Engendering Development

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.

The Sustainable Development Goals were launched in 2015 with grand ambitions for ending poverty, protecting the planet, and ensuring prosperity for all, with ‘no one left behind’. However, these goals will be impossible to achieve without addressing inequity, inequality, marginalisation, and exclusion related to gender, and to other intersecting social hierarchies linked to deeply emotional, culturally bound norms and judgements of worth. This book asks readers to consider issues of knowledge, power, and effectiveness, emphasising the limits of taking a categorical approach to gender and other social hierarchies, and the importance of process in what is known about generating transformative social change. Engendering Transformative Thinking and Practice in International Development draws on a range of real world examples which demonstrate both the limitations of the frameworks currently in use, and the very real possibilities for change when the intersecting social hierarchies that sustain and create inequity and inequality are challenged. This book brings together theoretical perspectives on social change, gender, intersectionality, and forms of knowledge, concluding with a set of proposals for revitalising a change agenda that recognises and engages with intersectionality and practical wisdom. Perfect for students and scholars of social change, gender, and development, this book will also be useful for practitioners looking for new ideas to help to generate social change.

This book investigates women’s political participation in Africa. Going beyond the formal institutions of electoral politics, it explores a range of spaces where everyday politics take place, at national and at local levels. In recent years there have been significant improvements in the number of women elected to parliament in Africa. However, there is little indication that this is translating into better developmental outcomes, and indeed there is mounting evidence that it could in fact help to bolster some authoritarian regimes. Starting from the premise that politics is a far broader project than securing a seat in national or local legislatures alone, this book explores the opportunities for women’s political participation across a number of informal spaces where women and men gather, organise and interact in a more regular and systematic manner. Combining insights from political science, sociology and feminist theory and drawing on detailed cases from the Congo, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria and Rwanda, it examines how power in its multiple dimensions circulates across a range of everyday political spaces, while drawing attention to the links between domestic gender inequalities and the global political economy. Inviting scholars, practitioners and activists to broaden their focus beyond formal electoral institutions if they want to support women to become more politically active, this book provides fresh insights into major issues at the heart of African studies, development studies, gender and development, democratisation, and international relations.

Disparities between men and women in basic rights, access to resources, and power to determine their own lives continue to exist in virtually all countries of the world. This report reconfirms this importance of gender equality in the fight against poverty and stresses the urgency of promoting gendered-related action.

This guide provides practitioners, politicians and policy communities with the basic information needed to understand gender-responsive budgets and to start initiatives based on their own local situations.

Research on gender inequity in international health in both low- and high-income countries.

At the turn of the new millenium, war, political oppression, desperate poverty, environmental degradation and disasters, and economic underdevelopment are sharply increasing the ranks of the world's twenty million forced migrants. In this volume, eighteen scholars provide a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary look beyond the statistics at the experiences of the women, men, girls, and boys who comprise this global flow, and at the highly gendered forces that frame and affect them. In theorizing gender and forced migration, these authors present a set of descriptively rich, gendered case studies drawn from around the world on topics ranging from international human rights, to the culture of aid, to the complex ways in which women and men envision displacement and resettlement.

Democracy is the central political issue of our age, yet debates over its nature and goals rarely engage with feminist concerns. Now that women have the right to vote, they are thought to present no special problems of their own. But despite the seemingly gender-neutral categories of individual or citizen, democratic theory and practice continues to privilege the male. This book reconsiders dominant strands in democratic thinking - focusing on liberal democracy, participatory democracy, and twentieth century versions of civic republicanism - and approaches these from a feminist perspective. Anne Phillips explores the under-representation of women in politics, the crucial relationship between public and private spheres, and the lessons of the contemporary women's movement as an experience in participatory democracy.