Discussing Women's Empowerment - Sida

More documents

Recommendations

Info

28 RESOURCES, AGENCY, ACHIEVEMENTS • KABEER stance, between changes in women’s access to income earning opportunities and their decision-making power within the household although a few have also sought to model the effects of changes at the structural level for individual choice 5 . What is understandably missing from the measurement literature are examples of the more processual model of social change subscribed to by many feminists and exemplified in the following quotes from Batliwala: …the exercise of informed choice within an expanding framework of information, knowledge and analysis…a process which must enable women to discover new possibilites, new options…a growing repertoire of choices…to independently struggle for changes in their material conditions of existence, their personal lives and their treatment in the public sphere…The process of challenging existing power relations, and of gaining greater control over the sources of power… (Batliwala 1993 and 1994). A processual understanding of social change tends to treat it as openended. It is premised on the unpredictability of human agency and on the diversity of circumstances under which such agency is exercised. While it may identify certain key elements of structure and agency as having a catalytic potential, it does not attempt to determine in advance how this potential will play out in practice. Consequently, empowerment is seen as a form of social change which is not easily captured by quantitative data. Section 2: Measuring <strong>Empowerment</strong>: the Problem of Meaning Measuring ‘resources’ The ‘resource’ dimension of empowerment would appear at first sight to be the most easy to measure. However, a critical reading of attempts at measurement suggest that the task is less simple than it appears, even when resources are defined in narrow material terms as they generally tend to be. There is a widespread tendency in the empowerment literature to talk about ‘access to resources’ in a generic way, as if indicating some relationship between women and resources automatically specifies the choices it makes possible. In reality, however, resources are at one remove from choice, a measure of potential rather than actualised choice. How changes in women’s resources will translate into changes in the choices 5. The study by Hodinott et al. on the reduction in married women’s suicide rates apparently as a result of changes in the divorce law in Canada is an example.
KABEER • RESOURCES, AGENCY, ACHIEVEMENTS 29 they are able to make will depend, in part, on other aspects of the conditions in which they are making their choices. By way of example, let us take women’s ‘access’ to land. At the systemic level, this is often captured by distinguishing between different categories of land rights with the assumption that women are likely to exercise a greater degree of autonomy in those regions where they enjoy some rights to land (e.g. Dyson and Moore, 1983; Boserup, 1970). Yet studies which use measures of women’s access to land as an indicator of empowerment seldom reflect on the pathways by which such ‘access’ translates into agency and achievement, let alone seeking to understand these pathways empirically. It is noteworthy, for instance, that a causal connection is often made between patrilineal principles of descent and inheritance in the northern plains of the Indian sub-continent compared to the south and the lower levels of female autonomy beli in the northern plains of the Indian sub-continent, compared for instance, with the south. However, land inheritance rules are by no means uniform within this region. Among Hindus, joint family property is a central tenet shaping inheritance practices with some local variation in how this is interpreted. Joint family property is generally held in a coparcenary system by men, usually fathers and sons, to the total exclusion of women (Mukhopadhyay, 1998). Among Muslims, on the other hand, women have always enjoyed the right to inherit property and to inherit as individuals. Muslim women and men consequently enjoy individual, absolute but unequal rights to property: men tend to inherit twice the share of women. Hindu law has been reformed after Indian independence to give men and women equal rights of inheritance; Muslim inheritance principles have been left untouched. However, despite these differences in the customary and legal positions of women in the two communities, both Muslim and Hindu women tend to be treated as effectively propertyless in the literature. For Hindu women, older norms and customs remain powerful and Agarwal (1994) provides evidence of the difficulties they face they seek to assert legal over customary practices around land inheritance. Muslim women, on the other hand, generally prefer, or are encouraged to prefer, to waive their rights to parental property in favour of their brothers with the result that they too are treated as effectively propertyless. Thus the critical measure of women’s access to land which characterises the Indian literature is de facto rather than de jure entitlement and by this measure, there is little difference in the Hindu and Muslim community. Yet it is by no means evident that de facto ownership tells us all we need to know about the potential domain of choice. It has, for instance,
Page 1: Discussing Women’s Empowerment -
Page 4 and 5: Sida studies can be ordered by visi
Page 7 and 8: Foreword This volume offers a selec
Page 9 and 10: Further adjustments of GAD discours
Page 11 and 12: SUMMARY 9 calls current development
Page 13 and 14: INTRODUCTION 11 spective: Towards a
Page 15 and 16: INTRODUCTION 13 more fully in polit
Page 17 and 18: INTRODUCTION 15 search activities t
Page 19 and 20: Resources, Agency, Achievements: Re
Page 21 and 22: KABEER • RESOURCES, AGENCY, ACHIE
Page 29: KABEER • RESOURCES, AGENCY, ACHIE
Page 57 and 58: KABEER • REFERENCES 55 England, P
Page 59 and 60: KABEER • REFERENCES 57 Rowlands,
Page 61 and 62: McFADDEN • CULTURAL PRACTICE AS G
Page 73 and 74: McFADDEN • REFERENCES 71 - We wom
Page 75 and 76: Questions of Power: Women’s Movem
Page 77 and 78: ARNFED • QUESTIONS OF POWER 75 re
Page 79 and 80: ARNFED • QUESTIONS OF POWER 77 be
Page 81 and 82:
ARNFED • QUESTIONS OF POWER 79 al
Page 83 and 84:
ARNFED • QUESTIONS OF POWER 81 di
Page 85 and 86:
ARNFED • QUESTIONS OF POWER 83 mu
Page 87 and 88:
ARNFED • QUESTIONS OF POWER 85 19
Page 89 and 90:
ARNFED • REFERENCES 87 Hannan, Ca
Page 91 and 92:
DOMÍNGUEZ • CITIZENSHIP AND WOME
Page 93 and 94:
Page 95 and 96:
Page 97 and 98:
Page 99 and 100:
Page 101 and 102:
Page 103 and 104:
Page 105 and 106:
Page 107 and 108:
Page 109 and 110:
Page 111 and 112:
Page 113 and 114:
Page 115 and 116:
DOMÍNGUEZ • REFERENCES 113 - (19
Page 117 and 118:
SAADALLAH • GENDER AND POWER IN M
Page 119 and 120:
Page 121 and 122:
Page 123 and 124:
Page 125 and 126:
Page 127 and 128:
Page 129 and 130:
SAADALLAH • REFERENCES 127 In the
Page 131 and 132:
NOTES ON THE AUTHORS 129 al. She is
Page 133:
Acknowledgements Sida would like to
Page 136:
Clockwise from the upper left corne
show all

Discussing Women's Empowerment - Sida

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?