Lynne Phillips

Capacity-Building: The Neoliberal Governance of Development

ABSTRACT In the post-cold war era of trade liberalization, a wide range of new economic and social processes is influencing the mechanisms of policy decision-making and the transformations of governance at international, national, and local levels. We consider many of these developments as taking place within a form of governance that can be referred to as “neoliberal governance.” This form of governance involves new ways of thinking about governing populations, regions, and groups that hinge on mechanisms of decentralization, privatization, and individualization. Within the context of developing a critique of neoliberal governance, in this paper we highlight the specific global knowledge practices that are linked to what we refer to as the knowledge economy of capacity-building.

Feminist Flows, Feminist Fault Lines: Women’s Machineries and Women’s Movements in Latin America

This article begins with the assumption that the flow of feminist ideas and practices is multilayered, multidirectional, and always in translation. Locating various sites of feminist work in Brazil and Ecuador, the article examines two pervasive translations of feminism, referred to by the authors as the “UN‐orbit” and “another‐world” translations. Globalization is understood to be an important context for a dynamic feminist politics that both supports and divides feminist efforts in these translations. The article suggests that the dynamic of international feminism requires analysis of the specific location of feminist flows as well as of the similar and divergent contexts, practices, and visions that inform feminist translations.

Responsible Expertise Governing the Uncertain Subjects of Biotechnology

Viewing biotechnology as a lens through which to analyse new ways of governing populations, in this article we consider how the United Nations has globally communicated biotechnology’s risks, uncertainties and opportunities to develop and expand what we refer to as ‘responsible expertise’. We specifically examine the activities of UNESCO and the FAO to show how these organizations operate as agencies of rule by, on the one hand, marshalling expertise about biotechnology to identify populations ‘at risk’ and, on the other, capturing the imagination of people as responsible subjects with appropriate expertise to manage their own uncertain futures. As an orientation that engages both expert knowledge and moral judgement, the promotion of responsible expertise around the world signals a strategic shift in the UN’s efforts to tame bio-technology for the everyday decision-maker.

Gender Mainstreaming: The Global Governance of women?

ABSTRACT What are the effects when gender mainstreaming becomes part of the enabling claims of international organizations? In this paper I examine the fit between gender mainstreaming, as a policy and device of transformation, and the calculations of international organizations to produce certain kinds of gendered subjects in the name of good governance. Noting the expansion of audit cultures and notions of accountability within international organizations, I focus on the case of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). I find that gender mainstreaming facilitates FAO efforts to mobilize a new rural woman with increased capacities and responsibilities for attending to global food security, at the same that it supports the organizations deployment of neoliberal techniques for maximizing rural productivity. The consequences for feminist practice of being drawn into the technologies of international rule are examined.

Give Me Discipline and Give Me Death: Neoliberalism and Health in Chile

The authors examine the connections between apartheid-like social relations and health in pre-Pinochet/neoliberal “democratic” Chile and explore how these intersections have rearticulated with the perpetuation of a neoliberal regime imposed during 20 years of military dictatorship and continued by a Christian Democrat/Socialist neoliberal regime.

The Violence Against Women Campaigns in Latin America New Feminist Alliances

This article urges caution in reading the backlash against gender-sensitive policies as a global phenomenon. Drawing inspiration from Latin America, the authors consider how international agreements for nation-states to adopt measures to prevent violence against women have been taken up in proactive ways through the collaboration of international organizations, national governments, and expanding and evolving womens movements. The push for the development of democratic citizenship in Latin America has opened up possibilities for bringing awareness of violence against women to a public that is in the process of engaging with a range of social justice issues and collaborating on multiple fronts. The authors argue that strategic coalitions across difference have been central to the success of the efforts to combat violence against women. They show how new feminist alliances have not only helped denormalize and deprivatize gender violence but revitalized feminist issues as part of a broad front to build progressive societies.

Circulations of Insecurity: Globalizing Food Standards In Historical Perspective

The new millennium is a time to reflect on the standards that feed our perceptions of change and uncertainty in our so-called modern world. In the context of this volume, it is especially useful to explore how our contemporary views of food insecurity, especially as defined in terms of disease, malnutrition and overpopulation, have their links to earlier efforts to create order and reduce risks related to the production and supply of food around the world. This chapter identifies and discusses various ways in which the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations relied on modern scientific thinking and practice to standardize approaches to thinking about world food and agriculture issues immediately following World War II. At the time, this approach paralleled other interests and initiatives to continue control of specific national and local territories and their production and trade efforts, as well as to reduce the political risks posed by food insecurities in a Cold War world. More specifically, this chapter emphasizes how building a global model of food consumption was based on an effort to set aside the diversity of food and people in the world and to make these categories comparable. This was accomplished through a process that involved mapping food and human bodies, and rendering them separable from their localities, and then stabilizing them as representations of standardized units that could be compared. In addition, we consider the ways in which the FAO has been involved in identifying, managing, and communicating information on risks related to food production and consumption, as well as global food stability and security. This attention to the relations of risk and food standardization is critical to understanding current international thinking about improving and stabilizing food production.

Mapping Populations: The United Nations, Globalization, and Engendered Spaces, 1948–1960

Over the last hundred years, we in the more favored parts of the world have been doing all that we could to displace [the] attitude of resignation and feeling of inability to do anything about such circumstances [“poverty and disease and ignorance”]. We sent missionaries throughout the world preaching the gospel of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man and converting a lot of people in the underdeveloped areas of the world to a conviction that they can in fact work out an improvement of their own lives. In addition to these religious missionaries we sent out trade missionaries, commercial agents, who aroused desires on the part of the people of the underdeveloped areas for conditions of life and physical comforts that are commonplace in the advanced countries of the West. Moreover, during both World Wars, but particularly during the second, we sent our military forces into practically every corner of the world so that at the present time there is no place anywhere on the globe in which any considerable number of peoples live who do not know that it is possible for a human being to live a far better life than is customary for three quarters of the human race.