With the new millennium has come a growing concern that the mainstreaming of Gender and Development (GAD) has not produced the expected gender transformations in developing economies.
Much has been written on whether those expectations were overly optimistic (Standing 2007), on whether the techniques of GAD or the policies aimed at alleviating poverty and empowering women themselves serve to depoliticise gender issues (Batliwala and Dhanraj 2007; Jackson 1998) or re-traditionalise gender relations (Molyneux 2006). A particular concern is that feminist analyses that focused on women’s individualised autonomy and empowerment and that conceived of conjugal and kin relations as primarily relations of subordination and constraint have been readily embraced by neoliberal discourses and policies.
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This article comes from the IDS Bulletin 39.6 (2008) Whose Money is it?‘: On Misconceiving Female Autonomy and Economic Empowerment in Low‐income Households
