The first challengers

Devaki Jain on the feminists of the South and a new framework for reconstructing the very basis of economic reasoning.

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Photo: Soma Mitra Mukherjee (CARE/WFS Media Fellowships)

In the 1980s, while there was much critiquing and challenging of the development paradigm and what was called the ‘modernization project’, it was feminists of the South who first established an intellectual identity for the South, pinned on the understanding of women’s poverty and on its removal. They then challenged the development transfers, which were derived from the characterization of women of the South in the image of their northern sisters.

As the eminent development economist, Louis Emmerij, said back in 2002, “What is amazing when it comes to development thinking by and within the United Nations system is the dominance of Western ideas in an organization that is now composed of almost 200 nations and even more cultures. Starting with modernization theory, all the development approaches are “Western” and are dominated by economists. This remains true, even with strategies conceived by thinkers from the South or the East.”

However, feminist scholars and advocates revealed how the “characterizations” of women’s economic roles were dramatically different from the roles being played by their sisters in the North. At the same time, there was great similarity across the continents of the South. For example, women vendors were a part of the market scenario in most of these continents – the higglers of the Caribbean islands, the market women of Ghana and Liberia, and the street vendors of South and South-East Asia. In many parts of these regions, women were, and are, the principal wholesale and retail traders. They are also the informal banks. Home-based production was another critical economic characteristic of women in the continents of the South. Women in these continents were engaged in cultivation of food and cash crops, often owning land too – all very different from their Northern sisters.

Women for a new era
This characterization, apart from the identity it established, generated both an organized voice and theoretical intrusions into the concept of development. For example, a feminist network of the South, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), identified the “crises” in the regions – Africa’s food crisis, Latin America’s debt, South Asia’s poverty, and the militarization of the Pacific Islands – as the frameworks within which the efforts to enable women to move out of poverty needed to be located. Poor women in these regions were not only totally engaged in the economies of these countries but were suffering from, and also responding creatively to, these onslaughts. A new framework began to emerge.

DAWN’s analysis noted that only a few countries that had pursued export-led strategies for growth had gained systematic results. In fact, countries that had experienced economic booms were the same ones that had a record of growing inequality. It located the structural roots of poverty not in insufficient economic growth but in “unequal access to resources, control over production, trade, finance, and money and across nations, genders, regions, and classes”.

The South Commission
The next challenge to what could be called the “given gospel” of macro-economic reasoning came from the South Commission (1987-90), initiated by the Non-Aligned Movement and chaired by the late Dr Julius Nyerere, former President of Tanzania. At the very first meeting, the members, all economists from the continents of the South, proposed that the very language, the whole package termed “progress”, as generated by Eurocentric thought, needed to be challenged. As the world economy ran into trouble with the crisis starting in 2007, feminists of the South, in partnership with scholars from the North, analyzed the sources and offered ideas for reconstructing the very basis of economic reasoning, as well as measures of progress.

In India, for example, the potential for generating sustainable growth of output along with jobs, livelihoods is tangible. Data from official sources on the output of the small and medium enterprises, as well as hand-driven sectors, reveals a steady contribution to the output of the industrial sector, even without the support of strong public policy initiatives. Women are the predominant labour force in these forms of production and exchange.

According to Arjun Sengupta’s National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector report (published in 2009), of the total workers in the unorganized sector, 148 million (32.3%) are women. More than half of them, nearly 80 million women, do home-based work.

Even though household industry is undervalued (and not supported either), it is household savings that contribute to domestic savings, and as YV Reddy, the former Governor of India’s central bank, has pointed out, it is “domestic savers who, in any case, finance over 90% of investments…”

Wage-led growth
The South then has the potential to redesign and relocate its engines of growth. By firing these engines, it is possible to generate what can be called wage-led growth, as distinct from capital-led growth as a paradigm, and shift from the current, so-called, market-led growth – a misnomer, as markets are a lifeline for the poor in developing countries.

One of the most inspiring economic programmes for building growth and progress that is spread out has come from Gandhi himself. I call his ideas for economic progress, the ‘bubbling-up theory of growth’, as a way of challenging the current ‘trickle-down’ theory of growth. The bubbling-up theory argues that the process of the removal of poverty can itself be an engine of growth, that the incomes and capabilities of those who are currently poor have the potential to generate demand. This demand, in turn, will drive production, but the production of goods that are immediately needed by the poor, who are currently peripheral in production. The ‘oiling’ of this engine will bubble up and fire the economy in a much more broad-based manner. Unlike export-led growth, it will not skew production and trade to serve the interests of the elite, a trap which is accentuating disparities and creating discontent.

Inclusive growth
Countries of the South, and women in them, are a fertile field right now for generating industrial growth that is inclusive, in other words, which generates employment, as opposed to industrial growth that is jobless, and tends to create corporate empires and gross inequality.

Feminists of the South have revealed that women are the principal actors, but are underpaid and unrecognized in the so-called emerging economies, where success is built on the provision of cheap, unprotected labour. This phenomenon, if converted into a value through recognition, as well as through building another theory of growth, such as the bubbling-up theory of growth, means that UNIDO can fly a flag for ‘industrial development for economic justice’.

The author acknowledges the assistance provided by Deepshikha Bathej.

● Devaki Jain is an Indian activist and a development economist, best known for her work on poverty, employment and the empowerment of women. She was one of the founders of a wide range of institutions, such as Development Alternatives for Women for a New Era and the Institute of Social Studies Trust – a research centre in New Delhi where she was Director until 1994. She has served as a member of the South Commission, established in 1987, and various other committees, such as the Advisory Committee for the UNDP Human Development Report on Poverty, 1997. She has been a member of many policy- and programme-designing task forces and working groups with special reference to women’ s economic empowerment set up by the Government of India.