Are There Good Samaritans? Beyond Local Gender Systems and Global Standards

Abstract

This paper examines why “gender and development’ programs and other schemes to improve the human condition have failed in Third world countries (specifically in Southeast Asia, in particular, East Timor, Indonesia, and the Philippines). The analyses is based on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork on the failure of key institutions and the rush to meet short-term project deadlines, rather than valuing local knowledges and social processes, and partnering with people we would usually not partner with. It provides critical analyses of the gaps in the knowledge of the so-called “rule of experts’ with their “global standards’ and recommends how they can unlearn their privileges (especially with regards to communication), undertake pedagogical reform (when it comes to “knowledge sharing”), and shift the paradigms in order to learn from people they would normally ignore, especially those who are virtuosos in the art of not being governed, local gender systems, and anti-colonial clandestine political cultures. It engages the theoretical analyses of James Scott's “Seeing Like a State’ and “The Art of Not Being Governed,” Timothy Mitchell's “The Rule of Experts,” and Ha-Joon Chang's “Bad Samaritans’ to see whether gender and development policy-makers, students, and activists can learn from masculinities studies and one-size-fits-all strait-jackets that fail. It also looks at the limits of political theory and the importance of building bridges and exploring possibilities for more serious studies on how to build social solidarity networks locally and transnationally.