transformative policy for poor women: a new feminist framework
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This article was downloaded by: [Clark University]On: 18 December 2014, At: 19:03Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office:Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
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Transformative Policy for Poor Women: A NewFeminist FrameworkNaomi Hossain aa Institute of Development Studies , Brighton , UKPublished online: 08 Nov 2012.
To cite this article: Naomi Hossain (2012) Transformative Policy for Poor Women: A New Feminist Framework,Gender & Development, 20:3, 631-633, DOI: 10.1080/13552074.2012.731755
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13552074.2012.731755
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she makes an effort to define boundaries, to anticipate potential sources of conflict, to
name the individual areas of work and to negotiate over them. Her intention is to
create a zone of freedom, within which she has relative autonomy’ (p. 72).
Helma Lutz situates her wealth of fascinating interview material within an
analytical framework that goes well beyond a rigid dichotomy between those who
pay for domestic services and those who provide them, because ‘antagonisms emerge
on every level which cannot be resolved with moral appeals’ (p. 194). It is not the
author’s aim to apportion blame or to offer universal solutions, but to pose important
questions about the care economy in a sympathetic and thought-provoking manner.
As a final note, after the author had completed her research, the International
Labour Organization (ILO) Convention on Domestic Workers (2011) was overwhel-
mingly adopted. Among other things, it states that domestic workers should be
guaranteed the minimum wage and a clear, preferably written, statement of employ-
ment conditions. The UK delegation abstained. By contrast, the first country to ratify it
was Uruguay.
# 2012, Deborah Eade, writer and editor, France. Email: [email protected]
Gender and Development 20 (2012)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13552074.2012.731755
Fernandez, BinaTransformative Policy for Poor Women: A New Feminist FrameworkFarnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012, ISBN: 978-1-4094-0507-8, 208 pp.
Anyone who has ever had a hand in anti-poverty programmes for women �/ whether
as researcher, practitioner, or evaluator �/ will have had the experience that Bina
Fernandez describes in her new book: of encountering problems that always occur; of
blatantly obvious ‘design errors’; of gaps between intention and implementation so big
and so predictable you could safely drive a train through. The get-out-of-jail-free card
commonly used when programmes fail ranges from ‘not enough political will’ to ‘the
women were too uneducated’ or ‘elite capture/corruption/bureaucratic indifference
derailed a well-intentioned initiative’. All very familiar; what is surprising is that until
I read this book, I never really thought of these familiar failings as avoidable. That I
have always tacitly accepted that programmes of this kind go wrong in precisely these
kinds of ways might just be an example of the policy ‘foreclosures’ the analysis in the
book highlights: anti-poverty programme design often feels like TINA (there is no
alternative), when of course, the courage to embrace the messiness of real-world policy
implementation could make the difference. For that alone, this is a worthwhile
contribution.
The point of this dense but rewarding feminist take on anti-poverty policy analysis
is to derive a framework that can analyse policies so that the usual errors are avoided,
Gender & Development Vol. 20, No. 3, November 2012 631
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and genuinely transformative policies for poor women result. As someone who moves
between academic gender analysis of anti-poverty programmes and the hands-on
worlds of programme design and evaluation, I felt the value immediately: it sparked
all kinds of ideas for more systematic thinking about what goes wrong, but in
particular about what stays off the policy table (unpaid care work) and what we avert
our eyes and policy recommendations from in order to be intelligible and relevant
(e.g. men, rich and poor, always benefit from programmes intended for poor women).
One of the reasons this book is so valuable is its accessible sweep of theoretical and
methodological approaches to policy analysis. The framework itself includes feminist
principles within a broadly ‘governmental’ approach, but its purpose is situated within
the wider feminist agenda of influencing the policy process in developing countries.
The first two chapters review gender and development (GAD) policy literature, dart
around salient parts of welfare state theory, Partha Chatterjee on political society,
related work on ‘seeing the state’, review Bernard Schaffer on policy analysis, and
alight on Nancy Fraser’s redistribution, recognition and representation framework as
the criteria for assessing policy performance. From this theoretical review, a fairly
eclectic (or appropriately pluralist, as the author argues) framework is derived.
The framework has four main elements. The first is constitutive contexts �/ context
can make and break a policy: the framework is realistic about how the constraints and
realities of policymaking are situated in the places in which they get made. The second
and third are policy representations and policy practices, which are equally intuitive:
what goes on in practice is concerned centrally with the production of meaning and
grounded in regimes of practices which target, measure, define, label, and shape the
behaviours of the populations with whom they are concerned, not necessarily with
coercion. The arguments that create policies by fitting solutions to perceived problems
need analysing as the products of power: what remains invisible and unspeakable
depends on how the policy is represented and by and to whom. When it comes to
the policy consequences, failures and successes owe much to policy ‘escape hatches’ �/
typically, lame excuses for predictable failures �/ and institutional conflicts, both in
effect, built into many policies that purport to transform the lives of poor women.
Claims that the framework avoids the usual traps of linear conception�/design�/
implementation�/evaluation policy thinking were not entirely convincing, as the
conceptual categories quite nicely mapped themselves against conventional categories
for thinking about policy. Yet the content and the questions raised by the categories
were greatly more insightful than the sterile, much-abused idea of a gap between the
discrete categories of ‘design’ and ‘practice’.
The framework is applied to the SGSY (Suvarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojanai)
programme in India, using primary empirical evidence from Maharashtra and
Madhya Pradesh. It is then tested again using secondary material for resonance with
the Vaso de Leche programme in Peru, the Bolsa Familia programme in Brazil, and the
Malawian Social Action Fund. Part of the value of the empirical work is the use of a
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novel framework in cases that are mostly quite familiar to the feminist social policy
analyst. It helps to see reasonably familiar stories given a fresh interpretation, because
this shows off the most novel parts of the framework to their best advantage.
This is no light read, packed with theory and empirical material as it is. Yet
Transformative Policy for Poor Women feels overdue. It feels like the right moment for a
serious analytical approach to the failures of policies for poor women. Its insights into
how women’s informal economic and unpaid care work overshadow and largely
determine development outcomes for poor people seem timely: it’s certainly time these
concerns became part of mainstream development policy, if mainstream development
policy is as concerned with gender equality as it claims to be. Bina Fernandez might
say little about why women’s unpaid care and low-paid informal economy work
remain invisible or a low priority on the development policy agenda. But she shows
clearly that ignoring the inconvenient realities of women’s lives are precisely the
reasons policies fail, again and again and again.
# 2012, Naomi Hossain, Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, UK, email:
Gender and Development 20 (2012)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13552074.2012.731757
David, Emmanuel and Elaine Enarson (eds.)
The Women of Katrina: How Gender, Race, and Class Matter in an American Disaster
Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012, ISBN: 978-0-8265-1799-9, 264 pp.
This edited collection is a welcome edition to the small but growing gendered
literature around ‘disasters’. While its focus is on the Gulf Coast region of the United
States where Hurricane Katrina made landfall in August 2005, and as such focuses on a
country of the ‘developed’ world, it has much to say about processes of under-
development, inequality, and social exclusion. It also offers insight into the resilience of
those with limited resources to call upon in times of crisis and their strategies for
coping. As such, those working in ‘development’ should not see the title of the book
and think it has nothing to offer them �/ there is much to learn from this edited
collection.
The book’s strength lies with the voices it allows to be heard, voices often silent or
silenced post-disaster. The focus is not only on women and making women’s voices
heard, but ensuring the diversity of those women impacted by Katrina is highlighted �/
including, among others, narratives from women of colour and indigenous women,
women of differing abilities, women of faith, women living with violence and those
who work to provide help and support to them. Many of the authors are not academics
but instead are some of those women impacted most, and are activists and service
Gender & Development Vol. 20, No. 3, November 2012 633
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