Resources

Twenty years after the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action it is worth looking at the achievements regarding Chapter K ‘women and the environment’. The complexity of the links between rights (inter alia women’s rights), social dimensions and sustainable development is a remaining challenge that has so far not been addressed adequately. This article aims at identifying this interdependence from a grass-root perspective. Women in Europe for a Common Future’s (WECF) project work with grass-root women in Tajikistan provides an insight into the challenges related to the links between ecologically sustainable development and gender equality when looking at the realisation of the right to land and natural and productive resources. …

In as much as women's subordinate status is a product of the patriarchal structures of constraint that prevail in specific contexts, pathways of women's empowerment are likely to be ‘path dependent’. They will be shaped by women's struggles to act on the constraints that prevail in their societies, as much by what they seek to defend as by what they seek to change. The universal value that many feminists claim for individual autonomy may not therefore have the same purchase in all contexts. This article examines processes of empowerment as they play out in the lives of women associated with social mobilisation organisations in the specific context of rural Bangladesh. …

Sonia Alvarez reconsiders what she had earlier labelled ‘the Latin American feminist NGO boom’ of the 1990s. She offers reflections on how and why, at least in that region of the world, we may be moving beyond it. Alvarez revisits the notion of NGO-ization, then reviews the crucial ‘movement work’ performed by NGOs that was often obscured by that notion. She proposes that Latin American feminisms and other social movements may be moving away from the particular organizational forms and practices – actively promoted and officially sanctioned by national and global neo-liberalism – that characterized NGO-ization in the past. …

The paper will examine some of the critical issues raised by the women's movement in India on the violence experienced by women both within the family and through modes of development initiated by the state in India and the manner in which the state has sought to both counter feminist critiques as well as co-opt them through state initiated policies. It will particularly examine literacy and micro-credit programmes to argue that the rhetoric of empowerment functions as a new 'mantra' which does little to even dent the violence of women's everyday lives especially when they are poor and located on the social margins. …

In preparing for the twenty-year review of the Beijing Platform for Action on women’s economic empowerment, both formal policy documents and media coverage in developed countries such as the Netherlands resonate with the rhetoric of choice between work and care. In this article, my central argument is that framing the combination of work and care as a matter of personal choice stands in the way of economically empowering women. For policy makers to take responsibility in these matters, both policy documents and media coverage should promote win-win instead of zero sum solutions in combining work and care, for both men and women. …

This article offers some reflections on how the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA) theme of women and decision making power came to be translated into a set of policy directions, and what their implementation suggests in terms of their potential to challenge power hierarchies. The article draws on work from the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment programme on voice and constituency building. The article argues that the policy focus of the BPfA, after the introduction of MDG 3 in particular, became one of redressing gender disparities in representation in legislatures. Twenty years later, we are at a critical juncture in which we need to ask ourselves whether we need to go beyond numbers in parliament as a proxy for political empowerment, and probe into: what kind of politics, through which pathways, in relation to whom, to achieve what? …

The women’s funding movement has contributed to and been a product of women’s rights movements around the world for over 30 years. This article looks at the history of Mama Cash, the first international women’s fund, to chart how the effort to mobilise resources for women’s rights activism has been going – before and since the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. The many advances by feminist movements include how we have resourced our movements and ourselves to do this work. Reviewing Mama Cash’s efforts to continue to support and sustain feminism/ists reveals lessons about the role that resources and processes of resourcing play in organising by women, girls and trans* people, as well as what types of resourcing support women, girls and trans* people to build movements that are responsive, effective and resilient – and ultimately successful at securing the various changes we seek in the world. …

Within the last decades, feminist movements in Brazil have advanced significantly beyond borders, gaining increasing recognition in global spaces, UN ones in particular, for positively influencing Brazil’s official position. Unsurprisingly, Brazil has served four terms in the CSW and, in the eyes of more progressive delegations, is a much needed presence to ensure no lost ground on what has been achieved in previous conferences. However, the actual presence of Brazilian feminist activists in the delegations and the NGO Forums has dwindled considerably. What have been the strategies and mechanisms at play in maintaining a radical vein in our official position? Can it be sustained without the more active involvement of feminist activists – say, throughout Brazil’s new role as president of the 60th CSW session? These are some of the issues I address in this article, sharing the views of activists present at those events. …

This article discusses a state-run economic empowerment initiative Chapeu de Palha Mulher which is having a transformational effect supporting women to follow pathways into jobs which were once considered to be ‘men’s jobs’. …

Brazilian feminists have made steady progress at both national and regional levels with establishing sexual and reproductive rights, and they have an important stake in the discussions at 2010's UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). Cecilia Sardenberg calls on them to be alert against retrogressive steps. …

This article examines the experience of mobilizing for the right to safe, legal abortion in Brazil. It focuses on exploring the strategies pursued by the feminist and women’s movements to ‘win hearts and minds’ both within these movements, and beyond them, through collective struggle, dialogue and coalition building. Tracing the trajectory of the Brazilian campaign for the legalization of abortion, Jornadas pelo Direito ao Aborto Legal e Seguro (Brazilian Journeys for Legal and Safe Abortion), the article looks at avenues of action and modes of activism. It describes how the efforts of campaigners have focused not only on engaging support from the public and the media, but also on working with the Ministry of Health and health professionals to guarantee the availability of services for abortions that are legal under current restrictions, monitoring changes in public opinion and the media, and on legislative change, which has recently become especially difficult in the wake of increased activism by the Church. …

McFadden argues that societies in the South have been approached from a particular research gaze that is derived from a liberal epistemology that focuses on the individual; it simplifies women’s lives and is both methodologically and politically inadequate and deeply problematic. Empowerment as a notion is, too, embedded in liberal and neo-liberal worldviews and is ideologically flawed. With this liberal and neo-liberal development discourse in mind, McFadden looks at empowerment, MDGs, gender and human rights, and citizenship, entitlement and rights and analyses how they are embedded in this ideology. …

In moving away from prescriptive one-way communications exercises, participatory development communications use better strategies to engage communities and capture nuance. This article examines a communications case study in Egypt: a photography competition aimed at understanding how local photographers depict women and empowerment in their images. Opportunities for discussion and self-reflection provide cultural producers the space to delve into how they see women and how they then choose to represent them. This type of communications initiative actively courts a richer understanding of empowerment, leaving room for the complexities this might entail. …

This article maps the multiple methods used to bring scholar-activists, music producers and music consumers together in a conversation that culminated in the creation of three winning ‘empowering songs’ from the ‘Changing representations of women in popular music’ project. This project explores the gendered stereotypes of women in popular music, and seeks to contribute to reflection on, and creation of, alternative (empowering) narratives about women through song. The article discusses this marriage of research and advocacy and reflects on some of the outcomes from ‘corporate’ reflections – all of which generated a lot of passion about the tensions and possibilities around women’s representations and roles. The authors conclude that for research findings to have practical and policy value and legitimacy, what, how, when and where we communicate our messages is extremely important. …

‘Women’s empowerment’, as used by international development organisations, is a fuzzy concept. Historical textual analysis and interviews with officials in development agencies reveal its adaptability and capacity to carry multiple meanings that variously wax and wane in their discursive influence. Today a privileging of instrumentalist meanings of empowerment associated with efficiency and growth are crowding out more socially transformative meanings associated with rights and collective action. In their efforts to make headway in what has become an unfavourable policy environment, officials in development agencies with a commitment to a broader social change agenda juggle these different meanings, strategically exploiting the concept’s polysemic nature to keep that agenda alive. …