Social Science Assignment 12

Engendering development and disasters Sarah Bradshaw Principal Lecturer, Development Studies, Department of Law and Politics, University of Middlesex, United Kingdom

Over the last two decades the different impacts of disasters on women and men have been acknowledged, leading to calls to integrate gender into disaster risk reduction and response. This paper explores how evolving understandings of ways of integrating gender into development have influenced this process, critically analysing contemporary initiatives to ‘engender’ development that see the inclusion of women for both efficiency and equality gains. It has been argued that this has resulted in a ‘feminisation of responsibility’ that can reinforce rather than challenge gender relations. The construction of women affected by disasters as both an at-risk group and as a means to reduce risk suggests similar processes of feminisation. The paper argues that if disaster risk reduction initiatives are to reduce women’s vulnerability, they need to focus explicitly on the root causes of this vulnerability and design programmes that specifically focus on reducing gender inequalities by challenging unequal gendered power relations.

Keywords: disasters, feminisation of responsibility, gender, men, poverty, women, vulnerability

Introduction While ‘disaster’ is a contested notion (Cardona, 2004; Oliver-Smith, 2002; Quarantelli, 1998), it is usually understood that one occurs when an individual or group is vul- nerable to the impact of a natural or human-made hazard, i.e. they are unable to ‘anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from’ an event (Blaikie et al., 1994). Being a woman does not in itself lead to greater vulnerability, but women may be more vulnerable to hazards than men, given the unequal gendered power relations that limit women’s access to and control over resources. Vulnerability to an event is not based on sex or biological differences between men and women, but rather due to how society constructs what it means to be a man or a woman—i.e. what roles they should play and how they should behave—and this also influences how risk is per- ceived and responded to, with the concept being understood differently by men and women (Gustafson, 1998). Their lack of information, education and engagement with preparedness activities means that women faced by a perceived risk often do not feel that they can act, do not know when to act or do not know how to act on warnings. Socially constructed roles and norms mean that women cannot leave their homes without male permission, for example, or their roles as carers for children and the elderly slow their escape, meaning more women than men may die in an event. While reliable fatalities data disaggregated by gender and generation is still largely missing (Mazurana et al., 2011), a study by Neumayer and Plümper (2007) concluded that in countries where a disaster has occurred and where the socioeconomic status of women

doi:10.1111/disa.12111

Disasters, 2014, 39(S1): S54−S75. © 2014 The Author(s). Disasters © Overseas Development Institute, 2014 Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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is low, more women than men die, or they die at a younger age. For those women who do survive there may be longer-term and more intangible ‘secondary’ impacts such as a rise in violence or greater insecurity in employment (Bradshaw and Fordham, 2013). Disasters, then, are gendered events. The last two decades have seen an increased interest in ensuring a gender perspec- tive in post-disaster response efforts, and more recently there have been initiatives to mainstream gender into disaster risk reduction (DRR) initiatives. The Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA), which provides the global framework for DRR, is a good example of how this has been approached. Its opening section states that a gender perspective should be ‘integrated into all disaster risk management policies, plans and decision-making processes, including those related to risk assessment, early warning, information management, and education and training’ (UNISDR, 2005, p. 4). However, while it has been suggested that this provides the ‘most explicit reference to gender of any other international policy frameworks for DRR’ (see UNISDR, 2009), it is not without limitations. Most importantly, its call to integrate gender into all areas of DRR did not result in gender being integrated even into the HFA itself, and in the remainder of the document gender and women are mentioned only twice: once when discussing early-warning systems and once when discussing the need to ensure equal access to appropriate training and educational opportuni- ties. This suggests a lack of real commitment to adopting a gender perspective by the international agencies responsible for DRR. That there is a lack of commitment to integrating gender into DRR was a view shared by participants at the International Conference on Gender and Disaster Risk Reduction in 2009, who noted that gender ‘remains a marginalized issue in the current national and international negotiations around DRR and climate change adaptation’ and that gender considerations have been ‘hardly applied as a fundamental principle in policy and framework development’ (cited in UNISDR, 2009, p. 7). A survey in 2010 by the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction also suggests that gender is not being prioritised by those working in DRR. The study reviewed over 14,000 diverse pieces of material and classified them into themes and issues. This was followed by a survey of 1,856 DRR professionals to ascer- tain broad acceptance of this categorisation. It also asked them to indicate if these themes and issues were areas of specialisation and which areas needed more expertise (UNISDR, 2011). Analysis of the results shows that the highest number of respond- ents stated that ‘disaster risk management’ was their area of ‘expertise’ (61 per cent), and this also scored highly as an area needing strengthening (36 per cent). Newer areas that are key to disaster ‘risk reduction’ scored lower on both expertise and as areas needing strengthening. For example, 42 per cent of respondents said they had expertise in risk identification and only 28 per cent thought it was an area that needed strengthening, while climate change scored lower still on expertise (20 per cent), but was more readily identified as an area that needed greater expertise (35 per cent). However, the theme that scored lowest on both expertise and recognition of the need to strengthen knowledge of this area was ‘gender’, with only 13 per cent suggesting

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they had expertise in the area and 13 per cent suggesting it was an area that needs more expertise. It seems, therefore, that there is still a long way to go to convince DRR profes- sionals of the importance of adopting a gender perspective. In contrast, development professionals seem to have been more open to incorporating gender into their pro- jects and policies. The ‘success’ of efforts to integrate gender into development is witnessed by the World Bank’s commitment to ‘engender’ development via the adop- tion of a gender mainstreaming strategy in 2001, while even the most male-dominated of all the development agencies, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), proclaimed in 2012 that empowering women is just ‘smart economics’. The evolution of how women and gender have been integrated into the develop- ment process is not only more ‘advanced’ than the same processes in disasters, but also much better documented (see El Bushra, 2000; Kabeer, 1994; Moser, 1993; Ostergaard, 1992; Saunders, 2002; Young, 1993). This paper seeks to begin to redress the balance, exploring how gender has been incorporated into disaster policy and practice to date. It draws on the processes to ‘engender’ development in order to better understand processes to integrate gender into disasters. It begins with a consideration of the early stages of integrating women into development, before exploring the advances made in promoting gender as an issue in disasters. It then examines how gender has been integrated into relief and reconstruction in practice, using the debates within gender and development to problematise this. The next section considers more recent advances in engendering development, examining the notion of gender mainstreaming and how this operates in development policy, using the World Bank as a case study. The final section extends these ideas of engendering development to the disasters field, highlighting lessons to be learned.

Integrating women and gender into development Initial theorising around development presented the process as gender neutral. While the two main theories of development—modernisation theory and dependency theory—make no explicit mention of women or gender, the inherent assumption was that policies and projects that help men would also help women. The turning point came in 1970 with the publication of Boserup’s landmark text Women’s Role in Economic Development, which effectively demonstrated that ‘development’—or, rather, processes of modernisation—can harm women. While critiqued in turn (see Saunders, 2002), her work was ground breaking at the time since it illustrated that policies were not gender neutral, but based on gendered assumptions. Boserup’s work made clear the negative impact development could have on women and instigated a movement to integrate women into development. In particular, it is said to have helped inspire the UN Decade for Women (1976–1985) and a series of UN World Conferences on Women starting with a meeting in Mexico in 1975, followed by meetings in Copenhagen (1980) and Nairobi (1985). The fourth and last full meet- ing was held in 1995 in Beijing and the resultant Beijing Platform for Action now acts

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as a framework for annual sessions to review progress. The movement to integrate women into development is generally seen to have two key ideological threads— Women in Development (WID) and Gender and Development (GAD). WID emerged in the 1970s and set out to deliberately target more development resources at women. It has its roots in liberal feminism and was and is the acceptable face of engendering development, and, it could be argued, also more recently disas- ters. Women’s subordination was seen to stem from their exclusion from the market sphere, and their limited access to and control over resources. The key to change was seen to be via laws and legislation around education and employment to effectively place women ‘in’ existing processes, i.e. the aim was to maximise women’s access to the ‘modern’ sector. While women’s significant productive contribution was made visible, their reproductive role was downplayed. Women’s ‘problem’ was diagnosed as insufficient participation in a benign development process because of an oversight by policymakers. As the name suggests, WID sought to integrate women into exist- ing development processes. However, this integration did not stretch to integration into development agencies, and instead WID led to the setting up of separate offices and officers (Rathgeber, 1990). For many, while WID interventions have made women more visible in the devel- opment process, the way in which this has taken place is problematic (Bandarage, 1984; Jaquette, 1982; Parpart, 1993). Critics questioned if you could—and, more importantly, should—just try and integrate women, or ‘add women and stir’. Those who questioned the dominant development discourse of modernisation also ques- tioned the benefits for women that being more integrated into this process would bring. There was also a suggestion that the focus on women constructed them as ‘the problem’, rather than locating this in the unequal gender roles and relations that form the basis of gender subordination. While most literature presents GAD as emerging as a counter-movement to WID, it is important to note that one other development occurred before the move from WID to GAD. Women And Development (WAD) saw one very small change lin- guistically, but one very large shift ideologically. It could be suggested that if WID was a reflection of modernisation theory, then WAD is a gendered dependency theory. WAD located gender struggle in the structure of capitalism, so—as with Marxist feminists—it privileged capitalism over patriarchy. For this reason the extent to which it actually had an explicit aim to ‘engender’ development or the extent to which it was ‘properly feminist’ was questioned (Saunders, 2002, p. 7), and while it is part of the WID–GAD progression, it is often overlooked. The more usual counterpoint to the WID school has been GAD. Here two changes may be seen to arise in response to the criticisms levelled at WID above—from ‘in’ to ‘and’, and ‘women’ to ‘gender’. The change to ‘gender’ reflects the fact that it is not women that are the problem, but the unequal power relations between men and women, while ‘and’ suggests the need to explore both gender and development. In other words, it is not sufficient to add women to existing processes of development, but it is also essential to problematise such development. The focus on gender suggests

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that rather than looking at women in isolation, there is a need to address the imbal- ance of power between women and men. The resultant projects are not just about improving women’s access to income generation or girls’ access to education, but are focused on challenging the social norms that keep girls from attending school and the structural inequalities that mean women earn less than men for comparable work, for example. This approach also gives special attention to the oppression of women in the family and highlights the need for policy initiatives to enter the ‘private’ sphere. While attractive in theory, GAD has its origins in academic thinking and may be seen to be a more theoretical understanding than the practically oriented focus of WID. Initially non-governmental organisations (NGOs) embraced GAD, but more recently institutions such as the World Bank have stated that they follow a GAD approach. However, while many say they have a GAD approach, what they often do in practice is WID (Rathgeber, 1990)—a criticism that may also be levelled at recent attempts to gender disasters (see below). Although WID and GAD are the two mainstream approaches to engendering development adopted by both international development agencies and NGOs, other approaches also exist. In particular those working with grass-roots women’s organi- sations and Third World feminists became disillusioned with both WID and GAD. They questioned the extent to which it was possible to generalise about women’s situation and position, suggesting such thinking had led to the construction of Third World women as a homogeneous group of ‘benighted, overburdened beasts, help- lessly entangled in the tentacles of regressive Third World patriarchy’ (Parpart, 1995, p. 254). In contrast, the Third World feminist tradition highlighted diversity and difference (see Mohanty, 1991), emphasising that inequalities of power exist on many levels, not just male/female, but rich/poor and First World/Third World. It suggested the need to recognise that women inhabit multiple sites of oppression and what is seen to be a key issue for a low-income woman may be as much class-based as gender based-discrimination. Just as there are multiple sites of oppression, there is also the need to address multiple inequalities of power. The ‘empowerment approach’ places a consideration of power relations as central (see Rowlands, 1997). The critique from women from the Global South that ‘Third World’ women were being constructed by WID/GAD as a homogeneous group of oppressed ‘others’ (Mohanty, 2003) promoted debate around both approaches, but they were also being questioned by another set of critics. By the end of the 1990s what had variously been defined as ‘men in crisis’ or ‘troubled masculinities’ were recognised (Chant, 2000, p. 7). This supposed crisis arose in part from the success of WID/GAD, which meant that girls were ‘over-achieving’ compared to boys in education, for example, but also processes of globalisation had seen the rise of women’s employment and men’s under- or unemployment and, related to this, women assuming decision-making roles in households. At the same time men had been generalised as lazy in the development discourse (Whitehead, 2000), sitting around talking while women work, and it was suggested that gender discourse had constructed men as ‘lurking’ in the background imagined as ‘powerful and oppositional figures’ (Cornwall, 1998, p. 46), and that

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through this ‘gender roles and relations’ had become shorthand for inherently oppo- sitional relations. In practical if not in ideological terms, the case had been presented that men needed to be explicitly included in development. From the start some questioned the exist- ence of this ‘crisis of masculinity’ (see Chant and Gutmann, 2000), not least since problems of ‘masculinity’ might be better read as problems emerging from processes of globalisation and related to a crisis in international capitalism rather than gender. The masculinity projects that sprang up led to more questioning, since many pro- jects focused on male subjectivities—the personal constructions and understandings of ‘maleness’ and the implications of this for relationships with others. The focus reinforced men as self-reflecting subjects and complex individuals, yet the ‘Third World woman’ remained positioned as an object of subordination, not least since women rarely have the luxury to reflect on their ‘femaleness’—a luxury even less accessible when men’s projects compete for limited funding from the gender funding pot. More importantly for some, masculinity projects seemed to forget the vested interest men have in resisting change and the inherent contradiction in the aim to ‘empower men to dis-empower themselves’ (Redman, 1994). Pearson (2000, p. 44) suggests the construction of men as being in crisis at that time might have little to do with any real crisis of masculinity, but rather may be seen ultimately as aiming to dilute the radical women-focused development agenda that had arisen. More generally, by the turn of the millennium the advances made in pro- moting women’s rights were under attack. The 1990s had witnessed the ‘rise of rights’ (Eyben, 2003), with many organisations and international development agencies adopt- ing some form of ‘rights-based approach’ to development (Molyneux and Lazar, 2003; Piron, 2005), and within this the concepts of reproductive health, reproductive rights and sexual rights had become popularised (Petchesky, 2000). While the rights-based approach has not been without its critics (see IDS, 2005; Molyneux and Cornwall, 2008; Tsikata, 2004), the potential of rights for increasing recognition of women’s demands as legitimate claims has made rights particularly attractive to women’s move- ments. Some of the most effective organising over the past two decades has been around rights-related claims (Antrobus, 2004; Ruppert, 2002), including perhaps the greatest achievement—recognition of the fact that women should live free from violence as a ‘right’. Yet despite the agreements made at international conferences on women’s rights and the advances made in including women in development practice, for many gender activists the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) highlighted that a backlash had begun. Launched in 2000, the MDGs were to frame the development agenda until 2015. What was included and excluded has been important in ideological and funding terms. While the MDGs contain a goal focused on gender equality and women’s empower- ment, they make no mention of sexual and reproductive rights, while ending vio- lence against women is also missing. This led some gender activists to declare that the abbreviation MDG is better understood as ‘Most Distracting Gimmick’ (Antrobus, 2004). Since the MDGs were formulated there have been some more positive devel- opments, such as the formation of UN Women in 2010. This merged four key UN

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initiatives promoting the empowerment of women and seeks to hold the UN system accountable for its own commitments on gender equality. UN Women also seek to influence inter-governmental bodies in their formulation of policies, global standards and norms, including, as the MDGs come to an end, the ongoing process to formu- late a post-2015 development agenda and a new set of ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs). The illustrative goals presented to the UN by the High Level Panel in June 2013 suggests advances from the MDGs, with violence against women proposed as a specific target and the explicit mention of sexual and reproductive health and rights. However, it is the Open Working Group of the General Assembly that has the ultimate responsibility for agreeing on a proposal on the SDGs, and a communiqué in February 2014 at the conclusion of the ‘stocktaking phase’ of the process suggests that the inclusion of sexual rights in any new set of goals is far from agreed. While the ‘exclusion’ of gendered rights from initiatives such as the MDGs has been a focus for gender activists of feminists over the decades, more recently the inclusion of gender has been problematised, and nowhere more so than in the poli- cies and projects of the World Bank and its plan to engender development through gender mainstreaming. Before considering the contemporary development land- scape further, an examination of processes to date to integrate gender into disasters is first needed.

The road to gendering disasters While Boserup’s work has been identified as the moment when a movement toward integrating gender into development emerged, no such defined movement to integrate gender into disasters in global agencies and agendas or official disaster discourse exists. Outside of the formal processes such as UN initiatives, perhaps the most coherent ‘movement’ in the gender and disasters field is the Gender and Disasters Network (GDN). This being said, many people working in the field of gender and disasters remain unaware of this organisation and its work. Conceptualised in 1997 as a re- sponse to a gender gap in disaster analysis and practice, it is presented as unique in its ‘strategy of engendering Disaster Risk Reduction by taking advantage of the virtual space created by the World Wide Web’ and it has become a ‘legitimate and respected voice for gender and disasters issues’ (Sanz et al., 2009, p. 15). Just as research was a key factor in initiating the WID movement and as the basis of the GAD approach, the importance of promoting and disseminating quality research has not been lost on the founders and members of the GDN, and it has become a repository for gender and disaster knowledge. Tierney (2012, p. 245) suggests that the field of disaster research has been charac- terised by a series of ‘critical disjunctures’, with discontinuities in research and the systematic neglect of some topics, and even collective resistance to the introduction of new ideas. In the field of disaster studies gender might be seen to be one such topic, and it has suffered from ‘periodic lapses of attention’ (Anderson, 2012). In 1982 Rivers published a key paper exploring gender differences and discrimination in disasters,

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and since then the production of gendered disasters knowledge has made large advances. The end of the 1990s saw one of the main disasters journals, the International Socio- logical Association’s International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters, publish its first special edition dedicated to women and disasters, and in the interim decade a number of edited texts have focused on gender and disasters, starting with The Gendered Terrain of Disasters (Enarson and Morrow, 1998). In 2009 Fordham edited a special edition of the journal Regional Development Dialogue dedicated to ‘Gender and Disas- ter Management’, and in the same year an edited collection on Women, Gender and Disasters (Enarson and Chakrabarti, 2009) was published. These texts include con- tributions from a wide range of scholars and practitioners from a variety of countries, including scholars from the Third World, demonstrating how the field has expanded. While texts have considered disasters and development (see, for example, Pelling, 2003), it was not until 2013 that the first text dedicated to better understanding gen- der and disasters in the developing-world context was published (Bradshaw, 2013). Towards the end of the 20th century events such as Hurricane Mitch in Central America saw advances in terms of understanding how gender roles, relations, and identities are constructed and reconstructed in the context of disasters (see, for exam- ple, Bradshaw, 2001; Cupples, 2007). High-profile events during the early part of the new millennium, including the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, meant an upsurge in case studies and survivor narratives (see, for example, Oxfam International, 2009) and accounts from field workers that focused on both women and men (see, for exam- ple, Clarke and Murray, 2010). Research after Hurricane Katrina allowed new voices to be heard (see, for example, David and Enarson, 2012) and brought new directions in gendered research (see, for example, D’Ooge, 2008; Fothergill and Peek, 2008; Gault et al., 2005), and advances in the theoretical discussions on the meaning of disasters (see, for example, Brunsma, Overfelt and Picou, 2007). The GDN Gender and Disasters Sourcebook (2006) initiative has sought to disseminate existing studies such as these and to publicise good practice by making resources available via the internet to academics and practitioners. Although such virtual forums are important, a number of conferences have also brought together those working in the field, illustrating how thinking around gender in the disaster context has evolved. The 1998 ‘Women and Disaster’ conference in Vancouver was followed in 2000 by the meeting in Miami with the theme ‘Reaching Women and Children in Disasters’. In 2004 about a hundred women and men met to discuss ‘Gender Equality and Disaster Risk Reduction’. The change in titles from ‘Reaching Women and Children’ at the 2000 conference to ‘Gender Equality’ at the 2004 conference parallels the shift in language witnessed in the gender and develop- ment field. For the first time, during the 2004 meeting a breakaway discussion was held largely consisting of men. It identified the current practice of focusing discus- sions on identifying and mitigating women’s vulnerabilities as ‘limiting in the long run’ and called for engaging with ‘men and boys in equal measure’ (Mishra, 2009, p. 35). This move toward reasserting masculinities also demonstrates parallels with the changing and contested gender and development discourse.

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The 2004 conference led to the Honolulu Call to Action (see Anderson, 2009), which calls for disaster risk, gender, social equity, and environmental issues to be considered in an integrated way and highlights the gaps in the MDGs in terms of DRR and gender. The GDN has since gone on to seek to influence the interna- tional policy dialogue, with a delegation being invited to make an oral and written statement at the 2007 ‘Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction’ in Geneva, for example, and through involvement in the discussions around the development of the second phase of the HFA post-2015. Some progress has therefore been made since the late1990s, when Fordham (1998) noted that the incorporation of a gender focus into disaster work had still not advanced much further than revealing the situation of women, and that—if addressed at all— gender had been integrated into disaster practice as a demographic variable or per- sonality trait and not as the basis for a complex and dynamic set of social relations (Enarson, 2000). Yet as late as Hurricane Katrina in 2005 the ‘not noticing’ (Saeger, 2012) of the gendered dimension of the disaster by the media and expert responders alike was highlighted, and despite the advances made by those working in the field, it seems that gender is yet to be fully mainstreamed in humanitarian relief, integrated into research and field projects undertaken by the major disaster centres, and included in disaster training courses (Enarson and Meyreles, 2004). The gendering of the dominant disasters discourse has advanced slowly. Where the most rapid advances have been made is not in the integration of women into DRR, but the inclusion of women in post-disaster reconstruction activities.

Women in development and disasters in practice In the contemporary post-disaster context, studies suggest that women are included in the reconstruction projects, and are targeted as beneficiaries and participants. For example, as far back as 1998 an evaluation of projects post-Hurricane Mitch financed with funds through the Disasters Emergency Committee (ECA, 2000) concluded that the projects ‘tended to favour women and children in the distribution of products and services’ and that women were included as:

• beneficiaries of the self-construction of houses with the title issued in the woman’s name;

• participants in construction projects (roads, houses, bridges), which helped break certain stereotypes regarding their capacity to work; and

• beneficiaries of productive programmes in order to reduce their economic vulner- ability. These included chicken rearing, agricultural projects, the manufacturing of cement blocks for construction, and agricultural aid.

Women were also recipients of direct economic aid when, as part of a packet of cash given to each household, an amount was allocated directly to them. Some evalua- tions mentioned this as marking ‘a step forward’ for women. However, it was also

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recognised that such packets of economic aid for women did not help them free them- selves from the ‘oppressive power structures’ in the household and community (ECA, 2000). The way in which these evaluations describe the projects and women’s inclu- sion suggests the focus of reconstruction overall was very much on a WID approach. These projects provided women with access to resources, while the power struc- tures underlying women’s lack of equality of access were not tackled. Dealing with these would have a required a different approach that addressed the more strategic gender interests of women rather than just their practical gender needs (see Molyneux, 1985; Moser 1989). The inclusion of women’s practical needs in reconstruction initiatives is fundamen- tal for post-disaster recovery. Practical needs arise from an immediate perceived need and are formulated from the existing concrete conditions. However, many of the needs defined as basic needs of women are also those of all male and female members of the family, such as the provision of water, health, housing, and basic services and food. They are identified as the practical needs of women because it is they who assume responsibility for them. Women’s practical needs therefore derive from the (unequal) position of women in the gendered division of labour, and responding to these needs may reinforce unequal gender power relations rather than challenge them. In contrast, strategic gender needs are perhaps best thought of as the transforma- tions necessary to change the unequal situation between men and women. Focusing on women’s strategic interests demands the questioning of the nature of the relations between men and women with the aim of overcoming women’s subordination. Addressing strategic needs covers issues like the elimination of institutionalised forms of discrimination such as the right to land ownership, or instituting measures against intra-family violence, for example. Strategic gender needs/interests place the focus on women’s rights rather than their existing responsibilities. Post-disaster there is often the suggestion that there is no space to consider women’s gendered rights, because the more important task of providing material relief takes precedence. Post-event, projects that focus on strategic interests struggle to find fund- ing (Bradshaw, 2004). Moreover, gender training and consciousness-raising activi- ties may not be female participants’ priority when they are trying to find resources to ensure their households’ survival. While for some, practical needs must be met before more strategic concerns can be broached, for others meeting women’s practical needs can only reinforce their sub- ordinate position, not overcome it. For example, even when women’s participation in reconstruction projects provides practical benefits, the resources gained through their participation may be afforded a different and lesser value than resources ‘earned’ through male paid labour (Bradshaw, 2004). Providing resources to women—even non-traditional resources such as housing titles or more livestock—without tackling the household relations that limit women’s ability to enjoy the benefits of these resources will produce no real change. Impact evaluations often see projects as success- ful by calculating the amount of resources allocated and to whom—X number of cows to X number of women. They do not evaluate what difference giving resources to

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women actually makes to their lives or if they do actually benefit from them. As noted of one project that ‘gave’ cows to women, the outcome was that ‘the women have their cows and the men are drinking the milk’ (Bradshaw, 2001). The benefit to the women ‘beneficiaries’ of this project is questionable. As this suggests, projects that address women’s practical needs may change gender roles, but do not necessarily bring changes to gender relations, because the latter changes demand projects that specifically address unequal power relations. The impact of projects such as the one discussed above on household and couple relations is often ignored. Some research suggests that projects with a more ‘strategic’ focus, i.e. those that focus more on training and awareness raising, may provoke greater levels of conflict and arguments in households, but this does not necessarily translate into violence against women (Bradshaw, 2004). In contrast, projects with a more ‘practical’ needs focus may not lead to arguments, but may increase violence against women, because resources may be physically taken from women by men or men may react badly to resources being focused on women. This can be understood in the context in which reconstruction occurs, where any ‘crisis of masculinity’ noted in the development literature may be heightened by an event that reveals men’s ina- bility to fulfil their socially prescribed roles. The losses sustained during a disaster demonstrate that men could not protect their families and goods, and the need for aid demonstrates that they cannot provide for their families. Instead of supporting men to return to their provider role, the focus on women in reconstruction projects may further undermine the male role as aid agencies become the new providers to and protectors of women and children, and indirectly then to men. Not only does this disempower men, but the very nature of the asymmetrical power relationship in which assistance is bestowed from First World to Third World, from male aid work- ers to female ‘beneficiaries’, aims or expects to elicit their gratitude and ‘symbolically disempowers’ women also (Hyndman and de Alwis, 2003, p. 218). For some commentators, the idea that projects that suggest they aim to empower women may actually do the opposite is not a sign of a poorly designed project, but indicative of the nature of contemporary strategies to ‘engender’ development and, more recently, disasters.

Engendering development The latest evolution in how to incorporate gender into development has seen pro- cesses of engendering via gender mainstreaming (see Mukhopadhyay, 2004; Porter and Sweetman, 2005; True and Mintrom, 2001; Walby, 2005; Woodford-Berger, 2004). This includes the World Bank’s adoption of gender mainstreaming in 2001. However, the initial calls to mainstream gender into development had come much earlier from feminists at the Beijing conference in 1995. The call at Beijing was in reac- tion to concerns not only over the lack of progress in the implementation of WID/ GAD, but also that such approaches did not truly deal with the structural issues or

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underlying causes of women’s subordination. To address this it was suggested that gender equality concerns needed to be integrated into the analyses and formulation of policies and projects, and initiatives were needed that enabled both women and men to participate in decision-making across all issues, i.e. the need to address both policies and the policymaking processes. This vision of mainstreaming is based on a desire for transformation, not only of women’s lives, but also of the agencies and institutions that make the policies that affect their lives. However, mainstreaming in practice has adopted less a transformative and more an integrationist approach. Walby’s (2005) analysis suggests that three approaches should be adopted for gender to be effectively mainstreamed:

• an inclusion approach that entails the equal treatment of women (and men) in inter- actions with them, including in development projects and programmes;

• a participatory approach that suggests listening to and including women in planning and policy processes and incorporating their perspectives into the products of these processes; and

• a gendered approach that would mean analysing gendered power relations and how these are affected by particular work in particular contexts in order to address gen- der imbalances

In practice the third aspect—the gendered approach—has rarely been part of the process and is most resisted, since it challenges the vested interests of men, who remain the majority of those working in and for development, especially in large and influential institutions such as the World Bank and IMF (Stevens, 2007). It is the approach to mainstreaming adopted by agencies such as the World Bank rather than mainstreaming as such that has been criticised. They have adopted a techni- cal approach that makes gender just another category to be included in policies, with little thought or analysis and often with a focus on providing for practical needs rather than addressing strategic interests. As just another box to be ticked, the inclusion of gender poses little challenge to the status quo. Once mainstreamed, gender becomes the responsibility of all—or the responsibility of no one—and may actually make it more difficult to ensure that women’s concerns are addressed (see Mukhopadhyay, 2004). Moreover, the World Bank’s mainstreaming strategy has been justified on efficiency grounds, promoting mainstreaming to male economists via promises of the economic growth gains it will bring. The bank’s mainstreaming strategy was backed up by a policy research report entitled Engendering Development (World Bank, 2001b) that exam- ined the conceptual and empirical links among gender, public policy and develop- ment outcomes. It had one clear conclusion: societies that discriminate by gender tend to experience less rapid economic growth and poverty reduction than those that treat males and females more equally. This and earlier research was used to highlight that improved gender equity can bring economic growth gains (see Dollar and Gatti, 1999; Klasen, 1999). The World Bank Gender and Development Group highlights in particular the benefits that investment in human capital, especially girls’ and women’s education and health, brings (WBGDG, 2003, p. 6), suggesting that if the countries

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of Africa had closed the gender gap in schooling between 1960 and 1992 as quickly as East Asia did, this would have produced close to a doubling of per capita income growth in the region (WBGDG, 2003, p. 12). The logic is that ‘educated, healthy women are more able to engage in productive activities, find formal sector employ- ment, earn higher incomes and enjoy greater returns to schooling than are uneducated women’ (WBGDG, 2003, p. 6). The continued WID focus is clear from this. While seemingly logical, it ignores the fact that unequal relationships of power in the home and male control may limit women’s ability to engage in productive activities out- side the home or lead to conflict if they do so, especially if they earn higher wages than men. It also ignores the fact that women still tend to be responsible for domestic work in the home and will face a double day of reproductive and productive work. The World Bank’s suggestion that girls’ attendance at school could be enhanced by providing a source of clean water close to school for them to carry home after their school day is over (WBGDG, 2003, p. 12) further demonstrates that this ‘engen- dering’ does not seek to challenge gender roles, let alone gender relations, and may actually reinforce gender stereotypes. Ultimately, women are seen to be an efficient means to achieve wider economic goals. For example, the World Bank has noted that social gender disparities result in a reduced ability among the poor to manage risk (World Bank, 2001a, p. 27) and thus produce economically inefficient outcomes. It has been suggested that improving women’s access to risk management tools will bring efficiency and equity gains (Holzmann and Kozel, 2007). However, the fact that World Bank documentation states that ‘gender-sensitive development strategies contribute significantly to eco- nomic growth as well as to equity objectives’ (World Bank, 2001b, p. 3, emphasis added) suggest that for the bank, gender equity or women’s empowerment is a secondary concern, a byproduct of policies designed to promote economic growth gains. It is this instrumentalist approach to including women in contemporary development pro- cesses that is the target of feminist critiques. The extent to which this approach is mirrored in the disasters discourse will now be explored.

‘Gendering’ disasters From Hurricane Mitch onwards studies suggest evidence for a move towards women becoming key ‘beneficiaries’ of reconstruction and being actively sought out by NGOs and other agencies to be central to the organised response to disasters. What is being questioned here is not if women are being targeted, nor that women should be targeted, but why women are currently being targeted. While, of course, the targeting of resources at women may stem from a moral position to use the often-mentioned ‘window of opportunity’ for transformation opened up by disasters to advance their position and situation, the lack of studies that demonstrate long-term post-event changes in gender relations suggests that a policy assumption is being made that such a window exists. More generally, the focus on

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women is justified by highlighting that a disaster has a gendered impact, with women suffering most from such an event. For example, a recent UN initiative suggested that ‘women always tend to suffer most from the impact of disasters’ (UN/ADPC, 2010, p. 8); however, data to support this assertion is largely lacking. While women may face a ‘double disaster’, suffering a post-event deterioration in economic and social well-being, including an increase in violence and sexual violence (Bradshaw and Fordham, 2013), the impact of the event is generally measured in terms of loss of life or material loss. Data on disaster deaths is still often not disaggregated by gender, while material losses tend to be measured at the macro level of infrastructure and productive assets. Even when individual losses are recorded, they are at the level of the household, and any comparison is then between male-headed and female-headed households, not men and women. A review of a report by Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID, 2004, p. 3) highlights that in the absence of data, policy assumptions are being made about who will be impacted and why. The report singles out female household heads, suggesting that ‘female-headed households in developing countries are amongst those most asset-poor and have been found to be among those most affected by natural disasters’. Given that data to support this statement is not provided, it demonstrates that a series of assumptions are being made: it is assumed that female heads are more vulnerable; they are more vulnerable because they are poorer; and because they are poor they suffer more losses. While not to negate the importance of tackling gendered poverties in any way, the assumptions being made by organisations such as DFID can be contested. The construction of female-headed households as the ‘poorest of the poor’ has been contested in itself and as part of a wider critique of the ‘feminisation of poverty’ thesis. It ignores the ‘secondary poverty’ suffered by women and children in male-headed households from male heads withholding income for personal consumption (Chant, 2008a), meaning that while the household is not poor, women and children in the household are. However, even when accepting women’s relative poverty as a fact, while poverty is a key component of vulnerability it is not the only nor necessarily the best component in terms of predicting impact. Using poverty as a proxy for vul- nerability ignores factors such as social norms and relations that inform individual status and individual response. Considering loss of life, while since the Indian Ocean tsunamis it has become something of received wisdom to assert that more women die in such events, care is needed, given men’s socially prescribed riskier behaviour in the face of danger in societies such as those in Latin America, which may put men more at risk. The basis for a feminised loss of life during disasters now seems to rest on an often-cited study of 141 countries which found that where the socioeconomic status of women is low, more women than men die or die at a younger age (Neumayer and Plümper, 2007). While a welcome development, caution is needed, since the study does not analyse gender-disaggregated data on disaster-related deaths, since such data still does not exist. It instead uses a series of data sets to create indicators of disaster strength and women’s

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socioeconomic status, and explores how these relate to the size of the gender gap in life expectancy in the selected countries. What it suggests is that it is not poverty alone that explains this gender gap, questioning the policy assumption that poverty can be taken as a proxy for vulnerability. Moreover, even if this study did provide conclusive proof that more women than men die, it does not provide support for targeting resources at women post-event. In fact, it suggests the opposite policy pre- scription, and that resources should be provided to men, because they are more likely to survive and be left to care for others. If the loss of life cannot justify a policy focus on women, loss of material resources might explain the targeting of resources at women, the assumption then being that women will incur heavier losses than men. Again, a feminised calculation of loss is questionable, especially in absolute terms, as is the extent to which this can be asserted with any certainty, as noted above. It has been suggested that disasters should be understood in terms of the response to them rather than the physical damage they cause, in that they tell us not so much about actual loss, but rather about how loss is understood (Dynes, 1998). What may then explain the post-event targeting of women and especially female heads is not so much the actual situation, but per- ceptions of their situation. Female heads are targeted because they are assumed to be poorer, and as such assumed to be more vulnerable, and as such their loss is assumed to be greater. The constructions of gendered poverty in the development discourse are of impor- tance in understanding these constructions of women and women household heads in this discourse. The notion of a ‘feminisation of poverty’ acquired something of its current status as a global ‘orthodoxy’ in 1995 when the eradication of the ‘persistent and increasing burden of poverty on women’ was adopted as part of the Beijing Platform for Action (Chant, 2008b). The feminisation-of-poverty thesis has over time come to be equated with more women being poor and more women being among the poor, that this is a rising trend, and that it is related to a feminisation of house- hold headship. Underpinning this is the notion of women heads as being the poorest of the poor. However, while these ideas appear to have become received wisdom, there is little research to support claims that women’s relative income poverty is at the suggested scale and is increasing over time. Research also fails to confirm any con- sistent linkage between the ‘feminisation of poverty’ and the ‘feminisation of house- hold headship’ (Chant, 2008a). Jackson (1996) called for a move to ‘rescue’ gender from this ‘poverty trap’, noting that the dangers of equating gender and poverty may mean that policies to address poverty are assumed to automatically address gender inequality or are implemented in the name of women and gender equality. This inclusion of women to address poverty rather than because of their own expe- rience of inequality may help to explain why the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean found that the percentage of women participating in poverty reduction programmes in the region was actually much higher than the percentage of women identified as poor (ECLAC, 2004). This high ‘participation’ of women in poverty reduction programmes has led some to suggest that, rather than

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the feminisation of poverty, we should talk of the ‘feminisation of poverty alleviation’ (Chant, 2008b), whereby women are being constructed not as the most poor, but as the most efficient means by which to reduce the number of poor people. While women are expected to take on a new role as the ‘beneficiary’ of projects that provide economic resources for the household, and in particular children, this new role is conceptualised as part of women’s existing gendered roles as mothers and carers. Women, then, are at the service of the new poverty agenda rather than being served by it, and the ‘motherisation’ of the gendered poverty agenda does little to change the situation and position of women (Molyneux, 2006, 2007). This femi- nisation or motherisation is not confined to policies aimed at reducing poverty, nor to development policy more generally, but has been noted in environmental poli- cies also, constructing an ‘ecomaternalism’ that targets women as the victims of environmental degradation, but also as the virtuous protectors of the environment (Arora-Jonsson, 2011). When considering post-disaster relief and reconstruction efforts in this light, the focus on women as beneficiaries of aid becomes clearer, with women being targeted as ‘virtuous victims’. As with recent development initiatives, while policy interven- tions are justified by constructing women as victims, it is their assumed virtuous behaviour that may really explain this targeting: women are targeted not because they need help, but because they are seen as being better at providing help. Women’s inclusion may therefore be less based on a perceived feminised vulnerability, but the opposite: on the understanding that women are better able to distribute resources to vulnerable others (Bradshaw, 2010). Learning from development, resources given to women post-disaster are not ‘wasted’, but rather are used by them for the good of the household. Efficiency rather than vulnerability, then, may be at the heart of gendered reconstruction projects, and not only individual women are targeted. Recent large-scale disasters have highlighted the important role played by women’s networks and women’s groups in the organised response. Post-disaster, many women’s groups and individual women immediately assume the role of carer. The ‘feminist’ response to challenge gender stereotypical roles appears to be overruled—at least in the short term—by a socialised gendered response to care for others. These stereo- typical caring roles that women take on are then further reinforced by international actors and international aid, which seek out women and women’s groups as the ‘beneficiaries’ of projects, thus reinforcing the notion of a feminised responsibility to care (Bradshaw, 2009). Far from challenging women’s stereotypical roles, reconstruction initiatives may instead reinforce them, making response to disasters another element of women’s caring role. Yet while women’s activities expand, this expansion of activities occurs in terms of existing gendered roles and the activities are conceptualised as reproduc- tive rather than productive, i.e. as part of women’s ‘natural’ roles. As such, these new activities are afforded little value, and given that there is no perceived change in gender roles, there may be no associated change in gender relations. The focus on women may therefore bring few benefits to women.

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Conclusion Attempts to ‘engender’ development have been ongoing since the 1970s and are not only more advanced than similar attempts to include a gender perspective in the disaster discourse, but also have received much more scrutiny. Processes to gender disasters have been ongoing for a number of years, yet while there has been some evidence of gender entering the mainstream, it remains rather marginal to central debates. In contrast, while in the 1970s the battle was to ensure that women were included in development, by the mid-2000s this had been achieved and the focus changed to one of questioning that inclusion. The instrumentalist approach to engen- dering development, with its focus on women as the efficient providers of economic growth gains, has led gender activists and feminists to suggest that at times the inclu- sion of women in development processes is as problematic as their exclusion. What a discussion of engendering development illustrates is that how women are included, or gender is mainstreamed, is as important as whether it occurs, and it cannot be assumed that women’s inclusion is necessarily or always a good thing. Over time women have been increasingly constructed as a vulnerable group in the face of natural hazards and they have been included in post-disaster relief and reconstruction. However, targeting resources at women should not be read as neces- sarily addressing women’s vulnerability and poverty, nor should a ‘gendered’ response be seen to be necessarily aimed at improving the situation and position of women. While gendered post-event projects may seek to use the hypothesised ‘window of opportunity’ to address gender inequalities, many projects, rather than addressing women’s strategic interests, actually focus on responding to ‘their’ practical needs. The focus on women post-disaster may therefore be driven less by a desire to chal- lenge gender stereotypical roles than by an understanding of the efficiency gains to be made through utilising existing gendered roles and relations. A key lesson to be learned from the gender and development literature is that why and how women are included do matter, with contemporary processes placing women at the service of the development agenda. Similarly, the current targeting of resources at women as the virtuous victims of disasters brings efficiency gains justified in equal- ity terms. If the disasters agenda is going to serve women, rather than women being at its service, a different approach needs to be adopted that addresses women’s strategic interests rather than just their practical needs. While including women and girls in disaster response may reduce disaster risk overall, unless disaster risk reduction and response activities specifically address gen- der inequalities, they will not change the situation and position of women. They will not therefore address the root causes of women’s vulnerability, but merely better respond to the outcomes of that vulnerability. It is inequities in the everyday, and not just in times of disaster, that create greater risk and reduce life chances for women and girls. If disasters are to learn from development, the key lesson is not that gender matters, but that how gender is addressed matters. The way to reduce disaster risk is through gender equality, and the only way to promote gender equality is through specific programmes and projects that look to address unequal gendered power rela- tions during, after and—most critically—before a disaster.

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Acknowledgements My thanks to Brian Linneker for comments on an earlier draft of this paper and to the anonymous peer reviewers.

Correspondence Dr Sarah Bradshaw, Department of Law and Politics, University of Middlesex, London NW4 4BT, United Kingdom. E-mail: [email protected]

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ARTICLE

Advancing the Disaster and Development Paradigm

Andrew E. Collins1

Published online: 12 December 2018 ! The Author(s) 2018

Abstract Consolidation of disaster and development studies as an integrated field of action research that influ-

ences policy has proved to be fundamental to global dis-

aster risk reduction, sustainable development, climate change, and humanitarian agreements. However, chal-

lenges in achieving targets, such as those of the Sendai

Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals, requires further advances

of the disaster and development paradigm underpinning

these aspirations. This article presents perspectives that grew primarily from local action research, particularly

research carried out with marginalized and highly at-risk

groups of people in Southern Africa and South Asia. Analytical fronts from these findings emphasize disaster

and development risk assessment opportunities that con-

solidate earlier ideas and extend understanding of disaster and development-related risk intervention options. These

acknowledge severe shortcomings in disaster risk reduction

progress while including greater use of hope as an active ingredient. This process of paradigm exploration remains

fundamental to achieving disaster risk reduction, sustain- able development, and associated policy objectives. The

analysis presented here reiterates earlier groundings in

people-centric perspectives, emphasizing social relations and systems of meaning as essential active ingredients for

challenging power structures, technology, education, and

human behavior. The analysis proposes some consequent thematic fronts for increased investment. These include

investing in early buildup of well-being before a disaster, better living with uncertainty, and overcoming the barriers

to desired disaster and development outcomes. The article

is intended to contribute to an ever-evolving paradigm of disaster and development risk that requires impetus from

personal and collective values beyond calculations of dis-

aster and development.

Keywords Disaster and development

paradigm ! Disaster risk reduction ! Disaster risk management ! Local action research

1 Introduction

The application of disaster risk management to sustainable

development to achieve disaster reduction has variously

formed a part of integrated disaster and development studies over decades. For this article disaster risk man-

agement is subsumed into disaster risk reduction (DRR)

terminology. Disaster events impact on development pos- sibilities, while post-disaster recovery and human resi-

lience requires environmental, societal, and economic sustainability. It was in response to the theoretical, policy,

and practice basis of this relationship that the world’s first

center of international postgraduate studies in combined disaster management and sustainable development was

launched at Northumbria University, United Kingdom in

the late 1990s. Its intake of students started in Millennium year 2000 and continues to date. The integration of this

field has since progressed both in global policy and local

actions. Disaster and development approaches are empha- sized in transitioning from the Hyogo Framework for

Action 2005–2015 (HFA) to the Sendai Framework for

Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 (SFDRR). The

& Andrew E. Collins [email protected]

1 Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences / Disaster and Development Network (DDN), Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 8ST, UK

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Int J Disaster Risk Sci (2018) 9:486–495 www.ijdrs.com

https://doi.org/10.1007/s13753-018-0206-5 www.springer.com/13753

SFDRR (UNISDR 2015a) is recognized as a driver for

achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (UNISDR 2016a) and is also often cross-referenced with

the revision of ongoing climate change and humanitarian

agreements. However, the nature of change in politics, behavior, and knowledge required for achieving the

SFDRR goal and the SDGs requires more in-depth analysis

and application.1 Given that progress lags behind what is required, it is timely to consider how the disaster and

development paradigm might be advanced. This article provides a comment on perspectives that

persist as part of the disaster and development paradigm,

guided by action research findings from Northumbria’s work in this field, in order to assess how to advance the

paradigm conceptually in order to further steer imple-

mentation of disaster risk reduction. This will also help to reassess what should be added by way of analytical fronts

in order to bring about advances in disaster and develop-

ment awareness building and improved governance of disaster risk reduction. Three thematic areas are promoted

here as underpinning potential advances in applied disaster

and development studies, addressing theory, policy, and practice going forward. These fronts are broadly described

as: (1) build up earlier a human well-being that offsets

negative risk; (2) live better with uncertainty; and (3) know the nature of barriers to more effective transitions in sus-

tainable development and disaster risk reduction.

2 Persistent Perspectives of Disaster and Development

The section of the article brings to the fore perspectives on

disaster and development from earlier findings alongside interpretations that can advance the paradigm and in so

doing underpin a knowledge of more means to achieving

effective disaster risk reduction.

2.1 Disaster and Development as Common Sense

Common sense reflection on disaster and development

concludes that these are combined processes of change that

are exemplified by a long-term propensity of humanity to demonstrate its capacity to fall unprepared into both per-

sonal and collective catastrophe, while at the same time

develop relative health and well-being. Combined disaster

or development outcomes come and go across anthro- pogenic landscapes that are undergoing accelerated change.

Major catastrophic events have altered trajectories of

human survivability and quality of life throughout largely unquantifiable environmental, social, and economic dis-

ruptions dating from before records began. In relatively

recent academic discourses addressing the precariousness of everyday human life, reducing disaster risk, and

achieving more sustainable development present as com- mon agendas (Collins 2009a, 2013). There are many

overlapping ways in which the field has been formulated.

For example, and by way of a few of the indicative sources, reducing disaster requires actions to address both proxi-

mate and underlying risks (Blaikie et al. 1994; Wisner et al.

2004), hazards mitigation (Tobin and Montz 1997; God- schalk et al. 1999; Smith 2001), and fundamentally

imposed human vulnerability (Cannon 1994; Lewis

1999, 2014; Cutter et al. 2003; Bankhoff et al. 2004; Gaillard 2010). Though much of the field has been, and

often continues to be, analyzed from a natural-hazards

orientation, a significant drive has shifted the paradigm to be people centered through more socially, politically,

economically, and culturally aware agendas (Hewitt

1995, 1997; Collins 2009a, b; Pelling and Dill 2010; Col- lins et al. 2015; Krüger et al. 2015).

Post-crisis development had been belatedly recognized

within emergency relief as incomplete where it is only oriented to immediate survival; relief agencies needed to

invest in recovery of development processes over time

(Cuny 1983). Shifting the agenda, agencies formerly spe- cializing in emergency relief transitioned their work to

include more developmental approaches. Calls to recognize

relief and development investments as essentially political processes also challenged conventional norms of humani-

tarian assistance of the day (De Waal 1997; Middleton and

O’Keefe 1998). Other discourses further brought out the socially constructed nature of disaster and its definition

relative to context (Hewitt 1995; Quarantelli 1998; Perry

and Quarentelli 2005) and human rights-based imperatives in disasters (Enarson and Fordham 2011; IFRC 2007).

These emphases continue to overlap with each other and

get variously shared across a myriad of subsequent authorships; only a few indicative sources are provided

here. The resultant knowledge base remains instrumental to

a convergent lexicon within current disaster management that is now also pervasive in global policy narratives. Some

further evidence of the impact on discourse is reflected in

the definitional content of disaster management terminol- ogy itself (UNISDR 2016b) within which the concepts

accompanying more people-centered approaches are now

easier to recognize than they were under more hazards dominated approaches.

1 Goal of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030—‘‘Prevent new and reduce existing disaster risk through the implementation of integrated and inclusive economic, structural, legal, social, health, cultural, educational, environmental, technolog- ical, political and institutional measures that prevent and reduce hazard exposure and vulnerability to disaster, increase preparedness for response and recovery, and thus strengthen resilience.’’ (UNISDR 2015a, Paragraph 17, p. 12).

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Int J Disaster Risk Sci 487

While much progress can be identified in terms of dis-

aster and development-based problem analyses, with some common goals being identified and getting reflected in

global policy, both disaster risk reduction and sustainable

development needs have yet to be resolved in most parts of the world. Something of an ideological front has been

advanced, but requisite actions to bring fundamental

change lag woefully behind. An urgent concern is neces- sarily being reemphasized in that the focus of the problem

is essentially about how to better intervene in ‘‘disaster risk creation’’ (Lewis 2012), whether in terms of demographics,

environmental sustainability, human security, or in linking

disaster and conflict risk reduction (Collins 2019), among various other means. Given the critical condition in which

a majority of the world’s inhabitants find themselves living,

it is reasserted that urgent further progress is needed and that a burgeoning field of disaster and development studies

has only just begun.

Although the field lags behind demands for immediate implementation, there are empirically based studies in

disaster affected locations that already have a lot to offer in

terms of better understanding the nature of many of the obstructing issues and some ways forward. For example,

there have been working case studies instigated through

Northumbria’s disaster and development field-based work that took place during this first part of the Millennium.

These projects included a range of community-based dis-

aster risk engagement activities in Mozambique, Zim- babwe, Bangladesh, and Nepal involving in each instance

listening to and working with the motivations of local

people, local authorities, and wider level bureaucrats to achieve impacts. The research tools and engagement pro-

cesses varied depending on the identified demand for risk

reduction for survivability and well-being. An infectious disease risk reduction project in Mozambique and Ban-

gladesh involving tens of thousands of people caught up in

epidemics progressed through integrating community dri- ven infectious disease risk monitoring alongside adapted

community and government led responses (Collins et al.

2006; Williams et al. 2010). A further example was borne out by a community driven natural resources risk mitiga-

tion and development project in the upper Zambezi region

of Zimbabwe. This similarly enabled action research-ori- ented techniques and engaged legal services for entire

communities to be able to know and apply their rights in

the sustainable use of local resources critical to their sur- vival in contexts of marginalization (Manyena et al.

2012, 2016). Comparative evidence based research with

several communities in Nepal (Jones et al. 2013, 2014) was able to inform on barriers to safety and opportunities to

progress through the varied structuring of risk governance

in relation to specific social groups.

Many other examples of action-oriented research in

disaster affected locations are documented by the organi- zations of the United Nations around the world, presented

through Global Platforms and Global Assessment Reports

(for example, UNISDR 2009, 2011a, b, 2013, 2015b; WHS 2016). The Northumbria projects with groups of local

partners and communities in affected areas of Southern

Africa and South Asia essentially found that:

• People, even in marginalized situations, can control

ecological and socioeconomic risks where these are well understood. This includes risk caused by climate

change, hazardous environments, poverty, and human

instability. • Community self-organization and wider good gover-

nance define resilience to disasters.

• It is possible to reduce human activities that contribute to environmental and other disaster risks without

knowing everything.2

The findings from the range of specific field-based

examples are essentially people centric and show that

disaster risk reduction and good governance-based disaster and development actions are core drivers for progress. This

should not always be considered as entirely new knowledge

but rather as empirically based reaffirmations of an often- neglected understanding of humanity. Together with the

observations of many recent reflections on this field, the

findings point, perhaps unsurprisingly, to disaster reduction or development progressing at the local level where it is:

• Informed—by ongoing real or perceived threats of the governed;

• People centered—being driven and motivated by dis-

aster assessment that is multidisciplinary, integrated, and perpetually reassessed;

• Practitioner oriented—being guided by a perpetual

interpretation and review process; • Proactively engaged—including with hazards, vulner-

ability, and coping to facilitate resilience;

• Guided where possible by lessons learned—through evaluation before, during, and after risk reduction

activities;

• Related to localized knowledge—being made relevant through grounded research;

2 These overall findings constitute a selection of key points from more than 10 Northumbria coordinated studies carried out between 2002 and 2014 funded by Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Department of International Development (DFID), British Council, WHO, UNICEF, UNHCR, and others. Further information is available as an Impact Case Study reported by the UK Collaborative for Development Research (UKCDR) at http://www.ukcdr.org.uk/the- global-impact-of-uk-research/communities-against-disasters.

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488 Collins. Advancing the Disaster and Development Paradigm

• Invested in—where there is the political will, institu-

tional and personal commitment to disaster reduction

and sustainable development.

With better-honed evidence, principles such as these are

now increasingly recognizable in global discourses such as

the SFDRR. With suggested operational basics more prominent in the shifts required for policy and practice,

although still underutilized, it is timely to step further into

what can increase more effective engagement in this dis- aster and development informed DRR agenda.

2.2 Going Deeper in Applied Disaster and Development Studies

Despite much existing common sense in the paradigm there are clear analytical and practical challenges in the appli-

cation of disaster risk management and sustainable devel-

opment for disaster reduction. For example, considering that flood risk includes environmental change, human

exposure, and the nature of prevention and response sys-

tems, it is necessary to address predictability/uncertainty, opportunity for precautionary actions, ‘‘natural’’ versus

built approaches, hard and soft catchment, river and coastal

management, and the methods of long-term maintenance (Collins et al. 2015). In relation to exposure factors, per-

ception, socioeconomic enablement, information, commu- nication, expectation, culture, age, gender, and other forms

of social differentiation are more relevant (Collins et al.

2015). In relation to the same flood events, prevention and response systems raise challenges of political will, market

forces, capacity, connectedness with proximate and

underlying causes, learning cycles, adaptive capacity, role management, centralization/decentralization, hard/soft

catchment management (upstream/downstream), mainte-

nance, public and private responsibilities, and the roles of insurance (Collins et al. 2015).

Moving beyond flood risk, with respect to multi-hazard

and risk environments—and noting that actions for disaster risk reduction lie in structural contexts and political will,

human behavior and education, science and technology—

consideration should also be directed at multileveled (or enveloping) societal relations and systems of meaning

(Fig. 1, I and II). Case studies reporting the implementation

of disaster risk reduction actions, such as those referred to in the previous subsection, variously refer to or imply this

disaster and development contextualization. Social rela-

tions aspects involve roles in disaster and development working relationships and forms of domination in the

public, private, and community sectors, and in the devel-

opment of the subject area. These relationships include issues of global structures, empowerment, participation,

class, gender, origin, residency status, age, and position in

family structures and society. These shape the routes to

disaster avoidance and mitigation, though inevitably also to

responses and the relative impact of disasters on develop- ment trajectories.

Systems of meaning refer primarily to methodological

needs to come up with a more satisfactory presentation of both structural and cultural sociologies of disaster and

development, escaping overly simplistic and inappropriate

divides between structure and culture. Structure and human agency in disaster and development approaches operate

together. The basic perspective here is drawn from wider

applicable ideas as, for example, reflected by Hays (1994) on ‘‘structure and agency and the sticky problem of cul-

ture.’’ While it is not possible in practice to neatly separate

issues across a structural-cultural divide, it is possible to derive more meaning in disaster and development work

based on this more critical realist perspective if mindful of

the crossover between structural and cultural factors. Systems of meaning include beliefs, values of social

groups, language, forms of knowledge, instinct, and vari-

ations in ways of being that influence disaster and devel- opment outcomes. Historically, disasters were considered

acts of God. Science brought an explanation as to how

physical environmental phenomena are part of natural systems of change. However, people have been left

unsatisfied with both explanations, as neither acts of God

nor applied science-based perspectives addressed the pre- vailing uncertainty about disasters sufficiently to ade-

quately direct interventions. It is now commonplace to

consider most major disasters as unnatural, being human induced, including through climate change, and a function

Fig. 1 Multileveled view of disaster and development

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Int J Disaster Risk Sci 489

of people being in the wrong place at the wrong time

without adequate forms of protection. While the definition and parameters of disaster have remained contested, they

increasingly emphasize social and economic drivers.

Notions of development have been contested for many decades given a tension between equilibrium, growth, and

social justice interpretations, and accentuate an urgency to

identify sustainability transitions (Brauch 2019). The milieu in both disaster and development studies has

been accompanied by social constructivist interpretations of real and perceived hazards, risks, and disasters. This,

however, can be seen as constraining where the needs of

policy and practice are to interpret rapid, effectively, and justly for disaster impacts regularly experienced, extreme,

and varied. Standards for practice such as, for example,

through the Humanitarian Charter,3 responded in part by drawing on cultural values and learning for good practice.

Examples in development work are the rights-based

approaches referred to in the community-based action project examples referred to earlier in this article and those

influenced by perspectives that draw variously from Wes-

tern, Eastern, globalized, or otherwise sourced values that resurface with change. These are, however, as yet only

loosely incorporated into more reflective disaster risk

intervention assessments. Nonetheless, large parts of the sector remain influenced by world religions and variously

oriented policymakers seeking to find transformations and

impacts through change from within society as well as from without. Ultimately, systems of meaning, together

with systems of social relations, guide human behavior for

disaster and development. It is suggested here that opening out the interpretations

and opportunities presented by the disaster and develop-

ment paradigm can facilitate changes needed for survival and a sustainable quality of life, not only for deeper

thinking about the existing paradigm but also as a likely

means to greater engagement. For example, peace building processes are tantamount to disaster risk reduction in the

context of extremely disrupted or fragile states and regions.

Social relations and systems of meaning, as considered in the context of combined conflict and disaster risk reduc-

tion, can involve common processes of early warning,

rights, and resilience drawn from common values.4 This

would be a way forward for many areas experiencing

conflicts and environmental hazards simultaneously or in tandem.

Beyond these systemic areas it is pertinent to also

consider cosmologies, faith-based beliefs, existential dis- courses, or aesthetic goals that provide explanation or

resolution to understanding human nature (Fig. 1, III). It is

partly on this basis that more linear equations of risk reduction—such as those based on investment in sustain-

able development interventions (Collins 2009a, b), those that reduce the probability or magnitude of the disaster

event (Smith 2001), or those that reduce hazard and vul-

nerability through improved capacity (Wisner et al. 2004)—can be expanded further for greater investment in

motivation and engagement. This also requires greater

emphasis on hope, evidence based or otherwise, as this stimulates action (Fig. 2). In such an approximation, evi-

dence of risk reduction in action may be proportionate to

some combination of certainty and hope that people draw upon or aspire to. This aligns with the consciousness

implied by Fig. 1.

3 Selected Action Research Fronts that Advance the Disaster and Development Paradigm

Moving forward with disaster and development oriented

DRR, based on the above analysis, suggests the need for ongoing development of the following.

3.1 Building up Human Well-Being Earlier and More Urgently to Offset Negative Risks

The SFDRR (UNISDR 2015a) has included as its fourth priority the earlier concept of ‘‘build back better’’ (Monday

2002). Though a desirable aim, this in itself generates a

wider debate as to how such a process post-disaster is best to occur. In addition to tackling the merits of reconstruction

and recovery—be these infrastructural, social, psychoso-

cial, or other—a disaster and development perspective requires building up human well-being and capacity earlier

and more effectively, so as to offset early the propensity for

disaster impacts. For example, in analyzing transitions from a state of vulnerability to a state of well-being, Col-

lins (2009a) indicated that this can be represented by

overcoming combinations of biological susceptibility (malnourishment, exposure to hazardous environments and

pathogens, lack of medicine and health care), mental

impairment (lack of education, loss of skills, ideas and

3 https://www.spherestandards.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/the- humanitarian-charter.pdf. 4 Work in the field of conflict and disaster risk reduction was overlooked by much of the SFDRR process, but has been addressed concertedly in other fora. For example, the 2016 annual Dealing with Disasters (DwD) conference organized by Northumbria and Freetown Universities and the International Peace Research Association (IPRA) combined in Freetown, Sierra Leone, around the theme of ‘‘Agenda for Peace and Development; Conflict Prevention, Post-Conflict Transformation, and the Conflict, Disaster Risk and Sustainable Development Debate’’. This has led to the emergence of a revision of

Footnote 4 continued Peace Ecology to encompass conflict and disaster risk reduction as an integrated concept.

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490 Collins. Advancing the Disaster and Development Paradigm

options, entrapment and dependency, cultural isolation), and insecurity (displacement, abuse, denied access to

resources, lack of a voice or representation, conflict). While

there is no panacea in mapping multiple types of contexts and human conditions, a transition from this integrated

vulnerability to integrated well-being that offsets disaster

impact would be characterized by:

• Health—nutrition, water, sanitation and clean air,

pathogen avoidance and control, shelter, and energy, health care, and longevity;

• Resilience—coping, capacity, adaptability and creativ-

ity, social, economic, and cultural capital; • Human security—rights, access to resources, represen-

tation, empowerment, absence of conflict.

The ‘‘build up early’’ approach is also implicit through calls for health and well-being centered disaster risk

reduction.5 By way of operational specifics it is also rele-

vant with this approach to emphasize that healthy groups (or societies) often impact on disaster risk in that they are

comprised of people who are more able to:

• Get out of the way of disaster—including through

aspirations to mobilize socially, economically, and

physically, and able to also potentially help those around them;

• Offset risks with resilience to resurgent and emergent

hazards, where resilience includes adaptive capacity as ability to improvise and overcome;

• Maintain aspirations for achieving greater survivability, sustainability, and human well-being;

• Access or apply decision-making roles.

A way in which this can occur is by learning to live better with inevitable uncertainties through adaptive pro-

cesses; investing in the present in a precautionary and

sustainable manner; and by dealing concertedly with any barriers there are to these processes (see Sects. 3.2, 3.3).

Proportionate hope resides in that unknowing—which

includes the state of an inevitable lack of certainty—can be accompanied by significant vulnerability reduction through

investment in transitions to sustainable well-being that

would offset disaster threats. A virtuous spiral of risk sensitive development and disaster avoidance needs to be

apparent both quantitatively and qualitatively in the lives of

billions of people.

3.2 Understanding the Means to Living with Uncertainty

The second theme responds to the realist viewpoint that DRR decision making can be only as good as the capacity

to predict and respond to environmental, economic, and

social change. It can be argued that more complex inter- sections of environmental systems, power, and culture

underlie the nature of risk reactions. Accentuated in rela-

tion to major human crises—be these climate-induced, development or conflict related—this systems understand-

ing provides subjectively derived routes to DRR interven-

tions that are dependent on everyday activities of all people who are ultimately at risk. As systems underlying risk

reduction or its creation are better understood it becomes

clearer how responsibility for risk management always resides somewhere. Moreover, risk as a function of

uncertainty is by definition part non-experiential and non-

evidence based (Collins 2015). This leads to an ascendant capacity to survive that requires actions driven also by

moral, economic, or other imperatives rather than solely by

risk assessment through measurement exercises. It is pertinent to link again here to the ‘‘healthy disaster

risk reduction’’ introduced in Sect. 3.1. Such people-cen-

tric approaches, whether health centered or otherwise (for example, oriented by education, planning, gender, conser-

vation, or polycentric approaches) help identify that the

right intervention in a complex system takes place in time and space. This, often peculiar, balance is dependent on the

sentience of people who access, learn, implement, com-

municate, and cooperate with each other. Two aspects of living better with uncertainty are touched upon further in

the following subsections; they are (1) realizing value in

unknowing for some unknowns or unknowable aspects that lie in belief systems, the unanticipated, and the non-expe-

riential; and (2) opportunities presented by individual and

collective learning processes.

3.2.1 Value in Unknowing and the Non-Experiential

While uncertainty describes the conditions of unpre-

dictability, unreliability, riskiness, chanciness, precarious-

ness, or unsureness, a state of unknowing can be considered to be not knowing or aware, having a lack of awareness or

knowledge. The two terms are not mutually exclusive or

necessarily define an individual or group as deficient; unknowing might be simply an acceptance of the

Evidence of Risk Reduction Evidence of Certainty x Evidence of Hope Economic, Cultural, and Biogeophysical Context

Fig. 2 Proportionate evidence of risk reduction in disaster and development

5 In 2015 the Disaster and Development Network (DDN) ran the first international conference on ‘‘Health Centered Disaster Risk Reduc- tion’’ as one of its Dealing with Disasters (DwD) series of events. This followed a concerted effort with the WHO and other agencies to make health more prominent in the SFDRR, since it had been all but left out of the previous HFA pre-2015. While there are many aspects to the role of health in the current framework, a central aspect has been to acknowledge health as both a prerequisite and an outcome of DRR, in an advancing disaster and development framing.

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Int J Disaster Risk Sci 491

impossibility of knowing everything. Systems function

where there may be gaps in knowledge as long as the requisite information gaps are usefully applied to problem

solving. As such it is not necessary, and often not possible,

to have achieved a fully evidenced-based prediction of an impending crisis before preventive actions could be taken

on moral and ethical grounds.

The phenomenon of deciding on an acceptable and unacceptable level of risk, given gaps in information, can

be pervasive in the field of emergency management and

DRR, as it is in the insurance sector. A shortcoming is to miss the known, but ignored, such as for example,

indigenous knowledge in DRR, which was commonly

absent from the sector, although the ‘‘indigenous’’ theme gets written about (Mercer et al. 2010). What is being

advanced here then is simply that: while aspirations of

DRR to be evidence based and experiential should be upheld, this might be improved upon through consideration

of all actions that might be taken without knowing every- thing. Adaptable theories and ever smarter coping with the

known and the unknown (Fig. 3) are synonymous with

smarter coping with known and unknown disaster risks. While the field needs to be, and often is, based on expe-

rience, in adapting and progressing theory to extend the

paradigm, forms of non-experiential learning provide impetus (Collins 2015).

3.2.2 Individual and Collective Learning in Disaster and Development

Section 3.2.1 has argued that understanding disaster risk involves learning that is ongoing, reflective, and evaluative,

and that this need not be entirely based on experience, not

least since many complex emergencies are yet to come.Fig. 3 Volatile and de facto understanding of disaster risk

Fig. 4 Learning disaster risk and development individually and collectively

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492 Collins. Advancing the Disaster and Development Paradigm

Learning from beyond what is personally experienced

occurs through an array of secondary sources, such as

records of the emergency services, relief and development agencies, libraries, and other written or verbal sources,

whether formally documented or not. The combination of

experiential learning of an individual is however supple- mented by feelings and beliefs. The notion of a gut feeling,

instinct, or intuition for actions taken in emergencies is well talked about within the sector. However, a problem is

that the experiences, interpretations of secondary sources,

and feelings and beliefs of individuals regarding disaster prevention and preparedness may or may not be heard or

accepted by others around them. It is reasonable to propose

therefore that where a plural interpretation of learning might be more collective, a powerful level of group

behavior transitioning for everyday life and emergency

situations might be harnessed (Fig. 4). Success with what has become widely known as community-based disaster

risk reduction and community-based development pro-

gramming, may be understood further along these lines, although here the meaning refers specifically to people-

centered approaches; there are ambiguities or misrepre-

sentations of what is ‘‘community’’ in this field of work (Titz et al. 2018).

3.3 Addressing Barriers and Transitions in Disaster Risk Reduction and Sustainable Development

Much of the analysis in this article confirms the importance of understanding risk in terms of systems of disaster and

development interdependencies that are key to imple-

menting DRR. Solutions for DRR frequently present as

wider development, motivational, and interpretational

issues paramount to successful everyday life. It is as though

a significant part of what is required is to do more with what is already known and actionable, and to ask what are

the obstacles to otherwise readily available solutions. To

this end, the third of the action research fronts presented here focuses on the need to better understand the sets of

barriers there are for more effective DRR and to ask what transitioning is needed for individuals, institutions, and

groups to overcome these.

By way of an outline analysis on this point, Table 1 presents some of the types of barriers there are in disaster

and development work, and the nature of transitioning that

might take place towards different types of outcomes. This is not intended as a definitive list, which varies in place,

time, and in relation to different types of people. However,

in itself it shows a form of analytics that could be con- sidered more in-depth to advance the way that human

engagement in DRR is interpreted, while suggesting what

might be overcome or adapted in everyday life and the consequent outcomes.

For example, using Table 1 as a thought enabler and

considering the case of wanting to achieve advances in responses to early warnings, communication is often con-

sidered a barrier; people may hear a warning but not react

because they either misinterpret what the warning requires them to do, do not believe the warning or its severity, are

unable to do anything in response to the warning, or may

be of a risky disposition and choose to take a chance. The barriers to transition need to be removed, either incre-

mentally or at once, for greater effectiveness. They include

in this instance, for example, issues of trust and perception.

Table 1 Examples of barriers, transitioning, and outcomes for engagement in disaster risk reduction

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Int J Disaster Risk Sci 493

Depending on context, potential combinations of other

characteristic boundaries listed in the left column would also apply. Characteristic transitioning might be considered

to include features listed in the middle column. Potential

outcomes of transitioning are indicated in the right column. However, a way in which to carry out the analysis is to start

with the outcome and to work back in considering the

forms of transition across particular types of barriers. It is not an exacting process, but if the basic principle of

moving forward the disaster and development paradigm for DRR by removing barriers is considered recurrently, this

may prove to be cost-effective and enable impactful con-

tributions to addressing critical forthcoming threats. The concept here is that DRR will better operate when free of

both the externally imposed and any self-inflicted forms of

harmful risk inducing constraint.

4 Conclusion

This article calls for advancement of the disaster and

development paradigm, particularly with respect to its ongoing contribution to DRR. Reviewing of the current

paradigm already confirms a need to emphasize the evo-

lution of maneuverable ideas in finding intellectual and applied ways out of impasse for the sake of future sur-

vivability. Some progress in the policy environment is

evident but it is often the case that disaster risk reduction decision making is only as good as the capacity to under-

stand and respond to environmental, economic, and social

change. Less progress has been made in addressing com- plex intersections of environmental systems, power, and

cultures that underlie emergent understanding of the nature

of risk reactions and active engagement. As ways forward may become more accessible than

hitherto encountered within this sector, aspirations to build

up quality of life in a risk sensitive manner has to be enabled further alongside any advance of the paradigm.

Health and well-being aspects present a readily accessible

and transformative way to advance the actuality of a fully people-centered approach. We can note in this context also

that hope resides in that unknowing can be accompanied by

vulnerability reduction and investments in sustainable development that would offset both known and unknown

disaster threats. Risk as a function of uncertainty is part non-experiential and non-evidence based. More progress

could therefore also be harnessed by greater use of disaster

and development collective awareness and engagement. Recognizing and acting upon the barriers to people taking

control of DRR for themselves within their own lives is

very much part of the disaster and development paradigm. Barrier removal for transitioning to future security, peace,

and well-being, however, also requires appropriate political

and economic contexts, and will require new technological breakthroughs that reduce the creation of hazards, risks,

and disasters in society. An ascendant capacity to survive

therefore requires actions driven by combinations of moral imperatives and plenty of highly motivated people.

Acknowledgements The author would like to thank the reviewers for useful comments on this paper. The paper is based on a presentation given to the IASS–IDRiM Workshop on Risk Governance for Natural Disasters—Extending Integrated Disaster Risk Management to Sus- tainable Communities, Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS), Potsdam, 29 August 2017. Thanks to Norio Okada (IDRiM) and Ortwin Renn (IASS) for their hosting of this event.

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://crea tivecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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Fixing women or fixing the world? ‘Smart

economics’, efficiency approaches, and

gender equality in development1

Sylvia Chant and Caroline Sweetman

This article focuses on the current trend for investing in women and girls as ‘smart

economics’, which is a direct descendant of the efficiency approach to women in

development (WID) prevalent in the wake of the economic crisis in the 1980s. We

highlight the dangers of conflating the empowerment of women as individuals with the

feminist goal of removing the structural discrimination which women face as a

gendered constituency, and consider the implications for feminists in development if

they adopt smart economics-speak and work in coalition with individuals and

organisations who have fundamentally different aims. This has attractions in strategic

terms, but risks recreating the very problems gender and development seeks to

transform.

Cet article se concentre sur la tendance actuelle de l’investissement dans les femmes et

les filles dans le cadre de l’« économie intelligente » qui tire directement son origine de

l’approche d’efficacité pour ce qui est des femmes dans le développement (WID –

women in development), approche qui était très courante au lendemain de la crise

économique des années 1980. Nous mettons en relief les risques que comporte le fait de

relier l’autonomisation des femmes en tant qu’individus et l’objectif féministe

d’élimination de la discrimination structurelle à laquelle se heurtent les femmes en

tant que groupe constituant représentant un sexe, et nous examinons les implications

pour les féministes dans le secteur du développement si elles adoptent un discours

d’économie intelligente et travaillent dans le cadre de coalitions avec des personnes et

des organisations dotées d’objectifs fondamentalement différents. Cela présente des

côtés attrayants en termes stratégiques, mais risque de recréer les problèmes précis que

le genre et le développement cherchent à transformer.

Este artı́culo se centra en la tendencia actual de la ‘‘economı́a inteligente’’, la cual

propone invertir en las mujeres y niñas. Dicha orientación se remonta al enfoque

basado en la metodologı́a de la eficiencia aplicada a las ‘‘mujeres en el desarrollo’’ (WID

por sus siglas en inglés), que prevaleció tras la crisis económica de los años ochenta.

Las autoras advierten sobre el peligro de confundir el empoderamiento de las mujeres

como individuos, con el objetivo de las feministas de eliminar la discriminación

Gender & Development Vol. 20, No. 3, November 2012 ISSN 1355-2074 print/1364-9221 online/12/030517�13 – Oxfam GB 2012

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13552074.2012.731812

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estructural enfrentada por las mujeres como grupo de género. Asimismo, analizan las

implicaciones que, en caso de trabajar en coalición con personas y organizaciones cuyos

objetivos son distintos, podrı́a tener el uso del lenguaje de la economı́a inteligente para

las feministas en el desarrollo. Aunque ello representa ventajas en términos

estratégicos, si reproduce los mismos problemas que la perspectiva de género y el

desarrollo buscan transformar, puede encerrar riesgos.

Key words: smart economics; efficiency; feminist economics; empowerment; gender equality; World Bank

Introduction

There has been enormous progress on ‘mainstreaming’ gender equality concerns into

development since the United Nations (UN) Decade for Women (1975�/1985). Yet when

we look back over the past 30 or so years, we can perhaps detect a sense of ‘plus ça

change, plus c’est la même chose’ (the ‘more things change, the more they stay the same’),

in that the majority of development actors remain focused on narrow economic

development goals. Comparatively few have genuinely shifted their policies and

missions to reflect a concern for more holistic ideas of human development

(epitomised by the work of Amartya Sen), rights-based development, or notions of

human well-being and happiness.

This article focuses on the current widespread interest in ‘smart economics’, which

rationalises ‘investing’ in women and girls for more effective development outcomes

(Chant 2012). Soundbites on ‘smart economics’ as the rationale for investing in women

and girls have become ubiquitous. For example, UNICEF refers to the ‘Double

Dividend of Gender Equality’ (www.unicef.org). Policymakers and practitioners report

needing to argue for funding for programmes with gender equality aims on the basis

of broader social and economic impact (a trend noted in Moser 1989, who dubbed this

the ‘efficiency approach’ to women in development).

The agenda of smart economics is a far cry from the nuanced and subject-sensitive

ideas of what the empowerment of women and the attainment of gender equality

actually entails, to be found within the gender and development literature [ranging

from the early work of Caroline Moser (1989) to map what empowerment might look

like in project terms, to the ongoing work of Naila Kabeer (2003) which focuses on both

structure and agency, and to the highly participatory research and activism associated

with the Department for International Development-funded Pathways of Women’s

Empowerment project at the University of Sussex �/ see PoWE 2012]. A gender and

development approach recognises gender inequality as a relational issue, and as a

matter of structural inequality which needs addressing directly and not only by

women, but by development institutions, governments and wider society.

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Women as a development resource: the rise and rise of a big idea

The thinking behind smart economics extends back until at least the ‘lost decade’ of the

1980s, when it became eminently obvious that women, individually and collectively,

were acting as a buffer to the fall-out of Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs). The

effects of SAPs included rising male un- and under-employment, falling purchasing

power, and scaled-down public-sector service provision. As Diane Elson and others

noted at the time, women were expected under SAPs to substitute for the failure of

state institutions to provide health, education, and other services for their citizens

(Elson 1991), and to make ends meet in an era of high and increasing unemployment.

Critiques of anti-poverty approaches to women in development have highlighted

the severe toll that increasing hours and intensity of work had on women’s sleep,

leisure, and food (Jackson 1996). Feminists have also flagged up the limits to women’s

‘social capital’ �/ that is, their reciprocal bonds and friendships �/ which have been relied

on to subsidise household and community survival during sustained periods of

economic crisis (González de la Rocha 2007). Yet of course, despite the critiques

asserting the injustice and unsustainability of passing the buck to women to ensure

economic survival, women did make a vast difference. Through their efforts, in the form

of increased efforts to earn money and cut back on domestic budgeting, and intensified

unpaid labour at household and community levels, households were ‘cushioned’ to a

substantial degree from the worst effects of neoliberal restructuring (Elson 1991).

At the start of the focus on gender mainstreaming, at the UN Fourth World

Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, growing consciousness of women’s apparent

ability to withstand economic crisis and carry on providing gave rise to the core message

in the World Bank’s flagship publication on gender issues that year: Enhancing Women’s

Participation in Economic Development (World Bank 1995). In a chapter unashamedly

entitled ‘The Pay-offs to Investing in Women’, the World Bank professed that:

Investing in women is critical for poverty reduction. It speeds economic development by raising

productivity and promoting the more efficient use of resources; it produces significant social

returns, improving child survival and reducing fertility, and it has considerable inter-

generational pay-offs. (1995, 22)

Added to the economic messaging came statements alluding to evidence of other social

‘goods’ to be gained by investing in women, drawing on evidence associating female-

controlled income with better outcomes for children (Whitehead 1984), and associations

between female education and lower fertility rates (Jeffery and Jeffery 1998).

From Beijing onwards, gender equality and the empowerment of women became

increasingly adopted as a goal which made simple economic sense. The World Bank

made an explicit link to Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 3, ‘Promoting Gender

Equality and Women’s Empowerment’, in the Gender Action Plan (GAP) 2007�/2010, as

Gender & Development Vol. 20, No. 3, November 2012 519

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well as in several other World Bank publications. Gender equality itself is here

depicted as smart economics, in that it enables women to contribute their utmost skills

and energies to the project of world economic development. For example, the Global

Monitoring Report argues that:

[i]n the long run . . .greater gender equality in access to opportunities, rights and voice can lead

to more efficient economic functioning and better institutions, with dynamic benefits for

investment and growth. The business case for investing in MDG 3 is strong �/ it is nothing

more than smart economics. (World Bank 2007, 145)

Yet as Naila Kabeer’s work has shown, including her 2003 work on the Gender

Equality MDG alluded to earlier, attention to collective action to enable women to

challenge structural discrimination has been downplayed in analyses of what women’s

empowerment means in the context of the MDGs, in contrast to the education,

employment, and political leadership of individual women.

Today, the win�/win synergies assumed to exist between gender equality and

efficient economic development form part of the mission statements and change goals

of a wide range of development organisations. Many have adopted a particular focus

on young women and girls. For example, in Plan International’s ‘The State of the

World’s Girls 2009: Girls in the Global Economy. Adding it All Up’ (2009), quotes from

two senior World Bank personnel stress that ‘girls matter’ �/ not only in their own right,

but to the project of economic development. Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, then Managing

Director of the World Bank,2 is quoted as claiming that: ‘Investing in girls is the right

thing to do. It is also the smart thing to do’. The current President of the Bank, Robert

B. Zoellick,3 further asserts that: ‘Investing in adolescent girls is precisely the catalyst

poor countries need to break intergenerational poverty and to create a better

distribution of income. Investing in them is not only fair, it is a smart economic

move’ (Plan International 2009, 11, 28).

Development organisations and governments have been joined in this focus on the

‘business case’ for gender equality and the empowerment of women, by businesses and

enterprises which are interested in contributing to social good. A key example is the Nike

Foundation, in its ‘Girl Effect’ initiative �/ ‘Investing in Girls has the potential to save the

world’ (www.youtube.com/watch?v�WIvmE4_KMNw). One of the promotional

videos of the ‘Girl Effect’ campaign takes the message of investing in girls to perhaps

even more extreme lengths by proposing that once these investments are made girls will

‘do the rest’, ‘change the course of history’, and safeguard the ‘future of humanity’.4

The real impact of smart economics on women

Why does the rise and rise of smart economics matter? We think that even if everybody

�/ women and men, girls and boys �/ nominally stands to gain from the adoption of

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smart economics as a rationale for investing in women and girls, it is nevertheless

critical to ask some hard questions about principle and practice.

In particular, it is imperative to ask whether the goal of female investment is

primarily to promote gender equality and women’s ‘empowerment’, or to facilitate

development ‘on the cheap’, and/or to promote further economic liberalisation (see

Chant 2012; Zuckerman 2007). This is because �/ as feminist critiques of SAP showed so

clearly �/ the actual lived experience of women in poor households and communities

suggests that a win�/win scenario in which poverty is alleviated, economic growth is

assured, and gender equality attained, is very far from the truth.

In fact, in the wake of macro-level global economic changes and the imperatives of

poverty reduction, women and girls in many societies are faced with a grassroots

reality of compensating for economic austerity measures and decline, which are

compounding various complex crises including food security, climate change and the

ongoing spectre of HIV. Relying only on female populations even to guarantee

business as usual, let alone transform the world, demands super-human sacrifices in

terms of time, labour, energy, and other resources (Chant 2012).

Listening to the voices of real women on the ground, it is quite clear the toll that

complex crises are taking on their lives, and the injustice that this represents. As

examples, here are two voices from recent research by Sylvia Chant (2008), which

indicate a decided trend towards a ‘feminisation of responsibility and/or obligation’.

In the Philippines, one 44-year-old female shopkeeper, part-time hospice worker, and

mother of four, declared:

A poor man will say ‘I do not have a job, I do not have some things’, and usually most will

resort to gambling or drinking . . . vices . . . to try and compensate them for what they don’t have.

Whereas a poor woman will carry her responsibilities. She will create something in order to have

earnings. I have to have a sari-sari store (small grocery shop) to have earnings. I have to cook to

eat, to sustain ourselves, different to a man. (ibid., 177�/8, Panel 3)

In the Gambia, another mother of four, a 35-year-old fruitseller and batik-maker

echoed this:

Men are not doing anything �/ if they pay for breakfast, it’s women who pay for lunch and

dinner. Women pay for school lunches. You see the festivals, and it’s the women who are

selling . . . some men are not working, and some men refuse to work, or if they work they don’t do

it for that [the family]. (ibid.)

From such a vantage point, it is heartening �/ and no surprise �/ that Elaine Zuckerman

from the international financial institution (IFI)-watching Washington DC-based non-

government organisation (NGO) Gender Action, complained that the World Bank’s

focus on gender issues in the GAP 2007�/2010 amounted to a ‘business case [which]

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ignores the moral imperative of empowering women to achieve women’s human

rights and full equal rights with men’ (Zuckerman 2007, 1). She further observed that:

Adhering faithfully to the Bank’s decades-old business model, GAP aims to increase women’s

participation in land, labour, products and financial markets �/ while privatising them as much

as possible �/ which benefits corporations the most. (ibid., 2)

Possibly in reaction to such critiques, GAP 2007�/2010’s successor: ‘Applying GAP

Lessons: A Three Year Road Map for Gender Mainstreaming 2010�/13’ incorporated

some welcome shifts in approach and in thematic priorities. As pointed out by Gender

Action’s Elizabeth Arend (2010), for example, highlights included strengthening

gender mainstreaming in Bank operations, an increased focus on maternal mortality

and reproductive health, and more comprehensive plans for gender-focused monitor-

ing and evaluation.

However, on a more negative note, Elizabeth Arend (2010) contends that these

advances are held in check by the World Bank’s reticence on how it actually

incorporates ‘gender issues’ in projects with ‘gender coverage’ and how these have

actually benefited women. Another major problem is the pernicious, if not explicitly

articulated, presence of ‘smart economics’ in GAP 2010�/2013, which prioritises the

‘need to build and disseminate a solid business rationale for gender equality [which is]

the basic incentive for Bank staff to mainstream gender issues and for client countries

to demand gender equality work’ (ibid.).

In light of the contradictoriness of GAP 2010�/2013, the World Development Report

2012 (WDR 2012), coming just before its mid-term point, provided a potentially

fruitful space for a reflective pause and re-consideration. This was especially so given

the World Bank’s apparent enthusiasm for consulting a wide variety of stakeholders

internationally (for a full discussion of Sylvia’s personal experience of engagement

with the creation of the WDR 2012 with LSE colleagues and affiliates, see Chant

2012).

The fact that WDR 2012 is the first of the World Bank’s annual flagship

publications ever to focus on gender is, as Shahra Razavi (2011, 2) describes, ‘a

welcome opportunity for widening the intellectual space’. It indicates that the World

Bank is taking gender seriously, which will certainly affect the ways in which gender

issues are addressed in the wider development community. However, despite the fact

that the WDR does employ ‘rights speak’ and give priority to gender equality as ‘a

core goal in and of itself’, which is to be applauded, we remain concerned about the

fact that reference to gender justice and rights proceeds directly to the instrumen-

tality of gender (read women) for development: in the run-up to WDR 2012, for

example, the draft document which featured on the World Bank’s website

proclaimed that

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‘The Bank recognises the importance of gender equality for poverty reduction and development

effectiveness’

and that:

‘One rationale for policies aimed at improving gender equality has been that such policies, if

successful, will yield a large dividend in terms of economic growth.’ (Chant 2012, Table 2)

In the final published version, there are numerous references to smart economics

which point to clever conflations, suggesting that efficiency and rights are one and the

same (Chant 2012). In the Overview alone, for example, we hear that ‘Gender equality

matters intrinsically . . . [and] instrumentally’ (World Bank 2011, 3) and that ‘Gender

equality matters for development �/ it is smart economics. An instrument for

development’ (ibid.).

How will these apparent contradictions play out in policies and practices informed

by the WDR 2012? Is it really possible to promote rights through utilitarianism, and if

so, what guarantee is there that the formulations of gender equality, women’s rights,

women’s empowerment will be achieved?

What does smart economics leave out? A feminist critique

Even if we accept that smart economics amounts to an efficiency approach with

elements of empowerment bolted on to the side, the programmes with which it is

associated rely on a reductive understanding of development and its aims, and

critically assume a much smoother and easier transition between individual ‘economic

empowerment’ and engaging with the social and political structures which constrain

individuals �/ and women as a collective marginalised group �/ in reality. These

structures discriminate on grounds of gender, race, and class, as highlighted in gender

and development writing since the inception of the field (see Young 1984, for example).

Smart economics seeks to use women and girls to fix the world. It may be well

overdue to hear how important women and girls are for economic survival, stability,

and growth, but the literature on gender and development has long borne witness to

this, starting with Esther Boserup’s classic 1970 text, Woman’s Role in Economic

Development. It is less welcome to women who are already contributing vast amounts

to both production and unpaid reproduction to be romanticised and depicted as the

salvation of the world. Embroiled in this message is the risk of overestimating what

women are capable of in a global order characterised by on-going gender bias and

structural barriers to their capabilities. For this reason, feminist understandings of the

empowerment of women and girls living in poverty in the global South emphasise that

this involves public action to transform the laws, policies, and practices which

constrain personal and group agency.

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Another question here is, what is to be done to address the interests and needs of

the growing world population of older women? An efficiency-driven focus on young

women and girls as smart economics leaves this critical part of the global population

out. Does the empowerment of women cease to be an issue when those women move

into adulthood, or go beyond their reproductive years? In respect of the private sector

and its adoption of girls as a particular focus, are human beings only worthy of

development assistance, with their considerable contribution recognised, when they

are attractive to the media, and support youthful branding and product placements?

In addition, aside from traditionally marginalised cohorts of women, what about

male stakeholders? ‘Smart economics’ messaging, and the programming emanating

from it, focuses narrowly and exclusively on the agency of women and girls, and

leaves men and boys out of the picture. Is this because the focus is on economic

investment rather than economic, social, and political change, and economic invest-

ment in men and boys is regarded as already sufficient? Or is it because the

prospective ‘returns to development’ from male investments might be less than those

in their female counterparts? And if the latter is so, to what degree does this imply

the perpetuation of stereotypes of male ‘egoism’ and ‘irresponsibility’ versus female

‘altruism’ and ‘self-sacrifice’ (Brickell and Chant 2010).

The smart economics approach represents, at best, pragmatism in a time of

economic restructuring and austerity. Without reform of the institutions whose

decisions and resource distribution shape their lives, women and girls are set up for

exhaustion and failure. As suggested earlier, analyses and programming informed by

an efficiency perspective have their roots in the economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s,

casting women as agents of survival and recovery in states undergoing variations on

the standard SAPs package of ‘reforms’, focusing on cutbacks in public employment

and expenditure. In the present time of economic meltdown and austerity in many of

the countries of the global North, there is great pressure on the IFIs, on bilateral and on

international NGOs facing crises in funding, to invest in developing countries in ways

which are maximally cost-effective.

Smart economics oversimplifies complexity and shifts responsibility. Caroline

Moser (1989) charged the programmes that she saw as informed by an economic

efficiency perspective with focusing on women as being the solution to the crises

created by structural social and economic problems. Women are enlisted as

footsoldiers to serve in battles whose aims are not related directly to their interests �/

consigned to the role of ‘conduit for policy’ (Molyneux 2006), in the service of others,

particularly children. This has been especially noted in the context of conditional cash

transfer (CCT) programmes and micro-finance initiatives which, in relying on

essentialising maternalist gender stereotypes and expecting particular kinds of

contributions from women, often lead to increased labour burdens and the perpetua-

tion of ‘female altruism’ (ibid., also Brickell and Chant 2010; Chant 2008).

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These boost the appeal of programmes which depict their ‘beneficiaries’ as

requiring merely a simple injection of funds or training before becoming powerhouses

of agency and action. Such programmes leave much of the responsibility for project

success or failure on the shoulders of the women and girls depicted as strong,

resourceful, and endlessly energetic in their efforts to better themselves, their families,

and their nations (Cornwall and Anyidoho 2010).

This reminds us of the scenarios critiqued by feminists in the 1980s, in which the

impact of SAPs on the care economy as governments rolled back social spending was

mitigated by women’s labour in the soup kitchens and at home. How fanciful is it to

see the same dynamics of exhaustion, asset depletion, and disillusion now affecting the

women and girls which smart economics approaches depend on to deliver the

development goods? (Rai et al. 2011).

How should feminists engage with smart economics?

Many feminists working in development institutions who have profound ideological

difficulties with an instrumental focus on women that focuses on them and their ‘rights’

purely due to a concern for other development goals, actually use these arguments

strategically. The discussions at the Beyond Gender Mainstreaming Learning Event

which forms a part of the project giving rise to this issue of Gender & Development bore

witness to this reality �/ noted by Cecile Jackson in her 1996 paper ‘Rescuing Gender

from the Poverty Trap’. The work of gender mainstreaming in development is difficult,

often demoralising, and frequently very poorly resourced, in terms of both human

resources and financial support. This requires strategic decisions about working in

coalition with stakeholders whose understanding and vision of what they are about is

very different from one’s own; and on flexibility in recognising shared opportunities for

work which further goals which are shared, sometimes by very different players.

Of course the resources which come to women and girls from programmes and

projects informed by efficiency and smart economics perspectives are incredibly welcome

to them. A pragmatic perspective which is widely held by many gender and development

policy advisors and practitioners is that these resources can be taken and used by women

regardless of the original intent. For many, they represent the only source of funds and

other resources. The working model of empowerment that these projects use depends on

attitudes and beliefs in wider society responding positively to a growing number of

women using resources wisely and transforming their family and community well-being.

The approach taken in projects is all-important. Micro-finance projects have been

widely discussed in relation to their ability to support the empowerment of women

involved in them (Mayoux 2006), but there is a clear message that the answer to the

question of how helpful they are is, ‘it depends’. One major factor is that projects which

focus on savings seem to be more successful than those focusing on credit. Another is

that ‘transformative potential’ �/ Kate Young’s term, from her classic work on gender

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mainstreaming (1993) �/ needs to be integrated consciously into these projects. In

addition, development funders need to focus consciously on getting institutions ‘right for

women’ (Goetz 1995), focusing on the links between male bias in their culture and broad

aims, the interventions they make and fund, and outcomes for women on the ground.

Much gender equality work relies on funds from organisations which have no such

issues with the concept of women delivering development goals to benefit others, with

little or no emphasis on the well-being, empowerment or rights of the women

themselves. To adopt a focus on smart economics is a useful pragmatic strategy for

many gender and development advocates and activists. Many of them would prefer to

use more radical and transformative messaging, but recognise that they are engaging

with politically and socially conservative institutions which need to be involved on

their own terms. For international NGOs and other development organisations

participating in advocacy and campaigning for change in international bodies and

national government, arguments based on justice and a commitment to equality may

have less chance of success than arguments linking (aspects of) the empowerment of

women with efficient, cost-effective development goals.

Conclusion

In smart economics, lack of an essentially political critique of what is wrong with

the world at the level of analysis results in programming which focuses solely on

the agency of individual women and girls to deliver development goals �/ changing

the world with minimal or no support from other actors. Since development

institutions are part and parcel of the structure of society surrounding women and

girls, they need in addition to analyse and challenge the structural inequalities

which constrain the rights, choices, aspirations, and dreams of women and girls.

This suggests a course of action which focuses on the relational aspects of gender

inequality �/ taking into account men and their roles, and concentrating on the

advocacy role of development institutions representing the interests of women and

girls to governments, among others. Feminists working in development therefore

need to be very careful about supporting, and working in coalition with, individuals

and institutions who approach gender equality through the lens of smart economics.

This may have attractions in strategic terms, enabling us to access resources for

work focusing on supporting the individual agency of women and girls, but risks

aggravating many of the complex problems that gender and development seeks to

transform.

We have argued in this article that the agenda of ‘smart economics’ is a far cry from

the nuanced and careful ideas of what the empowerment of women and the attainment

of gender equality actually entails to be found within the gender and development lit-

erature. It is the descendant of the ‘efficiency’ approach to women in development

identified by Caroline Moser in the late 1980s (Moser 1989). As such, smart economics

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returns our gaze to women and their agency, in an approach which fails to focus on the

existence of structural discrimination against women in IFIs, governments, and private

business. This structural discrimination constrains the agency of women and girls and

presents many of them with insurmountable obstacles, despite their best efforts to

advance their own interests and meet their own needs.

In order to expand their agency, women and girls need well-placed actors in

development institutions to remove the structural constraints on it �/ by challenging

and dismantling gender �/ and race and class �/ biases in their analyses, policies, and

practice. In contrast to smart economics, what is needed is a gender and development

approach which recognises inequality as a relational issue, and which recognises the

equal rights of all women and girls �/ regardless of age, or the extent of nature of their

economic contribution. Gender and development should also involve the inclusion of

other social actors vital in supporting the empowerment of women �/ including, most

importantly, men and boys.

Smart economics is concerned with building women’s capacities in the interests of

development rather than promoting women’s rights for their own sake. We think this

matters, because it does the agenda of the empowerment of women and the attainment

of gender equality a very significant disservice. Going forward, it is necessary to

reassert the primacy of gender justice and rights in a manner which eschews the notion

that it is only worth investing in women if they can ‘fix the world’.

Sylvia Chant is Professor of Development Geography at the London School of Economics and Political

Science. Postal address: Department of Geography and Environment, LSE, Houghton Street, London

WC2A 2AE, UK. Email: [email protected]

Caroline Sweetman is Editor of Gender & Development.

Notes

1 Matthew Gutmann’s main title for his 2009 monograph on sex, birth control, and AIDS

in Mexico was ‘Fixing Men’ (Gutmann 2009). We are very grateful to Matthew for

giving us permission to adapt his phrase.

2 In July 2011, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala left the World Bank to become Minister of Finance

in Nigeria in the new administration of President Goodluck Jonathan.

3 Robert Zoellick was appointed as the 11th President of the World Bank in 2007. 4 Interesting reactions to the Nike ‘Girl Effect’ campaign can be read on the ‘Aid Watch

blog’ on ‘So now we have to save ourselves and the world too? A critique of the ‘‘Girl

Effect’’’ at http://aidwatchers.com/2011/01/so-now-we-have-to-save-ourselves-and-

the-world-too (last checked by the authors October 2012) and on Contestations, Dialogues

on Women’s Empowerment, Issue 4, March 2011 at www.contestations.net/issues/issue-

4/ (last checked by the authors October 2012).

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Week 12: Gender, Development and Disasters