Inclusive Administration and Development: Feminist Critiques of Bureaucracy

Abstract

The effectiveness of development policies and the economic well-being of women have been the dual objectives underlying the gendered approaches to development in the Third World such as women in development, gender and development and empowerment. Although the United Nations Decade for Women, 1975–85 — with its themes of equality, development and peace — was largely responsible for the global spread of women’s studies,1 the emphasis on women in development is mostly attributable to a recognition of the failure of the process of economic modernisation. By the early 1970s, a general consensus prevailed among both academics and practitioners that development policies had left women marginalised socially and economically, while increasing their dependence on men. Women in development, with an emphasis on equity in the early 1970s that shifted later to an anti-poverty approach, pressed for the efficient integration of women in the development process.2 However, Third World feminist scholars, in explaining the inadequacies of the approach of increasing women’s participation in the development process, began an examination of the structural relationships between problems of women on the one hand, and the global capitalist social and economic relations and patriarchy on the other.3