social mobility and empowerment among Sri Lanka’s global factory workers

Studies on global assembly line workers showcase how gains women make are counteracted by physical, social and psychological problems stemming from long hours of working, low wages and the precarity of work. Few studies analyse these workers’ experiences after they terminate factory work. Using life histories collected over 12 years and in-depth interviews, this article highlights the different paths former workers pursue to achieve social mobility and identifies key work and life experiences that contribute to social mobility and empowerment. I argue that contrary to popular belief global factory work does lead to forms of social mobility and empowerment.     

Post-Feminist Spectatorship and the Girl Effect: “Go ahead,really imagine her”

Women and girls are currently positioned as highly visible subjects of global governance and development, from the agendas of the United Nations and the World Bank to the corporate social responsibility campaigns of Nike, Goldman Sachs and Coca Cola. This paper examines the representations of empowerment in visual (image and video) material from the Nike Foundation’s ‘Girl Effect’ campaign. Drawing on the works of Angela McRobbie and Lilie Chouliaraki, I suggest that this campaign is reflective of a mode of ‘post-feminist spectatorship’ that is now common to corporatised development discourses; it is manifested both in terms of the conservative mode of neoliberal empowerment proposed for distant others and the mode of ironic spectatorship imagined for the viewer. I conclude that the relations constructed in the ‘Girl Effect’ campaign between the (empowered) Western spectator and the (yet-to-be-empowered) Third World Girl work to erode bonds of solidarity and entrench structural inequalities by positioning economically empowered girls as the key to global poverty eradication.     

Traditions of Australian governance

Australia's traditions of governance tend to be pragmatic and to blend different ideologies. Its traditions are less dependent on political party ideologies, and more on competing conceptions of the significant problems and the way that they should be addressed. In this article we identify five principal traditions, namely: settler–state developmentalism; civilizing capitalism; the development of a social–liberal constitutional tradition; traditions of federalism; and the exclusiveness/ inclusiveness of the state and society. These traditions have been robust and have developed over time. We show how political actors operating from within this plurality of traditions have understood the public sector and how their understandings have led to changes in the way the public sector is structured.     

Public Value as Rhetoric: A Budgeting Approach

The public value theory has been accused of serving as a “rhetorical device” for public managers to advance their interests and influence vis-à-vis politicians. This article uses Legislative Budget Offices (LBOs) as a lens to re-examine the theme of “public value as rhetoric”. It examines how an LBO can relegate itself to a lower public value-creating position that avoids conflict with politicians, which then allows politicians to employ rhetoric such as fiscal “sustainability” and “responsibility”, without making actual budget choices that incur political costs. The findings of the article suggest that the use of public value as rhetoric is a function of contradictory values held by citizens, which politicians and public managers must reconcile by choosing to divert either resources or rhetoric. Furthermore, rhetoric is bidirectional, and employable not just by public managers, but by politicians as well.     

Quelles mobilités pour quelles ressources?

In West Africa, where the available natural and financial resources are not always sufficient to support a family for a whole year, mobility has become a strategy for accessing the resources of the region as a whole. Daily life is based on a mixed sedentary and mobile logic which responds to opportunities at greater or lesser distances, for longer or shorter periods of time, and with greater or lesser regularity of movement, and which enables survival or a better livelihood to be secured. Mobility requires mobilisation – of social networks, individual capacities and sociabilities, elements we can also refer to as resources, only this time social resources. This article explores the notion of resources and its connotations to show how populations in the West African Sahelian space seek a balance of survival and livelihood through mobility.     

Choice as Everyday Politics: Female Palestinian Citizens of Israel in Mixed Cities

The paper analyzes everyday life as an arena of politics and choice as a form of everyday power. The paper discusses the theoretical debate on choice and everyday life as depoliticization mechanisms and claims, as opposed to the prevailing theory, that choices made in everyday life form politics of small things. In the various choices that women make and the way they conduct their everyday lives, they offer an alternative sociopolitical order based on a conscious, intentional choice. The experience of Palestinian woman citizens of Israel living in cities of mixed Jewish and Palestinian populations serves as the field of study. I argue that the choice to live in a mixed city and everyday life in this city constitutes an alternative life space for Arab–Palestinian women that allows them to express their opposition to both their own society and the larger Jewish society and, at the same time, serves as a setting for social change. Arab–Palestinian women utilize the space of the mixed city to forge new ways for themselves and their families to structure gender relations, feminine identity, class identity, and Palestinian national identity in a largely ethnonational and gendered unequal society.

The Determinants of Women’s Empowerment in Bangladesh: The Role of Partner’s Attitudes and Participation in Microcredit Programmes

This paper employs data from the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (2004) to explore how women’s empowerment is related to partner’s attitudes, participation in microcredit programmes and a set of other socio-economic factors. We use a structural equation model with categorical observed variables. We get that participation in microcredit programmes has a positive impact on both the empowerment’s dimensions considered, while partner’s attitudes effect is weaker, proving that gender community norms are likely to be rooted in women’s minds regardless of the partners’ perceptions of women’s status.     

Cultural Capital and Sustainable Livelihoods in Sri Lanka's Rural Villages: Towards Culturally Aware Development

Increasing attention is being directed towards the role of culture in the development and well-being of rural communities. Systems of knowledge, beliefs, customs, norms and a wide range of culturally related activities, such as arts, crafts and music, can play a significant role in the everyday lives of people and contribute to the sustainability of human societies. The means through which culture can be effectively incorporated into development processes requires further research. This article develops the concept of ‘cultural capital’ to explore how cultural assets sustain an artisan class in three rural villages close to the city of Kandy in central Sri Lanka. The field research found that embodied cultural traditions and subsequent material outputs are vital ‘resources’ in achieving livelihood objectives and meeting family aspirations. We argue that the development industry needs to reconsider cultural assets and traditions and incorporate them into its work at conceptual and programmatic levels. Conceptually development needs to see itself as a cultural as much as economic or social process, and programmatically we see openings within sustainable livelihoods approaches for a greater explicit appreciation and awareness of locally-specific cultural traditions, strengths and perspectives.     

Health care and AIDS

The acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) is a harbinger for change in health care. There are many powerful forces poised to transform the industrialized health care structure of the twentieth century, and AIDS may act as either a catalyst or an amplifier for these forces. AIDS could, for example, swamp local resources and thereby help trigger national reform in a health care system that has already lost public confidence. AIDS can also hasten the paradigm shift that is occurring throughout health care. Many of the choices society will confront when dealing with AIDS carry implications beyond health care. Information about who has the disease, for example, already pits traditional individual rights against group interests. Future information systems could make discrimination based upon medical records a nightmare for a growing number of individuals. Yet these systems also offer the hope of accelerated progress against not only AIDS but other major health threats as well. The policy choices that will define society's response to AIDS can best be made in the context of a clearly articulated vision of a society that reflects our deepest values.     

Legal Empowerment of the Poor through Property Rights Reform: Tensions and Trade-offs of Land Registration and Titling in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Land registration and titling in Africa is often advocated as a pro-poor legal empowerment strategy. Advocates have put forth different visions of the substantive goals this is to achieve. Some see registration and titling as a way to protect smallholders’ rights of access to land. Others frame land registration as part of community-protection or ethno-justice agendas. Still others see legal empowerment in the market-enhancing commodification of property rights. This paper contrasts these different visions, showing that each entails tensions and trade-offs. The analysis helps explain why land law reforms aiming at legal empowerment may be controversial or divisive in African countries.