Contextualising gender empowerment at the grassroots: a tale of two policy initiatives

Abstract

The policy environment on gender is fraught with contradictions and contestation of varying degrees in India that does not disappear even as recent transformative mode of participatory initiatives seem to place women's agency at the core of empowerment agenda. Drawing from two collaborative projects at the grassroots, the paper argues that even well conceptualised projects miss the cutting edge distinction between women and gender and continue to engage with an instrumental logic of women's development and empowerment at the expense of issues of gender equality and equity in translating the intention into action. It is also observed, however, that spatially embedded social and cultural specificities impact policy discourse resulting in very different outcomes of conceptually comparable policy formulations. According to the author acknowledging spatiality of experiences provides a vantage point to critically engage with context-specific strategies to resolve gendered conflicts and tensions resulting from confining social relations and normative gender codes.

NGOs and Feminisms in Development: Interrogating the ‘Southern Women's NGO’

“…Exclusion deriving from class politics that undermines an imagined feminist solidarity is evidenced, for example, in an extensive and growing body of research on how both micro‐credit programmes and self‐help groups in the Indian context may entrench class divides, invisibilising the most marginalised or vulnerable women as neither qualified to speak nor participate. This includes research by Sangtin Writers and Nagar (), Raju (), Batliwala and Dhanraj (), Dwivedi (), Sharma and Parthasarathy () and Murthy et al (). Critiques of women and class in Africa include work by Amadiume () on postcolonialism and elite women, Creevey's () analysis of the class‐based inequalities that exclude lower class women attempting to participate in women's credit societies in Senegal and Gugerty and Kremer's () critical analysis of women's community associations in Kenya, where they find that women, contrary to donor assumptions, are neither better at communicating nor above concerns around elite capture, even at the local level.…”

The Difficult Transition

“…The complexities of the relationship between economic development and gender relations have been noticed widely, not just through the feminist critiques of the development discourse on a theoretical plane, but also through the substantial empirical evidence suggesting that expansion of economic opportunities, unless accompanied by specific gendersensitive targets, policies and instruments, does not necessarily result in egalitarian gender outcomes. In fact, there has been a growing concern over the relative ineffectiveness of the gender policy instruments, which, though ensuring specific gender-sensitive targets and, in some cases, even ensuring that decision-making processes at different levels are more inclusive, fail to bring about the desired transformation in gender relations, mainly because of the overarching dominance of patriarchy in various spheres of life and livelihoods (Jayal, 2003;Raju, 2006). The multidimensionality of the processes of exclusion and discrimination that has been the defining characteristic of patriarchal control over resources, opportunities, institutions and decision-making processes, calls for critical scrutiny of the process of economic development, particularly in relation to the differential outcomes for individuals, classes, genders, communities and regions.…”