Teaching feminist economics to gender-blind policymakers in Hanoi

On 21 August I posted a blog for the International Association of Feminist Economics, of which I am a founder-member.  The post can be read here.

Unpaid care work, poverty and women's human rights

ActionAid International, the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, and Oxfam are facilitating the launch today of a report on unpaid care work and women's poverty by the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights. The Report will be presented to the UN later in the month.

A video overview of the Report highlights its key messages, which has been a focal part of my research and advisory activity for decades:

global fertility

The Economist offers some remarkably accessible videographics that explains some of the key international development issues. This one, on global fertility patterns, demolishes the Reverend Thomas Malthus in 3:32, demonstrating how there is no 'population bomb'.

the 2nd annual David Morrison lecture in international development

I am very pleased to say that Trent University's excellent David Morrison Lecture in International Development is now on YouTube. Part 1 is below.



The rest of the lecture can be viewed here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VM8nqN4YZBE&feature=related

gender, international development, and the UN

Last week it was my privilege to be asked to be a member of the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) Expert Group on Economic Growth, Gender Equality and Poverty Reduction. UNDP is currently revising its corporate strategy for the next 3 years, and the role of the Expert Group is to offer advise to UNDP's Gender Team so that gender can be 'mainstreamed' throughout the organization. To that end, a group of 28 met at the University of Essex, in Colchester, UK, to thrash out a set of core objectives that the Gender Team would like to see UNDP working towards over the next 3 years. It was an incredibly intensive 2 days, and by its end I was exhausted. However, I was also quite exhilarated. The discussions that we had were lively, engaging, provocative and challenging. I think that some of the key themes that emerged from our discussions--of the need to highlight the role of social and cultural norms in sustaining gender inequality, of the need to integrate unpaid work and care into all aspects of economic analysis and policy advice, and of the need to more systematically develop the data base that can be used to sustain gender-aware evidence-based advice, amongst others--could all go a long way towards improving the integration of gender into the day in and day out work of UNDP. Of course, one cannot expect very much from an institution as large and as complex as UNDP. Nonetheless, I remain quietly optimistic that some good will come from these discussions.

I am often asked how it came to be that I became so centrally involved in feminist development economics. To me, it is a somewhat strange question. During my academic career it has always been self-evident to me that a major failing of economic analysis and policy is that it systematically fails to understand who does unpaid work and why, and how care is provided within and between families. The failure to understand these things means that economics fails, as a discipline, in its ability to understand day to day processes that affect everyone. It means that economics as a discipline actually understands very little, because unpaid work and care are the basis upon which all economic activity must take place: without care, there is no economy, stupid. This self-evident truth is not self-evident to most economists, though. Nonetheless, it has meant that I have practiced what we now call feminist development economics for my entire academic career.

Despite a rhetorical commitment to gender within international development institutions, in most instances such commitment is not matched by resources or by paying attention to gender relations when it comes to hard questions of money and its allocation. This was easily demonstrated a couple of years ago, when, as part of a global study of general budget support carried out on behalf of the UK's Department for International Development, I was asked to act as the gender consultant for the study. This was a study that had a budget that ran into the hundreds of thousands of pounds. The DfID has a strong gender focus. Yet, despite these two things, I was asked to provide 5 days--count them, 5 days--worth of input. In other words, a derisory amount of time and money was actually devoted to gender analysis in this research. Which meant, for me, that the understanding that was generated was not much of an understanding at all. I can only hope that I do not have a similar experience with UNDP.

why don't development economists learn?

I have been, these past few days, teaching a short course at my old workplace, the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, on Gender and Microeconomic Policy Analysis. The students on the course come from 4 continents, and are here to basically improve their economic literacy so that they can advocate more effectively for gender-aware policy interventions with the economists that they meet and who dominate policy identification, design, implementation and monitoring and evaluation in international development.

I've been an economist for all of my professional life, and yet teaching the material that I have been teaching--about the gender-constructed character of demand, the centrality of the household and care to the capacity of an economy to supply goods and services, and the gendered character of markets and other economic institutions--I am struck by the fact that:

1. it should be obvious that gender shapes economics
2. if it is obvious, why is feminist development economics a minority within a minority within international development?
3. in this light, how can gender be said to be 'mainstreamed' unless it is fully integrated into the economic analysis that dominates international development? It can't.
4. what does all this say about the effective, as opposed to indicative, commitment of international development practioners and practice to gender empowerment?

Economics in general is dominated by neo-classicism. Even at it's most erudite, dealing with the economics of information, it is unable to address the way in which conflict and consensus shape activity in the care economy, the allocation of time and resources to the care and market economies, and the way in which care is a precondition of markets. In failing to address these issues, neo-classicism demonstrates the extent of its abstraction from the real world. Yet teach basic neo-classical ideas to non-economists, demonstrate the gender critique of those ideas, and it is obvious. They get it. Why can't the economics profession get it?

The answer has to lie in the challenge that feminist development economics, along with other branches of heterodox economics, poses to entrenched positions of power and privilege, within economics, sure, but more importantly, in the real world--in the centers of political and economic power that shape the global economy. Ideas do change the world. Feminist development economics offers a humane alternative to our globalized future. This is precisely why it is marginalized. It is also precisely why there is an ongoing need to advocate for feminist development economics in the institutions where we work, and the civil society where we live.