International Financial Institutions

Feminisms in Development: Contradictions, Contestations and Challenges

Citation:

Cornwall, Andrea, Elizabeth Harrison, and Ann Whitehead. 2007. Feminisms in Development: Contradictions, Contestations and Challenges. Zed Books.

Authors: Andrea Cornwall, Elizabeth Harrison, Anna Whitehead

Annotation:

Summary:
The political project of reasserting feminist engagement with development has proceeded uneasily in recent years. This text examines how the arguments of feminist researchers have often become depoliticised by development institutions and offers accounts of the pitfalls and compromises of the politics of engagement (Summary from WorldCat).
 
Table of Contents:
1. Gender myths that instrumentalise women : a view from the Indian frontline
Srilatha Batliwala and Deepa Dhanraj
 
2. Dangerous equations? : how female-headed households became the poorest of the poor : causes, consequences and cautions
Sylvia Chant
 
3. Back to women? translations, re-significations, and myths of gender in policy and practice in Brazil
Cecilia Sardenberg
 
4. Battles over booklets : gender myths in the British aid programme
Rosalind Eyben
 
5. Not very poor, powerless or pregnant : the African woman forgotten by development
Everjoice Win
 
6. 'Streetwalkers show the way' : reframing the debate on trafficking from sex workers' perspective
Nandinee Bandyopadhyay with Swapna Gayen [and others]
 
7. Gender, myth and fable : the perils of mainstreaming in sector bureaucracies
Hilary Standing
 
8. Making sense of gender in shifting institutional contexts : some reflections on gender mainstreaming
Ramya Subrahmanian
 
9. Gender mainstreaming : what is it (about) and should we continue doing it?
Prudence Woodford-Berger
 
10. Mainstreaming gender or 'streaming' gender away : feminists marooned in the development business
Maitrayee Mukhopadhay
 
11. Critical connections : feminist studies in African contexts
Amina Mama
 
12. SWApping gender : from cross-cutting obscurity to sectoral security?
Anne Marie Goetz and Joanne Sandler
 
13. The NGO-ization of Arab Women's Movements
Islah Jad
 
14. Political fiction meets gender myth : post-conflict reconstruction, 'democratisation' and women's rights
Deniz Kandiyoti
 
15. Re-assessing paid work and women's empowerment : lessons from the global economy
Ruth Pearson
 
16. Announcing a new dawn prematurely? human rights feminists and the rights based approaches to development
Dzodzi Tsikata
 
17. The chimera of success : gender ennui and the changed international policy environment
Maxine Molyneux.
 

Topics: Development, Economies, Poverty, Gender Mainstreaming, Households, International Financial Institutions, NGOs Regions: Africa, MENA, Americas, South America, Asia, South Asia, Europe, Western Europe Countries: Brazil, India, United Kingdom

Year: 2007

Developing Partnerships: Gender, Sexuality, and the Reformed World Bank

Citation:

Bedford, Kate. 2009. Developing Partnerships: Gender, Sexuality, and the Reformed World Bank. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Author: Kate Bedford

Annotation:

Summary:
A critique of how the World Bank encourages gender norms, Developing Partnerships argues that financial institutions are key players in the global enforcement of gender and family expectations. By combining analysis of documents produced and sponsored by the World Bank with interviews of World Bank staffers and case studies, Kate Bedford presents a detailed examination of gender and sexuality in the policies of the world's most influential development institution (Summary from WorldCat).
 
Table of Contents:
1. Working women, caring men, and the family bank : ideal gender relations after the Washington consensus 
 
2. The model region remodels partnerships : the politics of gender research in Latin America and the Caribbean
 
3. Forging partnerships, sidelining child care : how Ecuadorian femocrats navigate institutional constraints in World Bank gender policy
 
4. Roses mean love : export promotion and the restructuring of intimacy in Ecuador
 
5. Cultures of saving and loving : ethnodevelopment, gender, and heteronormativity in Prodepine
 
6. Holding it together : family strengthening in Argentina.
 
 

Topics: Development, Gender, Gender Roles, Households, International Financial Institutions, Sexuality Regions: Americas, Caribbean countries, Central America, South America Countries: Argentina, Ecuador

Year: 2009

The Strategic Silence: Gender and Economic Policy

Citation:

Bakker, Isabella, ed. 1994. The Strategic Silence: Gender and Economic Policy. London, UK; Atlantic Highlands, N.J., USA: Zed Books in association with the North-South Institute/l’Institut Nord-Sud.

Author: Isabella Bakker

Annotation:

Summary:
Most treatments of economic change harbour a conceptual silence: the refusal to recognise that global restructuring is occurring on a gendered terrain. This book's unique contribution to the literature on restructuring and adjustment lies in its application of feminist scholarship to macroeconomics. The contributors focus on these conceptual silences, examining macroeconomic methods and policies in order to propose new research strategies to deliver a more gender-aware economics (Summary from WorldCat).
 
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction : engendering macro-economic policy reform in the era of global restructuring and adjustment
Isabella Bakker
 
2. Conceptual silences and new research strategies. Micro, meso, macro : gender and economic analysis in the context of policy reform
Diane Elson
 
3. Shifting the boundaries : gender and the politics of restructuring
Janine Brodie
 
4. Structural adjustment, demographic change and population policies : some preliminary notes
Caren Grown
 
5. Gender, productivity and macro-economic policies in the context of structural adjustment and change
Marjorie W. Williams
 
6. Macro-economics, the state and the household : lessons from the north and south. Restructuring in the fishing industry in Atlantic Canada
Martha MacDonald
 
7. The implications of economic restructuring for women : the Canadian situation
Marjorie Griffin Cohen
 
8. Gender bias and macro-economic policy : methodological comments from the Indonesian example
Barbara Evers
 
9. Turkish women and structural adjustment
Nilufer Cagatay
 
10. Mexican rural women wage earners and macro-economic policies
Antonieta Barrón
 
11. Women and the state : some considerations of ideological and economic frameworks in engendering policies
Haleh Afshar
 
12. The impact of structural adjustment policies on women : some general observations relating to conceptual bias
Swapna Mukhopadhyay.
 

Topics: Development, Economies, Households, International Financial Institutions, Political Economies, Privatization Regions: Americas, Central America, North America, Asia, Southeast Asia Countries: Canada, Indonesia, Mexico, Turkey

Year: 1994

After the Revolution: Neoliberal Policy and Gender in Nicaragua

Citation:

Babb, Florence E. 1996. “After the Revolution: Neoliberal Policy and Gender in Nicaragua.” Latin American Perspectives 23 (1): 27–48.

Annotation:

Summary:
“Programs of stabilization and structural adjustment spread widely throughout Latin America during the 1980s. In revolutionary Nicaragua, the Sandinista government introduced an adjustment program late in the decade, but harsher measures mandated by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have come more recently, since the 1990 elections ushered in the Union Nacional Opositora (United National Opposition-UNO) government of Violeta Chamorro. A debate has emerged in the country over the consequences of these measures for the most vulnerable social groups. In Nicaragua as elsewhere, the poor, women, and children are hit hardest by these policies. Yet in Nicaragua the recent history of social mobilization has prepared these sectors in distinct ways to confront the devastating effects of neoliberal economic programs, setting the country apart from others in Latin America. Low-income urban women are among those affected most by the political change of the past few years, and this article argues that these women are actively confronting worsening conditions both at work and at home” (Babb 1996, 1).

Topics: Development, Economies, Poverty, International Financial Institutions, Privatization Regions: Americas, Central America Countries: Nicaragua

Year: 1996

Gender, Financial Deepening and the Production of Embodied Finance: Towards a Critical Feminist Analysis

Citation:

Roberts, Adrienne. 2015. “Gender, Financial Deepening and the Production of Embodied Finance: Towards a Critical Feminist Analysis.” Global Society 29 (1): 107–27.

Author: Adrienne Roberts

Abstract:

This article critically interrogates the ways in which gender equality has been linked to processes of financial deepening, partly via a global coalition of public and private institutions that have come together in recent years to promote an instrumentalist gender equality agenda. Corporations, banks and financial firms are playing an increasingly important role in shaping the contours of the global gender equality agenda and reproducing narratives regarding the need to (1) financially ‘empower’ women, (2) uphold women as the ‘saviors’ of national economies post-2008 and (3) ‘tap in’ to the productive (i.e. profitable) potential of women's bodily capacities. Drawing on Marxist and feminist theory, I develop an approach to theorizing the inherently embodied and gendered nature of finance that reveals the ways in which these tropes obscure the labour associated with social reproduction, promote the commodification of women's bodily capacities to produce, and support the differential production of bodies while simultaneously masking embodied forms of difference. (Abstract from original)

Topics: Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, International Financial Institutions, Multi-National Corporations, Privatization

Year: 2015

Neoliberalism with a Feminist Face: Crafting a New Hegemony at the World Bank

Citation:

Prügl, Elizabeth. 2017. "Neoliberalism with a Feminist Face: Crafting a New Hegemony at the World Bank." Feminist Economics 23 (1): 30-53.

Author: Elizabeth Prügl

Abstract:

Neoliberalism has been discredited as a result of proliferating crises (financial, ecological, care) and mounting inequality. This paper examines the growing research on gender at the World Bank as a site for the construction of a new hegemonic consensus around neoliberalism. Drawing on a computer-assisted inductive analysis of thirty-four Bank publications on gender since 2001, the paper documents Bank efforts to establish a positive relationship between gender equality and growth; shows the expansion of the Bank’s definition of equality as equal opportunity; illustrates how the focus on institutions has enabled engagement with core feminist concerns, such as equality in the family; and traces how incorporating notions of women’s empowerment and agency has made possible a focus on domestic violence. The paper concludes by emphasizing the ambiguous effects of the Bank’s new neoliberalism, which continues to use the market as the arbiter of social values while providing openings for feminist agendas. 

Keywords: World Bank, neoliberalism, gender equality

Topics: Development, Domestic Violence, Economies, Feminisms, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, International Financial Institutions, Privatization

Year: 2017

Austerity Measures in Developing Countries: Public Expenditure Trends and the Risks to Children and Women

Citation:

Ortiz, Isabel, and Matthew Cummins. 2013. "Austerity Measures in Developing Countries: Public Expenditure Trends and the Risks to Children and Women." Feminist Economics 19 (3): 55-81.

Authors: Isabel Ortiz, Matthew Cummins

Abstract:

This study examines how austerity measures may have adversely affected children and women in a sample of 128 developing countries in 2012. It relies on International Monetary Fund (IMF) fiscal projections and IMF country reports to gauge how social assistance and other public spending decisions have evolved since the start of the global economic crisis. The study finds that most developing countries boosted total expenditures during the first phase of the crisis (2008–09); but beginning in 2010, budget contraction became widespread, with ninety-one governments cutting overall spending in 2012. Moreover, the data suggest that nearly one-quarter of developing countries underwent excessive fiscal contraction, defined as cutting expenditures below pre-crisis levels. Governments considered four main options to achieve fiscal consolidation – wage bill cuts/caps, phasing out subsidies, further targeting social safety nets, and reforming old-age pensions – each of which would be likely to have a disproportionately negative impact on children and women. (Abstract from original)

Keywords: fiscal consolidation, austerity measures, public expenditures, social spending, crisis recovery

Topics: Development, International Financial Institutions, Privatization

Year: 2013

'Poor' Romanian Women Between the Policy (Politics) of IMF and Local Government

Citation:

Neaga D.E. 2012. "'Poor' Romanian Women Between the Policy (Politics) of IMF and Local Government." European Journal of Science and Theology 8 (1): 291-301.

Author: D.E. Neaga

Abstract:

There are a consistent number of studies showing that women are more vulnerable than men in terms of poverty and social exclusion. Romania is not an exception. Poverty and underdevelopment are major topics in the area of international political economy and, in the context of global economic crisis, international institutions like IMF and WB became more and more relevant. The main question to which I try to give an answer in this paper is: how the IMF policies/politics and those of the Romanian government challenged the issue of gender inequalities during the recent economic crisis? In order to do so I will concentrate my arguments in two major directions. First, I will underline the necessity of gender mainstreaming in international political economy and secondly I will analyze the neoliberal project and the Romanian case in terms of a deepening gender gap as a result of the agreement with IMF. (Abstract from original)

Keywords: neoliberalism, economic crisis, women, IMF, international political economy

Topics: Development, Economies, Poverty, Gender Mainstreaming, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, International Financial Institutions Regions: Europe, Eastern Europe Countries: Romania

Year: 2012

Impact of the World Bank and IMF Policies on Rural Women's Human Rights in Sub-Saharan Africa

Citation:

Ibnouf, Fatma Osman. 2008. "Impact of the World Bank and IMF Policies on Rural Women's Human Rights in Sub-Saharan Africa." Agenda 22 (78): 28-41.

Author: Fatma Osman Ibnouf

Abstract:

Over the past decades, national governments across sub-Saharan Africa have implemented World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies. The liberalisation of the market and reduced expenditure on public services under these policies may have effects on rural women who, as a result, might have to pay more for agricultural inputs, have access to fewer public services, and may lose the opportunity to participate in the formal labour force. This article aims to study the impact of World Bank and IMF policies on rural women's human rights and first reviews the literature on the World Bank and IMF policies and their gendered impacts, then focuses on the impact of these policies on rural women's human rights in sub-Saharan Africa in the areas of education, labour force and food security. 

Keywords: Sub-Saharan Africa, World Bank and IMF policies, rural women's human rights, food security

Topics: Agriculture, Development, Food Security, International Financial Institutions, Rights, Human Rights, Women's Rights Regions: Africa, Central Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa, West Africa

Year: 2008

The Gender Dimensions of Economic Adjustment Policies: Potential Interactions and Evidence to Date

Citation:

Haddad, Lawrence, Lynn R. Brown, Andrea Richter, and Lisa Smith. 1995. "The Gender Dimensions of Economic Adjustment Policies: Potential Interactions and Evidence to Date." World Development 23 (6): 881-896.

Authors: Lawrence Haddad, Lynn Brown, Andrea Richter, Lisa Smith

Abstract:

Many developing countries have implemented stabilization and structural adjustment programs over the last 20 years. The success of these programs depends critically on individual-level responses to changing economic incentives. Access to, control of, and an ability to move productive economic resources between sectors is determined, in part, by gender. If an individual's gender impedes their ability to fully participate in the economic adjustment process by inhibiting resource access, control or movement adjustment will be impaired. This paper discusses the potential gender dimensions of structural adjustment policies and examines the evidence to date (Abstract from original).

Topics: Development, International Financial Institutions, Privatization

Year: 1995

Pages

© 2024 CONSORTIUM ON GENDER, SECURITY & HUMAN RIGHTSLEGAL STATEMENT All photographs used on this site, and any materials posted on it, are the property of their respective owners, and are used by permission. Photographs: The images used on the site may not be downloaded, used, or reproduced in any way without the permission of the owner of the image. Materials: Visitors to the site are welcome to peruse the materials posted for their own research or for educational purposes. These materials, whether the property of the Consortium or of another, may only be reproduced with the permission of the owner of the material. This website contains copyrighted materials. The Consortium believes that any use of copyrighted material on this site is both permissive and in accordance with the Fair Use doctrine of 17 U.S.C. § 107. If, however, you believe that your intellectual property rights have been violated, please contact the Consortium at info@genderandsecurity.org.

Subscribe to RSS - International Financial Institutions