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P v rt , ll B n , nd nd r: h t nt , hH rdSusan Moller Okin

Philosophy & Public Affairs, Volume 31, Number 3, Summer 2003,pp. 280-316 (Article)

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SUSAN MOLLER OKIN Poverty, Well-Being, andGender: What Counts, Who’s Heard?

I focus here on three recent books that address the situation of the economically poorest quarter of the world’s population, especially thewomen who are disproportionately represented among them. Each ofthe three in its own way examines and analyzes aspects of humanagency and well-being, in particular women’s agency and well-being,that have for far too long been ignored and neglected by virtually alleconomists, even those who specialize in development. And each—though Amartya Sen’s far more explicitly than the other two—constitutesa critique of prevailing measures and standards of development eco-nomics. After I discuss the theories of development as human develop-ment, with their alternative measures and standards, that are presentedin the three focal books, I turn to some recent sources of evidence aboutwhat the people who comprise the least well-off quartile think abouttheir own most pressing needs. This evidence helps us to evaluate thestrengths and weaknesses of the three theories of human development.It also demonstrates that “listening to the silent voices,” as Brooke Ackerly’stheory urges, provides an invaluable point of reference for scholars con-tributing to a more expansive, human concept of development.

© 2003 by Princeton University Press. Philosophy & Public Affairs 31, no. 3

This article discusses recent literature on global poverty and economic development,focussing on Brooke Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2000); Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Develop-ment: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); andAmartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999). I am very grateful toPranap Bardhan, Samuel Bowles, Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, Joshua Cohen, Gerald Cohen,Lynn Eden, Jane Mansbridge, John Roemer, Philippe van Parijs, Robert van der Veen, DebraSatz, Hillel Steiner, Myra Strober, Cass Sunstein, and the Editors of Philosophy & PublicAffairs for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

I. POVERTY AND GENDER: BASIC FACTS

To appreciate the significance of the works I shall discuss, one mustgrasp some elementary but enormously important facts about globalpoverty and the history of international efforts to promote economic de-velopment in poor countries.

The first fact concerns the dimensions of poverty. If, by a “conservativeestimate,” the poverty line is set at $1 per person per day, then 1.3 billionpeople lived in poverty at the end of the twentieth century. This meansthat about one-quarter of all living human beings are desperately poor.The total percentage of those living in poverty has declined by a fewpoints, mostly owing to significant economic progress in the People’sRepublic of China (PRC). Elsewhere, however, things have mostly gottenworse. During the period from 1985 to 1998, poverty rates rose in Africa,rose sharply in the so-called transition economies of Eastern Europeand the ex–Soviet Union, first doubled and then declined in Latin Amer-ica, and declined slightly (though the absolute numbers of those inpoverty increased) in South Asia.1

If we consider, not poverty rates, but absolute numbers of people liv-ing in severe poverty, we find that, outside of the PRC, the number ofpoor persons in the world rose steadily during the last two decades ofthe twentieth century. This increase in numbers of the poor is part of thephenomenon of growing global economic inequality, both among coun-tries and within countries. The less-developed countries’ (LDCs’) andtransition economy countries’ incomes have stagnated while the richindustrialized countries’ have risen. Those 16 percent of the global popu-lation living in the most affluent countries have 81 percent of total globalincome, leaving the other 84 percent to share the remaining 19 percent.2

281 Poverty, Well-Being, and Gender:What Counts, Who’s Heard?

1. This line was set at $1 in 1985 dollars. By 1993 it had risen to $1.08, owing to inflation,but it is still referred to as the “$1/day line.” The data in this paragraph draws from ShaohuaChen and Martin Ravallion, “How Did the World’s Poorest Fare in the 1990s?” DevelopmentResearch Group, Working Papers—Poverty. Income distribution, safety nets, micro-credit,no. 2409 (World Bank, 2000), p. 6; and Shahid Yusuf and Joseph Stiglitz, “Development Issues:Settled and Open,” in Frontiers of Development Economics: The Future in Perspective, ed.Gerald M. Meier and Joseph E. Stiglitz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 228and 232.

2. William Easterly, “The Lost Decades: Developing Countries’ Stagnation in Spite ofPolicy Reform,” World Bank Conference Paper, 2000, p. 7; World Bank Development Report2003 (New York: The World Bank and Oxford University Press), p. 235.

3. Ravi Kanbur and Lyn Squire, “The Evolution of Thinking About Poverty: Exploringthe Interactions,” in Meier and Stiglitz, p. 193. The growth of global inequalities and globalpoverty in the late twentieth century are debated. See for example David Dollar and AartKray, “Spreading the Wealth,” Foreign Affairs 81 (2002): 120–33, and Responses by James K.Galbraith, Joe W. Pitts III, Andrew Wells-Dang, and Dollar and Kray in “Is Inequality De-creasing?” Foreign Affairs 81 (2002): 178–83. According to my judgment, the critics defi-nitely get the better of Dollar and Kray’s analysis.

4. On other global institutions and systemic factors that contributed, see ThomasPogge, “ ‘Assisting’ the Global Poor,” in The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the DistantNeedy, ed. Deen K. Chatterjee and Don E. Scheid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2003).

5. For a brief summary of relations between LDC debt, the oil shocks, rising interestrates and the debt crisis, see William P. Avery, “The Origins of Debt Accumulation amongLDCs in the World Political Economy,” The Journal of Developing Areas 24 (1990): 503–22.

Within most countries, too, the less well off became poorer even by theconventional measures of household income or consumption (which,as we will see, miss some crucial aspects of their impoverishment), whilethe rich got richer. As Ravi Kanbur and Lyn Squire wrote in 2000, “[f]ormany countries over long periods of time, inequality has been surpris-ingly persistent, and where inequality has changed rapidly, it has in-creased.”3

The second fact involves the extent to which the policies of the world’smost powerful international financial institutions—the World Bank(WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—failed disastrouslyduring the last two decades, even when held to their own macroeco-nomic standards. The policies of structural adjustment, also known asthe Washington Consensus, that were expected to lead to steady eco-nomic growth in the LDCs and transition economies have not done so.In some respects they have made the poverty problem worse.4

The development policies that prevailed at the WB and the IMF in the1980s and 1990s strongly discouraged government intervention in mar-kets. Due to their heavy debts and rising interest rates, the LDCs had littleor no choice but to accept the conditions placed on new loans or the re-structuring of earlier ones: that they stop sheltering infant industries,eliminate barriers to free trade (including but not restricted to tariffs),privatize publicly owned and run enterprises, end subsidies (includingthose on food staples), allow their currencies to float to world marketlevels, and, last but by no means least, balance their budgets.5 The lead-ership of the international financial institutions believed that such poli-cies would lead to growth, which would in turn trickle down (eventually,

282 Philosophy & Public Affairs

if not immediately) to the poor. However, partly because of militaryspending, the LDCs’ budget cutbacks—where they were undertakenrather than feigned—frequently meant allowing infrastructure such asroads, bridges, and utilities to fall into disrepair, or led to reductions of,or new charges for, services in the realm of health, education, and socialservices.6 As the author of one prominent development economics text-book writes of structural adjustment policies, “These actions may havehelped highly indebted LDCs pay off parts of their loans and thus re-solve the debt crisis for developed-country private banks, but they in-variably reduced levels of living for the urban and rural poor.”7

Policy makers at the WB and the IMF optimistically projected that ifthe LDCs privatized their economies thoroughly, let markets reign, andbalanced their budgets, they would experience 3.3 percent annualgrowth rates from 1982 to 1995. Their worst-case scenario assumed an aver-age per capita growth rate of 2.7 percent for these years.8 What actuallyhappened is now sending shock waves through the international devel-opment community. Instead of growth, most LDCs experienced stagna-tion or economic shrinkage, even when measured in conventionalterms. Their average rate of growth from 1980 to 1998, measured in termsof per capita GDP, was 0.0 percent. Even when the failing transitioningeconomies of Central Asia and Eastern Europe during the 1990s are leftout, the rate of growth was only 0.03 percent. As William Easterly re-ports, for the twelve countries that received fifteen or more WB or IMFadjustment loans between 1980 and 1994, the median per capita growthrate was zero.9 While part of this stagnation was probably due to lowgrowth in the industrialized world, the coincidence of the shift from


6. On feigning adjustment and cutting back on the maintenance of infrastructure, seeWilliam Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 111–15.He writes: “The World Bank’s World Development 1994 estimated that ‘timely maintenanceof $12 billion would have saved road reconstruction costs of $45 billion in Africa in the pastdecade’ ” (p. 111). On the effects of adjustment on infrastructure and agricultural services inKenya, see Pradeep K. Mitra, Adjustment in Oil-Importing Developing Countries: A Com-parative Economic Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 225. On cutsin social services and other negative effects on women, see especially Diane Elson, “MaleBias in Structural Adjustment,” Caroline O.N. Moser, “Adjustment from Below: Low IncomeWomen, Time, and the Triple Role in Guayaquil, Equador,” and other articles in Haleh Afsharand Carolyne Dennis, eds., Women and Adjustment Policies in the Third World (New York:St. Martin’s, 1991).

7. Michael P. Todaro, Economic Development (New York: Longman, 5th ed., 1994), p. 600.8. Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth, p. 101.9. Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth, p. 115. See ch. 6, passim.

10. For critiques of the World Bank’s policies from within the Bank, see for example,James Wolfensohn, “The Other Crisis,” Address to the Board, 1998; Joseph Stiglitz, “MoreInstruments and Broader Goals: Moving Toward the Post-Washington Consensus,” 1998WIDER Annual Lecture; and Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth. Stiglitz has becomemore overtly critical since leaving the Bank; see his Globalization and Its Discontents(New York: W. W. Norton, 2002).

11. Covenant for the New Millenium: The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action(Santa Rosa, Calif.: Free Hand Books, 1996), p. 13.

12. The most commonly used measurement of inequality, the Gini coefficient, has beenfound to increase by 35 percent in rural Filipino households when calorie intake betweenmale and female individuals within households is added to income equalities amonghouseholds (Kanbur and Squire in Meier and Stiglitz, p. 190).

13. Amartya Sen, “More than 100 Million Women Are Missing,” New York Review ofBooks 37 (December 20, 1990): 61–66. Sen arrived at this horrifying figure by calculatinghow many girls and women would exist globally if the sex ratio in every country were thesame as it is in the countries in which females are least discriminated against or neglectedin life-threatening ways.

slow growth to no growth with the imposition of free markets and freetrade on much of the less developed world is now being regarded asmore than just coincidence by some economists, including some whoeither work for the WB or otherwise contribute to the thinking that goeson there.10

The third fact concerns the extent to which and the ways in which in-equalities between women and men contribute to and complicate thisgrowing inequality and contribute to poverty. As the final platform state-ment of the World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995) states, “Onefourth of all households world wide are headed by women and manyother households are dependent on female income even where men arepresent. Female maintained households are very often among the poorestbecause of wage discrimination, occupational segregation in the labormarket and other gender based barriers.”11 It is now known in develop-ment circles that, in addition to this feminization of global poverty at thehousehold level, gender disparities increase when intra-household in-equalities are added to the equation.12 In many cultures, when anyscarcity exists women and girls tend to get less to eat and less health carethan men and boys in the same household; these disparities, in additionto sex-selective abortion and the neglect of widows, help to explain why,as Amartya Sen has dramatically phrased it, “more than a hundred mil-lion women are missing,” mainly in South Asia and the PRC.13 In addi-tion, in hundreds of millions of the world’s worst-off households overworkafflicts women who struggle with dual or even triple roles—householdwork, work in the market or workplace, and community organizing. The


relation between women and poverty is of increased urgency because it directly affects so large a proportion of children. Since mothers, on average, contribute to their children far more of the resources available tothem than do fathers, when a mother is deprived of income, time, energy,health, or decision-making power, her deprivation affects her childrenfar more than if their father were similarly deprived.14 Not only, then, aresound development policies crucial for women, how women are faringhas a crucial impact on development.

In part because policy makers so often ignored gender considerations,the neoliberal policies described earlier failed to address adequately theproblems of poor women in a number of ways. A great deal of the workwomen do—reproduction, housework, subsistence farming, and anywork done within the family without pay—does not register in eco-nomic terms as “productive,” so if this part of their workload increaseseconomists do not notice. If public social services, such as hospital beds,are reduced, the financial savings to governments show up in the econo-mists’ accounts, but the extra, unpaid work done by women caring forthe sick at home does not. In fact, this exact “cost–shifting,” viewed asfeasible in light of the “elasticity” of women’s labor, was advocated aspart of the WB’s and the IMF’s structural adjustment policies of the 1980sand 1990s. So were fees for schooling; but girls tend to be withdrawnfrom school first, damaging their future ability to support themselvesand to control their own fertility. Sometimes the negative impact onwomen of seemingly neutral economic thinking is less direct. Recent de-velopment policies have resulted in the shutting down of some indus-tries and the opening up of others. Since economists regard jobs at thesame skill level as fungible, if a male earner loses his job because an auto-mobile factory is converted into a clothing factory or a microchip fac-tory, which hires his wife at the same wage rate, nothing has changed. Ifshe continues to do all the housework, thus working a double shift whileher husband does little or nothing, there is still no change, economicallyspeaking. Due to the imposition on many poor countries of policies in-tended to foster development through growth, this too has been a com-mon scenario during recent decades. Not surprisingly, feminist critiquesof such policies for serious gender bias, predicting dire consequences,


14. See, for example, Ray Lesser Blumberg, “Income Under Female Versus Male Control:Hypotheses from a Theory of Gender Stratification and Data from the Third World,” Journal ofFamily Issues 9 (1988): 51–84.

15. For example, Gita Sen and Caren Grown, Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987), esp. ch. 2.Though the WB has hired some gender experts and developed a gender team, their influ-ence is very limited.

16. Many generations of economists simply assumed the unity of interests of the house-hold. In “A Theory of Marriage,” Journal of Political Economy Part I, 81 (1973): 813–46, andPart II, 82 (1974): 511–26; and A Treatise on the Family (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1981), Gary Becker made the classic argument for the altruistic head model, though he hassince modified it. For a discussion and critique of his views, see Naila Kabeer, Reversed Reali-ties: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 98–113. Althoughproblems with Becker’s model were pointed out early on, economic theory proceeded asthough it, or something that justified treating households “as if” they were individuals, wasvalid. Sen and Nancy Folbre are prominent critics: Amartya Sen, “Gender and CooperativeConflicts,” in Persistent Inequalities: Women and World Development, ed. Irene Tinker(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 123–49; Nancy Folbre, “The Black Four ofHearts: Toward a New Paradigm of Household Economics,” in A Home Divided:Women andIncome in the Third World, ed. Daisy Dwyer and Judith Bruce (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 1988), pp. 248–62.

emerged from LDC women’s movements by the mid-eighties, but theyhave been largely ignored.15

To a significant extent, the failure of international financial and devel-opment policy to produce a sustainable reduction in global poverty canbe traced to the widespread acceptance among economists and policymakers of certain core beliefs. First, the basic economic unit is thehousehold or family, headed by “economic man” who, while motivatedin the marketplace by rational self interest, behaves within his family asa perfect altruist, as if he felt the burdens and enjoyed the benefits of anyof its members as his own. Thus, each household is a “black box” in thesense that its internal distributions are irrelevant to economists; theycan be assumed optimal for all. Long challenged as a misleading fictionby feminists, and recently questioned by others who argue that conflict,bargaining—and therefore power differentials—affect distributionswithin families and must be attended to, the single-interest householdhas had remarkable staying power.16

Second, what is considered to be economically productive and of eco-nomic value is measured in terms of labor, or of goods and services, thatare bought and sold in the marketplace. Thus unpaid labor such as childcare and other domestic labor, subsistence farming, or other work donein the family is, by definition, not productive and has no economicvalue. Consumption is defined as the consumption of goods and ser-vices that have economic value. Devaluing a great deal of women’s labor,


this has certain paradoxical consequences: For example, if children whowere previously cared for by their mother are enrolled at a daycare cen-ter and the mother does nothing with her saved time and energy, thechange contributes to the economy.

Third, the growth of its economic product as just defined (GDP) is theonly important measure of a country’s development. Acceptance of thisproposition was encouraged by a near-religious belief in the “Kuznetscurve”—the claim that growth, though in the short run it may lead togreater economic inequality, leads in the long run to the reduction ofpoverty.17 Despite the highly speculative nature of the claim, and a large-scale empirical study in the early 1970s that refuted it, the curve remainedtenacious until very recently.18 Even economists who became quite criticalof the WB’s various methods of trying to promote growth have been loathto give up on growth as the correct aim.19 Continued acceptance ofKuznets’s model undoubtedly delayed concern about growing inequalityin the LDCs, since it lulled most development economists into thinkingthat, whatever the short-run effects of growth, its long-run advantages torich and poor alike were assured. At too long last, almost thirty years afterthe first big doubts were raised about the model, and with little fanfare,economists have recently begun to acknowledge that the famous curve onwhich the central premise of development economics has depended isquite false.20


17. Simon Kuznets, “Economic Growth and Income Inequality,” American Economic Re-view 45 (1955): 1–28. Kuznets frankly acknowledged the meagerness of his data, drawn onlyfrom already developed countries. He wrote: “The paper is perhaps 5 per cent empirical in-formation and 95 per cent speculation, some of it possibly tainted by wishful thinking,” p. 26.

18. Irma Adelman and Cynthia Taft Morris, Economic Growth and Social Equity in De-veloping Countries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973). They studied forty-threedeveloping countries, discovering to their shock that there was no positive relationshipbetween economic growth and reduction in poverty. Rather, growth led to “trickle up” tothese countries’ small middle classes, and particularly to the very wealthy.

19. Easterly, for example, faults the Bank’s methods but not its aim, concluding his cri-tique by saying: “May the quest for growth over the next fifty years succeed more than ithas for the last fifty years, and may more poor countries finally become rich.” The ElusiveQuest for Growth, p. 291. But his argument for the connection between growth and povertyreduction is brief and weak. He cites data connecting growth with reductions in poverty(p. 13), but the rates of growth required for even modest reductions in poverty rates are un-realistically high. Growth of 1.6 percent p.a., quite ambitious for LDCs, correlates with littlechange (�0.6 percent p.a.) in the poverty rate.

20. In 2000, Ravi Kanbur and Lyn Squire, in “The Evolution of Thinking About Poverty: Ex-ploring the Interactions,” wrote: “The Kuznets curve faded from view, leaving the conclusion

that income and inequality are not systematically related according to some immutablelaw of development.” Ignoring Adelman and Morris’s 1973 book, they refer to work of the1990s, including a 1998 study by Klaus Deininger and Squire in which of forty-nine coun-tries studied, there was no statistical relationship between income (GDP) and inequality inforty; in five of the other nine, the relationship was the opposite of Kuznets’s model. (Meierand Stiglitz, pp. 192–93).

21. Ester Boserup, Woman’s Role in Economic Development (London: Earthscan, 1970);Daisy Dwyer and Judith Bruce, A Home Divided: Women and Income in the Third World(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Nancy Folbre, “The Black Four of Hearts”; CarolynMoser, Gender Planning and Development: Theory, Practice, and Training (New York:Routledge, 1993); Naila Kabeer, Reversed Realities ; Irene Tinker, “The Adverse Impact ofDevelopment on Women,” in Women and World Development, ed. Tinker and MichelleBramsen (New York: Praeger, 1976), also Tinker, ed., Persistent Inequalities: Women andWorld Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Sen and Grown, Development,Crisis and Alternative Visions.

During the 1990s, largely because of the tireless efforts of highly visiblecritics such as Amartya Sen and less well known ones like Irma Adelmanand Cynthia Taft Morris, many development economists have begun torise to the challenge of thinking differently. This involves estimating andcounting the value of subsistence production, reconsidering the sup-posed relationship between growth and inequality, trying to determinethe actual quality of people’s lives, and paying special attention to thepoor. Influenced by the work of feminist economists such as EsterBoserup, Irene Tinker, Nancy Folbre, Carolyn Moser, Naila Kabeer, andothers, some have even begun to consider gender as a topic that must beof interest to economists.21

II. DEVELOPMENT AND HUMAN WELL-BEING

Against this background of failed development policy and worseningpoverty we can better appreciate the significance of Amartya Sen’s,Martha Nussbaum’s, and Brooke Ackerly’s recent books. All three ques-tion conventional beliefs about the goals and measurement of economicdevelopment. All three show how the well-being, freedom, capacities,functioning, and voices of the world’s women, especially the poorest, areon the one hand severely short-changed or even completely neglected bystandard economic measures and, on the other hand, absolutely crucialto development—especially when understood as human development.Sen and Nussbaum point out that rapid economic change by no meansalways benefits women or the poor, and that economic growth is by no


means simply related to human well-being. Sen and Ackerly insist thatunless the voices of the world’s least advantaged women are heard and at-tended to, gross injustice on a global scale is likely to continue, and prob-lems such as population growth and environmental degradation will beexacerbated.

Sen’s Development as Freedom, written as a series of lectures at theWorld Bank, mounts an incisive critique of many of the Bank’s policies.Over the last two decades, Sen has developed the ideas forming thebackbone of the book, and credit is due largely to him and the persua-siveness of these ideas for the changes since the late 1980s in how theUnited Nations measures development and for the winds of changeblowing at the Bank since about 1993.22 In the early 1980s, he developedthe idea that he now terms “development as freedom” and that he andNussbaum both call “the capabilities approach.” Much of the time, Senuses the term “freedom” more or less interchangeably with “capability,”but he also says that “[c]apability is a kind of freedom,” suggesting thatthe latter term is more encompassing.23 He focuses to some extent onformal freedom, but far more on substantive freedom—which dependson the extent to which people are able to exercise their freedom. Theessence of his approach is that meaningful development cannot beequated with economic growth or measured in the readily calculableways preferred by most economists, but must take account of howpeople are capable of functioning, of the extent to which they are free toflourish in important human ways—of what people are able to be and todo. Acknowledging that people have different goals in life, Sen does nottheorize beyond what he regards as fairly basic, widely accepted capa-bilities or freedoms—such as having basic civil and political rights, andbeing able to avoid deprivations such as malnutrition, ill health, or pre-mature morbidity, and the lack of gainful, unforced employment or ofbasic education. Since he has long argued that people’s different circum-stances affect their needs and he holds the democratic view that the


22. Sen gives credit for these changes to the economist who was more directly respon-sible for implementing them, thus changing the shape of the Human Development Reportfrom 1990—the late Mahbub ul Haq, of the United Nations Development Program. Devel-opment as Freedom, p. 73. Sen’s previous major works that have contributed to broadeningperceptions of development include “Development: Which Way Now?” Economic Journal93 (1983): 745–62; Commodities and Capabilities (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1985), andparts of Inequality Re-examined (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

23. Sen, Development as Freedom, p. 75.

24. This example is from Sen, Inequality Re-examined, p. 126. Could Costa Rica’s havingno military and a well-supported system of free public education be related to this out-come? Other examples are given in Development as Freedom, pp. 5–6.

25. Sen, Development as Freedom, ch. 2; quotations are from p. 35.

people of various societies should be free to choose many of their ownpriorities—say, between an improved standard of living and the main-tenance of certain aspects of their traditions—it seems to him inappropri-ate to spell out in advance or in detail all that may be needed for freedomand human flourishing.

Besides strengthening his now well-established theory of development,Sen directly points out how some of the WB’s policies have exacerbatedthe problem of poverty. He reiterates the looseness of the connection be-tween per capita GDP and human well-being that he had pointed out inprevious works, citing nations with relatively low per capita GDPs andhigh average life expectancy, and vice versa: Costa Rica, with a per capitaGDP less than one-tenth of that of the United States, had in the late1990s an average life expectancy only one year less than that of the U.S.24

Given this looseness of connection, Sen criticizes theorists and policymakers who think that development requires “toughness and discipline,”including “calculated neglect” of “soft-headed . . . concerns”—such aspublicly provided social services and social safety nets for the poor aswell as the “luxury” of democracy, with its civil and political rights—“much too early” in the development process. Theories of this “hard-knocks” school—and one easily recalls the proponents of growth-orientedstructural adjustment in the phrases Sen employs—err in thinking thatcutbacks and discipline on the part of governments, together with relianceon the rugged individual entrepreneur, are the only route to development,which they assume will take the shape it has in the West.25

Readers of Development as Freedom who are unfamiliar with the eco-nomic theories prevailing at the WB and the IMF for the past few decadesmay find some of Sen’s arguments rather peculiar, for few reasonablepersons not steeped in such theories would think to argue the oppositecase. But Sen knows he needs to argue that the widespread literacy andnumeracy that come only with free and compulsory public educationand the widespread basic health that comes only with publicly fundedhealth systems are essential components of development, for he is wellaware that the WB and the IMF, in their budget-cutting adjustment pro-grams, have encouraged LDCs to charge their citizens “user fees” for


education and health care. He knows he needs to point out the clearconnection (known since at least the early 1980s) between rising femaleliteracy rates and falling fertility rates, for he is well aware that user feesand cuts in public education spending encouraged by the WB have beenstalling or even eating away at previous progress on both fronts in someof the world’s most economically deprived nations. He knows he needs tomake the case that political rights and the civil rights that render themeffective are both crucial aspects of human freedom and also importantcatalysts for the kind of economic development that benefits the many,not only the few, for he knows that the WB and the IMF, both state-centricin their approaches, have made loans as readily to corrupt dictators andusurping tyrants as to democratically elected and accountable govern-ments. As is typical of all of Sen’s work on development, in Developmentas Freedom his detailed knowledge about the actual living and workingconditions of the poor in LDCs constantly informs his theorizing.

Overall, Sen’s approach to development equates it with the expansionof people’s freedoms—both as ends in themselves and also as crucialmeans to further development. Free and widely available education,and transportation to it, open up young people’s ways not only to betterjobs or better success in farming or business, but also to informationthat can enrich their personal and social lives in many ways. “Individualfreedom is quintessentially a social product,” he says, going on to arguethat this is a two-way process: Social arrangements and institutions canexpand individual freedoms, and the use of these in turn can not onlyimprove individual lives but also help to make social arrangementsmore effective.26

Sen provides a rich discussion of the essential freedoms, their inter-connections, and how they challenge the neoclassical conception ofdevelopment. Along with some critics of earlier versions of his theory,though, I am troubled by his over-extension of the term “freedom,” andregard the theory as more balanced when he emphasizes capabilities asmuch as freedoms.27 Since the terms are far from always interchangeable,


26. Sen, Development as Freedom, p. 31.27. For example Joshua Cohen, “Review of Sen’s Inequality Re-examined,” The Journal

of Philosophy 92 (1994): 275–88, esp. 278–80; G. A. Cohen, “Review: Amartya Sen’s UnequalWorld,” The New Left Review (January 1995): 117–29, esp. 120–25. Sen does not respond toeither of these powerful philosophical challenges to his concept of “effective freedom,”which he now terms “substantive freedom.”

28. Sen, Development as Freedom, p. 33.29. This is suggested by G. A. Cohen, pp. 124–25. The quotation is from Sen’s Inequality

Re-examined, p. 69.30. Sen, Development as Freedom, p. 86.

both are needed, and Sen’s title, Development as Freedom, seems toleave out an important part of the story. It is hard to conceive of somehuman functionings, or the fulfillment of some needs and wants, suchas good health or nourishment, as freedoms without stretching the termuntil it seems to refer to everything that is of central value to human beings.It is one thing to think in terms of freedom from want or from fear. Butwhy extend the meaning of “freedom” to the point of the infelicitousphrasing Sen uses in equating development with “removing the unfree-doms from which the members of the society may suffer”?28 Freedom isa complex enough term, without its taking on the work of a whole moralvocabulary. So why does Sen place such weight on freedom, rather thanrelying equally on the concept of capabilities?

Perhaps Sen, believing as he does that “freedom is one of the mostpowerful social ideas,” wants to retake it from right-wing ideologueswho regard all action by the state as diminishing freedom.29 Perhaps hewants to reclaim the term from neoclassical economists, with theirheavy emphasis on free trade and free markets—though he certainlyvalues the personal freedoms, as well as the efficiency, that are enhancedby markets. Alternatively, is his motivation suggested briefly when, inconcluding his chapter on freedom and the foundations of justice, hementions that one of the merits of his approach (which he refers to hereboth as “the freedom approach” and as “the capability approach”) is thatit can “pay substantial attention” to the values motivating other promin-ent accounts of justice—utilitarian, libertarian, and Rawlsian? Why hewould want to do this in the case of libertarianism is unclear, except per-haps to show up that account’s conception of freedom as distorted andinadequate in comparison with his own far more expansive and egalitar-ian version. But in the case of Rawlsian theory, it seems far clearer whySen might want, by focusing on freedom, to ally himself with its “focuson individual liberty, and on the resources needed for substantive free-doms.”30 For, as Joshua Cohen has pointed out, not only does Sen agreewith Rawls that not just liberty itself but the worth of liberty is central tosocial justice, but he has also pushed this idea far further, arguing that


attention to the distribution of “primary goods” is insufficient and thatattention to people’s actual capabilities and functionings is essential to atheory that can adequately account for the worth of liberty.31

Whatever Sen’s reasons may be for doing so, he tends to overextendthe concept of freedom. Nonetheless, his rethinking of development ashuman development has done far more to advance development theoryand policies than the work of any other scholar.

In Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach,Nussbaum presents her approach as it applies to women in developingcountries, specifically with a view to influencing public policy. Acknowl-edging that Sen pioneered the approach in economics, she spells out thecapabilities in considerably more detail than Sen has done, and aims tobase her own philosophical approach on “a single clear line of feministargument.” Her objective is to argue, on the basis of human capabilities—“what people are actually able to do and to be”—for a set of universallyapplicable “central constitutional principles that citizens have a right todemand from their governments.”32 In much of the world, Nussbaumpoints out, women are more likely than men to lack the fundamentalsnecessary for living. Women are less well-nourished, healthy, and liter-ate, and more vulnerable to violence and sexual abuse. Women have farless access to capital, land or other resources, and to political power.Frequently they work far longer hours than men. Laws often discrimi-nate seriously against women in crucial areas such as property, inheri-tance, and divorce; even where laws don’t discriminate, tradition andculture often do. Women are often treated as means to others’ ends,even in their own homes. The capabilities approach, Nussbaum argues,is especially important for understanding both the vulnerability ofwomen to poverty and the vulnerability of poor women, since so manyof their problems and the causes of these problems are invisible to anyoneapproaching them with the perspective and assumptions of a conven-tional economist.

Nussbaum argues for her capabilities approach in part by arguing forits superiority over other approaches to social justice and in part byapplying what she calls a “narrative method,” which consists of her build-ing on the stories of two specific, economically poor, Indian women. She


31. Joshua Cohen, pp. 281ff.32. Nussbaum, pp. xiii–xiv, 5, 12.

33. Nussbaum, p. 77.34. Nussbaum, pp. 78–83; quotations from pp. 81 and 83.35. Nussbaum, pp. 96–101.

states her agreement with most aspects of Sen’s theory although, as shenotes, she differs from him in the centrality her theory gives to Aris-totelian and Marxian ideas about human functioning, in her explicitconfrontation of cultural relativism, and most of all in her specificationof a list of central human capabilities. Nussbaum’s extensive list includeshaving a normal life span, adequate food, shelter, bodily security, andthe social basis of self-respect. It includes the opportunities to supportoneself through work, to be healthy, and to participate in controllingone’s environment (which entails basic civil and political liberties). Italso includes such things as having opportunities to use one’s imagina-tion, to produce self-expressive and self-chosen works and events (forexample, literary and religious ones), to form a conception of the goodand search for the ultimate meaning of life, and to relate to animals,plants, and the world of nature. Nussbaum says that some items on herlist “may seem to us more fixed than others” and that, in the sense thatsome are more debatable, “the list remains open-ended and humble.”33

However, she also considers that “all are of central importance,” thatreasonable trade-offs among them are limited, and that there is “a tragicaspect” to anyone’s being pushed below the threshold in any one ofthem. Building on the perfectionist intuition that “certain human abili-ties exert a moral claim that they should be developed,” which sheclaims is cross cultural, she concludes that the developed use of all suchabilities is necessary for leading a truly or completely human life.34 Thusshe wants not to prioritize those basic freedoms and capabilities that aretypically protected by human rights, and are included in Sen’s accountof the theory, over capabilities that some would see as far more variablein importance from culture to culture, from context to context, and fromperson to person.

Nussbaum briefly compares her capabilities approach with the morefamiliar human rights approach. She acknowledges some advantages ofthe latter but appears overall to consider the capabilities approach animprovement on it.35 Her reasons for this, however, are not clear. Shequotes Bernard Williams on his preference for (Sen’s version of) basichuman capabilities as less “obscure” than basic human rights, but does not


justify this claim. She pronounces, rather than argues, that the capabilitiesapproach “has the advantage of . . . taking clear positions on [many] dis-puted issues,” such as whether groups (or only individuals) have rights,and whether for every right some identifiable person or institution has aduty to respond. Nussbaum’s capabilities approach seems to indicate “no,only individuals” on the first issue, and “yes, the state” on the second;however, neither answer seems beyond reasonable dispute. In the firstcase, groups too have capabilities—to express their views, to make deci-sions, and so on. Moreover, some capabilities of persons, as Nussbaumenumerates them, depend on their living in various kinds of groups. Somaybe sometimes groups are the appropriate focus, whichever approachis taken. In the second case, although Nussbaum says that her capabilitiesargument yields constitutional principles by which states should abide,she neither justifies this choice of duty-bearer nor explains why she re-frains from arguing for a more global responsibility. In cases in whichstates are so poor that they cannot do their duties vis-à-vis promotingtheir citizens’ capabilities, does the duty then fall on wealthier states,wealthy individuals, the international community, or no one at all? Theanswer to this philosophically and practically important question seemsno more or less clear-cut if the issue is one of promoting human capabil-ities than if it is one of human rights.

Nussbaum says at the outset of her argument that feminist philoso-phers should not only focus on the urgent needs of women in the devel-oping world, but that they should do so “in dialogue with them.”36 So itseems odd that, in a three hundred page book, each of the Indianwomen whom she interviewed—Vasanti and Jayamma—speaks for her-self, being directly quoted, only once. Of Jayamma, she says “[s]he doesn’tseem interested in talking,” thus making one wonder about the choice ofher as a subject to be interviewed.37 Almost everything Nussbaum saysabout the two women, their lives, and even their thoughts, perceptions,and emotions is filtered through her, and much of is prefaced by phraseslike “it seems” or “suppose.” These women live, as she points out, nearthe bottom of a society that ranks 138th of 175 countries when measuredby the United Nations’ Human Development Index. Things are so toughfor women and girls in India that the ratio of women to men declined


36. Nussbaum, p. 7.37. Nussbaum; quotation from p. 19. Vasanti speaks on p. 17, Jayamma on p. 19.

38. Nussbaum, p. 26, citing Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, India: Economic Developmentand Social Opportunity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

39. Nussbaum, p. 82.40. Nussbaum, p. 69.

from 97:100 in 1901 to 92.7:100 in 1991.38 India is also close to the bottom interms of female education; 65 percent of women are illiterate. Vasanti,Nussbaum tells us, has suffered most from an abusive marriage and atotal lack of education, but has been fortunate in obtaining a micro-loanso that she can earn a living; Jayamma has suffered most from decadesof underpaid, hard physical labor, and is destitute in her old age. Not sur-prisingly, Vasanti and Jayamma are, according to Nussbaum’s account,above all concerned with their own basic physical, economic, and socialwell-being and that of those close to them. They say nothing about relat-ing to nature or searching for the ultimate meaning of life. They give nosign that they would consider such capabilities just as central in theirlives as being able to eat adequately or not to be beaten. And whereaseach of them clearly wants more control over her life and to be able toprovide for her own needs, it seems extremely unlikely that either ofthem would sign on to Nussbaum’s statement that “[t]o plan for one’sown life without being able to do so in complex forms of discourse, con-cern, and reciprocity with other human beings is . . . to behave in an in-completely human way.”39

From where, then, does Nussbaum’s list, her comprehensive accountof human capacities and functioning, come? And whence comes herunderlying conception of what it is to live a completely human life? Shewants and claims to take “an approach that is respectful of each person’sstruggle for flourishing, that treats each person as an end and as asource of agency and worth in her own right.”40 But her highly intellectu-alized conception of a fully human life and some of the capacities cen-tral to living it seem to derive far more from an Aristotelian ideal thanfrom any deep or broad familiarity with the lives of women in the less-developed world. As for the more sophisticated, even fanciful, items onher list, they seem to draw more from the life of a highly educated, artisti-cally inclined, self-consciously and voluntarily religious Western womanthan from the lives of the women to whom she spoke in India.

This seems true not only of Nussbaum’s list, but to some extent of herchoice of areas of concentration. For example, it seems neither of thewomen she interviewed mentions religion, except when Nussbaum says


that one cannot understand “why Jayamma prays every evening and whyshe thinks it matters” without understanding her particular social, caste,and regional circumstances.41 She gives no account of what Jayammasaid about her daily prayer or her reasons for it. Although this is the onlymention of religion from either of the two women, Nussbaum devotes avery long chapter—almost a quarter of the book—to a discussion ofwhether religious freedom requires that India’s “personal laws” (laws ofmarriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance, historically biasedagainst women) should remain under the control of the various reli-gions’ leaders. This focus would seem more appropriate if she had raisedthe issues of religious freedom, the inequalities of the personal laws, orthe impact of religion on their lives with her interviewees, or if they hadraised these subjects. Given her stated narrative and dialogic method,and given no specific indication of Vasanti’s or Jayamma’s valuation ofreligious freedom, it is unclear why she pays so much attention to it.

These reflections suggest that whereas Nussbaum aims to enable thetwo women to speak for themselves, and to avoid the error of imposingon them categories that “reflect [her] own immersion in a particular the-oretical tradition,”42 as their interpreter she has allowed her own voice todominate. Without this, it would be much more difficult for her to sustainher comprehensive list, or to go beyond her initial claims—more in linewith Sen’s—that “a basic social minimum” is required by human dignity,and that “certain very general values” are recognizable across differenceof class, culture and context.43 What is it about her methodology thatleads her to claim universality for values that seem far less basic andmore variable? How might she have avoided showing, in the course of herargument, the opposite of what she intends to demonstrate by it—justhow much values and capabilities that go far beyond the crucial, basicones do in fact and perhaps should vary from culture to culture, fromcontext to context, and even from one person’s experience to another’s?

Ackerly’s Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism presents apowerful answer to these questions. Ackerly makes a strong case for thesuperiority of social criticism that on the one hand respects diversity andon the other hand has critical teeth. Such criticism, she argues, emanates


41. Nussbaum, p. 22.42. Nussbaum, p. 39.43. Nussbaum, pp. 5, 41.

from, or at the least listens very hard and carefully to, the voices of themost oppressed. She points out the limitations of theories of deliberativedemocracy, of culturally relativist communitarianism, and of essential-ism, but her theory also draws from what she finds valuable in them. Thus,while critical of Nussbaum’s “essentialist” account of human nature sheadapts (and cuts back on) her list of human capabilities. Central to herown model of social criticism is that it builds on the works and theexperience of feminist activists and scholars around the world—groupslike the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), which has enabledmany thousands of previously vulnerable “piece workers” in India tostrike and negotiate better rates of pay; Women Living Under MuslimLaws (WLUML), which works to connect Muslim women and otherwomen living under Islamic laws, and to make them aware of diversitywithin Islam; and Development Alternatives for a New Era (DAWN), aworldwide network of women activists/scholars who have been criticalof conventional economic development strategies and their impact onwomen, and have proposed alternative visions. Such groups, whetherthey call themselves “feminist” or not, are feminist social critics, accord-ing to Ackerly, because they believe in the ideal of collectively informed,collective and uncoerced social decision making, and they work to pro-mote it. Her theory is much enriched by what such groups have learnedin their conversations with many thousands of women.

Social critics, Ackerly argues, must develop ways of actively elicitingthe voices of those who are likely otherwise to be silent. Unlike most re-cent theories of deliberative democracy, the method of inquiry she pro-poses does not presume either equality or complete knowledge, but canbe used by those who live in the real world of inequality and imperfectknowledge. Unlike cultural relativism, it does not assume that given orseemingly accepted practices and meanings are really shared within agiven culture. Instead, alert to the dangers of domination and subordi-nation, it subjects such practices and meanings to skeptical scrutiny andqueries them from multiple perspectives. Unlike theories that claim onthe basis of an essential human nature that certain goods and capabili-ties are universally applicable, it finds certain “guiding criteria” to beuniversal but stresses that they always require local interpretation.

Ackerly argues that the method of social criticism she advocates, unlikemost ostensibly critical social or political theories, is able to successfullybridge the gap between the ideal aspired to by the critic and the real


world that may be in need of questioning and change. In order to evalu-ate existing values, practices and norms, she suggests, critics shouldstart by asking three questions, trying especially hard to elicit answersfrom the most oppressed members of society—those otherwise mostlikely to be silent, or silenced. First, “Do the people of the society deliber-ate inclusively, collectively, and without use of coercion about the values,practices, and norms that affect their lives?” Second, “Are inequalities ex-ploitable to the detriment of the less powerful?” And third, “How doesthe life each person leads compare with the life a human being should becapable of living?”44 Each of these questions, she explains, contributes toone of the three parts of her feminist methodology. Asking about deliber-ation and its absence helps the critic to hear how the less powerful think,value, and experience the world. Addressing the exploitative aspects ofinequality leads to skeptical scrutiny of elitist, coercive, sexist, racist, orotherwise exclusionary norms and practices. Comparing the constraintsof the real lives people, especially the less powerful, are able to lead withthe lives humans ought to be able to lead results in the development ofguiding criteria for reformed norms, values, and practices.

Whereas Nussbaum rejects the terminology of “human rights” for herlist of capabilities, Ackerly does not. Probably the most significant resultof their respective choices is that Ackerly gains considerable insight fromstudying the recent movement for women’s rights as human rights—a movement whose dialogue and debate can teach us a great deal aboutthe expressed needs and priorities of the world’s women. Acknowledgingher debt to both Sen and Nussbaum, Ackerly presents as her general“criteria” a revised version of Nussbaum’s list of capabilities, specifyingthat her list “is meant to guide the design and reform of familial, social,economic, and political institutions.” Though she says it is “informed byexisting universal declarations in international law,” she stresses farmore than Nussbaum the extent to which the criteria or rights listedneed to be interpreted in the light of different local social and culturalcontexts.45 In modifying the list, she draws not only from the discourseon women’s rights as human rights, but also from a broad variety ofother sources in which Third World women speak, for example writingsissuing from such largely locally based organizations as SEWA, DAWN,


44. Ackerly, p. 18.45. Ackerly, quotations from p. 113.

46. Ackerly, p. 115. For her and Nussbaum’s respective lists, compare pp. 114–16 withNussbaum, pp. 78–80.

and WLUML. On this basis Ackerly omits, as less than universally appli-cable or centrally important, some of the more intellectual and aestheticcapacities on Nussbaum’s list, such as the abilities to create self-expressiveworks and events and to search for the ultimate meaning of life in one’sown way. Although many of the capabilities Ackerly lists are exercisedby persons as individuals, some are necessarily exercised collectively.She emphasizes that it is important “to be a part of a community whichhas the capability of self-determination regarding values, practices, andnorms that are consistent with . . . those of other societies.”46 This adds a local focus to Ackerly’s argument, as well as opening up an interna-tional norms dimension. Whereas Nussbaum does not address whatought to happen when a state lacks the resources to foster all of itscitizens’ capabilities up to the threshold level, Ackerly links her versionof human capabilities with the international human rights approachthat has been taken since 1948. Since, as we saw earlier, there is such vastinequality among states’ capacities to meet their people’s needs, itseems imperative to retain the dimension of international responsibilityin discussing people’s rights, capabilities or freedoms—however they aretermed.

An important strand of Ackerly’s argument is that the best, most insight-ful social criticism tends to come from multisited critics. Whether theyoriginate inside or outside the context of their critique, she argues, it isbest to have many critics and criticism from a number of perspectives.The perspective of the critic who is both an insider and an outsider to thesocial context or culture is particularly valuable. Such a critic has bothindispensable local knowledge and the perspective on this knowledgethat is gained from having experience outside of her local context. Dia-logue between outsiders and insiders, under conditions that may be farfrom perfect but that emulate in significant ways those Ackerly recom-mends, can indeed promote informed and constructive social criticism.Such dialogues can help us to evaluate aspects of Sen’s, Nussbaum’s, andAckerly’s theories, and they can indicate and help correct for the kinds ofmistakes that are likely when decisions are made by distant, powerfulexperts.


III. LISTENING TO THE SILENT VOICES

Two fairly recent sources, the Beijing Fourth World Conference onWomen’s Platform for Action and the first two volumes of the WorldBank’s study Voices of the Poor, both provide unusual opportunities tohear the often silent and silenced voices of the oppressed.47 Each pro-vides substantial evidence of what women in the less developed worldthemselves rank as their own highest priorities. In turning to them, Ishall attempt to evaluate Sen’s, Nussbaum’s, and Ackerly’s methods andtheir main conclusions about women’s well-being, as well as turningback to the question of how development economics became so di-vorced from the realities of the lives of many people in LDCs.

What can we learn about the well-being, the capacities, and the free-doms crucial to the world’s women from the recent movement forwomen’s rights as human rights (WRHR)? This movement, while nur-tured by such organizations as the Center for Women’s Global Leader-ship and Women’s Human Rights Watch, rethought human rights andcompiled women’s human rights from the experiences of the membersof grass-roots women’s organizations worldwide.48 Reports and recom-mendations from thousands of local, national, and regional meetingsprovided excellent evidence of what women consider most importantand indispensable in their lives. For strategic purposes, including theneed to present a united front and to make a strong impact even on peopleapathetic or uninformed about gender inequity, the movement coalescedaround the issue of violence against women. This issue, above all, led tothe realization that human rights must be reconceived in order to fullyinclude rights crucial to women. For as those at the grassroots soon


47. The Beijing Declaration, Platform for Action, Covenant for the New Millenium(Santa Rosa, Calif.: Free Hand Books, 1996); Deepa Narayan, with Raj Patel, Kai Schafft,Anne Rademacher, and Sarah Koch-Schulte, Voices of the Poor: Can Anyone Hear Us? (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2000); Deepa Narayan, Robert Chambers, Meera Kaul Shah,and Patti Petesch, Voices of the Poor: Crying Out for Change (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2000). A third volume was published after this article was written.

48. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks inInternational Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), ch. 5. See also BellaAbzug, “A Global Movement for Democracy,” Beijing and Beyond: Toward the Twenty-firstCentury of Women. Women’s Studies Quarterly 24 (1996): 117–22; Charlotte Bunch and NiamhReilly, Demanding Accountability: The Global Campaign and Vienna Tribunal for Women’sHuman Rights (New Brunswick, N.J.: The Center for Women’s Global Leadership, 1994).

49. Twelve “Critical Areas of Concern” are listed, Platform for Action, p. 20. I base myaccount of the Platform’s priorities on both that list and the text as a whole.

made clear, women were at least as likely to suffer violence in the privatesphere, from intimates—husbands, partners, fathers—as to suffer vio-lence in the public sphere from the state—the major focus of previoushuman rights advocates. Having drawn attention to women’s rightsthrough the dramatic example of violence, and rethought many humanrights so as better to apply them to women’s lives, the WRHR movement—still working from the grassroots—compiled a substantial and varied listof rights that were of sufficient weight to be considered human rights ofall women everywhere.

The final Platform for Action, adopted in Beijing in September 1995,places most emphasis on the following “critical areas of concern” for theworld’s women: the burden of increasing poverty, including overwork(paid and unpaid), underpay, and malnutrition; unequal and inad-equate education; unequal and inadequate health care; many forms ofviolence against women and effects of conflict on women; unequal accessto power, decision-making, credit, resources, and management of theenvironment; stereotyping of women and neglect of women’s perspec-tives in the media; and persistent discrimination against and violationof the rights of the girl child.49 There is no doubt from this document (aswell as from the records of the struggle to get it adopted) that when the“silent voices” are heard, through the many NGOs and other representa-tives participating in the WRHR movement, they confirm much of whatSen, Nussbaum, and Ackerly say about human capabilities and free-doms. More in line with Sen’s and Ackerly’s accounts than Nussbaum’s,however, highest priority goes to the fulfillment of women’s basicneeds—including their physical security as well as the resources andskills that enable them to make a living for themselves and their children—and to the attainment of more control over central aspects of their lives.

The Platform also states clearly that prevailing economic theorieshave contributed to the problems of many women, especially poorwomen, in LDCs, and must change if they are to be solved, “Insufficientattention to gender analysis has meant that women’s contributions andconcerns remain too often ignored in economic structures. . . . As a result,many policies and programs may continue to contribute to inequalitiesbetween women and men. Where progress has been made in integrating


gender perspectives, program and policy effectiveness has also been en-hanced.”50 Problems arising from structural adjustment programs getexplicit attention, especially their measures for reducing public spend-ing on social services such as health care. In the Platform’s initial discus-sion of the recent “expansion of unspeakable poverty” in the world,harms done by structural adjustment to vulnerable groups are targetedfor criticism numerous times. The policies are blamed for shifting re-sponsibilities from governments to already overburdened women, aswell as often failing to “take account of their impact on women and girlchildren, especially those living in poverty”—whose numbers havegrown.51

The Platform’s stance on religion and women is more nuanced andless positive than Nussbaum’s. On the one hand, it endorses the impor-tance of religious freedom, acknowledging that religion “plays a centralrole in the lives of millions of women and men” and that it “may, and can,contribute to fulfilling women’s and men’s moral, ethical, and spiritualneeds.” However, it by no means highlights religion and spirituality, asNussbaum does, as essential to a complete human life. It also specifi-cally acknowledges that “any form of [religious] extremism may have anegative impact on women and can lead to violence and discrimina-tion.”52 Moreover, the Platform takes the strongest position yet taken at aUnited Nations meeting on the priority of women’s human rights overclaims coming from “various historical, cultural and religious back-grounds . . .” where the two come into conflict.53 Thus it strongly en-dorses Nussbaum’s, Sen’s, and Ackerly’s antirelativist positions.

Where else can the voices of the otherwise silent or silenced readily beheard? Even more direct accounts of what economically poor people, in-cluding many women, in LDCs are saying are the recent Voices of thePoor volumes, Can Anyone Hear Us? and Crying Out for Change. Thislarge-scale study, undertaken by the International Bank for Reconstruc-tion and Development (part of the WB), indicates a major shift in methodfrom those more prevalent in economics. It indicates far higher priority isbeing placed on empirical data—in particular, specific qualitative data


50. Platform for Action, p. 82.51. Platform for Action, pp. 12–13. Structural adjustment programs are specifically criti-

cized three times on these pages, as well as frequently during subsequent discussions.52. Platform for Action, pp. 13–14.53. Platform for Action, pp. 9–10.

54. Crying Out for Change, p. 2. Evidently, the poverty line assumed here is $2/day.55. James Wolfensohn, from an address given to the World Bank’s Board of Governors,

September 28, 1999, cited in Can Anyone Hear Us?, p. ii. In referring so explicitly to thepoor, and to individuals, as the Bank’s “clients,” Wolfensohn is breaking quite radically withmuch of the World Bank’s past, in which governments, especially the governments of thewealthiest nations, were considered its most important clients.

56. Crying Out for Change, p. 109.

that can be gathered only by eliciting and listening to the voices of theoppressed. In the early 1990s, when some of its sections began to focusmore directly on poverty, rather than solely on economic growth, the WBdeveloped the method of Participatory Poverty Assessment. Providing atleast a complement to the Bank’s tendencies to presume from scant evi-dence that economic growth is closely associated with human well-beingand results in the lessening of poverty, and to presume that lack of in-come is the most crucial factor, or even the only crucial factor, in thelives of the poor, this Assessment broke new ground by asking poor peo-ple themselves about their poverty and its impact on their lives. Thecentral premise behind the studies is that while “the development dis-course about poverty has been dominated by the perspectives and ex-pertise of those who are not poor—professionals, politicians, andagency officials. . . . [t]here are 2.8 billion poverty experts, the poor them-selves,” who should be listened to.54 How do they understand, define,and experience poverty? What role do institutions play in their lives?How do gender relations within the household affect their experiencesof poverty? How have political and economic restructuring affected so-cial cohesion and poor people’s abilities to cope? Sessions were held allover the world at which more than 60,000 poor men and women had theopportunity to speak and the Bank’s representatives had the chance tolearn directly from those whom its president, James Wolfensohn, calls“our clients as individuals.”55

One can learn a great deal about poverty, the unmet needs of the poor,and the plight of poor women, in particular, from these volumes, each ofwhich includes a substantial chapter on gender relations in what is referredto as their “troubled transition.”56 First, it is noteworthy that various cat-egories of women appear repeatedly as among the most vulnerable of thepoor. Women who bear children in adolescence, female heads of house-holds, and widows appear, along with children, the disabled, the chroni-cally ill, and the elderly, as particularly vulnerable and readily exploited


persons. And poor women in general, whether living with men or not, are“the new breadwinners,” especially in the informal, most unregulated sec-tor of the economy, which tends to be physically demanding, dangerous,and especially exploitative. As Can Anyone Hear Us? reports, “Over andover what emerges is that women are prepared to do jobs considered toodemeaning by men to ensure that their children survive.”57 Moreover, virtually all of economically less advantaged women’s income goes to meetfamily basic needs, whereas even poor men in many parts of the worldtend to retain a significant part of their income for their own personal use,such as smoking, drinking, gambling, and spending on other women. Andwomen and girls still do the vast majority of the unpaid family work,whether growing food, minding children, tending the sick, cooking, clean-ing, or the often extremely onerous and time-consuming tasks of fetchingfuel and water.

Voices of the Poor shows clearly, just as Sen argues, that poverty is amultidimensional phenomenon to which interconnecting factors con-tribute. Obvious examples are that education can help considerably toincrease income (at least, in many situations) and that poverty frequentlyleads to malnutrition or untreated illness, which affects the ability towork, which in turn deepens poverty. Poverty is also very frequentlytransmitted from one generation to the next through such factors: If achild’s labor is required in order for the household to function and tomake ends meet, she goes uneducated and has fewer labor market skillsand less knowledge with which then to keep either herself or her ownchildren healthy. If a child is malnourished or has an untreated illness,he is less likely to attend school. If a woman works a seventeen-hour day,she cannot take advantage of the literacy program that might otherwiseimprove her earning power or enable her to find out about her legalrights or government programs or services she could qualify for. Whatshines clearly through all the testimony of the poor is that alleviatingpoverty and preventing future poverty cannot be expected to result as aside effect of economic growth. Such alleviation and prevention can bebrought about only by paying attention to the specific causes of poverty,which, although common themes run through them, are also likely todiffer from place to place, climate to climate, and from cultural context tocultural context. At the same time, improving and repairing both basic


57. Can Anyone Hear Us?, p. 184. See pp. 184ff.; also Crying Out for Change, p. 112.

58. Sen, Development as Freedom, p. 21.59. Can Anyone Hear Us?, pp. 35–36; quotation from p. 35.

infrastructure such as roads and utilities, and social services such ashealth care (including public health) and education, are crucial factorsin alleviating poverty everywhere.

What do the poor lack, on their own account? Many of the things theylack are not in the least surprising. Indeed, when asked what they under-stand by poverty, some respondents point to themselves, their physicalstate and clothing, and their dwelling, saying, “This is poverty.” They usually first describe their poverty as their inability to meet their basicphysical needs. They are frequently hungry or fearful of imminenthunger—suffering most of all from seeing their children go hungry. Theyoften lack safe drinking water or water to keep their garden plots alive.They have no shelter, or they have inadequate or unsafe housing, withleaking roofs and walls. Often they do not have clothing decent enough toappear in public without shame (which is particularly acute in the young).In spite of their dire material needs, they rarely speak of their lack of in-come per se. Rather, in line with what Sen and Nussbaum suggest by theuse of their term “capabilities”—though rather more concretely, perhaps—the poor tend far more often to speak of lacking the assets or resourceswith which they could meet their own basic needs. These resources mightbe access to land or credit with which they could be productive; alterna-tively, many speak of yearning for a secure job that would pay themenough to live on. (As Sen makes clear, unemployment deprives people offar more than just income.58) Many voice their lack of capacity to meettheir needs in terms of being always at risk or vulnerable—to weather, es-pecially drought, to shifting prices, to violence, to a crisis such as illness oraccident. In countries experiencing civil war, peace and security are evenhigher priorities than secure food or shelter. Some tell of crippling debt,even debt that essentially “binds” them to exploitative employers. Some,especially women, speak of the constant exhaustion of overwork; to beable to “sleep until you are no longer tired” was the ambition of some.59

What the people say they lack, overwhelmingly, are assets and resourcesthat could enable them to cope, by working, to make a reliable living forthemselves. Well-being is having the ability to feed, clothe, and shelterthemselves and their children, as well to provide them with the healthcare and education necessary for their avoiding poverty in the future.


Among the most important assets of which the poor speak is theirhuman capital, especially the health of the adult member(s) of the house-hold; becoming ill and not being able to afford health care or medicinesis a constant fear. Another human capital asset is literacy, which is val-ued by virtually all of the poor—at least as much as a means not to betaken advantage of by others as for its use as a salable skill. Beyond basicliteracy and numeracy, however, the studies find some ambivalenceabout education. While it is very highly valued in many situations, as animportant escape route from poverty for their children, in other situ-ations people doubt either its relevance for such better coping or thequality of the education that might be available to them if they could af-ford it. Some, in various cultural contexts, think education wasted ongirls, since they will “only marry,” leaving the family. Without the avail-ability of jobs, credit, or other resources, some very reasonably questionthe point of sacrificing for their daughters’ or their sons’ education. Thus,free public education is necessary, but not sufficient, to help the eco-nomically worst off on a lasting basis—for this requires the education ofgirls no less than boys, and it requires that education be perceived as evi-dently useful. As Sen suggests in discussing possible trade-offs betweentraditional practices and material well-being, people’s freedom is com-promised if others dictate their priorities to them. However, it seemsmuch less coercive to provide incentives—such as school meals or a safemeans of transportation—for people to make nontraditional decisionsthat are likely to have a lasting positive impact, such as placing equalvalue on the education of girls.

The second type of experience that the poor most note about theirpoverty is psychological. On top of anxiety about meeting their basicmaterial needs, they suffer from the lack of voice, power, and indepen-dence. They speak repeatedly of not being listened to or of having no in-fluence on or control over events around them, of the humiliation of beingexposed to exploitation and to rude and inhumane treatment, of beingharassed, of being without necessary documents because they lack con-nections, knowledge, or the ability to pay bribes, of being beholden toothers for fulfillment of their daily needs. These grievances go beyond whatSen’s emphasis on basic civil and political rights can respond to, though hisstress on people’s need for gainful employment free from coercion is clearlyrelevant to them. Such grievances are better responded to by Nussbaum’sstress on the social bases of respect and nonhumiliation and on control


60. See especially Can Anyone Hear Us?, ch. 7, and Crying Out for Change, ch. 12.

over one’s environment, and by Ackerly’s confirmation of these emphasesand her addition of the importance of listening to the silent or silencedvoices. Many of the poor who contributed to the studies have detailed,contextual, potentially valuable, knowledge of their needs, problems, andpriorities.60 However, they—especially poor women, in many places—seegovernment at various levels as inaccessible, as ignoring them and igno-rant about them. (This was confirmed by interviews with officials insome regions; for example, Kenyan officials were unaware that healthclinics regularly charge the poor for their health care.) The poor alsospeak of the special pain of not being able to participate in communitycultural events and traditional rituals, of becoming socially isolated be-cause they cannot afford to buy the simplest gift when a social occasioncalls for one, or to host an appropriate family event, such as a weddingor funeral. Not necessarily seeking “to be able to form a conception of thegood”—which Nussbaum suggests is an indispensable human capability—they clearly value goodness and kind actions, grieving their lack of themeans to be generous and to do good.

Finally, the poor frequently voice their need for basic infrastructure—such as functioning, usable roads and bridges, which could enable themto secure better prices for their goods; also safe water and (especially inthe more developed, transition economies) affordable electricity. Theyoften voice their frustration with those in power, at various levels, fortheir corruption and for failing to provide and maintain such publicgoods. Seeing a clear role for governments in the public provision ofsuch infrastructure, they have noted its disintegration over the lastdecades. The protection of their physical safety is another public func-tion of which the poor, especially poor women, feel the acute lack, andwhich they often look to governments or nongovernmental organiza-tions to provide. Poor women in many instances spoke of their fear ofcrime, especially of rape or sexual assault—exacerbated by numerouscontextually specific factors, from lack of latrines to the need to gatherfuel in remote areas.

A chapter in each of Can Anybody Hear Us? and Crying Out for Changefocuses specifically on gender and issues of particular concern towomen, concentrated as they—as well as their children—are among the


poor. The main point made in each of these chapters is that what menand women respectively do has changed far more rapidly than beliefsabout gender roles and inequality. Whereas unemployment has risen formen, paid employment for women has risen dramatically. The economicrestructuring that was supposed to lead to growth has diminished gov-ernment employment, and has in many parts of the world substitutedjobs that were supposedly fungible but are in fact thought of withinmost cultures as distinctly gendered. Often owing to adjustment poli-cies, jobs in manufacturing have disappeared, to be replaced by jobs inservice industries, or large-scale manufacturing has given way to manu-facturing that, requiring small motor skills, is seen as women’s work. Asmen become unemployed and women become employed, men havenot—except in a small minority of cases—taken up the family’s domesticwork. Thus women, carrying two burdens and sometimes three (sincewomen do most unpaid community work) are particularly stressed bylack of time and energy. Women often have time for nothing but workand tending others.61 Men often resent losing their status as the house-hold breadwinner and (therefore) decision maker; couples often argueand fight when women request money for necessities and men havenone. There is no doubt, given what is reported in Voices of the Poor, thatthese changes and failures to change are causing widespread stress andin many cases contributing to an increase in domestic violence.62

As those interviewed for Voices of the Poor make clear, the extremelypoor do not ask for a great deal, in order to have lives very different fromthe difficult and insecure ones they live now. They do not ask to becomerich; indeed, they are quite critical of what they see as the effects ofwealth on people. They want to be able only to earn or to produce, with-out exploitation, enough to live on and to raise their children. They wanttheir children to be educated—at least, literate and productive—and theywant the prevention or treatment of their own and their children’s readilypreventable or treatable diseases. They want time—to participate in theevents of their communities, to pray, and to rest, and restore themselves


61. Can Anyone Hear Us? pp. 184–88; Crying Out for Change, pp. 114–15.62. Wife-beating seems to have risen most in the transitional economies of Eastern

Europe and Central Asia, but it is regarded as more or less a normal, culturally acceptable,though often not much spoken about, way of life in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa,South Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Can Anyone Hear Us?, pp. 194–97; CryingOut for Change, pp. 119–31.

for work. They want to be able to participate in the collective life of theirsociety without shame or humiliation, and they want much more con-trol over what happens in their communities that directly affects theirlives. Much of this resounds with a great deal of what Sen says aboutfreedoms and capabilities, with some of what Nussbaum calls capabil-ities and human functioning, and with Ackerly’s revision of Nussbaum’slist. As all of them argue, and as Sen has finally been able to persuadepowerful forces at the World Bank, many human needs are fairly straight-forward, and poor people want what economically better off people takefor granted most of the time. They want to be able to live free fromhunger, thirst, exposure to the weather, ill health, humiliation, and fear.

It is striking how, even without being asked the three questions Ackerlyspecifies as key, fundamental questions of social critics, the respondentsin Voices of the Poor answer them with overwhelming clarity. First, it isutterly clear from their own voices that the poor are excluded from de-liberation of any societal kind about the practices, norms, and valuesthat have so much influence over their lives—exclusion they are acutelyaware of and dislike. Second, they are continually exploited by the morepowerful—exploitation they very reasonably resent and often chafeagainst. And third, the lives of the poor diverge, in many respects cata-strophically and in most respects chronically, from the lives human beingsshould be capable of living. As Ackerly suggests will be the case if thesequestions are addressed, there is enough material contained in thesevolumes to fuel much social criticism. Here is, at least implicitly, criti-cism of the ways in which all of those with power and comparativewealth have participated in and profited from global inequality andpoverty or at least allowed them, by their inaction, not only to continueunabated but to grow worse. Here too is abundant fuel for criticism ofthe priorities and ways of thinking of the most powerful economic insti-tutions and nations of the world. There is enough material here to sug-gest both immediate and longer-term ways in which we can do much toalleviate the appalling conditions of life of a huge proportion of theworld’s population.

On the other hand, the poor respondents do not speak of wantingsome of the elaborate, more philosophically sophisticated items onNussbaum’s list. They do not think it necessary, in order to live a satisfy-ing human life, to be able “to search for the ultimate meaning of life,”or “to use imagination and thought in connection with . . . producing


self-expressive works and events of one’s own choice.” Although theywant far more control over their lives, they do not voice the need for“practical reason” as Nussbaum defines it, “[b]eing able to form a con-ception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the plan-ning of one’s life.”63 On the whole, they know what they consider a goodlife, and would like to be able to live it—both in the sense of having ahappy life and in the sense of being able to perform good actions. Nor dothey seem to require that their work involve the exercise of practical rea-son, as Nussbaum suggests it should; rather, it should earn them a livingand restore their self-respect. For many people, the idea that life has an“ultimate meaning,” which one must seek in order to be fully human,seems far from urgent; perhaps to many it doesn’t make a lot of sense.Many people apparently live complete human lives without engaging intheir own chosen artistic self-expression, preferring to sing songs anddance dances that have been handed down to them by their ancestors.For many, even consciously planning one’s life (much less, engaging incritical reflection about such planning) may not be necessary to living itfully. Not surprisingly, perhaps, since the origins of Nussbaum’s perfec-tionist account of a “fully” or a “complete” human life are distinctlyAristotelian and, as Ackerly reminds us, Aristotle’s account was intendedonly to apply to leisured men whose wives and slaves did all the work ofreproduction and production, there are parts of it that do not seem toapply to or to resonate in the lives of many people.

Finally, poor people’s concern for the world of nature seems in somecases more practical and, in others, more spiritual, than Nussbaum sug-gests when she writes of “being able to live with concern for and in rela-tion to animals, plants, and the world of nature.”64 Maybe this kind ofconcern with nature is more characteristic of affluent people who live incities, for whom nature means leisure and renewal, than it is of peoplewho are trying to eke a living out of a natural world that must often seemunyielding and harsh. At any rate, according to those who speak in Voicesof the Poor, many people value nature more as an essential resource forhuman life (which should therefore not be despoiled) than as somethingto relate to; whereas some people, especially indigenous peoples, have


63. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, pp. 78–80.64. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, p. 80.

65. Can Anyone Hear Us?, p. 37. This and the following five quotations are typical, ratherthan atypical, statements about religion from the two volumes of Voices of the Poor.

66. Can Anyone Hear Us?, p. 44.67. Can Anyone Hear Us?, p. 265.68. Crying Out for Change, p. 224.69. Crying Out for Change, p. 115.70. Can Anyone Hear Us?, p. 197.

a quasi-religious relationship with very specific parts of nature—withtheir own lands, or with certain sacred trees, for example.

Apart from such mentions of the sacred, the respondents sometimestalk about the importance to them of time to pray or otherwise to experi-ence the spiritual. Some talk of the importance of being protected byGod, of being God-fearing, or of being able to turn to God for solace. Butfor others, what they call “spiritual impoverishment” has resulted from“the anguish of loss,” from having those they love killed or have to risktheir lives in war. Spirituality for many, it appears, need not be connectedwith religion, and may be better promoted by peacekeeping efforts thanby religious freedom. On the other hand, poor people’s lists of importantinstitutions often include faith-based organizations, which are frequentlydescribed as effective institutions. The role such organizations play intheir lives, however, is varied: Some are given credit for kindness or forhelping the poor, whereas others play a divisive role in communities andsome are described as greedy.

It is quite striking, moreover, that what the respondents say specificallyabout God, about religious leaders, or about religious texts usually ration-alizes their poverty or reinforces gender inequality. It often reinforces a fatalistic view about things they are rightly indignant about in other con-texts. In Brazil, a poor person says, “The poor person has to exist so that hecan serve the great one, the rich. God made things like that.”65 In Moldova,a woman laments that her refrigerator, once full of sausage, is now empty,saying, “Perhaps God has punished us for our wastefulness in the past.”66

An Armenian says, “People now place their hopes in God, since the gov-ernment is no longer involved in such matters.”67 Women in Bangladeshsay they have no part in any decision taken by or about the mosque.68 Aman in Ethiopia says, “It is Allah who has differentiated women’s andmen’s responsibilities. It will culturally be out of the way and shameful if aman does any of women’s responsibilities.”69 Some men in Bangladeshjustify wife beating as “condoned in Islamic religious texts.”70

Given that none of the respondents in any way suggests that their reli-


gion is a matter of free choice, and that many cite religious beliefs as justi-fying poverty and hierarchy, one is led to question Nussbaum’s giving suchcentral focus to religious freedom, or considering religion as central to acomplete human life. Religious freedom does, of course, enhance people’ssafety, given the dangers of conflict in religiously pluralistic societies thatdo not secure it. But what we hear from the normally silenced voices of thepoor leaves quite open the question of whether religion, on balance, pro-motes or detracts from their freedoms or capabilities taken as a whole.

The voices of the WRHR movement and those heard in the two Voicesof the Poor volumes give us many reasons to question the directiontaken in past and most present economic development theories andpolicies. For example, there is considerable consensus that much of thebudget cutting and government trimming of the last two decades hashurt the poor especially, leading as it has to the disintegration of physicalinfrastructure on which they depend, to increased costs—and thereforediminished accessibility—of even basic education and health care, andto the cutting or even dismantling of many government functions, fromagricultural services to social safety nets for the poor. There is much evi-dence that fast economic change based on free market assumptionsabout employment, including the idea that labor is fungible, have led, inthe context of fairly entrenched norms about gender, to unemploymentand demoralization for many men and overwork and exhaustion formany women. Clearly, what may be new economic opportunity for thestrong and sometimes for the unscrupulous can as readily be experiencedas a radical new insecurity for the vulnerable or for the unfortunate. Eco-nomic growth as measured by per capita GDP, even if it had occurred as aresult of growth-oriented structural adjustment, gives no guarantee thatmany will not be left behind in its wake. Real change for the world’s eco-nomically worst off is likely to happen only as a result of direct attentionto what makes people poor and to the factors that help them to becomeself-supporting when this is possible, to meet their needs when it is not,and to prevent or at least reduce poverty in the next generation.

IV. WINDS OF CHANGE IN THE DEVELOPMENT ARENA?

Within the last decade, especially since James Wolfensohn became itspresident and with Joseph Stiglitz as its chief economist, the World Bankembarked on a major shift in its thinking that appears to have been extremely difficult for the institution. One of the most important


71. Kaushik Basu, “On the Goals of Development,” in Meier and Stiglitz, p. 61.72. Gerald M. Meier, “The Old Generation of Development Economists and the New,”

in Meier and Stiglitz, p. 34.73. Shahid Yusuf and Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Development Issues: Settled and Open,” in

Meier and Stiglitz, pp. 227 and 232.

changes, as can be seen from the Voices of the Poor series, is a greater focuson poverty, including a new readiness to ask the poor about what theyneed, especially, in order to escape their poverty. However, change seemsto take place perilously slowly at the Bank, and some of the mavericksamong those who spearheaded this change have left, perhaps in despairat its pace. Another change is that more attention is being paid to gender—although this is happening very unevenly, and attention to gender is scantamong those in the higher echelons of power.

Recently, some development experts (including some of those con-nected with the WB) have acknowledged the real limitations of policiesaimed at the growth of per capita GDP and in particular those emanat-ing from the Washington Consensus. In an article in Frontiers of Devel-opment Economics, Kaushik Basu says, the development debate “ap-pears to be, at last, coasting toward a new consensus.” He points to theaim of “new objectives . . . to go beyond narrow economic objectives tolarger social and political goals[:] . . . .‘human development’ or ‘compre-hensive development,’”71 and focuses his attention on the economicallylowest quintile of populations. In the same volume, Gerald Meier writes,“The future is likely to witness a reaction to the minimalist state that wasadvocated by the second generation [of development economists]. . . .[G]overnment will still have extensive functions in dealing with the newmarket failures . . . , providing public goods, satisfying merit wants suchas education and health, reducing poverty and improving income distri-bution, providing physical infrastructure and social infrastructure, andprotecting the natural environment.”72 Shahid Yusuf and Joseph E.Stiglitz, writing in the same volume about “the worsening problem ofpoverty,” write of the partial decoupling of the cure for poverty from thefocus on growth and markets, saying, “It is now clear that trickle-down,which can take many years to reach the lower income levels, must besupplemented by policies of inclusion that lessen sharp disparities in incomes and assets, enhance human capital accumulation and employ-ment opportunities, and help provide safety nets for the more vulner-able elements of a society.”73


In the article most overtly critical of the WB’s policies over the last fourdecades, Irma Adelman refers to monocausal accounts of underdevel-opment as versions of one of three major fallacies of the developmenteconomics that prevailed in recent decades.74 “Hyperactive” or “evil gov-ernment” as the cause of underdevelopment, she argues, was the particu-lar version of this fallacy that reigned from 1980 to 1996, following on inthe neoclassical tradition that produced alternative versions such as“getting the prices right” and “trade is enough.”75 The second fallacyAdelman confronts is the notion that a single criterion, such as growthof GDP, can be used to evaluate development performance. While recog-nizing that this is “well appreciated in the literature,” she points out thecostly time lag between this appreciation (by her and Morris, in the late1960s, in the 1980s by Sen, and more recently by Wolfensohn and Stiglitz)and the policies of development economics, which have continued tofocus very largely on growth. To the power of this fallacy she attributes“the immense human costs of structural adjustment policies in LatinAmerica during the 1980s.” If human development were being mea-sured, complex though this is to do, Adelman says, these policies wouldeither not have been adopted in the first place, or would have rapidlybeen changed, and “much human suffering could have been avoided.”76

Reading the recent literature, attending conferences, and talking withpeople in the development community, one has the impression thatcritical voices like Adelman’s are being listened to more closely than before.Sen’s and Nussbaum’s critique of the idea that growth is an end in itselfhas resonated throughout the development institutions, and the finaldemise of Kuznets’s curve should reduce reliance on growth as the mostdirect road to ending poverty. The World Bank itself has undertaken a seriesof reforms and changes in its policies and practices. So perhaps there isreason for hope that the errors of judgment of the last twenty years willnot be replicated in the twenty years to come.

At the same time, however, there is no question that the Bank, and development economists in general, still have a long way to go beforethey will recognize what scholars thinking about and observing gen-dered practices and the division of labor around the world have very


74. Irma Adelman, “Fallacies in Development Theory and Their Implications for Pol-icy,” in Meier and Stiglitz, pp. 104–06.

75. Adelman, p. 113.76. Adelman, p. 117.

clearly articulated, from Boserup’s pioneering work in 1970 to Sen’s,Nussbaum’s, and Ackerly’s recent books: Women and gender are of basicand central importance to the project of development. Until whatwomen do counts as much as what men do, until women’s capabilitiesare fostered as much as men’s, until women’s voices are heard as stronglyas men’s—which is to say until economists pause from their mathema-tics long enough to notice what real men and women do, and what theyvalue—the development of the LDCs is doomed. The project simplycannot succeed until gender, as well as poverty, is central to it.


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