Priorities for Development? Gender, Environment, Poverty Reduction

There are three areas which, to me, are top priorities for development. I say this based on my own experiences and skill sets, for these are also the areas in which I seek to work. They are: gender equality and women’s empowerment, environmental sustainability, and poverty reduction. I bring to these a series of questions.

First of all, how can we expect to attain common values of peace, justice, democracy, and development, when half of the world’s population still experiences discrimination in some form? I am angry that around the world women still suffer because of their sex –enduring domestic violence and conflicts, having unequal access to healthcare and nutrition and education and dying in disproportionate numbers because of this, experiencing legal discrimination and social injustices, lacking representation in the political and business worlds. This desire to work on gender equality is rooted not only in passion, but also in analysis. Much of the focus of my research over the past five years has been related to questions of gender and development. What this has shown me has been the subtle but repeated failures in attempts to empower women through development interventions, often related to the ways in which gender hierarchies are maintained. My Masters thesis was a study of UNFPA reproductive health programmes in West Java, and my doctorate focuses on state gender policies across Indonesia. I recall being a consultant for the Indonesian Ministry of Development for Disadvantaged Areas (Kementerian Pembangunan Daerah Tertinggal) in 2006 and talking to key officials about gender issues. After explaining some of the complexities and pitfalls involved in some of their projects, as related to gender concerns, the Minister turned to me and asked, ‘So, then, what do we do?’ Finding alternatives is important. My doctoral research has been critical of the processes involved in current gender policies and their institutional formulations. Yet I care deeply about issues such as combating gender inequality and injustice. It is precisely because I feel so strongly about these matters that I am suspicious of the invidious and subversive effects being had on gender relations, and women in particular, by over-simplified and essentialising approaches to gender. This area needs much more work.

Second, how can we expect development to continue apace when environmental pressures begin to constrain possible growth and to endanger the lives of the most vulnerable? My interests in climate change have been mainly personal, but one of my core projects as a Masters student studied the linkages between air travel, climate change, and disparate impacts upon the ‘North’ and ‘South’. It was only years later that this issue came to be championed by environmental organisations here in the UK. The project impressed upon me how environmental sustainability is both of common concern and also disproportionately dangerous for the weakest in society. For instance, we consider the very real possibility of a substantial increase in ‘environmental refugees’ over the next years, and what this will imply. If development efforts do not begin to tackle very seriously the problem of climate change, it is possible that little else will matter in the end.

Finally, how can we live in a world of such phenomenal wealth and accumulation when there are those who literally die from lack of food? The concluding paragraph of Cowen and Shenton’s Doctrines of Development quotes Adorno, saying: ‘He who asks what is the goal of an emancipated society is given answers such as the fulfilment of human possibilities of the richness of life. Just as the inevitable question is illegitimate, so the repellent assurance of the answer is inevitable. … There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that none shall go hungry anymore.’ This is not to say that I advocate a ‘basic needs’ approach over a more holistic capabilities approach as from Amartya Sen. But how to operationalise Sen’s work remains problematic. What is evident is that there remain immediate and pressing needs for the poorest of these, who lack the rudimentary components for a healthy life – sufficient food, clean water, sanitation, health care, literacy. The reduction of poverty at its basest level must be done, not only to prevent the gross injustice of dying from hunger in an otherwise well-fed world, but also to achieve development that brings together the greatest number of people able to live the lives that they have reason to value.