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Power structures that stand between women and the state
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Women's
empowerment is increasingly acknowledged as essential for reducing
poverty and accelerating economic growth.
WEMC understands
'empowerment' as an increased capacity to make autonomous decisions
that transform unfavourable power relations. Women's empowerment
eludes conventional interventions because these ignore power structures
that stand between women and state institutions. To address this gap,
we focus on informal power structures, especially those located at the
meso level, because such forces shape the gender systems within which
women's empowerment necessarily occurs.
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The autonomy of many women is obstructed by particular power
structures within which they are located. National policies and programmes
that are supportive of women's empowerment - such as those related to
the 'Beijing Platform for Action', the Convention for the Elimination
of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) - are ineffective when their implementation is
blocked by power structures that stand between women and state
institutions.
The WEMC research framework points out crucial differences between
power structures - between formal and informal power structures, and
between those located at the macro level and those located at meso and
micro levels. These differences pertain to their institutionalisation,
visibility and purview. Because it is assumed that the macro
encapsulates the meso and micro (such as provinces, districts, villages
and households), it is also assumed that there is no need to pay
attention to power dynamics occurring at the meso level. The assumed
logic is that once governance at the macro level is sound, lower levels
of governance would automatically follow suit. Realities increasingly
indicate the falsity of such assumptions.
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To
address such misconceptions, WEMC focuses on meso-level and micro-level
forces that are operating on the ground, including contestations between
formal and informal power structures and the impact of such contestations
on the lived realities within which women's empowerment or disempowerment
occurs. Through this focus, WEMC research breaks new ground by tracking:
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How
policies unavoidably filter through meso-level dynamics before reaching
women
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How
women's actions interact with meso-level structures, and with what
policy implications
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Real-world
processes of empowerment and disempowerment
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WEMC research veers away from conventional
development discourse that merely measures empowerment while completely
ignoring real-world power structures and power relations that impact on
women. Instead, the WEMC programme is concerned with processes of empowerment
and disempowerment as the fluctuating dynamics of ongoing power
contestations. WEMC asserts that women's relative lack of power stems
not from their lack of education, health or other skills and assets,
but from processes of disempowerment visited upon them by the power
structures within which they are located.
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Development interventions that effectively reduce
inequities undoubtedly enhance conditions under which it may become
more likely for women to assert their rights. But by itself, the
amelioration of the conditions of women's lives merely reshapes the
milieu within which existing power relations are played out. It does
not change existing relations of power or bring about women's empowerment
per se. Contrary to much of development discourse that regards such
domains as employment, education or health as the focus of women's
empowerment, WEMC research views these domains merely as the landscape
where women's empowerment takes place, rather than as achievements of
empowerment.
The programme emphasises women's indigenous strategies for empowerment
that have been largely undocumented, including individual and
collective struggles. The diagram below shows the empowerment processes
at individual, collective, organised, institutional levels that WEMC
research is studying:
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Scale of women's empowerment from individual to
institutionalised
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The
WEMC programme maps where, when, how and why individual actions
translate into collective efforts, then become organised and
institutionalised, or else fail to do so, as the case may be.
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Operationalising
the WEMC research framework
To operationalise this conceptual framework, the WEMC programme focuses
on women's empowerment and disempowerment in four thematic areas:
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- Theme 1: Women's views
and analyses of power, disempowerment, empowerment
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- Theme 2: Women engaging
in contestations of power around mechanisms of control used by
disempowering forces
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- Theme 3: Women's
strategies for empowerment and the support they mobilise
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- Theme 4: Outcomes of
women's initiatives for empowerment
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