THE DAWN DEVELOPMENT DEBATES (DDD)
Reflections from Within (Also available in DAWN Informs June 2010 Issue):
The DAWN Development Debates that took place in Mauritius from 18-20 January 2010 is an unusual DAWN meeting in two ways. It is the first time that DAWN had invited men. It is also the first meeting since the very early beginning where DAWN invited friends from the North. Interestingly, both of these had been part of DAWN’s intensive organizational debates in the past. The opportunity presented by the DDD may have to do with a number of things: DAWN’s own ‘coming of age,’ the evolution of movements, the creation of new spaces for debates and engagement. The meeting provided DAWN a moment to be able to pause and reflect. Through the debates, DAWN wanted to push the boundaries of its own thinking, to open up to new and challenging issues, or to revisit with friends tensions that DAWN women have met in the course of its two decades of political advocacy.
Global Apartheid:
“What I see emerging, sadly, is a new regime of global apartheid, which is highly marketized, militarized and sexualized… I also understood from our exchanges that a possible alternative to this regime would be, perhaps, more localized forms of production and governance, based on what Ros Petchesky (2010) had called trans ethics principles and universal citizenship rights that would transcend the gaps in existing Human Rights frameworks.” - Zo Randriamaro
Social movements:
“I would like to pick up the notion of social civility that our DTI alumna Carmen Capriles brought to our debates. She spoke of a social civility, which is not formalized and occidentalized, but one born out of simultaneous struggles against big powers, inequalities, discrimination and massive poverty. The global social movement of which we are a part must reflect and take positions on whether and how the mobilization and resistances are enhancing social civility in ways that individuals, whatever their identities and whatever their just claims, are not further dichotomized, polarized or hierarchized.” - Gigi Francisco
Developmental states:
“There’s a sense of idealism about the developmental states, despite the Asian tigers that manifest clear weaknesses… The developmental state is interventionist. Following Rodrik (2007), if the developmental state is interested in growth, health and development, that state must, in fact, intervene to change the incentive structures to ensure profit-generation. But is this what we want? That is not the sense that I gathered in the last 2 days so there’s a tension here between what is being idealized and what our development aspirations are.” - Marina Durano
Economic development & Rights
“One key concern would be how to bring production and consumption to economic discussions that are heavily only about distribution. In addition, who is the subject of rights? Are they persons, communities, or nations? What are Rights vis-a-vis Human Rights? The right to development defined as the right of persons but politically argued as right of states – how do we reclaim the discourse back as the right of persons but at the same time, address the issue of inequalities among states? What systems produce or do not produce justice?” - Gita Sen
Militarization & Development:
“If I look at some important frames of analysis that have come out of these debates, obviously, these are found in the nexus of neo-liberal economy and militarism as a mode of capitalist existence, particularly, the business of wars. War, violence, conflict and militarization create conditions in which local, regional and global political and economic interests are embedded… It is almost impossible to separate the myths of de-colonization, militarization of globalization, illicit economies, political economy of conflict and militarization. The question is how to bring this into DAWN’s political economy framework and analysis.” - Kumudini Samuel
Background
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).
