A knowledge revolution: Transnational feminist contributions to international development agendas and policies, 1965–1995

Abstract

The article traces the impact of feminist activists and development experts from around the world who, from the 1960s to the 1990s, pushed for greater attention to women's life situations in the emerging and increasingly contentious international debates about economic growth. Increasingly well-positioned within UN commissions, bureaus, and development agencies, these women used the statistical facts about policy impacts to redefine economic development agendas along feminist lines. This information 'from below' produced a 'knowledge revolution' that circulated widely within the UN system with far-reaching consequences for feminist advocacy. The new knowledge deepened understandings of rights claims even as its meanings, over time, led to competing responses among feminists to the continuing challenges of global inequality. The article is based on extensive published primary sources and relevant secondary interdisciplinary literature. KeywordsCommission on the Status of Women, DAWN, economic development, gender and development, transnational feminism, women-in-developmentThe UN Decade for Women (1975)(1976)(1977)(1978)(1979)(1980)(1981)(1982)(1983)(1984)(1985) brought diverse groups of women from around the globe together at women's world conferences to identify, and seek policy solutions to, the perceived disadvantages of women with respect to men's life opportunities. The

NGOs and Political Change: A History of the Australian Council for International Development

“…The key elements were an agreement that developed countries would provide 1 per cent of their GDP as aid and foreign direct investment, and developing countries would achieve a 5 per cent real rate of growth (Quataert 2013;Hulme 2013). The decade was launched by the UN General Assembly in 1961 and was characterised by a shift in focus to include agricultural development and the Green Revolution, as well as the large-scale industrial development so favoured in the 1950s.…”

“…It would simply take too long for industrial development to produce enough jobs in the context of a looming food crisis. The problem with these approaches, which still persists, is that they depend on imported technocratic solutions rather than adapting local approaches and addressing global structural issues of inequality and access to resources (Meier 1971;Quataert 2013;Gubser 2012 To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required -not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich (from John F. Kennedy's Inauguration speech quoted in Birdsall and Sowa, 2013, p. 3 ).…”

“…For example, a British Foreign Office view from 1954 was that CSW's push for women's rights was 'woolly, half-baked and impractical' (Laville 2012, p. 487). CSW, therefore, was largely alone in the UN system on women's rights, with the other major agencies such as the International Labour Organization (ILO) and FAO relegating women to being virtually second-class citizens by advocating what would be seen now as an anachronistic gendered division of labour, with women being confined to domestic roles (Quataert 2013;Jain 2005). Women and development was a virtual unknown in bilateral development programs, except for some pioneering work in Sweden in the mid-1960s (Nanivazo and Scott 2012).…”

“…In 1970 Ester Boserup's groundbreaking work Women's Role in Economic Development (1970), based on her own observations in India and Senegal and the work of the ECA in the 1960s, put the issue of women and development to a much wider audience (Turner and Fischer-Kowalski 2010;Quataert 2013). It put a challenge to Western donors when she argued for 'women's integration into the development process as equal partners with men' (Drolet 2010, p. 213).…”