WUNRN
DAWN - Development Alternatives with
Women for a New Era
New Website - http://www.dawnnet.org/about.php?page=us
Development
Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) is a network of feminist scholars,
researchers and activists from the economic South working for economic and
gender justice and sustainable and democratic development. DAWN provides a
forum for feminist research, analyses and advocacy on global issues
(economic, social and political) affecting the livelihoods, living standards,
rights and development prospects of women, especially poor and marginalized
women, in regions of the South. Through research, analyses, advocacy
and, more recently, training, DAWN seeks to support women's
mobilization within civil society to challenge inequitable social, economic and
political relations at global, regional and national levels, and to advance
feminist alternatives.
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DAWN has 4 main research
themes:
4. Political Ecology
and Sustainability (PEAS)
These areas form DAWN's core analyses and provide the focus
for the network's global advocacy efforts, which are aimed at influencing
debates around development thinking and policy, securing the gains made through
the UN conferences, working for greater accountability and radical
restructuring of and global governance institutions and multilateralisms, and
promoting gender analysis in progressive development organisations, networks,
and social movements.
A specific project is for the DAWN Analysis
Team to move forward a global conversation on issues and challenges for
feminist advocacies in the aftermath of earth-shaking shifts brought about by
global crises of finance, climate change and consumption. The variety of
responses across the economic south from Asia to Africa to Latin America and
how these interact with emergent South-North dynamics in multilateral policy
responses are critical starting point. The DAWN women will catalyze thinking on
how a south feminist inter-linkages
perspective such as that offered by DAWN might respond to the challenges
for alternatives.
THE DAWN DEVELOPMENT DEBATES
(DDD)
DDD 2010:
Development Debates in a Fierce New World:
Twenty-five years have passed after
DAWN published its seminal contribution to development debates entitled
“Development, Crisis and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s
Perspectives,” by Gita Sen and Caren Grown (1986) that examined “in great depth
why and how strategies designed to achieve overall agricultural growth and
industrial productivity have proven to be inimical to women (p. 16)”. At that
time, DAWN wrote about converging systemic crises that arose from erroneous
development policies and emphasized that “the solutions to the systemic crises
that are being put into place (viz., structural adjustment programs) are
creating a major reproduction crisis, especially in the indebted Third World
countries…Particularly, in the context of the debt crisis, the interests of
poor women appear to lie in joining their voices to the struggle for a more
structurally sound international and national economic order (p. 66).”
By the 1990’s economic strategies have changed and now favored the
intensification of trans-border processes of production, exchange and
consumption as well as the global expansion of finance, knowledge and the
services sector. The creation of a global capitalist market along neo-liberal
economic logic went into full swing. The structural adjustment programs of the
1980s which laid the foundation for the rapid integration of national economies
into a global market governed had now been overtaken by the rules of an
emerging World Trade Organization and of new regional free trade agreements /
economic partnership agreements that consolidated a number of disparate
bilateral trade and investments treaties of the earlier period. A novel
economic blueprint called the Washington Consensus was put in place. After the
1997 Asian financial crisis, a Post-Washington Consensus or an augmented
Washington Consensus attempted to present itself as a more benign version. All
these economic shifts underpinned the crafting of a new world.
The first decade of the 21st century has been marked so far by two
unprecedented critical events: the ‘war on terror’ and the global financial
crisis. In the wake of these two events, armed conflict, violence, terrorism,
national security, migration and religion; and transnational capital, labour,
and economies have come to preoccupy national and international, regional and
national politics and given rise to public policies that have had an immediate
effect on the lives of ordinary citizens. In their wake, issues of livelihoods,
poverty, human rights, freedom of expression and mobility, identity and
sexuality have come under pressure and been radically altered.
Today, we hear development economists and policymakers pronouncing the demise
of the consensus. This may be true. However, DAWN believes that although the
consensus may be dead, a new world had already been born – a world that is full
of shaken premises, complicated contradictions, serious fractures, severe
backlash, broken consensuses, and uncertain outcomes for the world’s women
especially women from the economic South.
What about the current context of multiple converging global crises – economic,
financial, food, fuel, which reflects a major crisis – which all point to the
unsustainability of the capitalist model of production and consumption.
The threads and thematic issues of the planned DAWN debates derive from the
contextual issues discussed above and will revolve around a central question
that has been raised by Peggy and Gita in 2004, and has become even more
crucial at this juncture:
“What is the social project of the
global women’s movements and is it larger than identity politics? Does the feminist
social project go beyond the project of the movement for global economic
justice? And if so, how?”
The DAWN Development Debates 2010 takes place 25 years after DAWN was launched
and builds upon two other DAWN publications that followed its seminal work. The
first produced at the turn of the century was the “Marketization of Governance:
Critical Feminist Perspectives from the South,” edited by Viviene Taylor
(2000). In this volume, DAWN called for challenging global economic
institutions and re-issued the call for feminists to reclaim governance through
alternative visions. The other is “Interlinking Politics, Policy and Women’s
Reproductive Rights: A Study of Health Sector Reform, Maternal Mortality and
Abortion in Selected Countries of the South,” edited by Sonia Correa (2006).
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