Gender Justice and Human Rights in International Development Assistance

Transcending Universal Divisions

Sarah Forti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138083868
• eBook ISBN: 9781351620819
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Gender Justice and Human Rights in International Development Assistance provides a critical analysis of how frameworks of gender equality play out in the field of international development assistance, at theoretical, international legislative and policy levels, donor and national policy levels and programme levels. If current dominant theoretical perspectives are not interrogated, the consequences could be that gender inequalities and injustices are inadequately addressed, or that opportunities are missed to impact on poverty reduction and on transformative gender changes. Through a renewed interpretation of gender equality in IDA, the book aims to show the way towards a more effective response to gender inequalities and injustices faced by women in developing countries.

Drawing on 20 years of experience working with IDA policies and programming across three continents, this book makes an important contribution to the active and dynamic field of critical feminism, as well as providing practical illustrations on how such critical thinking might contribute to gender transformational changes. Gender Justice and Human Rights in International Development Assistance will be important reading for scholars and upper level students working in the fields of gender equality, human rights, development assistance, foreign affairs, international law, and international relations.

Part I

1 Breaking the waves

This chapter provides a critical assessment of key theoretical frameworks and ideologies which have posed the most significant challenges to the concept of gender equality in IDA. The chapter proceeds to analyse the implication of these challenges on the key concepts underlying the notion of gender equality such as International Development Assistance (IDA),¹ Women in Development (WID)² and Gender and Development (GAD).³

The chapter thus first discusses how theoretical frameworks and ideologies underpinning gender equality have displaced fundamental notions in the interpretation of gender equality in IDA. In particular, the chapter critically assesses the eclipse of the notion of redistribution and the displacement of the universality⁴ of women’s human rights violations through the politics of identity’s perspective,⁵ which essentially focuses on recognition and representation.⁶

The first section of the chapter analyses the implications of the prevailing focus of identity politics in the interpretation of gender equality in the field of IDA. By identifying cultural relativism as one of the most challenging issue for the field, this section assesses the extent to which cultural relativism⁷ has found a renaissance through a variety of feminist schools of thought from anti-essentialists⁸ to Third Worldists,⁹ to postcolonialists¹⁰ and difference feminists.¹¹ It is argued that this revival has been achieved largely by delegitimising universalism, and with it, the notion of the universality which is inherent to i) fundamental violations of women’s human rights such as violence against women and ii) the unequal distribution of power and resources. The chapter focuses on these two aspects as they constitute, amongst other issues, the core problematics faced by women beneficiaries of IDA, as is further evidenced in the first section of Chapter 2.

The significance of these developments is further discussed in relation to the very conceptualisation and definition of key concepts and approaches influencing the understanding of gender equality in IDA. These are: IDA itself,¹² the Women in Development approach (WID)¹³ and the Gender and Development approach (GAD).¹⁴

Wavering framings and ideologies

Theoretical frameworks underpinning the concept of gender equality in the field of IDA have neither reflected a linear process, nor have they resulted in neatly divided, fixed and stable categories. Rather, they have been characterised by a wavering process of interconnected, disconnected and conflicting focuses, critiques and counter-critiques.

This section identifies and discusses the claims of the prevailing focus on the politics of identity and the implications vis-à-vis other fundamental notions underpinning the concept of gender equality. The section shows that one of the main implications of the prevailing focus on identity politics has been the eclipse¹⁵ of two fundamental notions underpinning gender equality of particular significance in the context of IDA. The first fundamental notion underpinning gender equality is the notion of redistribution, which essentially encapsulates socio-economic justice,¹⁶ and the second is the notion of the universality of fundamental violations of women’s human rights.¹⁷

The section focuses on these two specific notions as they constitute the core and common problematics faced by women beneficiaries encountered in the field and across diverse socio-cultural settings.¹⁸

Displacing the notion of redistribution

The relevance of the notion of redistribution as understood in this book relates to Mansell’s idea of substantive justice.¹⁹ The notion of justice as redistribution is understood in connection with John Rawls’ theory of justice as follows:

The idea of justice as fairness is to use the notion of pure procedural justice to handle contingencies of particular situations. The social system is to be designed so that the resulting distribution is just however things turn out. To achieve this end, it is necessary to set the social and economic process within the surroundings of suitable political and legal institutions. Without an appropriate scheme of these background institutions the outcome of the distributive process will not be just… . It is clear that the justice of distributive shares depends on the background institutions and how they allocate total income, wages and other income plus transfers.²⁰

The key problematics discussed by Rawls and which he sums up as follows: ‘While some effort is made to secure fair equality of opportunity, it is either insufficient or else ineffective given the disparities in wealth and political influence they permit’²¹ carries particular resonance in the field of gender equality in IDA by exposing the deficiencies of focusing solely on the notion of ‘fair equality’.

The issue at stake is further problematised by Dworkin as follows:

So the question of what division of resources is an equal division must to some degree include the question of what powers someone who is assigned a resource thereby gains, and that in turn must include the further question of his right to veto whatever changes in those powers might be threatened through politics.²²

As the notion of justice is defined as including the notion of distribution, which in turn includes issues of (re)distribution of power and rights, the concept of gender equality in IDA is thus problematised along the same lines. The key questions these reflections on the notion of justice raise for gender equality in IDA are: How has gender equality been interpreted? What did the interpretations provided include? Why did a particular focus prevail, and at what cost?

In seeking to respond to these questions, Nancy Fraser’s account offers a relevant and useful explanation of how ‘gender equality’ has been defined and what has been the changing hegemonic focus underlying its interpretation. Fraser provides a clear illustration and a historical account of the displacement of the notion of socio-economic justice²³ in the interpretation of gender equality as follows:

If the first phase of post-war feminism sought to ‘engender’ the socialist imaginary, the second phase stressed the need to ‘recognize difference’. ‘Recognition’, accordingly, became the chief grammar of feminist claims-making in the fin de siècle. A venerable category of Hegelian philosophy, resuscitated by political theorists, this notion captured the distinctive character of post-socialist struggles, which often took the form of identity politics, aimed more at valorising difference, than at promoting equality. Whether the question was violence against women or gender disparities in political representation, feminists increasingly resorted to the grammar of recognition to press their claims. Unable to make headway against injustices of political economy, they preferred to target harms resulting from androcentric patterns of cultural values or status hierarchies. The result was a major shift in the feminist imaginary: whereas the previous generation pursued an expanded ideal of social equality, this one invested the bulk of its energies in cultural change… . What distinguished the identity politics phase was the relative autonomization of the cultural project – its decoupling from the project of political-economic transformation and distributive justice.²⁴

Fraser in this concise statement draws a picture of the wavering ideologies underpinning the notion of gender equality. Her depiction is not within a static theoretical framework but rather portrayed as a succession of fundamental changes in a changing theorising process which characterises the evolution of feminist thought in the last 60 years. It is within this idea of a wavering theorising process that different ‘focuses’ have emerged. The focuses described by Fraser as ‘phases’ in feminist thinking are both objects of investigation as well as overall orientations and framing of feminist thinking in a certain period of time. Such description of framing ‘in movement’, as it were, is particularly relevant and useful when trying to make sense of the succession of ideologies that have informed, shaped and influenced, broadly speaking, the body of gender-related concepts in IDA. The term ‘focus’ will be used rather than ‘phase’ as it more closely illustrates the act of concentrating on a particular idea whilst at the same time framing and orienting the discourse within a particular perspective.

Nancy Fraser in her depiction further uses the word ‘decoupling’ to explain that one underpinning focus was substituted by another as opposed to different focuses coexisting through relevant interconnections in one overall theoretical matrix defined by the notion of justice. She contends that amongst others, the focus on identity politics and cultural difference became the current dominant framing, disconnected from the previous and original focus on distributive justice. It is argued not only that a similar phenomenon is verified in the field of IDA but that it takes the form of an eclipse of the notion of distribution.

Further, by denouncing the consequence of this shift in focus as displacing rather than deepening the socialist imaginary, Nancy Fraser assesses the implications of the hegemony of identity politics as follows:

The tendency was to subordinate social struggles to cultural struggles, the politics of redistribution to the politics of recognition. It was assumed, rather, by the proponents of the cultural turn that a feminist politics of identity and difference would synergize with struggles of social equality. But that assumption fell prey to the larger Zeitgeist. In the fin de siècle context, the turn to recognition dovetailed all too neatly with a hegemonic neoliberalism that wanted nothing more than to repress all memory of social egalitarianism. The result was a tragic historical irony. Instead of arriving at a broader, richer paradigm that could encompass both redistribution and recognition, we effectively traded one truncated paradigm for another … at precisely the moment when neoliberalism was staging its spectacular comeback.²⁵

The irony that Fraser is alluding to reflects well the fact that whilst many proponents of identity politics and especially proponents of Third Worldist and the cultural difference views were critical of Western liberal feminism, which in their view often amounted to neo-colonial imperialism, they fitted ‘all too well’, through their very anti-liberal critiques, into the neoliberal framework.

If Fraser assumes that identity politics ‘fell prey’ to the larger zeitgeist, suggesting that it was an unfortunate accident, arguably, the focus on identities may well find more common ground with individual...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of abbreviations and acronyms
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Bibliography
• Index