This post discusses the numerous ideas within the post of gender and development. Additionally, it charts the historical development of the three key critical viewpoints on gender and development identified by Eva Rathgeber in 1990: Women in Development (WID), Women and Development (WAD), and Gender and Development (GAD).

The blog aims to engage the readers in:

Understanding the role of gender in development.
Developing a critical understanding of the basic developments in the field of women and development.
Learning about various perspectives within the field of gender and development from a historical perspective.
Developing a connecting link between theories of development and feminism.
Developing an understanding of how to engage with these approaches while studying or implementing development programs from a gender lens.

Content

Introduction
Gender and Development: An Overview

Why gender?
Women’s World Conferences
Current responses and status

Gender and Development: Theoretical Evolution and Intersection
Policy and Practice of Gender and Development in India
Current Debates in the Field of Development and Feminism
Conclusion

Introduction

This blog emphasises how gender affects development. The module's goal is to familiarise readers with the key arguments surrounding gender and development. It looks at different advancements in the theories and applications of feminism and development in general as well as how gender and development notions have changed over time. Additionally, it chronicles the historical development of the three fundamental views Eva Rathgeber (1990) identified as being essential to understanding gender and development: Women in Development (WID), Women and Development (WAD), and Gender and Development (GAD). As a result, the subject serves as an essential introduction to the primary critical viewpoints needed to understand and carry out development issues and initiatives from a gender lens.

Gender and Development: An Overview

Why gender?

Gender is a problem for development (Momsen, 2010) and gender is a factor in growth. Women and men have been influenced differently by the various development strategies used in society before and after globalisation and liberalisation. The role of women in today's development processes has become more and more precarious as a result of advancements in technology and modern agriculture. Women are being excluded from the positive effects of development due to their limited (and frequently denied) access to and control over productive resources, as well as their growing exclusion from innovative types of production. Thus, there are newer pressures on gender inequality that have a significant impact on the outcomes of development.

The socially created form of relationships between men and women known as gender relations is uneven and typically favours men in terms of access to status, wealth, and power. Scholars have long studied how specific gender relations in a culture are influenced by and are influenced by development processes. The status of women and the degree of development in any community have long been known to be strongly and significantly correlated. The UN prioritises improving women's position in both its Sustainable Development Goals and previous Millennium Development Goals . UN WOMEN has often argued that gender equality is important for the advancement and development of every community.

With such acknowledgment, different techniques have been and are still being employed by various development stakeholders to increase women's engagement in society's developmental processes and to achieve social justice with gender equality. Welfare, effectiveness, anti-poverty, mainstreaming, empowerment, etc. are a few of them.

Women’s World Conferences:

The SDGs' emphasis on women's political engagement, economic independence, legal rights, and health is the culmination of decades of work by women activists and groups. Women's organisations, associations, and conferences held at an international level in places like Mexico, Beijing, Nairobi, and Copenhagen have made progress in advancing the importance of gender issues in global development . Women and men have different requirements, worries, possibilities, weaknesses, and goals when it comes to their growth, which has been made clear to professionals in the field. Thus, these discrepancies must be taken into account during the development process. It has been repeatedly emphasised that gender-blind development robs society of half its human capital and potential, has costs for both men and women, and ultimately slows down social progress. It is widely acknowledged that rapid economic expansion is insufficient. Though it has undoubtedly lessened the economic difference between men and women in both developed and developing nations, the political and social divides remain large and persistent.

Current responses and status

Women's issues must be addressed since gender-based inequities and disparities in opportunities and resources in development processes arise from women's limited or nonexistent access to and control over sources of livelihood as well as various other socio-political and cultural factors that influence such restrictions. Gender disparities must be addressed in order to eliminate poverty, provide employment possibilities, ensure that everyone has access to health care and education, and ensure that everyone has access to land and technology in order to achieve development (UNWOMEN, 2014). The 1995 Beijing Platform for Action ordered gender mainstreaming as a clever and pragmatic method to achieve women's empowerment and gender justice at all stages of development in response to numerous studies that claimed development did not assist women in their circumstances.

Presently, when formulating and carrying out their mainstream development strategies, the majority of state governments, including India, integrate gender as a key component. However, besides co-opting, there hasn't been much of a socio-political shift in gender relations and roles as a result.

Gender and Development: Theoretical Evolution and Intersection

Development initiatives have long disregarded women's existence and concerns, dating back to the 1930s. The principles of the theory of modernization, which held that development was supposed to be a straight path to advancement, were soon adopted by Western development professionals. This ideology contends that communities and nations can advance through embracing modernity and westernisation. It was believed that by adopting contemporary, Western-style institutions, values, and technologies, traditional countries like those in the third world might overcome their historical obstacles. To comprehend and advance civilizations, the modernization framework—whose key proponents include Walter Rostow, W.A. Lewis, Talcott Parsons, and Daniel Lerner—was widely used during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. In the 1940s, several colonised nations attained independence, and the newly independent countries' new development specialists predominantly chose the modernization paradigm to accomplish economic progress. The US emerged as the hegemonic power and a prototype for modernization-driven development throughout this time. Women were mainly excluded from development goals and activities prior to this time in all countries.

With the publication of Boserup's book in 1970, women were visible in discussions of development for the first time. For the first time, Ester Boserup addressed the role of women in development and the effects of development initiatives on women in Third World countries in Women's Role in Development. Few people have previously questioned how economic prosperity affected people of all classes, colours, and genders. Boserup emphasised how contemporary development initiatives undercut the responsibilities, possibilities, and independence of women in the workforce. Women's access to technology and paid job has been restricted by new technological trainings that neglect them. At the time, it was claimed that women and other socially oppressed groups would reap the benefits of modern development projects focused on technology. The novel made clear that it wasn't taking place. The trickle-down theory was contested by women in the US, who also took up the gender issue in development. They began referring to women in development and made an effort to influence US policy. They compelled the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to adopt specific plans and procedures for integrating women into country economies and development processes. Liberal feminism, which emphasised gender equality in the public domain, also emerged at the same time. Liberal feminists sought to provide women with equal access to jobs, education, wages, and favourable working circumstances. To attain these objectives of equal opportunity for women in development, they aimed to modify the law. The WID approach to gender and development embodies the fusion of liberal feminism with modernization development theory. The call for the inclusion and integration of women in paid employment and economies was the defining feature of this time period.

Planners were compelled to prioritise women's needs and increase women's involvement in development. For the first time, specialised research was conducted to comprehend the lives of women. There was more proof that women's access to employment, education, training, and productive resources needed to be improved. Women's active inclusion in development plans, policies, and implementation were required to accomplish this change. It was acknowledged that gender-responsive measures will eventually boost economic growth. Women were viewed as essential to society's general growth.

But WID's shortcomings quickly became clear. The methodology neglected the potential of indigenous knowledge systems because it is grounded in modernization philosophy. Additionally, it disregarded the role that other identities played in influencing how women lived their lives. Women's integration was frequently merely co-opted into development initiatives. Additionally, they were not integrated with sufficient resources or political clout. Most importantly, WID initiatives primarily relied on State assistance and considered the State as the primary solution to women's issues. They disregarded the possibility the state could likewise be a barrier to women's growth. Third World feminists operated at the grassroots level by organising themselves and did not collaborate with state-approved WID programmes because they recognised the role of the State as a male-dominated institution. Within a decade, NGO activity as well as grassroots work gained prominence. Women's problems work started to be done largely in opposition to liberal-feminist and WID methods.

Activists turned to Marxism to fill in the gaps in liberal modernization ideology. However, this strategy also didn't have much to say about women as the capitalist system was primarily under attack. However, a large number of significant feminists adopted the Marxist paradigm and analysed the lives of women by acknowledging the importance of reproductive labour, productive work, and class in women's lives. Under the influence of Marxism, the concurrent dependency theory of development was created, which upended the modernization idea. The proponents (primarily Paul Prebisch, Andre Gunder Frank, Samir Amin, etc.) argued that the capitalist centre metropolis exploited and benefited from the peripheral Third World and that the capitalist system functioned in a way that sustained this dependency, departing from the idea that underdevelopment is an internal issue of countries. Radical feminism emerged together with the development of dependence theory. These two frameworks posed problems for the government and other significant institutions. They called for the formation of alternative social institutions. Radical feminists dissociated themselves from men and emphasised the difficulties and risks of including women in patriarchal development initiatives. They demanded and produced "women-only" programmes for the advancement of women. Such an approach broke with WID's notion of women's integration and gave rise to WAD, which basically contends that women have always been an essential component of development. It places emphasis on how unique women's roles, work, knowledge, and responsibilities are. This strategy promoted organising that was centred on women instead of integration, drawing inspiration from radical feminism and dependency theory. However, as mainstream development mechanisms were not involved to influence women's growth, the WAD model was also quickly criticised for being too small scale. In addition to being attacked for treating women as a class and ignoring gender differences, WAD has been criticised for focusing on programmes for women only.

As a result, by the 1980s, several feminists were no longer persuaded by WID and WAD and sought a strategy that addressed the structural issues causing and upholding gender inequality. In response to these worries, GAD was developed in the 1980s. This strategy addressed gender-sensitive planning and empowerment. This strategy for the advancement of women was developed by Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), which was established at the 1985 Nairobi conference. It was inspired by the experiences and writings of Third World feminists (Sen and Grown, 1987). This strategy also draws inspiration from the examination of socialist feminism (Young, 1996; Moser, 1989). GAD acknowledges the significance of the material and cultural, patriarchal structural, economic, and capitalist systems that women are a part of, drawing on socialist feminism. The unique feature of GAD is its emphasis on gender relations as major factors influencing women's disadvantaged position in society. The interaction of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and other factors with women's experiences of their cultural and economic life is an important area of concern for GAD.

By the 1990s and beyond, every strategy was being used to address issues related to women and development at various times, locations, and scales. Many NGOs are still using the WAD method, even if WID is still the working approach in the majority of government policies and initiatives. Today's NGOs' activities are being progressively shaped by the GAD approach, which in turn is being formed by their experiences. The last strategy, however, is typically used by organisations only to reassure males that it is not all about women and that their interests are being taken into consideration. Instead of really fighting patriarchal institutions, GAD is typically employed as a fancy moniker till the co-option of the term gender and to appease the benefactors.

Thus, it is possible to see how various feminism and development frameworks came into being and interacted to produce the three main gender and development approaches known as WID, WAD, and GAD. In later modules of the current course on gender and development, each of these three views is covered in depth. The value of these frameworks in fostering a better society should be used to evaluate their merits, applicability, and flaws (Connelly, et.al, 2000). By the 20th century's conclusion, the majority of strategies for addressing women and development had converged into the GAD strategy (Rathgeber, 1990). The terms WID, WAD, and GAD no longer provide a clear direction for policies and activities. Even though a project may be built on the ideology of another technique while using the language of another. The methods are being employed concurrently for various goals.

Policy and Practice of Gender and Development in India

Development policies for women have changed over the years in response to the evolution of discussions and viewpoints on women's empowerment outside of India, as well as the pressure from feminist organisations, women's groups, and international agencies. Although social welfare has played a crucial role in India's planned development since independence, over the past 50 years, women's advancement has gone beyond welfare measures, and gender has only lately been incorporated into development plans and policies in India.

The sixth plan represents a crucial beginning for women's participation in development. Beginning with this plan, women were given a special place in the national plans and planning procedures, with an emphasis on employment, education, and health. Up until the implementation of the sixth plan, women were given better access to employment possibilities, healthcare services, and educational chances. According to N. Lalitha (1995), the 6th Five Year Plan changed the focus of the programmes and policies pertaining to women from welfare to development and from curative to preventive. The strategy adopted was essentially WID, emphasising the importance of women's economic development through income-generating activities. The three-pronged policy put an emphasis on enhancing the health, employment, and educational status of women. The seventh five-year plan made progress in educating women about their rights. The long-term goals of these plans' developmental initiatives were to improve the economic and social standing of women and integrate them into the fabric of the country's development. The time period placed a strong emphasis on the need to expand women's employment opportunities and acknowledged the value of women's contributions to many socioeconomic, political, and cultural activities. The realisation that women needed to be organised was another defining aspect of the time. It was anticipated that economically independent women would contribute to the nation's overall development. With regard to planning for women and development, the plan thus represented both the WID and the WAD approaches. Although some women undoubtedly profited in certain ways from this strategy, their social and political standing in the home and community did not significantly change.

When women's "empowerment" was acknowledged and accepted as a separate strategy in the 8th Plan, there was a significant paradigm change. Women delegates from the global south proposed the idea of "empowerment" during the International Women's Conference in Nairobi in 1985. In the planning and implementation of development, it asks for the transfer of social power and resource control in favour of women. Another important step towards the empowerment of women was the creation of the Women's Component Plan in the 9th Plan, which required specific ministries to outline the funding flow for women's programmes and schemes. During this time, it was realised how important it was to create environments that were gender aware. Participants in development meetings in the public and private sectors initiated gender-sensitization and training programmes. Planning in India shows a confluence of WID, WAD, and GAD methodologies after this plan. Targets for important human development indicators, including as the closing of gender gaps in wage rates, MMR, and literacy levels, were set in the 10th Plan. Self-help group promotion was prioritised in the 9th Plan. The strategy was to reach out to underprivileged women and help them assist themselves. The following strategy calls for everyone to work toward gender equity and socioeconomic empowerment. The emphasis on women's emancipation through SHG organisations persisted under the 10th Plan as well. By guaranteeing access to fundamental physical, health, and educational facilities and services, the 11th Plan made a substantial effort to recognise and reduce inequities between towns and regions. At this point, gender was acknowledged as a topic that cut across all industries (Ministry of Women and Child Development, 2012).

However, recent research suggests that despite such goals and segmentation efforts, "women development" is limited to giving women access to the workforce. Despite the inclusion of a gender equity component at the planning, project, and academic levels, gender prejudice still exists in development strategies. Within families, communities, old, and new institutions, the elements of structural restraints and gendered power relations are completely absent. The development initiatives geared toward women are somewhat rooted in patriarchal society, which only serves to legitimise gender inequality and social exclusion. Gender justice has largely been co-opted into the development agenda and action, even though the plans and numerous policy documents reflect incorporation of various critical viewpoints for women's development. Due to the widespread perception that economic development impacts both men and women equally and the "trickle down" theory, all development initiatives have mostly focused on advancing the economy. However, it is now well acknowledged that men and women are affected by development in distinct ways.

Additionally, in a society like ours, gender interacts with other various identities that people may hold. Age, marital status, caste, class, ethnicity, and race all have an affect on it (Bhasin, 2003). Not all women are "excluded" from the process and rewards of development in the same way or to the same degree as not all males are "included" in them. Because of the way the West has approached development and has paid little attention to how caste, ethnicity, etc. intersect, women and men are marginalised in different ways depending on the caste, class, and gender systems that are still in place. Plans and programmes for development ignore these various identities and the challenges they cause, failing to assist women in resolving their issues.

Current Debates in the Field of Development and Feminism

The 1950s to 1980s, when the Modernization and Dependency theories of development were first introduced, are different from the 1990s and later (Connelly et al, 2000). Economic restructuring, globalisation, the expansion of MNCs, and the liberal free market ideology in government policies were characteristics of the 1990s. Women and men have been affected differently by the economic restructuring and its associated free trade, structural adjustment, and rapid industrialization policies. As companies looked for flexible, inexpensive labour, women were given low-paying occupations with limited room for promotion, which feminised the workforce. Women make up the majority of the labour force in the informal sector since they find few jobs in the formal sector. Despite a minor gain in their economic involvement, women have been negatively impacted by the contraction of social security measures and services, rising prices, an increased need to engage in informal work, and the continuing of family responsibilities. Inequality in pay, male mobility, and limited access to resources with reproductive obligations all contribute to the feminization of poverty, especially in the South (Connelly et al., 2000).

Understanding how people experience these changes in their unique immediate settings becomes imperative. It is crucial to take into account local culture and expertise in addition to the bigger systems and institutions that influence economic developments on greater scales across the countries while trying to understand these new kinds of development. Recent postmodernist and poststructuralist critiques of socio-economic theories of development underline this need for fresh thinking on development. As a result, new perspectives are challenging the dominant development discourse and calling for viewpoints that respect individual differences and give prominence to local voices and knowledges that were previously disregarded in prior development paradigms.

There are now competing views that place more emphasis on people's agency as the authors of their own histories than on the continuous trend of development towards modernity. The postmodernists and postdevelopmentalists value and acknowledge indigenous knowledge systems over great knowledge and technical sciences. These methods concentrate on dismantling power structures in discourse and language related to development. The sensitivity to disparities in race, class, gender, and other factors is emphasised in the new development visions. It is thought that one group's development can occur at the expense of another. People in various locations and eras have various aspirations, with particular opportunities and limits shaping their concept of development. Thus, each organisation may have its own strategies for overcoming obstacles and resolving issues. An outsider-created development agenda cannot appropriately and thoroughly address their specific problems. Though primarily Western in orientation, postmodern ideas challenge the linear path of progress that countries are said to take that is implied by Marxist analysis and modernization theory.

Major contributions to these alternative theories on issues of power and difference have come from third world feminists. Third world feminism evolved from the North's feminism and was influenced by the experiences of feminist researchers and theorists in the South. It is preoccupied with issues like regional differences, racial disparities, the legacy of colonialism, and global inequalities. They emphasise both global economic inequality and female poverty. They set themselves apart by grounding the solutions to women's problems in their own reality and experiences. In India, feminism grew in the 1980s, and institutions like the Center for Women's Development Studies were founded. Bangalore is also where DAWN, an international forum for women from the South, was founded. Concerns about how development may affect women have been a top priority for DAWN. Similar to Socialist Feminists, Third World Feminists acknowledge the importance of economic and political elements but place a greater emphasis on issues related to culture, race, and ethnicity. They combine these components with socialist feminism (Sen and Grown, 1987). Southern feminist academics are wary of Western answers and look to the varied, diverse realities and intersecting identities of women for guidance. Therefore, new feminism-focused development methods aim to base development initiatives and policies on the unique and complicated reality of women, which are typically disregarded by development paradigms that were developed in the West for the South. The emphasis on difference and identity raises awareness of the various worries and experiences that women have as a result of the various axes at which they live. Feminists from the Third World therefore promote a development strategy that goes beyond economic development and is considerate of women's cultural knowledge and myriad interrelated identities. Their work places a focus on the hitherto disregarded and silenced voices and knowledge of Third World women. Vandana Shiva (1988) and Bina Agarwal (1991), both from India, made significant contributions to Third World feminism by stressing the link between women's environmental expertise and the long-term sustainability of a community.

Thus, in order to comprehend women's concerns, forms of resistance, and potential solutions that address local and global power structures, current development discussions emphasise the significance of being aware of the distinct historical, cultural, and economic context of women.

Conclusion

The various frameworks are constantly evolving to handle brand-new socioeconomic issues and difficulties. Over time, development approaches and policies have shifted from a woman-less or woman-only focus to one that emphasises gender relations between women and men. Each phrase has particular presumptions attached to it, which has influenced the creation of diverse strategies for including women in development processes (Rathgeber, 1990). One must be open to all methods and look for specific contributions to the implementation field when carrying out any development programme, specifically for women or for people in general. Before being adopted, each framework should be carefully examined for its advantages and disadvantages.

Gender and Development (GAD): An Introduction