Resources and Insights
We consider individual and collective learning, opportunities to build relationships and dialogue before participating in a contract. Below, our insights.
An inspiring news story for a change. A collective of single parent mothers, Moms 4 Housing, reclaimed a home they were about to be evicted from. They paired up with the Oakland Community Land Trust. The Mayor and Council gave them first rights of refusal for all of the properties from the company they were fighting, Wedgewood.
This is what is possible with strong organizing- heat from the bottom that leads to heat from the top!
Moms 4 Housing Collective. Photo: Guardian
Someone asked what they should be reading that is interesting in terms of economics. I’d recommend first reading something close to the ground and organizing, social movements. This is paper on feminist economics put out by Womankind Worldwide. This is what social and feminist movements globally have analyzed with respect to macroeconomics, the Bretton Woods institutions, illicit financial flows, corporate accountability, decent work, social protection, public services and human rights. The first thing to know is that these are all economic issues. https://world-psi.org/uncsw/word...
Then, get beyond Friedman and Smith. Elinor Ostrom (only woman to have received the Nobel prize for economics), Henry George, Karl Polayni have shaped our economic-political understanding of “commons” and more solidarity approaches to economics. For more contemporary writers, I would add feminist economists Silvia Frederici, Naila Kabeer as well as Kate Raworth.
Silvia Frederici, Italian-american scholar, activist. She critiques Marx and explores links between capitalist accumulation, women’s reproductive labour and bodily exploitation. Also alternative pathways and the political philosophy of the commons and public freedoms. See “Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.
Naila Kabeer is an London School of Economics scholar, originally from India. She has shaped a lot of practice and thinking around women’s economic empowerment. That it isn’t, first of all, only about financial and economic matters. It includes and is intimately tied to gender-based violence and other structural gendered norms. It includes policy levers like social protection, child care policy, recognition and supports for the care economy.
A more mainstream economist doing some interesting work is Kate Raworth from the UK. She founded the idea of doughnut economics. Instead of simple measures of wealth, even linear trends, she explores environmental and climatic thresholds in combination with human and economic development measures. The country closest to finding the sweet spot in these is Vietnam, so the question is: could we all live like Vietnam? In Canada or Turtle Island, we’re doing well on the social and abysmal on the bio-physical transgressions. What are we each willing to give up, willing to risk is the big question here?
(Source: Kate Raworth, The Earthbound Report).
Source: This work above represents the work of Harassmap. http://harassmap.org/en/ The diagram is adapted from Rao & Kelleher’s gender work (2005) with additions from the power and gender work by Cornwall (2014), Batliwala & Pittman (2010), Gaventa (2006), Veneklasen & Miller (2002) and Kabeer (1999).
******
Sisters Ink did a review of IDRC’s research for the last ten years to support dialogue and understanding of what makes gender-transformative research. Having rated 42 projects, 6 case-studies of IDRC research were selected for more in-depth analysis of what make gender-transformative research. These include research that:
- Introduced fish processing and gender relations through participatory dialogue in Zambia and Malawi
- Influenced gender narratives and power relations and policies in small scale and artisanal mining in Central and East Africa
- Enhanced Indigenous engagement, intercultural health practices and policy in Peru
- Supported dialogue between women, their communities and local governments for more accountable and gender-equitable settlement services and water and sanitation infrastructure in India
- Provided a digital crowd-sourcing platform for reporting gender-based violence, raising awareness and changing norms in Egypt
- Empowered girls, youth clubs to dialogue negotiate with others in their community around early marriage in West Africa
Though the cases had very different contexts, gendered issues, influence strategies and actors involved in the research, there were some common principles.
Gender-transformative research:
· Addressed root causes. Intersectionality, how gender intersects with other aspects of social identity, is key to understanding root causes.
· Engaged systemic partners. Actors and partners engaged were a fit for the system and context being changed. Influence is situated. In some contexts, the best partner was a women’s movement organization. In another a mix of stakeholders including elders were involved. In others, media and social media were the strongest influence.
· Embedded and embodied the change in gender relations locally. Even in the time-frame of funding early influence is possible. Some focused on building local research capacity or negotiating power. Some on beginning early dialogue across different actors.
· Revealed that structural gender analysis is a muscle. A diverse mix of capacities is needed for researchers and IDRC staff to practice. Structural gender analysis is key of course. Other important skills include: deliberative dialogue, brokering effective partnerships, systems analysis, conflict mediation, and positioning evidence for use.
Transforming gender relations is not just an issue of inclusion or individual agency, not even of good structural gender analysis. Research can play a role in this process where it is a much deeper situating of evidence in ways that influence underlying norms and institutions, and power relations that perpetuate unequal access, agency and control. Gender-transformative research goes beyond access and technical issues, and even goes beyond research papers to embed and embody the change being sought through effectives processes. Even in a shorter time-frame this embeddedness, influence and engagement of key actors is not only a way to redress inequities through the research. It is an investment in longer term changes in perceptions, norms, as well as institutional changes and uptake in policies, laws, budgets and markets.
