Elaine Unterhalter

The Millennium Development Goals: a cross-sectoral analysis and principles for goal setting after 2015

Bringing together analysis across different sectors, we review the implementation and achievements of the MDGs to date to identify cross cutting strengths and weaknesses as a basis for considering how they might be developed or replaced after 2015. Working from this and a definition of development as a dynamic process involving sustainable and equitable access to improved wellbeing, five interwoven guiding principles are proposed for a post 2015 development project: holism, equity, sustainability, ownership, and global obligation. These principles and their possible implications in application are expanded and explored. The paper concludes with an illustrative discussion of how these principles might be applied in the health sector.

Beyond Access: Transforming policy and practice for gender equality in education

Introduction Part One: The Challenges for Gender Equality in Education: Fragmented frameworks? Researching women, gender, education, and development Ensuring a fair chance for girls Measuring gender equality in education Part Two:Transforming Action - Changing Policy through Practice: Educating girls in Bangladesh: watering a neighbours tree? The challenge of educating girls in Kenya Learning to improve policy for pastoralists in Kenya When access is not enough: educational exclusion of rural girls in Peru Crossing boundaries and stepping out of purdah in India Pastoralist schools in Mali: gendered roles and curriculum realities Part Three:The Challenge of Local Practices - Doing Policy Differently?: Learning about HIV/AIDS in schools: does a gender-equality approach make a difference? Gender, education, and Pentecostalism: the womens movement within the Assemblies of God in Burkina Faso Enabling education for girls: the Loreto Day School Sealdah, India Conclusion: policy and practice change for gender equality Index

The Capabilities Approach and Gendered Education An Examination of South African Complexities

This article examines Amartya Sens writings on the capabilities approach and education. Sen sometimes suggests a loose association between education and schooling. Elsewhere he concludes that one can read off the outputs of schooling as an indication of capabilities and an enhancement of freedom. While the capability approach provides a valuable way beyond human capital theorizing about education, Sens writing fails to take account of the complex settings in which schooling takes place. Sometimes schooling does not entail an enhancement of capabilities and substantive freedom. South African policy responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic highlight how using the capability approach to evaluation without paying attention to conditions of gender and race inequality yield only half the picture.

The Capability Approach: Its Potential for Work in Education

Amartya Sen is one of the key thinkers and commentators of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Influential as a Nobel Prize-winning economist and a political philosopher, Sen is a key contributor to identifying, detailing, and campaigning against forms of global inequality. A major theme of his work is how to evaluate human wellbeing. His ideas on evaluation, equality, freedom, and rights stand at the center of the capability approach, which is generally associated with his name, having its origins in lectures he delivered in the late 1970s (Sen 1980). The capability approach rests on a critique of other approaches to thinking about human well-being in welfare economics and political philosophy, which are concerned with commodities, a standard of living, and justice as fairness. The capability approach challenges elements of these formulations and entails a consideration of evaluation, policy, and action that has had considerable impact both within the disciplines in which it emerged and within development theory concerned with analyses of poverty. An emerging literature has considered the implications of the capability approach for education; this book brings together conceptual and empirical writings on this theme.

Governing the UN sustainable development goals: interactions, infrastructures, and institutions.

Three of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) concerned health. There is only one health goal in 17 proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Critiques of the MDGs included missed opportunities to realise positive interactions between goals. Here we report on an interdisciplinary analytical review of the SDG process, in which experts in different SDG areas identified potential interactions through a series of interdisciplinary workshops. This process generated a framework that reveals potential conflicts and synergies between goals, and how their interactions might be governed.

Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries: the potential of Sen's capability approach for sociologists of education

Rationality and Freedom AMARTYA SEN, 2002 London, Harvard University Press 736 pp., £25.04 ISBN 0 674 00947 9 Valuing Freedoms. Sens Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction SABINA ALKIRE, 2002 Oxford, Oxford University Press 340 pp., £45.00 ISBN 0 19 924579 This important selection of essays by the in.uential Nobel Prize winning economist, Amartya Sen, deals with economic theory and social philosophy. Sabina Alkires book combines a lucid exposition of the significance of Sens work with an analysis of how it might be operationalised in development practice. Together with Sens popular and now very widely read exposition of his key ideas in Development as Freedom (Sen, 1999) the works provide a new language to understand important social and economic processes. These recently published works also indicate some new directions debates concerning Sens innovative ideas are taking. On the one hand, the connections across disciplines that Sens work represents are being explored, partly by Sen himself and partly by those who have interpreted his ideas. On the other hand, the implications of Sens work for examining practical approaches to social justice are emerging. While Sens ideas have posed some central questions for debates in philosophy concerning equality, for discussions on social choice in economics, and for the reframing of the de.nition of ‘development’ in development studies, his work has had surprisingly little impact on discussions in sociology of education. Before considering what some of the potential of his thinking is for sociologists of education, some elements of his thinking need explanation.

The work of the nation: Heroic masculinity in South African autobiographical writing of the anti‐apartheid struggle

The study draws on autobiographical writings of the South African anti-apartheid struggle to investigate representations of masculinity, work and gender relations. It identifies a common construction of masculinity in many texts across race, class and generation. This construction stresses autonomy, adventure, comradeship and a self-conscious location in history. This heroic masculinity is identified with a particular understanding of work as political work and links with a discourse that neglects the political interests, and differently contoured forms of political work by women. The study considers some similarities and differences between heroic masculinity and forms of work associated with violent masculinity, the subject of much more extensive research in South Africa to date.The study is divided into four parts. The first section provides some background on South African autobiographical writings and looks at some of the methodological questions relating to the use of published autobiographical texts. The second section theorises questions of masculinity in the context of the distinctive social divisions of South Africa. The third section looks at portrayals of masculinity and work in South African autobiographical writing by men and women. The final section compares heroic and violent masculinities as they have emerged in different kinds of writing concerning South Africa under apartheid. This section also draws out some of the implications of the depictions of heroic masculinity and work with regard to gendered features of the transition to democracy.

The school setting: opportunities for integrating gender equality and HIV risk reduction interventions

ROBERT MORRELL, RELEBOHILE MOLETSANE, QUAIRRAISHA ABDOOL KARIM, DEBBIE EPSTEIN and ELAINE UNTERHALTER argue school-based HIV interventions offer an opportunity to transform gender, in schools and beyond

Responding to the Gender and Education Millennium Development Goals in South Africa and Kenya: Reflections on Education Rights, Gender Equality, Capabilities and Global Justice.

This paper explores understandings of gender equality and education and the nature of global goal and target setting, drawing on empirical data collected in central and local government departments in Kenya and South Africa reflecting on their implementation of Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 1, concerned with poverty, MDG 2, concerned with education, and MDG 3, concerned with gender equality. The study raises questions about the ownership of the MDGs and the reasons for the kinds of changes in meaning about gender and rights made by differently situated officials.

Measuring Education for the Millennium Development Goals: Reflections on Targets, Indicators, and a Post-2015 Framework

Abstract Education has a prominent position in the current Millennium Development Goal (MDG) framework; targets on schooling are attached to two of the goals. However, from a human development perspective, the narrow framing of the education targets and indicators in the MDGs had perverse consequences, stemming from the omission of salient aspects of quality, context, and equity. The selected targets limited the capacity of the education sector to support other MDGs. In thinking about indicators for a post-2015 framework, this paper considers the history of how and why the indicators for MDG 2 were selected and puts forward some critical reflections on two alternative indicators for the education goal in a post-2015 framework.