It's a big, complex world. Development is a small part of it. We address it because we have huge inequalities--in a sense development is global welfare services. But those who take it seriously look beyond the band-aid mentality of welfare toward sustainability and autonomy for people, households, cultures, regions, countries, etc.

But change happens, regardless of what is done in the name of development. Sometimes development creates more problems than it solves. Sometimes social movements emerge from groups that experience discrimination or bias--this is where WID and GAD came from. Other broad social processes can have drastic effects--for instance, economic globalization. Sometimes even the simple introduction of a technology--remember our discussion of the snowmobile in Northern Finland and how it turned the culture upside down in 20 years--can completely transform a society (and not always in a way we would consider beneficial, in fact many times the opposite).

Whatever we do in the name of development, I think of it like a classroom on campus. We can meet, discuss, come to agreement, and take action. But we step outside the class, and there may be steamrollers prowling the lawns--big processes like globalization, militarization, free trade, that could swallow us up, despite our efforts in the classroom to make a small difference. Think of the 'patriarchal bargain.' It's changing in some areas, where the penetration of a cash economy creates a need for income, perhaps for more income earners in the family, and women who marry into their husband's household may suddenly contribute greater status by working and supplementing household income than by being sequestered and under the thumb of the mother-in-law. Change happens. Not always what we want or plan, but in all cases there will be winners, and there will be losers. Now, if billionaires lose a tax cut here and there, then you'd think it wouldn't be so bad (but often times these are the fiercest kinds of fights). I think we've figured out who the winners are more often than not in the arena of globalization, and it isn't agrarian villages or third world countries--more likely multinational corporations and consumers in the wealthy societies.

Remember back to the beginning of class, and Dudley Seers' article on the meaning of development. He described some minimum conditions that every society should strive for:

1. Meeting material needs (food, shelter)
2. Livelihood (some source of employment, but ideally something that has some meaning beyond a drudgerous job and a wage)
3. equality--everyone should have access to the above two, have the right to participate in public life and share equal protection under the law.

Distinguishing needs, interests

Yet even that minimal sort of criteria for development lies far into the future for many if not most countries in the world. In Kate Young's article on gender and planning, she discusses three different criteria for identifying needs and interests and thinking about them. First are practical interests. These are some of the basic necessities--enough food to eat, shelter from the elements, access to clean drinking water, maybe even respect and dignity (some people would identify these as fundamental needs. Second are strategic interests. These might include some voice, some ability to be heard in debates and discourse about issues that affect women. One important strategic interest would be women's control over their own labor. Often times the husband (in African households) or mother-in-law (in Asian/Arab households) exert control over a woman's labor--she may have little say in the matter. Or perhaps by the time she is freed to farm her own fields, for istance, she may have missed the planting window.

A second strategic interest would be women's access to resources. This could be natural resources--fuelwood, land to cultivate, etc. It could be other sorts of resources--institutions of government, for instance (the law, the courts). It could be health care--women do have the babies and perpetuate the local populations . . . Access to resources may be necessary for women to meet their practical needs as well.

A third strategic interest is the elimination or at the very least drastic reduction in violence against women. This is a pervasive problem in patriarchal cultures. Female genital mutilation would fit into this category.

A third consideration in thinking about women's interests is the idea of transformatory potential. When we think of development interventions, what will they do for women? Will they address strategic interests? Will they transform some of the structures, such as patriarchy, that work as a system of privilege to prevent women from achieving equality of opportunity? For instance, the WID movement did an excellent job of documenting women's status, their plight in much of the third world, and some of the adverse effects that 'development' had sown. But it didn't really change the rules of the game, the patriarchal incentive structures that reinforce certain gender roles in societies. It provided some welfare services and more income for some women, but did not translate into greater voice, power or decision making authority so that women could become equal partners in their own development. They were in a sense an appendage of a larger development apparatus (itself sometimes hijacked by even broader processes like globalization, as you'll remember if Structural Adjustment Lending rings a bell).

What transforms gender and power relations?

Here are some examples of development projects or initiatives. Think about whether they offer transforming opportunities, just a wage, etc.:

1. Doing piece work. For instance, ever heard of the small parts assembly business? People put together assemblies at home, send them off to a factory to be united with the rest of some product (the automotive industry does this)? Would women working in their own households provide transformative opportunities? Or a chance for individual women to earn some extra income?
2. Factory employment. This is the wave of economic development. Many women are migrating to cities in Latin America and Asia, particularly, in search of factory wage work. Many more than can find work, in fact. What happens to the spillover? What opportunities are available? Informal sector, petty trade, sex work, drug trade, etc.?
3. Collective garden. Women in many parts of the world have a tradition of working together, especially where they are lacking adequate access to productive resources, such as land, labor (e.g., when they have a labor-intensive job that takes help to complete), and capital (e.g., equipment, money). Collective action brings people together. It may be more difficult to take away resources that women acquire as a large group. Men may challenge them for a plot of land, but if they've put extensive labor into it, and they'll go complain to their husbands (who will likely to complain to the person seeking to evict the women), chances are they have more security.
4. Technology that reduces drudgery. We've written about this a bit in here. Women in many parts of the world, but especially where technology is low-energy, and tools are simple and often back-breaking, suffer from time poverty. If a woman spends on average 6 hours a day engaged in meal preparation (especially pounding grain with mortar and pestle), searching for and hauling fuelwood, drawing water, etc., what time is left for perhaps other economic activities that might offer a greater return? Why do we give the most productive members of the household the least-emancipating technologies?? The field of appropriate technology addresses this issue quite well. Women may choose, freed of time poverty, to spend their time in non-productive ways (economists often assume they'll run businesses or something). But it's what they want that counts, given a range of choices and possibilities of which they're aware, isn't it?

So in pursuing a development course that offers women transformatory potential, there are some key design principles that would be important to consider. In part II.