(from Kate Young, wk 10)

Development requires planning, planning is political, because the outcomes affect distribution of resources and power.

What are women’s interests? (remember what Seers had to say?)? According to Young, they include:

1. ‘easing women’s delivery of traditional benefits to children and family’ (many ways) (basic material needs);
2. increasing labor force participation (livelihood);
3. right to political participation (equality)

3 principles help to better understand how to think about ‘interests’:

• practical interests/needs: these would include food, water, income, health care, education, land, capital, etc.-material needs, but there are cultural differences that can change people’s definitions of material needs (e.g., self-respect and independence in Rajasthan, India were identified by a research project as basic needs for women)
• strategic interests: women’s position in society, how it affects opportunity structures, their ability to meet practical needs; Young suggests there might be agreement on the following three as central to women’s interests
  • addressing male control of women’s labor (patriarchy? ring a bell? hello?);
  • access to resources (econ. and political);
  • ending male violence, control of women’s sexuality
• transformatory potential: e.g., WID improved women’s lives, but did not transform gender relations;

So, Does addressing of practical needs have transformatory potential? here are 4 scenarios:

1. piece-work at home (doesn’t address household isolation);
2. Some sort of collective (provides a forum for discussion, consensus, identification of issues to be addressed);
3. factory employment (women in low wage positions, managed by men, meeting needs of firm)-what’s needed for transformation (in other words, is factory employment a doomed strategy of development, or how can we make the most of it for women)?
4. drudgery-reducing technology (less time spent doing drugerous tasks can be devoted to other pursuits, especially if women own and operate the technologies (e.g., some sort of grain mill)

Sustainability is a key to transformation (how would this work in one of the above cases?)

Keys:

• Decreasing women’s  isolation
  • Collective action-women physically convening;
  • Gaining better access to information-becoming ‘more worldly’ about who’s doing what in the next village, town, region, country
• Institutionalizing change
  • empowerment as alteration of structures that reproduce subordination
    • examples-classic patriarchy (structures were altered, but what were results?)
    • global economy, structural adjustment (can state go against the grain, or with it?)
  • collective action is critical (versus individual actualization)-diffusion of ideas, policy–how could it work from household to household?
• Problem of political conflict-is power zero-sum (meaning, when someone gains power, someone else loses some power), and if so why would men want to relinquish it? Men and women engage in cooperative and conflictual relations–households wouldn’t survive otherwise;
• Grassroots participation; public space (some freedom of expression), social movement potential; real legal protections; two-way information flows between groups and planners

Top down versus bottom-up–know the difference