Wed And Sustainable Development Essay Research Paper

Wed And Sustainable Development Essay, Research Paper

At the present rate of development, according to many scientists, the world will reach critical mass sometime within the next fifty years. With these doomsday predictions, many development models have come under scrutiny for their shortsightedness and lack of environmental concerns. Over the past thirty years, those affected most, or more appropriately, those who are being forced to bear the brunt of the negative impacts of these development programs the most, have increasingly become themes that have not only brought to light serious defects in Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPS) and other development programs, but have also critically assessed the very social fabrics that have encouraged the systematic deterioration of roles and status for a majority of people in the developing countries. Unfortunately, the majority is comprised of mainly women and children, with women especially affected by the development programs’ shortsightedness.

With this in mind, the theme of Women in Development (WID) and women, environment and development (WED), among other related themes and programs, have been the main actors in voicing the concerns of those in the Third World and making known the major flaws in the Western hegemonic model of development. However, in the 1980s, because of the variety of problems, situations, complexities, and a deeper insight of the root of exclusion, a transition from WID to Gender and Development (GAD) was enacted by the aid agencies. Rosi Braidotti outlines this in her chapter, “Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development: Emergence of the Theme and Different Views” in her coauthored book, Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development. Born in the early 1970s, WID addressed women’s roles in the development process and the need to recognize and account for their various contributions (Braidotti 80). However, with the need to eradicate poverty, governments and development agencies reformulated the demand for equity as a means to harness the valuable resource of women in economic development (80). With the increasing poverty of Third World populations, a crisis that was termed the “feminization of poverty,” women disproportionately suffered from cuts in government spending that development programs targeted as nonessential to rapid economic development, such as health care and social services (80). Additionally, development efficiency and effectiveness was seen through increased contributions (read as workload) of women . the “Efficiency Approach,”a term coined by Caroline Moser to describe the participation and equity of this approach to women’s development (81).

Criticizing the WID efficiency approach, aid agencies during the late 1980s initiated a move to GAD, which represented a transition to “not only integrate women into development, but look for the potential in development initiatives to transform unequal social/gender relations and to empower women” (82). This shift from WID’s preoccupation with women to GAD’s focus on gender was a stance that allowed for empowerment, something the WID approach essentially lacked. With the new view of “women as agents of change rather than as passive recipients of development assistance,” or only as tools and resources for economic development, many embraced the idea that women could be empowered in a way that allowed for better integration into development programs that would aim for complete economic development equality (82).

The adoption of GAD as a way of thinking for aid agencies was relatively simple considering the far more complex and mounting problem facing the agencies: How does one design a sustainable development program which could empower women as well as improve their economic well-being. One thing is for certain, the Western gendered division of labor instituted in the South through colonization would have to be replaced by or reversed back to a more “complementary” arrangement (Peterson and Runyan 131). The more rigid, less equal division of labor has not completely undermined alternative notions of the work that men and women perform, but instead, has become a unitary, global, gendered division of labor, which is rooted in the patriarchal conceptions of the “natures” of men and women that are inextricably a part of the world capitalist system (131). The gendered dichotomies of production/reproduction, public/private, paid/unpaid, and breadwinner/housewife ideologically confine the roles of men and women into a division of labor that has detrimentally affected countries in the South and have caused the basic failure of many SAPS and other development programs. Recognizing the Western model as inherently and structurally inappropriate for economic and sustainable development is a recommended start in designing a program for any country in the South.

Additionally, it has been found that not only do women experience a relative and absolute deterioration of role and status vis-.-vis men through the development process, but they also do not automatically benefit from that process (Braidotti 78). This was the outcome when men were drawn into the modernizing agricultural sectors while women remained in subsistence farming with no access to credits, training, and technology (78). The designers of development programs most often ignored women’s major contribution of labor in agriculture and in other productive acti