The changed and the unchanged: Peer learning for gender and development in Delhi

Abstract

Peer education has become a popular strategy for promoting gender equality in recent years in response to calls for more participatory forms of development and thanks to the growing popularity of ‘social norms change’ within the development industry. However, there is some evidence that the main benefits of peer education programs are accrued by the peer educators themselves, with little change evident among the target group. This essay draws on research with peer educators working in the ‘gender and development’ sector in Delhi to make two arguments. First, peer educators expressed a sense of enhanced agency and aspirations as a result of the participation in these development initiatives. However, consistent with critiques of other forms of ‘information-centred development’, the primary outcomes of these programs were tied to the material conditions of employment for peer educators rather than entitlements for intended beneficiaries or indeed the knowledge that peer educators had received and were disbursing. Second, in addition to the the absence of structural change and collective political action, the limited outcomes of peer education programs for intended beneficiaries might also reflect the binary created within information-centred approaches to development between the changed and the unchanged. This binary resonates with the dislocations described by scholars of development categories and postcolonial feminist scholars, suggesting that the intended beneficiaries of these programs might feel alienated by their purported peers when development is conceptualized in terms of norms to be changed through information programs.