Paromita Sanyal

From Credit to Collective Action: The Role of Microfinance in Promoting Women's Social Capital and Normative Influence

Can economic ties positively influence social relations and actions? If so, how does this influence operate? Microfinance programs, which provide credit through a group-based lending strategy, provide the ideal setting for exploring these questions. This article examines whether structuring socially isolated women into peer-groups for an explicitly economic purpose, such as access to credit, has any effect on the womens collective social behavior. Based on interviews with 400 women from 59 microfinance groups in West Bengal, India, I find that one third of these groups undertook various collective actions. Improvements in womens social capital and normative influence fostered this capacity for collective action. Several factors contributed to these transformations, including economic ties among members, the structure of the group network, and womens participation in group meetings. Based on these findings, I argue that microfinance groups have the potential to promote womens social capital and normative influence, thereby facilitating womens collective empowerment. I conclude by discussing the need for refining our understanding of social capital and social ties that promote normative influence.

Dignity through Discourse: Poverty and the Culture of Deliberation in Indian Village Democracies

Employing a view of culture as a communicative phenomenon involving discursive engagement, which is deeply influenced by social and economic inequalities, the authors argue that the struggle to break free of poverty is as much a cultural process as it is political and economic. In this paper, they analyze important examples of discursive spaces - public meetings in Indian village democracies (gram sabhas), where villagers make important decisions about budgetary allocations for village development and the selection of beneficiaries for anti-poverty programs. They examine 290 transcripts of gram sabhas from South India to demonstrate how they create a culture of civic/political engagement among poor people, and how definitions of poverty and beneficiary-selection criteria are understood and interrogated within them. Through this examination, they highlight the process by which gram sabhas facilitate the acquisition of crucial cultural capabilities such as discursive skills and civic agency by poor and disadvantaged groups. They illustrate how the poor and socially marginalized deploy these discursive skills in a resource-scarce and socially stratified environment in making material and non-material demands in their search for dignity. The intersection of poverty, culture, and deliberative democracy is a topic of broad relevance because it sheds light on cultural processes that can be influenced by public action in a manner that helps improve the voice and agency of the poor.

Capacity Building Through Partnership: Intermediary Nongovernmental Organizations as Local and Global Actors

Partnership and capacity building have become popular strategies among intermediary nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Partnership is viewed as a cure for centrally managed bureaucratic NGOs and capacity building as a measure for strengthening local NGOs. This article examines the case of an intermediary NGO that followed a unique strategy combining capacity building through partnership. Through this, it reveals the trade-offs involved in the choice of an appropriate governance structure. It was found that although the decentralized network form of governance proved to be a powerful innovation, it presented a paradox. Especially in this case where the goal was transmission of specific values and perspectives about sustainable development, such a strategy posed a complex set of trade-offs. Drawing from the experience of this organization, the author suggests that a “plural form” organization may provide maximum governance efficiency for intermediary NGOs like the one examined here. These insights may also apply to social movement organizations.

Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh

der inequality is linked to national security is further developed and tested in Chapter Four. Reviewing literature focused on gender inequality and state military actions, the authors identify the need for more encompassing and comparative cross-national measures of gender inequality than are available (e.g., GEM, GSI). The authors use indices from the WomanStats Database representing various dimensions of gender inequality to predict variation in state peacefulness, such as external/internal conflicts and violation of security-related treaties. The authors conduct simply understood analyses (detailed results in appendices) that establish basic support for their women-and-peace thesis: empowering women reduces the risk of domestic and international violence and conflict, even among democracies that tend to be both more peaceful and gender-egalitarian. Remaining chapters offer concrete topdown and bottom-up approaches to address the problem of gender inequality across the globe, including state actions like monitoring women’s well-being through sex-disaggregated data, adopting women’s priorities, and incentivizing vaccinating and educating girls. Bottom-up strategies include involving men and providing and utilizing cultural scripts redefining acceptability of violence and appropriate gender roles. Realistic, small-scale personal modifications as well as larger structural and cultural transformations to strive toward will empower readers to change women’s plight across the globe. The primary critique relates to causality. It is not yet clear whether economic success and democratic principles flow from more gender-equitable social arrangements or whether women’s status improves as a nation’s well-being increases. Additionally, there are likely important underlying socio-historical factors related to both violence against women and violence by states. Critical to future research, the authors hope to collect longitudinal women’s status measures, which may help disentangle temporal ordering. Evolutionary and natural-selection processes likely will remain untested, however. Although the range and depth of specific cultural accounts vivify women’s inequality in various contexts and elucidate the micro-aggressions suffered by women, some of the more sensationalistic statistics of early chapters tend to undercut rather than advance otherwise sound arguments of the authors. For example, incorrect statements such as the following are unnecessary: ‘‘In Sierra Leone, the lifetime chance of a woman dying incidental to pregnancy is one in eight. That’s akin to taking an eight-chambered revolver, putting one bullet in it, spinning the chamber, and pointing it at your head every time you have sex‘‘ (p. 23, emphasis added). Women and World Peace is accessible to a general, educated audience interested in learning about global gender inequality, how these patterns may have emerged, why such social arrangements are bad for everyone’s security, and what one can do about it. Scholars will value this text for its introduction to a vast and useful database on women’s well-being and the multidisciplinary ‘‘women and peace thesis’’ that prompted the expansive data collection effort.