UNRISD News Number 20

Spring/Summer 1999

ESSENTIAL MATTER

Making Development Interventions More Accountable to Women

As a result of growing international and domestic pressure since the United Nations Decade for Women (1976–1985), gender issues have become more visible in a wide range of policy-making institutions. New structures have been set up in many NGOs, aid agencies and state institutions with the aim of bringing women's diverse interests into policy-making processes. Through a series of global conferences, coalitions of women's groups and NGOs have also placed women's concerns on the policy agenda and, in some instances, have even changed the way some key issues of social development are understood. How have policy-making and implementing institutions responded to the diverse (and sometimes conflicting) demands voiced by global and national women's movements? Which issues have been taken up and which ignored? How have women's concerns been understood and translated into projects, policies and programmes? What kinds of constraints have been encountered in conceptualizing, institutionalizing, resourcing and implementing them?

A slow start?
Ironically, gender advocacy gained strength at a time when policy agendas were dominated by a faith in markets and opposition to equity-based state interventions. Accounts of institutional politics document the resistance that gender practitioners encountered in their struggle to bring their concerns into organizations that overlooked equity considerations. In the process, strategic alliances and compromises had to be made, with the inevitable outcome that gender policy has often been watered down—some would say irrevocably. Another constraint on the promotion of the gender agenda has been the depressed economic environment in which many developing countries have found themselves. When the accent is on stabilization, governments are less willing, and indeed less able, to accommodate demands for gender redistributive policies that imply new resource commitments.

In the 1990s, as the complexity of the adjustment process has become evident, simple market prescriptions look increasingly unsatisfactory. Poverty alleviation and social development are once again on the agenda, creating more openings for equity concerns. The rediscovery of the social dimensions of development has been facilitated through UN summits, which have provided occasions for a wide range of civil society groups, including women's groups, to forge strategic alliances among themselves, to voice their demands and to influence policy debates. Any realistic assessment of these summits must, however, gauge the actual commitment to implementation by governments and international agencies, once the dust has settled.

As part of its contribution to Copenhagen Plus Five, UNRISD will commission studies that examine some key aspects of the "enabling environment" for realizing the global women's agenda. Findings of the studies will be published in the forthcoming UNRISD report for Copenhagen Plus Five, Taking Global Responsibility for Social Development: Policy Reform and Institutional Change in the 1990s. The following considerations will guide the gender-related studies.

Defining the agenda: Justifying policy attention to women
There has been a long-running debate between feminists who call for gender justice on the basis of equality, and those premising their advocacy on the market conception of merit (also known as the "efficiency approach"). The equality criteria—embodied in equal rights feminism—has historically been a dominant force in the international women's movement, as well as in national-level efforts to promote women's legal rights. It values gender equality for intrinsic, rather than instrumental, reasons. It is becoming increasingly prominent again in the context of a "rights-based approach" to development. Other feminist advocates, especially those engaging with technocratic institutions, have sought to legitimize policy attention to women by framing gender justice in terms of the social and economic dividends it will produce (such as enhanced growth and reduced fertility rates). The current policy approach to female education, emphasizing the high payoffs of investing in girls schooling, displays such a tone.

The tensions between these two approaches have had serious political ramifications. Debates on reproductive rights provide a case in point. For many years, feminist health activists in different countries have opposed mainstream population and family planning programmes on ethical and political grounds. Specifically, they have argued that their failure to treat women's health and well-being as ends in themselves (rather than as means toward lowering or raising fertility rates), and their disregard for women as decision makers, constitute violations of women's human rights. More recently, at global summits,¹ women's coalitions from North and South worked to replace the population and planning discourse with broader concepts of reproductive and sexual health and rights, linking sexual and reproductive freedom to women's human rights. Does the change in language matter? Is the "Cairo consensus" a sham, as some have argued? Does it merely replace earlier family planning rhetoric with that of reproductive rights and women's empowerment in order to legitimize population control "with a feminist face"?

Similarly, in the field of education, is the instrumentalist view useful or sufficient for making education policies and programmes more appropriate for girls (and women) from poor households? What are its blind spots? Turning to another key question, what kinds of concerns would a gender-sensitive understanding of economic rights have to embrace? Women's (and men's) economic activities have been used to claim a range of workplace-based rights (such as wage parity, working conditions and benefits). But women are disproportionately visible in an important, unrecognized, area of economic activity—the "care economy"—which rarely involves any rights.

Institutionalizing the agenda: Alternative political strategies
What are the strengths and weaknesses of different strategies for influencing the agendas of mainstream development institutions, especially the state? Should feminists enter and gradually transform these institutions from within, even if it is recognized that change will be incremental? Or is it more effective to work for change from the outside, through grassroots women's organizations and NGOs? How can a dialogue between "insiders" and "outsiders" be created and sustained? What is the role of donors and global women's movements in promoting change at the national level?

Moving gender issues from the margins of development policy to the centre has been a major challenge for all those at the forefront of this effort—activists, scholars and development practitioners. Evidence from some national contexts points to the importance of strong external women's constituencies to support the work of internal gender advocates. In other national settings, however, women's groups and NGOs are reluctant to become too closely associated with "gender bureaucrats". This reflects their wariness about mainstream politics, party-linked gender units, and the high political positions occupied by the wives or female relatives of some national leaders. And while this may show a healthy concern about retaining autonomy, it makes strategic collaboration difficult.

Despite the diversity of institutions and social contexts in which gender advocates find themselves, the instruments (and language) used for promoting change have been remarkably uniform. This is perhaps an indication of the strength of the international women's movement in setting norms and in facilitating interaction, negotiation and exchange of lessons across national boundaries. The uniformity of approach, however, also begs the question of whether information and ideas flow exclusively from the North to the South. To what extent is the gender agenda donor-driven? What are the implications for creating legitimacy, commitment and sustainability in different national settings?

Examples of this uniformity in approach are the participatory research and planning methods now enthusiastically embraced by NGOs, donor agencies and some state institutions. Do these methods of data collection and planning give voice to the poor, especially poor women, as is often claimed? Given the nature of gender (and class) politics at the village level, how likely are poor women to express their needs and interests, especially in group situations? And beyond the issue of how data are collected, there is also a question of how well they are selected and analysed. But the moral emphasis on accessing the voices of the poor avoids questions about the reliability of data.

Financing the agenda: The struggle over resources
Redistributive policies imply resource commitments. But gender-sensitive policy proposals tend rarely to be traced through to actual budgetary implications. They therefore fail to make a direct impact on planned public expenditures. Women's movements repeatedly emphasize the need to recognize that women stand at the crossroads between "productive" activities and the care of human beings (the care economy). Subsidized childcare and elderly care facilities, public healthcare programmes, public transport and piped water/electricity help women meet their dual responsibilities. But when state resources are not channelled to such services, women must work more to compensate for the shortfall. In theory, women's work in the care economy is central to economic activity and should therefore carry economic rights or entitlements. But attracting resources when there are many competing claims on budgets has been a major challenge for women's movements worldwide. Has there been greater willingness to recognize the wider benefits of such social services as a result of the commitments made at the recent global conferences? And have countries taken steps to finance them?

1 The World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993; the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994; the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen and Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, both in 1995.

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