Engendering development/marketing equality.

• Author: Rittich, Kerry
• Position: Globalization and Comparative Family Law: A Discussion of Pluralism, Universality and Markets

INTRODUCTION

In a recent policy research report, Engendering Development: Through Gender Equality in Rights, Resources, and Voice, (1) the World Bank lays out a new "market-centered" approach to gender equality. Engendering Development is important for at least two reasons. First, it represents the most ambitious and comprehensive attempt by the Bank to date to explore and resolve the relationship between two goals that have often been in tension, gender equality and the pursuit of economic growth. Second, it represents a significant departure from established international norms and strategies surrounding gender equality.

Engendering Development is a project that faces in two directions. On the one hand, it makes a "gender" intervention in debates over market reform and development: it seeks to persuade those who may have no independent interest in gender equality that it is important to the objective of economic growth, and it makes the case for attention to gender equality in market-centered reform agendas. On the other hand, it represents a "market" intervention in the international debates over gender equality: it seeks to inject those debates with a new consciousness of imperatives of efficiency and to reframe both the analysis of gender equality and the strategies used to promote it in market-friendly ways.

This paper describes in broad contours the vision of gender equality in Engendering Development and profiles the ways in which that vision diverges from the mainstream gender equality project on the international plane. It traces some of the connections between the arguments in Engendering Development and the larger institutional and governance projects in which the Bank is immersed. And it suggests why Engendering Development represents both a cultural intervention and a cultural project of its own.

Engendering Development simultaneously challenges the mainstream international gender equality paradigm, incorporates some of its arguments and strategies, and reflects back its blind spots and omissions. Engendering Development is fascinating and important in its own right. But because it reveals elements of the mainstream paradigm that otherwise tend to be less visible--among them its connection to institutional and regulatory regimes that are now being seriously questioned--it is useful as a basis upon which to think about what is the same and what is different in the way we now pursue gender equality.

1. LOCATING ENGENDERING DEVELOPMENT

   At first glance, Engendering Development looks like a victory for gender equality activists and scholars. Even if motivated by the conclusion that it is instrumentally important to development too, the attempt to integrate gender equality into the development agenda is at least partly a response to the gender critiques leveled against the development agenda organized around the "Washington consensus." (2) If nothing else, Engendering Development confirms that it has become difficult to simply ignore calls for attention to gender equality: gender equality is sufficiently entrenched as an international norm--if not necessarily at the level of institutions and practice--that to oppose it is to risk delegitimation.

   Yet Engendering Development is a curious account of gender equality. To begin, Engendering Development represents no simple adoption or incorporation of the existing gender equality agenda at international law. It is new at the level of vision and institutional practice, and it challenges at a fundamental level visions of gender equality rooted in the use of the state to ensure a broad array of women's rights.

   It is difficult, if not impossible, to make sense of Engendering Development without placing it within the larger transformations in the realm of governance now underway. (3) Engendering Development is very much a project of its time. It bears many of the hallmarks of the dominant "third way" regulatory and policy proposals of the globalized era. (4) It draws in a deep way on narratives currently circulating about the constraints on regulatory action in an era of globally interlinked polities and economies. Enthusiasm for many standard legal and institutional remedies for gender equality in the Keynesian or New Deal mode, such as labor market institutions or social protection schemes, runs from lukewarm to cold.

   While it identifies a limited role for legal entitlements, public policies and state institutions, Engendering Development demotes the role of the state in the achievement of gender equality, seeking to pursue it instead within the paradigm of limited government that now dominates contemporary policy debates. And if it reflects resistance to the use of the state and skepticism about its capacity to generate greater gender equality, such resistance and skepticism are inversely related to its enthusiasm for the possibilities of markets at precisely the same task.

   Engendering Development moves the gender equality project in a new direction. It figures the state's role as "enabling" gender inequality in a variety of ways rather than directly ensuring it, and it relies principally upon the force of market incentives to advance gender equality. Engendering Development also locates a role for civil society in gender equality initiatives, on the theory that the state may be a weak instrument to change cultural norms and social practices that embody or support gender inequality) The net result is a significantly "privatized" model of gender justice, one in which furthering gender equality becomes co-extensive with, and in some ways subordinated to, the demands of growth and efficiency.

   Engendering Development can also be read as part of the emergence of "second generation" reforms and the attempt to assimilate human rights, equality concerns, and social objectives into the field of development. Although the relationship between such objectives and traditional economic concerns remains unsettled, the Bank no longer avoids responsibility for social concerns on the theory that they are simply outside the domain of development. (6) According to the new orthodoxy, first outlined in 1999 in Bank President James Wolfensohn's Comprehensive Development Framework, development should now be conceived as a project or balance sheet with two sides. (7) While the Bank and the International Monetary Fund must continue to attend to their traditional economic concerns, added to them is a series of "social, structural, and human" issues that previously received short shrift. Development has been reconceived by the promotion of human freedom: (8) as a result, it now includes human rights (9) and related goals such as the protection of core worker rights and gender equality.

   Whether, and to what extent, these discursive shifts portend changes in the institutional commitments and priorities of the international financial institutions, and greater attention to the social and distributive dimensions of development in particular, is now the question. While not official Bank policy, Engendering Development illustrates what it might mean to pay greater attention to the "social, structural, and human" side of development. Engendering Development elaborates on the institutional, regulatory, and policy implications of a development agenda reinvented to incorporate concerns around gender equality. However, it also reflects trends and developments that extend well beyond the issue of gender equality. The priorities in Engendering Development reflect the importance of human capital in the new economy, a theme that pervades development discourse in general. (10) They also reflect the overarching importance granted to concerns of competitiveness, market participation and economic growth in matters of public policy and market design. (11) Because Engendering Development shifts both the weight of particular factors in the gender equality agenda and the strategies by which gender equality is pursued, it indicates how social goals might themselves be transformed in the encounter with broader regulatory and institutional imperatives. Thus it provides useful clues about the nature of the general move to incorporate social issues into the development agenda.

   The Bank is a relative newcomer, perhaps even an interloper, to the international conversation around gender equality: a few short years ago, the Bank and those promoting women's rights were typically on opposite sides of the table when questions of gender equality were at issue. Engendering Development represents a serious challenge to the existing models of gender equality nonetheless, if only because it reframes the challenge of gender equality in ways that are likely to be attractive to contemporary policy makers. Engendering Development presents a model of gender equality that conforms to, rather than challenges, current governance norms. And it accommodates the demands of gender equality relatively painlessly and seamlessly with the imperatives of growth and participation in markets, by limiting the demands that it places on state resources.

   While it is impossible to foresee precisely how the encounter between the competing normative and institutional visions around gender justice will play out, Engendering Development destabilizes any assumption that the acceptance of gender equality represents agreement about gender justice, and still less the strategies by which it is achieved. It is also unclear whether, even if Engendering Development does represent the "mainstreaming" of gender equality in development, the result will be a strengthening, rather than weakening, of the effort to promote gender equality. The paradox is this: while the calls for greater attention to gender equality and other social values and interests (12) have now generated a response, one of the results is that the Bank has now emerged as an arbiter of gender equality--an authority by which other models and visions of gender equality can be...