Women and Gender Equity in Development Theory and Practice: Institutions, Resources, and Mobilization

Seeking to catalyze innovative thinking and practice within the field of women and gender in development, editors Jane S. Jaquette and Gale Summerfield have brought together scholars, policymakers, and development workers to reflect on where the field is today and where it is headed. The contributors draw from their experiences and research in Latin America, Asia, and Africa to illuminate the connections between women’s well-being and globalization, environmental conservation, land rights, access to information technology, employment, and poverty alleviation.

Highlighting key institutional issues, contributors analyze the two approaches that dominate the field: women in development (WID) and gender and development (GAD). They assess the results of gender mainstreaming, the difficulties that development agencies have translating gender rhetoric into equity in practice, and the conflicts between gender and the reassertion of indigenous cultural identities. Focusing on resource allocation, contributors explore the gendered effects of land privatization, the need to challenge cultural traditions that impede women’s ability to assert their legal rights, and women’s access to bureaucratic levers of power. Several essays consider women’s mobilizations, including a project to provide Internet access and communications strategies to African NGOs run by women. In the final essay, Irene Tinker, one of the field’s founders, reflects on the interactions between policy innovation and women’s organizing over the three decades since women became a focus of development work. Together the contributors bridge theory and practice to point toward productive new strategies for women and gender in development.

Contributors. Maruja Barrig, Sylvia Chant, Louise Fortmann, David Hirschmann, Jane S. Jaquette, Diana Lee-Smith, Audrey Lustgarten, Doe Mayer, Faranak Miraftab, Muadi Mukenge, Barbara Pillsbury, Amara Pongsapich, Elisabeth Prügl, Kirk R. Smith, Kathleen Staudt, Gale Summerfield, Irene Tinker, Catalina Hinchey Trujillo

Jane S. Jaquette is Bertha Harton Orr Professor in the Liberal Arts and Professor of Politics at Occidental College in Los Angeles. She is the editor of The Women’s Movement in Latin America: Feminism and the Transition to Democracy and a coeditor of Women and Democracy: Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe.

Gale Summerfield is Director of the Women and Gender in Global Perspectives Program and Associate Professor in Human and Community Development at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is a coeditor of Women’s Rights to House and Land: China, Laos, Vietnam and Women in the Age of Economic Transformation: Gender Impact of Reforms in Post-Socialist and Developing Countries.