Development and Institutions - Week Three

Naples and Desai:

As I have done research on women's social, political, and economic rights in Nicaragua I began to understand concepts such as the restructuring of labor and unpaid domestic labor. What I never realized was the extent to which economic and political systems ignore gender realities when it comes to the impact of laws or economics. The example of the Ghanian women in trading markets being neglected by the government and not receiving credits is perfect. It is perfect in that we are shown the gender relations within the country when the overwhelming majority of companies that received these credits were owned by men. This highlights how “gender-blind” laws unequally affect women in that with rising unemployment, rising health care costs, women are overwhelmingly thought to be the mitigators for the state's dropping of a social safety net.
The string of effects from economic restructuring was also new to me. The string of consequences from economic restructuring seems to be a system that feeds into itself. As women lose the ability to organize, there is an increase in informal and part-time work, which leads to the restructuring of women's labor in the home and subsequently places an uneven burden on women. I had a nascent understanding of these effects but never fully grasped the influence and power of international monetary organizations.
Understanding the power of these organizations requires understanding how neoliberalism, globalization, and capitalism intertwine into a mess of inequality and disproportionate distribution of wealth. The problem when it comes to understanding these ideas is that you cannot take them out of context and try to understand each one individually because you will miss the intersectionality of these ideas and how they translate into a difficult environment for the people living in the “periphery.”

Ferree and Tripp:

Development has become one of the most important women's issues. Typically this is thought to be purely a matter for gender-neutral economics we are increasingly seeing that this is not the case, and the problem is becoming that women are not being viewed as agents for economic development. The introduction of women from developing countries to UNIFEM opened a wider dialogue on what the goals of institutional women's organizations should be. Prior to concerns over development UNIFEM and many international women's organizations were only concerned with the legal and political equality of women. These concerns were not valid for most women in the developing world because the institutions in their home countries oppressed all peoples with apartheid. The introduction of a plurality of former colonies into the U.N. changed this goal and widened it to involve gender-awareness in governments.
The section on the “levers” of policy machinery was particularly interesting because Desai and Naples seems to provide a critique on institutional feminist organs as inherently flawed because they operate in a male dominated system. Ferree and Tripp seem to realize this by including that these institutions are left to the whims of those in control of them; therefore, if conservative women are controlling institutions then they will not be seeking feminist goals. At the same time this machinery provides another “tool,” as Ferree and Tripp mention, for women's and feminist organizations to spark change within their governments.
The political scientist in me feels that this may be one of the more effective methods for instituting change in governments but that would be ignoring institutionalized gender discrimination, governments with no women's organs, governments with no female civil servants, etc. While the machinery of the female policy organs may be an efficient method for democracies that have bureaus such as these, but for nations lacking in more equal gender relations this method would fail.

Questions:
Naples and Desai mention differing methods of competing with the negative effects of globalization. What effects would you think are most effective? Local movements (like the Local Food Movement: a movement against mass produced food coming from thousands of miles away) or transnational movements like Landless Workers Movement or the Zapatista Army in Mexico?

Ferree and Tripp discuss the need to confront issues of development for women. Development would include social safety net issues, political and legal issues, and would require awareness of racial and gender needs within a society. The U.S. is not exempt from this. What kind of “development” issues would you think of when looking at the U.S.?