Addressing the multiple dimensions of gender inequality requires commitments by policy-makers, practitioners and scholars to transformative practices. One challenge is to assemble a coherent conceptual framework from diverse knowledges and experiences. In this paper, we present a framework that emerged from our involvement in changing market culture in the Pacific, which we name a radical empowerment of women approach. We draw on detailed narratives from women market vendors and women-led new initiatives in marketplaces to explain this approach. We argue that the primary focus of recently developed projects for marketplaces in the Pacific is technical and infrastructural, which is insufficient for addressing gendered political and economic causes of poor market management and oppressive conditions for women vendors. By exploring the complex array of motives and effects of the desire to transform or improve marketplaces in the Pacific, we caution against simplistic technical or infrastructural solutions. This paper also introduces the practice of working as a cooperative, hybrid research collaboration. The knowledges and analyses that we bring to this issue demonstrate that substantive analysis generated from diverse and shifting 'locations' and roles, but underpinned by a shared vision of, and commitment to, gender justice, can provide distinctive policy and research insights.

Te Runanga o Te Rarawa is the tribal council representing the interests of the

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This paper makes three key points. First, beginning with a personal narrative on the radical practice of getting into the academy, it argues that scholars with non‐traditional academic trajectories must still be able to be competitive in employment rounds. Second, it outlines three particular pedagogies of radical practice: focussing on subjectivities; using local languages; and developing peer learning. Finally, it argues that active scholarly citizens bring intellectual agility that allows for creative, imaginative, and just development thinking and practice.

Yvonne Underhill-Sem from her place-based perspective of the Pacific Islands argues that as we think more about place, so too we must think more about bodies. She proposes that what is needed is a theoretical position that allows bodies and places to be both grounded and materially pinchable, but also to be fluid and discursively constituted. Development (2002) 45, 54–59. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1110318