Casablanca Dream III
A draft note on
PURPOSE
from Devaki Jain and Shubha Chacko
10 September 2008

Please comment react and reframe this paper over the next four weeks so we know where we are heading before we meet, and can organize the sessions towards that goal or goals.

1. The thrust

This quest on which we are engaged, on what is now the UNDP project, called "Assessing Development Paradigms through Women's Knowledge", is to harvest our knowledge, which of course we all know ,comes from our lived experience and engagement with feminists and feminism, in order to address the burning questions of to day , with the intention of constructing OR reframing , the underpinnings and the agendas of "politics".

While retaining a strong and political thrust we will unpack and rebuild the concept of progress. Progress is often flagged as indubitably desirable as a goal. Progress of nations, of humans /people , of science ,-the list can be limitless. It has a normative value of movement, and is mesmerizing in its universal appeal. However the underlying politics that inform this "progress project" is the broad subject of our interrogation.

The term politics is being used in its broadest sense, not only as power play, but to include the ethical and epistemological underpinnings ; to embrace all the dimensions of struggles for emancipation , for justice; to include the diverse or many elements we work with , namely history, economy, society, and institutions. As feminists we have seen and understood that almost all actions and view points or perceptions arise out of a politics, embedded hierarchies of thought, perception, power and action. Hence politics , in my view embraces these dimensions,

- and of course we welcome you to challenge, modify re frame all of this .

But if you like the umbrella concept, then we would give what we hope will be the outcome of this colloquium, a name , namely,

The politics of economic justice : feminist explorations

And the broader heading and the specific quest as

Interrogating and Rebuilding Progress: Through Feminist Knowledge

By drawing on the work, knowledge and experience of feminists, coming not only from varied geographical spaces, but also from a variety of knowledge spaces , the hope is to identify "other" ways of stimulating economic growth, ushering in prosperity, economic justice . "Other" obviously implies and suggests that the current ways of generating the growth of GDP, measuring prosperity , well being, progress , and/or offering an economic, social or political development program is flawed. ,

In other words, to repeat, the underlying assumption of the quest is that the current programs or projects or approaches that seek to usher in progress are often linked with various kinds of undesirable outcomes, notably the exacerbating of inequality, impoverishment and environmental devastation.

2. The basic question that the Casablanca process seeks to answer, in our view is:

How should a framework in development theory and practice respond to this new world with special reference to enabling women in poverty to walk out of it?

(...)

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