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Understanding Development
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Global Development and Gender
In this course, Dr Fanny Froehlich (University of Bristol) explores global development and gender. In the first lecture, we think about what development is. In the second lecture, we think about local and global development strategies. In the third lecture, we think about the role of Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) in development. Next, we think about the political economy of development. In the fifth and final lecture, we think about some key theories of development.
Understanding Development
In this lecture, we think about what development is, focusing in particular on: (i) defining the age of development as beginning with Harry S. Truman’s inaugural address on 20 January 1949, within which he described the Southern Hemisphere as “underdeveloped”; (ii) the focus in the 1950s and 60s being on the connection between development and economic growth; (iii) the shift in the late 1970s to recognising development as being connected to poverty reduction and achieving a minimum standard of living for citizens; (iv) the 1970s as a time when it was viewed that institutions had a greater responsibility to employ poverty reducing measures, rather than simply relying on the market; (v) the employment of structural adjustment programs and other neoliberal economic policies in the 1980s and 90s; (vi) a focus in the 1990s on good government and democracy as a key factor in development; (vii) the focus in the 2000s on sustainable development; (viii) one critique of global development being the dependency of some more agriculturally focused states on more technologically developed states; (ix) Arturo Escobar’s critique of unequal development and Dambisa Moyo’s declaration that aid is dead; (x) the Millenium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals adopted through the 21st century; (xi) understanding gender, from a scholarly perspective, to reflect the societal constructs surrounding the roles and relationships of the sexes; (xii) the four ways of thinking about gender being that it is plural and situational, it is relational, it represents intersexual power relations and it intersects with other social identities; (xiii) work by activists and scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw on intersectionality; (xiv) queer theory, which promotes the sociological separation of sex and gender; (xv) the two key links between gender and development being that development can have different consequences for people of different genders, and that the global differences in viewpoints on gender question the efficacy of a global development strategy.
Hello.
00:00:06My name is doctor Fonni Froehlich,
00:00:07and I'm a senior research associate at University
00:00:08of Bristol working in the field of gender and development.
00:00:12Today, we're gonna talk about what is development,
00:00:18what is gender, and how do the two link together
00:00:22thinking more broadly about global development and gender.
00:00:26So let's start with the question, what is development?
00:00:31Well, defining development is a difficult task as it carries
00:00:34many different meanings in different contexts.
00:00:37What can help us to understand development is to look at the
00:00:41shifts in meaning and practice of international development.
00:00:44And when we do that, we engage conceptually
00:00:49with the term development,
00:00:53but we also explore its practical and policy consequences.
00:00:54Several scholars agree that what we can call the age of
00:01:00development began in the nineteen forties with the
00:01:03inaugural speech of the then US president,
00:01:06Harry s Truman on twentieth January nineteen forty nine,
00:01:09when for the first time he declared the southern
00:01:13hemisphere as, in quotation marks, underdeveloped areas.
00:01:16Truman set out a program for development with a specific
00:01:21focus on scientific advances
00:01:24and industrial progress.
00:01:28Linked to this program by Truman,
00:01:29the dominant understanding of development in the nineteen
00:01:31fifties and nineteen sixties is really about fostering that
00:01:34economic growth of nations.
00:01:38But then in the late nineteen seventies,
00:01:41we see a significant shift in the dominant view on
00:01:43development towards poverty reduction and what we can call
00:01:45a basic needs approach.
00:01:49So, really, this approach is all about better access to services such
00:01:52as education, health, but also better nutrition.
00:01:55So the state and other institutional actors were
00:02:00really seen as key in providing more direct poverty reducing
00:02:03measures and not solely relying on the premise of economic
00:02:07progress to be distributed evenly through the functioning of the market,
00:02:11which was much more prominent before the nineteen seventies
00:02:16in our understanding of development.
00:02:20During the nineteen eighties and nineties then, we see
00:02:24another, shift
00:02:26on working with neoliberal economic policies that really
00:02:29take center stage in that international development practice,
00:02:34particularly in the form of structural adjustment programs.
00:02:38And these are firmly rooted again within that development
00:02:41through economic growth thinking.
00:02:45We have some critical development scholars like Naila
00:02:48Cabeya who have commented on the detrimental effects of
00:02:51these structural adjustment programs,
00:02:56notably in the global south,
00:02:58dubbing the nineteen eighties a lost decade for development.
00:03:01What happens in the nineteen nineties then?
00:03:05We see another shift.
00:03:07Attention is given to good governance and democracy as key
00:03:08path ways to development.
00:03:12And then from the early two thousand onwards,
00:03:14we can observe a more inclusive understanding of development
00:03:16framed as sustainable development.
00:03:20So this is really one way of how we can show what
00:03:23development meant between the nineteen forties and nowadays,
00:03:25really focusing on those dominant perspectives.
00:03:29However, as early as the nineteen sixties,
00:03:32we can also find what we can call alternative thinking on development.
00:03:34So already in the sixties and seventies,
00:03:39we have critical scholars, for instance,
00:03:41from Latin America that were part of the so called dependency
00:03:43school, and they really criticized how development of some nation
00:03:48states was very much linked to underdevelopment of others.
00:03:53So this research indicated, for instance,
00:03:58that some key industrialized states, such as the US, Europe,
00:04:00and Japan, that they really constitute centers and benefit
00:04:03from economic processes of growth,
00:04:08while other notably Latin American countries,
00:04:11but also others located in the global south with high levels
00:04:14of agricultural production remain dependent on them,
00:04:18dependent on on those centers.
00:04:22So what we start seeing is that according to some thinkers,
00:04:25development is happening quite unevenly
00:04:28in different parts of the world.
00:04:31In the nineteen eighties,
00:04:34remember that was the decade where there was this renewed
00:04:36focus on economic development as growth through neoliberal policies.
00:04:39What we also see at the same time is considerations
00:04:45around human development that go beyond an economic understanding.
00:04:49This really includes institutional
00:04:54reflections on broader environmental
00:04:57concerns but also sustainability concerns.
00:05:00In the nineteen nineties,
00:05:04as an alternative view on development,
00:05:06we have a couple of very critical scholars such as
00:05:08Arturo Escobar who raise critique against that
00:05:12mainstream development paradigm.
00:05:17And this skepticism is something that really continues
00:05:19well into the two thousands where, for instance,
00:05:23Dambisa Moyo proclaims aid as dead.
00:05:25However, aid is not that.
00:05:29And, really, throughout the two thousands up until today,
00:05:31we see an adoption of global agendas of development,
00:05:35such as the millennium development goals,
00:05:39which were active between two thousand and two thousand
00:05:41fifteen, or the sustainable development goals,
00:05:44which were adopted in two thousand fifteen and are
00:05:47continuing until twenty thirty.
00:05:51So these
00:05:55agendas, these global agendas to development,
00:05:57they really set out to frame and achieve human development for everyone.
00:06:00And we will talk more about this in the next lecture when
00:06:05we focus on local and global strategies for development.
00:06:08Let's now turn to our second key concept, that of gender.
00:06:12We can talk a lot about different understandings of gender,
00:06:17but let's start with quite a common understanding that is
00:06:20rooted in scholarly work.
00:06:23And such a common understanding would postulate that sex
00:06:26describes the biological characteristics of women and
00:06:29men, girls and boys, while gender refers to social
00:06:32constructed characteristics and also relations
00:06:37between and among women and men, girls and boys.
00:06:41But what does social construction of gender mean?
00:06:46Well, it means that we critique something that we can call
00:06:48biological determinism.
00:06:51So this is really an assumption that how we act, how we think,
00:06:53how we feel is mainly determined by our biology,
00:06:57in particular primary and secondary female
00:07:01and male sexual characteristics.
00:07:04But from a sociological perspective,
00:07:07gender is really way more complex,
00:07:09and we can think about it in four different ways.
00:07:11One gender is plural and situational.
00:07:14So, really, there are various ways of being a woman,
00:07:16or a man depending on your culture, your historical time,
00:07:19your social settings, your life stages, your individual traits.
00:07:23It also differs what it means to be a woman or a man in
00:07:28different situations.
00:07:31So how a woman, for instance, acts among her friend group
00:07:32might differ how she acts in the setting of a professional job interview.
00:07:37Two, gender is relational.
00:07:41Often, gender is thought in terms of sexual relations
00:07:43between women and men, but newer work emphasize that we
00:07:47really need to consider various gender relations
00:07:52among and between women and men,
00:07:55such as relations among male friends,
00:07:58but perhaps also the relation between a grandmother and a granddaughter.
00:08:02Three, we can think about gender together with power.
00:08:06So in this view,
00:08:09we can consider gender as power relations between and among
00:08:11women and men, but also among groups of women and men.
00:08:14So then gender becomes more than an individual trait or a
00:08:18social relation between two or more individuals.
00:08:21It becomes an aspect of social structure.
00:08:25Four, we can think about gender through the lens of
00:08:28intersectionality.
00:08:30Through that lens,
00:08:32we really think about gender in alignment with other social
00:08:33identity factors, such as race, class, ethnicity, age,
00:08:37sexuality, ability, disability.
00:08:42We draw here on the theory and concept of intersectionality
00:08:45that was coined by black feminists such as
00:08:49Kimberle Crenshaw.
00:08:52There's another important body of theoretical work around
00:08:54gender that really foregrounds the experiences of lesbian,
00:08:58gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex,
00:09:01and asexual community, LGBTQIA
00:09:06plus for short, and that is a body we could call queer theory.
00:09:09Unfortunately, in this course,
00:09:14we cannot go in-depth of what queer theory entails,
00:09:15but a key element of what queer theory
00:09:18does, but also some recent publications on gender,
00:09:22is really to question that need separation
00:09:26between sex and gender.
00:09:29How does all of this link now to development?
00:09:32It links to development in several ways,
00:09:37but I want to focus on two ways specifically.
00:09:39First, there is an assumption that the ways we think about development
00:09:43and the ways development is implemented
00:09:49has different consequences for women and men, girls and boys.
00:09:51Second, different understandings of gender in different parts of
00:09:56the world can lead to questioning
00:10:00a global development on gender in certain ways.
00:10:02And we will look at all of this more in the next lecture.
00:10:07
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Froehlich, F. (2024, June 05). Global Development and Gender - Understanding Development [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/global-development-and-gender
MLA style
Froehlich, F. "Global Development and Gender – Understanding Development." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 05 Jun 2024, https://massolit.io/courses/global-development-and-gender