Sarah Bradshaw

Civil society responses to poverty reduction strategies in Nicaragua

This paper considers the recent experience of civil society organizations in Nicaragua within the Poverty Reduction Strategies Papers (PRSP) process. The focus of the paper is not the poverty reduction strategy itself but rather civil society responses to this initiative in Nicaragua. It highlights the problems beginning to emerge within this process in relation to the World Bank-IMF, the national government and organized civil society. Fundamental to the conceptualization and design of PRSP is the idea of ‘national ownership’ facilitated by wide consultation and participation of civil society in the formulation and evaluation of individual country strategies. This paper uses Nicaragua’s PRSP process to examine the extent to which organized civil society can really influence PRSP formulation. It highlights the differences that exist in how poverty is defined and discussed by the key actors and examines civil society’s response to government proposals and the strategies they have adopted to promote an ‘alternative’ people-centred development perspective.

Reconstructing roles and relations: women's participation in reconstruction in post-Mitch Nicaragua

Hurricane Mitch, which took place in October 1998, affected millions of people in Central America, in Honduras and Nicaragua in particular. In Nicaragua, following the hurricane, many civil society organisations mobilised to participate in reconstruction, and to present alternatives to the governments reconstruction plans. The newly-formed Civil Co-ordinator for Emergency and Reconstruction (CCER), a coalition of NGOs, undertook a large-scale social audit of the reconstruction process. This article presents the results of the audit alongside more in-depth research to provide a gendered analysis of the reconstruction. It focuses on the roles of women in reconstruction, their participation and leadership in reconstruction projects and in individual household responses, and questions whether reconstruction projects have had any impact on transforming gender relations in post-hurricane communities.

Is the rights focus the right focus? Nicaraguan responses to the rights agenda

Abstract This article explores the limitations of a rights focus for furthering womens claims for social change and, more specifically, as a focus for mobilising women around these claims. It analyses the experiences of a feminist ngo that has used a rights approach and draws on interviews undertaken with key representatives of womens groups in Nicaragua. Many groups use the rights discourse and see utility in its unifying language, around which collective actions can be mobilised. However, the notion of ‘rights based development’ is a little understood concept in the womens movements and, when recognised, is seen to be part of the donor agenda. The paper explores what this means for womens actions for change, questioning the repackaging of gender as rights and raising concerns about the ability of a rights focus alone to challenge unequal power relations.

Women’s decision-making in rural and urban households in Nicaragua: the influence of income and ideology

 This paper contributes to the continuing debate on factors that influence women’s decision-making within households. Specifically, it considers the influence of income generation and gender ideology on women’s decision-making in urban and rural households in Nicaragua. It adds to the debate by extending the household decisions that are considered to include not only monetary decisions but also “life option” decisions, including those around women’s sexuality. It highlights that understandings of work and contribution are more important than income in some cases, and that ideology matters in terms of how obligations to the household are understood and fulfilled. It suggests that in itself being “urban” seems to contribute to understandings of both income and ideology, for both urban women and men.

Women in Chilean rural society

This chapter seeks to examine the effects of neo-liberalism on the lives of women in the Chilean countryside, and its effects on female participation and organisation. In Chile, as in most countries and societies, there exists a marked difference between male and female, their roles, tasks and status, within the family and society (Brydon and Chant, 1989). Further, the idea of male superiority, ‘Machismo’, is ingrained in many Latin American men, underlying relations between them and their families (Stevens, 1973; Chant, 1985). Men are considered the economic provider, working in the ‘public’ sphere to generate the family income. For women their sphere is domestic, care of the house, the children, and the husband. This work in the ‘private’ world of the home is not remunerated, and, as such, considered to be of little importance. This division of labour is considered by some to be at the very base of women’s subordination — it serves at the very least to reinforce women’s inferior position in society. Hence any change in women’s participation, their incorporation into the traditionally male public sphere, could perhaps have great consequences for their status in society.

Gender and poverty: what we know, don’t know, and need to know for Agenda 2030

Abstract Drawing on historical debates on gender, poverty, and the ‘feminisation of poverty’, this paper reflects on current evidence, methods and analysis of gendered poverty. It focuses on initiatives by UN Women, including the Progress of the World’s Women 2015–16. Our analysis of the data compiled by UN Women raises questions about what might account for the over-representation of women among the poor in official accounts of poverty, and how this is plausibly changing (or not) over time. The paper highlights that analysis of what is measured and how needs to be understood in relation to who is the focus of measurement. The lack of available data which is fit for purpose questions the extent to which gender poverty differences are ‘real’ or statistical. There is a continued reliance on comparing female with male headed households, and we argue the move by UN Women to adopt the notion of Female Only Households reflects available data driving conceptual understandings of women’s poverty, rather than conceptual advances driving the search for better data. Wider UN processes highlight that while sensitivity to differences among women and their subjectivities are paramount in understanding the multiple processes accounting for gender bias in poverty burdens, they are still accorded little priority. To monitor advances in Agenda 2030 will require more and better statistics. Our review suggests that we are still far from having a set of tools able to adequately measure and monitor gendered poverty.

Double Disaster: Disaster through a Gender Lens

This chapter explores the impact of disasters on women and girls, with particular reference to the context of the developing world. It critically explores the conceptual and theoretical basis for assuming that a differential impact exists. It highlights that disasters are gendered events and women and girls experience them differently from men, suffering longer term and more intangible impacts such as a rise in violence or greater insecurity in employment. Given women and girls are impacted more and differently than men and boys, it might be expected gender issues would be a key policy concern, yet the chapter highlights that gender is still excluded from much policy on disaster risk reduction. Drawing on the lessons learned from processes to “engender development,” it suggests that, although exclusion remains an issue, how women are included in disaster risk reduction and response can also raise concerns. It concludes by highlighting that tackling gendered risk demands both a reconceptualization of “disaster” and for disasters to become a development issue.

Gendered Rights in the Post-2015 Development and Disasters Agendas

This article explores how, 20 years after the Beijing conference, womens rights are being discussed within processes to develop a post-2015 sustainable development agenda and the parallel international disaster risk reduction framework. It is based on analysis of documents produced to date from the various processes, and also personal experience of seeking to influence both the post-2015 development and disaster agendas. It highlights how attempts to marry the environmental and development agendas reveal a continued problematic conceptualisation of sexual and reproductive rights. It suggests that in gender terms, while the post-2015 development agenda and the related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are over-ambitious to the point of being mere rhetoric, gender rhetoric is yet to enter the international disaster risk reduction discourse. This, the article argues, coupled with the continued conceptualisation of disasters as outside mainstream development, has further negative implications for the recognition and fulfilment of womens rights.

Extractive industries as sites of supernormal profits and supernormal patriarchy

ABSTRACT This article considers how patriarchal power relations between men and women are produced and reproduced within extractive industries, and examines the idea that the ‘supernormal profits’ to be made there encourage the development of ‘supernormal patriarchy’. By looking at the sites where extraction takes place and relationships between men and women within these sites, we show the extreme and exaggerated gender roles and relations that are found here. We nuance this account by highlighting the need to recognise that patriarchal power is not felt equally by all women and men. Exploring the different roles women adopt in the extractives context we demonstrate the fluidity of women’s identities as workers, ‘whores’, and wives with a focus on transactional sex. The article demonstrates the importance of not seeing women merely as victims of patriarchal relations, or making assumptions about how these relations operate, or the form they take. Better understanding of the range of gender roles adopted in the extractives and the supernormal patriarchal relations that produce and reproduce these is needed by policymakers. This will enable them to promote gender equality and natural resource justice, as part of an agenda to redistribute wealth gains from natural resource extraction.

The Women of Katrina: How Gender, Race, and Class Matter in an American Disaster

analyst. It helps to see reasonably familiar stories given a fresh interpretation, because this shows off the most novel parts of the framework to their best advantage. This is no light read, packed with theory and empirical material as it is. Yet Transformative Policy for Poor Women feels overdue. It feels like the right moment for a serious analytical approach to the failures of policies for poor women. Its insights into how women’s informal economic and unpaid care work overshadow and largely determine development outcomes for poor people seem timely: it’s certainly time these concerns became part of mainstream development policy, if mainstream development policy is as concerned with gender equality as it claims to be. Bina Fernandez might say little about why women’s unpaid care and low-paid informal economy work remain invisible or a low priority on the development policy agenda. But she shows clearly that ignoring the inconvenient realities of women’s lives are precisely the reasons policies fail, again and again and again.