Susanne Schech

Gender justice: the World Bank's new approach to the poor?

Gender inequality is now widely acknowledged as an important factor in the spread and entrenchment of poverty. This article examines the World Development Report 2000/01 as the World Banks blueprint for addressing poverty in the twenty-first century, together with several more recent Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), with a view to analysing the manner in which gender is incorporated into the policy-making process and considering whether it constitutes a new approach to gender and poverty. It is argued that the World Banks approach to poverty is unlikely to deliver gender justice, because there remain large discrepancies between the economic and social policies that it prescribes. More specifically, the authors contend that the Bank employs an integrationist approach which encapsulates gender issues within existing development paradigms without attempting to transform an overall development agenda whose ultimate objective is economic growth as opposed to equity. Case studies from Cambodia and Vietnam are used to illustrate these arguments.

New spaces of development partnership: Rethinking international volunteering

The concept of partnership is frequently invoked in international development as discourse and policy prescription to better understand relationships and engagements between donors and beneficiaries. Despite the increasing prominence of the idea of partnerships, in reality mutual, equal and sustainable development partnerships remain limited. This article examines the extent to which recent growth in international development volunteering can provide new spaces where equitable and sustainable partnerships may emerge. This review highlights partnership’s legacy in discourses of participation and explores the changing role and impact of development volunteering. We identify three spaces where new kinds of alliances and relationships can be forged – personal learning, policy and geopolitical.

Postcolonialism, Identity, and Location: Being White Australian in Asia

In this paper we explore the nature and degree to which Australian imaginings of self in Asia have altered since the 1960s. We do this in two ways. First, an analysis of Christopher Kochs two novels, The Year of Living Dangerously and Highways to a War, is used to establish the parameters of change in Australian imaginings of themselves in Asia. This analysis of literary texts, we argue, can be used to develop an analytical framework for considering Australian aid policies to Asia as cultural texts, and the extent to which such policies can be seen to be part of a redefinition of Australian settler society towards a postcolonial understanding of the ‘white self’. In the second part of the paper we offer a preliminary analysis of how Australian overseas-aid policies have begun to acknowledge the fact of Australias geopolitical location. We argue that these cultural texts reveal a repositioning of Australian identity which remains caught within a terrain of whiteness.

Simulating the global workplace for graduate employability

ABSTRACT Higher education institutions increasingly recognise the need to develop both disciplinary knowledge and soft skills to foster the employability of their graduates. For students in International Studies programmes, the workplace opportunities to develop soft skills relevant to their intended professions are scarce, costly and unavailable to many. This paper argues that universities can harness the power of ICTs in ways that students find engaging and offer opportunities to gain professional experience that prepares them for an international workplace. We describe a new work-integrated learning model that embeds a multi-layered in-person simulation within an academic context. Facilitated by cross-national pedagogical collaboration, students participate live in cross-campus experiential learning with online peers. Students’ reflections on the model indicate that this model can foster a range of generic soft skills that enable them to apply their academic knowledge, collaborate with a culturally diverse group and work in a digital world. To refine this blended learning model, more attention needs to be paid to designing appropriate evaluation tools and harnessing cultural diversity more effectively.

Between tradition and post‐coloniality: the location of gender in Australian development policy

Abstract This paper contributes to the debate on whether development assistance should adhere to universal measures of quality of life for all men and women, or defer, instead, to the many different norms that traditional cultures have established. It traces the development in the 1980s and 1990s of a gender policy for Australian overseas aid in the face of post‐develop‐mentalist, post‐colonial and post‐structuralist feminist critiques of ‘Western’ constructions of Third World women, which contend that Women in Development (WID) and Gender and Development (GAD) policies reinforce and maintain the discourse of modernity so essential to ‘northern’ hegemony and development practices. This paper suggests that a space between opposing universalist and relativist claims can be found for an Australian gender and development policy which is adaptable to geographically and historically specific gender relations, and which allows a self‐reflexive questioning of the hierarchical relationship between development ‘hel...

Teaching Ways of Seeing Development in the Global South: An Introduction

Development Studies, the interdisciplinary octopus, and its geography arm, Geographies of Development, have always faced a challenge when it came to providing students with experiential learning opportunities. While the subject is mostly taught in universities of the Global North, its focus has traditionally been the Global South. This symposium discusses Australian experiences of moving beyond text-based learning and bringing the Global South closer to their students.

Ethnicity, Politics, and State Resource Allocation: Explaining Educational Inequalities in Kenya

Despite international and national level recognition of the importance of education for all, both for development purposes and as a basic human right, its achievement still remains a huge challenge. Persistent inequalities of gender, class, ethnic, and regional context are evident in education systems worldwide, whether at the stage of enrolment and attendance, in outcomes and achievement, or in terms of consequent opportunities to which education is expected to give rise (Watkins, 2001). While gender inequalities in education are at their most extreme in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia (Challender, 2003), inequalities relating to ethnic minorities and indigenous people are widespread in many African countries, where they are often strongly linked to regional inequalities, and to the distribution of poverty (Watkins, 2001). In Kenya, despite heavy government investment in education, enrolment at various levels of education is characterized by regional, socio-economic and gender disparities and declining gross enrolment ratios (SID, 2004). Researchers have also identified imbalances in terms of financial allocations, inadequate facilities, poor teacher qualifications, and high teacher-pupil ratios as further evidence that not all is well in the Kenyan education system (Abagi, 1997; Kimalu, Nafula, Manda, Mwabu, & Kimenyi, 2002; Oyugi, 2000; SID, 2004). But research on education, as presently constructed, has tended to treat the issues of inequality as specific to the Kenyan education system, and consequently assumed that they can be addressed through educational reform. By seeing inequalities in education as a symptom of wider social processes and structures, this chapter aims to connect the issue of educational inequality to the broader notions of equity and the right to education. In pursuing this approach we argue that social inequality emanates from the unequal distribution of resources, power and privilege among members of society. In many societies, particularly in Africa, ethnicity is one of the instruments of division by which access to opportunities and power is distributed among the population. Some ethnic

Choosing caesareans? The perceptions and experiences of childbirth among mothers from higher socio-economic households in Dhaka

Abstract In this paper, we examine the perceptions and experiences of childbirth among a group of wealthier women in Dhaka through in-depth interviews. We find that a number of factors including preference for Caesarean Section (CS), socio-economic position, family structure, and perceptions of modern childbirth contributed to the women’s overuse of medical childbirth services. Furthermore, women’s capacity to purchase modern maternal health care in the private sector did not necessarily ensure high quality care in a health system which approaches maternal healthcare as a profit-making enterprise rather than as an essential human right.

A Review of “Race and the Crisis of Humanism”

Now comes the difficult part: What to make of Livingstone’s book? Well, it is thoroughly researched in terms of cataloguing, understanding, summarizing, and arranging several hundred statements on the possibility or impossibility of pre-Adamite humanity. At key points, Livingstone interjects comments from a wide variety of secondary sources in the history of scientific thought that he knows better than anyone. There is an attempt at setting the question of Adam within the sacred and secular traditions of Western consciousness and culture. It is well written in that kind of mild, gentlemanly, vague style that used to predominate in conventional academic circles, when professors smoked pipes, wore corduroy jackets with leather patches on the elbows, and never swore or talked politics in class. But “Colin Kidd, University of Glasgow,” who says on the book’s cover that “controversial themes and explosive issues abound in Livingstone’s work” has to be kidding if by “abound” he means “made explicit and extensively discussed.” There are bits at the end of the chapters, and a five-page Conclusion, where the “controversial themes” are briefly explored by Livingstone, but on the whole he lets the story tell itself, morally chastening only the most audaciously racist of these fine Christian authors. More David, less Adam, would have been better. In other words, the book is too remote and polite, given the temper of the present times, when people who believe in ridiculous religious nonsense control the centers of power, hegemonic and counterhegemonic. The Inquisition did not end in 1834 but merely changed form, from physical torture to discursive disciplining.