Gendering the Development Agenda

Scholars of Women’s Studies are continuously critically engaging with culturally defined gender roles and raising questions about the way we have organized ourselves, our major political and social institutions and knowledge itself. To understand the meaning that these scholars imply when they speak of gendering development agenda and the agenda itself, it becomes imperative to understand the following five forms of the interaction between feminism and development:

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Basis	Women in Development (WID)	Women and Development (WAD)	Gender and Development (GAD)	Women, Environment and Development (WED)	Postmodernism and Development (PAD)
Central Concept/Idea	WID involved an integrationist approach to bring women full force into a presumed progressive system of development is pertinent.	As per WAD, women’s oppression and marginalisation was due to the way their labour had been integrated into global capitalism by the core countries.	GAD focusses not on the identities of women as opposed to men, but the gender ideologies, structures and norms which construct the different positioning of both men and women. Therefore, this paradigm believed structural change was imperative to emancipate women.	WED drew parallels between men’s control over women and male control over nature and connections among masculine science and industrialization and assaults on the ecological health of the planet.	PAD advocated an emphasis on differences, providing space for the voices of the marginalized, and disrupting the representation of women in the South as an undifferentiated “other”.
Approach	In order to improve the living conditions of women, it was imperative to increase their participation and increase their share in resources, employment and income. 5 sub-approaches: Welfare, Equity, Anti-poverty, Efficiency and Empowerment	To understand the predicament of women within capitalist societies, Marxist analysis and its historical and materialist method, and feminist analysis, concentrating on the identification of patriarchy as a social and historical structure, were integrated.	Allocation of tasks needs to be changed as sexual division of labour in a society was one of connection in which men and women became dependent on each other.	Emphasis on unequal control over resources and treatment of gender as a critical variable in interaction with class, race, and other factors was a prerequisite shaping processes of ecological change.	Accepting and understanding difference and the power of discourse, and foster open, consultative dialogue to empower women in the South to articulate their own needs and agendas.
Methods	Addressing women’s issues like maternal mortality Setting up women-only projects and organizations for promoting their needs and interests	Using production and reproduction as inseparable aspects of development theory Reproductive democracy, including collective participatory control over family Procreative decisions Collective control over commodity production	Integration of gender in the discourse and using this perspective to look at the structures and processes giving rise to women’s disadvantaged position and the notion of male superiority Identification of key weak links in official policies for strategic interventions for women emancipation.	A combination of Gendered knowledge, gendered environmental rights, and gendered environmental politics, The notion of “sustainable development” was used as an opportunity for challenging the development-equals-economic-growth equation from the perspective of a feminist methodology.	Critique of colonial and contemporary constructions of the “Third World” woman deconstruction of development Recovery of women’s knowledge and voices Celebration of differences and multiple identities Consultative dialogue between development practitioners and their “clients”
Depiction of Women (Stance)	Victims.	Super-exploited working class.	Social actors within wider structures of constraints and a heterogeneous group divided by class, race and creed.	Victims of the violence of patriarchal development, women resisted this “development” to protect nature and preserve their own sustenance:	Women are their own agents with heterogeneous interests and needs.
Depiction of Development	Progressive System.	Gender-determined and a class process.	Development from this perspective is the process of improving the ability of individuals and of society to the whole range of human needs: physical, emotional and creative (Young, 1997).	Superimposition of the scientific and economic paradigms created by Western gender-based ideology.	Development, which is currently a Westernized concept, needs to be modified to include multiple voices and implications of social practices.
Critique	Imposition of North’s agenda on South without adequate understanding of Southern women Shallow social and economic analysis while neglecting gender relations	Neglecting social relations of gender within classes Incomplete consideration of variations in patriarchy in different modes of production and their impact on women. Universalizing the Western sexual division of labour and employing categories like “labour” and “production” rooted in the culture of capitalist modernity Failure to provide a genuine alternative to mainstream development	Difficulty in implementation due to questioning of underlying social, economic, and political structures Involvement of modernist tendencies while still essentializing poor women.	Extremely utopian without an instructive blueprint for policy change	In extremes, could hinder collective action among women Jargon of postmodern writing was an unsurmountable obstacle for people mired in illiteracy and economic crisis
Links with other Theories of Development	Modernisation	Dependency and Neo-Marxist approaches to Development	Socialist Feminism and Feminist Anthropology	Environmentalism and Political Ecology	Postmodernism

From the above table, we can deduce that the paradigm that actually most prominently talks about gendering development is Gender and Development, though all paradigms have certain implications to this regard. [1]

Since development intends to change people’s lives, individually and collectively, it takes into its purview the established structures and institutes. Overlooking relevant gender factors in macroeconomic policies and institutions can undermine the successful outcome of those very same policies and institutions as these structures have gendered dimensions which influence the processes as well as the impact of development. Therefore, it is imperative that gender perspectives, especially women’s voices and perspectives, inform policy making and development planning.[2]

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