Alternatives
From within the development ‘establishment’
Poverty-focused aid
•Recognition that modernization theory and its emphasis on the ‘trickle-down’
effect did not work.
•Analyses local power structures, especially those based on class and gender
relations.
•Identifies those ‘most in need’ and focuses on those groups.
•Examples: income-generation and micro-credit, the latter made famous by
Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank.
Grameen Bank and Micro-credit
•Started among and for landless rural women in Bangladesh; Mohammed Yunus
was its founder.
•Landless households were not only poor, but also lacked access to the
mainstream credit market.
•Yunus created the idea of micro-credit circles, that involved small, decentralized
groups of women that would be given interest-free loans from dues collected
from members. Repayment of loans was managed and supervised by each
micro-credit circle.
•Rates of repayment were very high; depended to a great deal on community
support and pressure.
•Problems
with Micro-Credit:
sometimes to a backlash among rural men in Bangladesh. This was
frequently under-reported due to pressure from donors.
–Also, early loans were mainly for micro-enterprises. As globalization occurred,
many of these micro-enterprises, e.g. tailoring or sewing also became linked to
commodity chains at the lower end of a contracting system.
–Also criticized for disseminating neo-liberal values of enterprise culture,
individualism and autonomy.
–However, loans do not HAVE to be given out only for micro-enterprises, and
decision making can be decentralized.
–Led
Participator Approaches
•Goal is bottom-up rather than top-down development projects which is seen as
more democratic.
•However, participation can take several forms:
–Dissemination of knowledge ABOUT the project.
–Involvement of local people in planning the project.
–Involvement of local people in formulating problems to be addressed, as well as
in planning and disseminating knowledge about the project. E.g. the Chipko
movement in the Himalayas.
–Who
is ‘the community’? Need for identifying the most marginal and excluded
within the community so that the better off do not monopolize the project and its
benefits.
–The participation approach should be combined with participatory research.
Participatory Research
•Derives its insights from social anthropology.
•Requires local people to be involved in the definition of what are considered to
be ‘problems’ or ‘issues’ that a project could address.
•From Robert Chambers:
–The idea of learning in the field as a flexible art rather than a rigid science.
–The need to learn in the field, informally, thru conversations and observation.
–The importance of the researcher’s attitudes, behaviour and rapport with local
people.
–The validity and potential value of indigenous knowledge
–However, participatory research usually only involves a few weeks’ research.
How can in-depth knowledge about a community be acquired in such a short
time? Particularly knowledge about forms of inclusion and exclusion within a
community? Who talks and who doesn’t within a community?
Empowerment
•Inspired by the work of the Brazilian educationalist, Paulo Friere.
•Based his educational work on the need to help people understand the ‘big
picture’, i.e. to stimulate and support people’s abilities to understand, question
and resist the structural causes of poverty through learning
•Also involved local literacy training, since poverty is seen as a form of overall
marginalization and exclusion and not only the lack of material resources.
Women in Development and Gender and Development
•Emerged in the late 1970s, stimulated by the successes of feminism in Europe
and North America, led to the UN Decade for women, 1975-1985.
•Caroline Moser has identified 5 major approaches to GAD:
–welfare project, linked to chartibale notions of helping women and children and
involves top down provision of goods and services for women and children.
–2. Equity based approaches
–Basic needs.
–Anti-poverty, recognised as women’s main problem, tied to the basic needs
movement, solution including income-generating projects, skill generation, etc.
–Efficiency: targeted women in development projects because of the centrality of
their productive contribution to the household. Saw women rather than men as
being the solution to poverty.
However, many critics, especially women from the south, criticized WID for its
ethnocentrism:
1. Tendency to homogenize all ‘third-world’ women, despite many and
huge differences between them.
2. Homogenization also involved an ‘othering’: third-world women were
defined as disadvantaged by gender relations, but more so than first-world
women.
3. Also, a tendency to see gender relations as polarized between
men/women. Did not take into account the possibility of complementary and/or
parallel gender systems in other societies.
e.g. the mis-specification of gender relations in a fish-smoking
cooperative in Guinea-Bissau, sponsored by UNIFEM.
As a result of these criticisms, WID has changed to GAD, and more participatory
research techniques are utilized today.