Gender Planning and Development

Theory, Practice and Training

Caroline Moser

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134935376
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Physical Sciences
• Categoría: Geography

Gender planning is not an end in itself but a means by which women, through a process of empowerment, can emancipate themselves. Ultimately, its success depends on the capacity of women's organizations to confront subordination and create successful alliances which will provide constructive support in negotiating women's needs at the level of household, civil society, the state and the global system.
Gender Planning and Development provides an introduction to an issue of primary importance and constant debate. It will be essential reading for academics, practitioners, undergraduates and trainees in anthropology, development studies, women's studies and social policy.

1 Introduction

This book describes the development of gender planning as a legitimate planning tradition in its own right. The goal of gender planning is the emancipation of women from their subordination, and their achievement of equality, equity and empowerment. This will vary widely in different contexts depending on the extent to which women as a category are subordinated in status to men as a category. The knowledge base explored in recent feminist and development debates provides the conceptual rationale for several key principles. These in turn translate into tools and techniques for a gender planning process. These analytical principles relate to gender roles and gender needs, also to control over resources and decision-making in the household, civil society and state. The procedures by which gender planning is operationalized as well as the framework within which it is institutionalized also require identification and acknowledgement before this new planning tradition is to attain legitimacy. For such a new planning tradition there is still a long way to go—what follows can only be a starting point documenting the development of gender planning over the last decade.

Why should the issue of gender constitute a legitimate planning tradition in its own right? To answer such a question it is necessary to start by examining both the current agenda of ‘women in development’ and the planning preoccupations of those involved in developing countries. For in the world of policy and planning where fashions come and go, women and development concerns are a peculiar anomaly. They resolutely refuse to disappear. However, unlike other recent contenders, such as the environment, they have not succeeded in attaining planning legitimacy. Why has it been so easy for environmental planning to gain identity as a separate planning tradition, and yet so difficult for the ‘women in development’ approach? Why do the proliferating numbers of policies and plans of action for women still only too frequently fail to be translated into practice? Why are Women’s Ministries so effectively excluded from national planning processes and marginalized in terms of resource allocation?

The background to these questions is well known. The United Nations’ Decade for Women (1976–85) played a crucial part in highlighting the important but often previously invisible role of women in the social and economic development of Third World countries and communities, and the particular ‘plight’ of low-income women. During this decade there were considerable shifts in approaches both by academic researchers and by policy-makers. Researchers moved away from a preoccupation with the role of women within the family and women’s reproductive responsibilities, towards an understanding of the complexities of women’s employment and their productive activities. Research on both waged workers and those in the informal sector, in urban and rural areas, helped in identifying the range of low-income women’s income-generating activities in Third World economies. Equally, during the decade policy-makers began to shift their focus from a universal concern with welfare-orientated, family-centred programmes which assumed motherhood as the most important role for women in the development process, to a diversity of approaches emphasizing the productive role of women. Despite developments such as these highlighting the importance of woman to the development process, the acceptance of gender planning has been hindered by a range of issues which still require clarification.

CONCEPTUAL ISSUES: FROM SEX OR GENDER TO WID OR GAD

The term ‘women in development’ was coined in the early 1970s by the Women’s Committee of the Washington, DC, Chapter of the Society for International Development, a network of female development professionals who were influenced by the work on Third World development undertaken by Ester Boserup and other ‘new’ anthropologists (see Boserup 1970; Tinker 1982; and Maguire 1984). The term was very rapidly adopted by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in their so-called Women in Development (WID) approach, the underlying rationale of which was that women are an untapped resource who can provide an economic contribution to development. USAID, with its Office of Women in Development, has been one of the most determined advocates of the WID approach. Together, with the Harvard Institute of International Development, they have produced a case-study based methodology to identify how women have been left out of development on the grounds that ‘women are key actors in the economic system, yet their neglect in development plans has left untapped a potentially large contribution’ (Overholt et al. 1984:3).

More recently a further shift in approach, principally in academic research, has recognized the limitations of focusing on women in isolation and has drawn attention to the need instead to look at ‘Gender and Development’ (GAD). This focus on ‘gender’ rather than ‘women’ was influenced by such writers as Oakley (1972) and Rubin (1975). They were concerned about the manner in which the problems of women were perceived in terms of their sex—namely, their biological differences from men—rather than in terms of their gender—that is, the social relationship between men and women, in which women have been systematically subordinated.¹

Approaches to issues relating to women in developing countries became concerned therefore with the manner in which gender and concomitant relationships were socially constructed. The focus on gender rather than women makes it critical to look not only at the category ‘women’—since that is only half the story—but at women in relation to men, and the way in which relations between these categories are socially constructed. Men and women play different roles in society, with their gender differences shaped by ideological, historical, religious, ethnic, economic and cultural determinants (Whitehead 1979). These roles show similarities and differences between other social categories such as class, ‘race’, ethnicity and so on. Since the way they are socially constructed is always temporally and spatially specific, gender divisions cannot be read off on checklists. Social categories, therefore, differentiate the experience of inequality and subordination within societies.

Although the critical distinction between sex and gender is well known, the further distinction between Women in Development (WID) and Gender and Development (GAD) is less clear. The terms are all too often used synonymously, yet in their original meaning they are representative of very different theoretical positions with regard to the problems experienced by low-income women in the Third World. Consequently, they differ fundamentally in terms of their focus, with important implications for both their policies and planning procedures.

The WID approach, despite its change in focus from one of equity to one of efficiency, is based on the underlying rationale that development processes would proceed much better if women were fully incorporated into them (instead of being left to use their time ‘unproductively’). It focuses mainly on women in isolation, promoting measures such as access to credit and employment as the means by which women can be better integrated into the development process. In contrast, the GAD approach maintains that to focus on women in isolation is to ignore the real problem, which remains their subordinate status to men. In insisting that women cannot be viewed in isolation, it emphasizes a focus on gender relations, when designing measures to ‘help’ women in the development process.

At the beginning of this book it is important to recognize that gender planning differs fundamentally from planning for Women in Development. Because it is a less ‘threatening’ approach, planning for Women in Development is far more popular. However, by its very definition it is an add-on, rather than an integrative, approach to the issue. Gender planning, with its fundamental goal of emancipation, is by definition a more ‘confrontational’ approach. Based on the premise that the major issue is one of subordination and inequality, its purpose is that women through empowerment achieve equality and equity with men in society.

PROCEDURAL ISSUES: FROM SOCIAL AWARENESS TO PLANNING PRACTICE

If the first problem is conceptual categories, the second is planning procedures. It is clear that while the important role that women play in Third World development processes is now widely recognized, conceptual awareness of both WID and GAD has not necessarily resulted in their translation into planning practice.

The extent to which social awareness or consciousness of inequality has been satisfactorily incorporated into planning varies widely. Class inequality, for example, has probably most commonly been addressed in planning through the introduction of income as a target group indicator for selection in policies, programmes and projects. The fact that the translation of social categories into planning indicators is neither automatic nor universal has had important implications for those addressing the concerns of gender inequality. Indeed, for many practitioners involved in different aspects of development planning, the lack of an adequate gender planning methodology has been the most problematical aspect of their work.

With the endorsement of the 1985 UN Forward Looking Strategies, institutions at international, national and non-governmental level now play lip-service to WID. Mostly focusing on women in isolation, Ministries of Women’s Affairs, WID Units, and Women’s Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), with predominantly female staff, have proliferated throughout the world, in countries as diverse as the Philippines, Zimbabwe and Belize. They have been involved in developing WID policies, in designing WID checklists and in formulating programmes and projects to ‘bring’ or ‘integrate’ women into the planning process. More recently, some organizations have moved towards a more ‘gendered’ approach, with many embarking on extensive training programmes aimed at changing the work practices of colleagues within the organization.

Despite the energy and resources allocated to this work for more than a decade, WID still most frequently remains an ‘add-on’ to mainstream policy and planning practice. It continues to experience difficulty in being satisfactorily incorporated into the diversity of sectoral interventions concerned with the lives of low-income communities in Third World countries. There are certainly important success stories. Nevertheless, in a context where so many policies fail to become translated into practice, the fundamental preoccupation remains the need to develop a far more rigorous planning framework than that which currently exists. Only then will gender concerns be integrated into development practice.

A number of problems have contributed to the failure to develop a gender planning framework. First, most authorities responsible for development planning have only reluctantly, if at all, recognized gender as an important planning issue. Despite the creation of women’s ministries, units and bureaux, decision-making powers largely remain male-dominated and gender-blind. The political constraints are overwhelming. However, to focus entirely on these is to miss a number of other crucial problems, some of them more technical in origin.

To begin with, the majority of policy-makers and practitioners working on WID/GAD issues do not themselves have any formal training in the discipline of planning. It is interesting to note that for planners working within such traditions as transport, land-use or regional planning, for example, comprehensive training is an assumed prerequisite; yet this is not the case with gender planning. Here the tendency is to recruit women on the basis that they will inherently understand the issues and rely on their good ‘common sense’. In many cases this has resulted in widespread ignorance of the inbuilt limitations of planning procedures adopted.

A further problem is that the concern of feminist academic research, by its very nature, has been to highlight the complexities of gender relations and divisions of labour in specific socio-economic contexts. It has not been concerned to identify how such complexities might be simplified into methodological tools which enable practitioners to translate gender awareness into practice. The audience of pure research still remains essentially other academics. This failure to translate the results of research into practice means that many of those committed to integrating gender into their work at policy, programme or project levels still lack the necessary planning principles and methodological tools. This issue is critical; planners require simplified tools which allow them to feed the particular complexities of specific contexts into the planning process.

Finally, and of greatest importance for those who are involved in planning practice, it has proved remarkably difficult to ‘graft’ gender onto existing planning disciplines. These have proved remarkably resistant to change. It is probably no coincidence that gender planning, as a planning discipline in its own right, developed out of a planning institution rather than an academic, research or consultancy environment. The personal frustration I experienced when teaching on a variety of training courses for Third World and bilateral planning practitioners, which I tried to make gender-aware by ‘grafting’ gender onto particular planning disciplines—be it land-use, ‘manpower’ or infrastructure planning—led me to recognize the necessity of distinguishing between a gender-aware planner (in, say, transport planning), and gender planning, as a specific planning approach in its own right.

As a consequence of factors such as these, women and gender remain marginalized in planning theory and practice, and will do so until such time as theoretical feminist concerns are adequately incorporated into a policy and planning framework, which is recognized as a planning tradition, with its own planning methodology.

DEFINITIONAL ISSUES: POLICY, PLANNING AND THE ORGANIZATION OF IMPLEMENTATION

It is important to realize that the problems of integrating WID or GAD vary at different stages in the planning process. This makes it necessary to define how such terms as ‘policy’, ‘planning’ and ‘implementation’ are used throughout the book. This is of particular concern given the widespread confusion in existing terminology, and the fact that the close interrelationship between them makes it difficult to distinguish where one term ends and another begins (Conyers 1982). If policy is about what to do, then planningis about how to do it, the organization of implementation is about what isactually done. The term ‘planning process’ is used generically to describe the three stages, outlined below, in what essentially is a continuous process.

•Policy-making: the process of social and political decision-making about how to allocate resources for the needs and interests of society, concluding in the formulation of a policy strategy.

•Planning: the process of implementation of the policy, often concluding in a plan.

•The organization of implementation: the process of administrative action to deliver the programme designed, often resulting in a completed product.

Similarly, the term ‘gender planning process’ is also used generically to describe the three interrelated stages of gender policy, gender planning and the organization of implementation, with the term ‘gender planning methodology’ referring to the detailed methods by which the process is achieved.²

The distinction between different stages in the planning process is critical. For instance, where there is gender-blindness in policy formulation one of two problems is likely to occur. First, women are not recognized as important in development processes and simply not included at the level of policy formulation. Secondly, development policy, even when aware of the important role women play in development processes, because of certain assumptions, often still ‘misses’ women, and consequently fails to develop coherently formulated gender policy.

In contrast, the inability to translate gender policy into implemented practice is often a different problem. This relates to identifying constraints that can occur in numerous phases in the implementation stage. In planning, the term ‘culture’ is frequently used as a blanket explanation to identify constraints in planning procedures. The use of this term in such a pejorative manner, as a causal explanation of failure, raises the issue of the extent to which planning is a neutral activity. Are the planning constraints encountered when challenging inequalities in society more often political rather than technical in nature?

POLITICAL AND TECHNICAL ISSUES: CONSTRAINTS AND OPPORTUNITIES IN THE PLANNING PROCESS

Is gender policy not implemented because of such technical constraints as inappropriate planning procedures, or are there wider political constraints, operating at the level of policy formulation, which impede successful implementation? Grindle (1980) identifies the manner in which social and structural constraints influence the ‘implementability’ of programmes, arguing ...