- Policy Papers
Women on Wheels in New Delhi, India
Victories in gender equality have been achieved, but development is now often seen as managerial rather than social change. Bipasha Baruah's research on Azad's driving training program for resource-poor women shows how focusing on "cost effectiveness" and "scale" can undermine valuable work and offers a way forward.
The development sector’s engagement with poverty alleviation and gender equality has evolved considerably over the past 40 years. Significant efforts have been made to accommodate theoretical advancements in the broader field of gender and development. Programs designed to empower women – and men in some settings – have evolved from the welfare, efficiency and equity focused-approaches of the 1970s and 1980s to the more recent empowerment, human rights and capabilities-based approaches of the 1990s and the new millennium. Because of a broader structural understanding of the sources of women’s poverty and disempowerment, today many more actors in development engage, not just with employment and labour force participation as means to empower women, but also with more politically-sensitive issues (i.e. property rights, political participation and the gendered division of household labour, to name a few) that they had previously been hesitant or unwilling to take on.
These progressive shifts have sometimes paradoxically occurred alongside changes that construct poverty alleviation and gender equality less as complex structural issues and more as technical-rational topics that can be addressed through a bureaucratic approach to development management and practice. There has been a gradual shift away from a political understanding of the causes of poverty and gender inequality to an apolitical and ahistorical management of its symptoms (Ramalingam 2013). The widespread use within donor agencies, government organizations, charities and even NGOs of the language and logic of business management – through, for example, tools such as Results Based Management (RBM) and Logical Framework Analysis (LFA) – has had a profound impact not just upon how development is conceptualised and operationalised but also upon the operational cultures and management styles of organizations working on the ground to alleviate poverty and promote gender equality. Consequently, these actors increasingly understand development more as a managerial issue that can be planned, carried out and evaluated within short periods of time, rather than as a messy, unpredictable process of social change.
Of course, it is important to remember that the technical-rational approach and the political approach are not entirely antithetical. Actors that understand development as a political process can nonetheless support a careful thinking through of the logical “theories of change,” and recognise that in a context of scarce resources, a focus on efficient and effective use of resources is a serious responsibility for those supporting change. The two strategies do not have to be mutually exclusive.
