Casablanca Dream Meeting Report
Istanbul, Turkey 23-25 July 2007
Prepared by Fatma Abdullahi
Quotes
"We need to move away from a from a fragmented view of poverty to an integrated definition of poverty" Zanele Mbeki
"We need to influence those at the top that have a say in development then filter it down, adapting for different audiences." Lourdes Beneria
"We also need to go beyond taxes to citizen participation, inputting resources into development in various ways." Zanele Mbeki
"Many people say globalization is here to say, well some people used to say slavery, colonization and apartheid are here to stay." Yassine Fall
"When women think, they think not only for themselves but for the entire community." Solita Monsod
"We do not have the answers, we are on a quest and we are not the ones who have begun this journey." Nomboniso Gasa
"We are naked, so we can shop for new clothes because we are not truly accepted into the intellectual domain which dominates." Devaki Jain
"We come because we share a particular vision, a changed society that is grounded on the experience of the lives of the people. We are saying that the way in which we measure growth and development has got to be linked directly to the ways in which our lives are changed." Nomboniso Gasa
"Hey, we are not doing this because we are so sick and tired of being left out, we are doing it because you are doing it wrong." Solita Monsod.
"The discussion in Casablanca meant that we could take our dreams to a whole set of different actors." Nilufer Cagatay
"I am absolutely horrified when I see advertisements giving the idea that to be a liberated and empowered woman is about what you can afford to buy." Diane Elson
"We have to re-write or write a new book that is as important to the world as Adam Smith and Marx." Devaki Jain
"Women are the main providers of economic surplus and growth and yet they are the ones that receive the least. This is not about complaining, it is about making an analysis." Yassine Fall
Purpose: The idea to meet in Istanbul at the GEM-IWG Conference was to take the Casablanca Dream discussions one step forward by discussing:
- the creation of a Casablanca Dream concept paper
- the concept of modernity (Diane Elson leading the discussion)
- the Dream to the GEM-IWG participants
- the report of the Casablanca meeting that Shubha Chacko and Devaki Jain worked on
- shifting "the engine" to continue the Casablanca energy to AWOMI
- the spaces where the group can intervene to move the Casablanca agenda forward - for example NAM, CSW, IPU
- how to present at CSW
- This scholarly document should capture the knowledge (the lived experiences of people that may not necessarily be literate) of women's conditions, transliterate it, engage it in theory.
- Target audience should be clear from the beginning.
- The theoretical, academic aspect of this paper should reflect the issues the women in the local levels experience.
- How do we get governments to listen and take up these issues?
- We have to pressure governments to want to take up these issues. There should not just be pressure from the supply side but also from the demand.
- Chaptering it to make it a negotiable document. Conversations need to get into decision-making forums in order to get to the local levels.
- In the section on the nature of the crisis, we can put the examples Yassine gave on the experiences of women from the local levels-for example, testimonies from Lusaka, a woman raising ten children on less than $1 a day, HIV+ women paying taxes for their health care even though ARVs are free. Examples of the state shifting its responsibility on women.
- Then think of mobilizing these women from the National forum, and each person can take this from the group into her own country.
- Remembering the main theme of the Casablanca initiative: empowering women to walk out of poverty.
- Discuss flawed Market prices are all flawed. GDP distortion due to discrimination against women and unpaid work not being counted.
- Evaluate unfair labor laws that exploit and compromise women's welfare labor laws, look globally-the ILO. There are countries with great labor laws, minimum wage etc, look to these for examples of best practice-Cambodia for example.
- Respect cultural relativism.
- Analyze the divide between the drive to compete and the drive to maintain human rights standards.
- Connect with the vibrant movements at the local levels to address the disconnect with the organization outside these levels-bridge these gaps so that women in the local levels can be part and parcel of this movement.
- Influence those at he top that have a say in development, then filter it down. Adapt it for different audiences.
- When going to the NAM and these different spaces with issues of human rights, we must use our own negotiating skills and stay firm on what we believe. Validating our own knowledge.
- In the beginning, when we are negotiating, we must be strategic and use language to get them to accept to take up our issues. We know what we want but we must not articulate it yet, so that we don't risk losing the battle so early by not being tactical. This language is a gate pass.
- We must maintain and use an economic and social rights framework in this concept paper
- We must write it first for ourselves, and CSW is a less intimidating place to start
After consolidating the above points Shubha Chacko and Devaki Jain put together Draft One Concept Paper to present to Winnie Biniyama, Director, UNDP gender Unit in preparation for CSW. Below is a breakdown of the sections in the paper:
Section I
The argument: Despite progresses made in the past forty years, the world faces a number of deep crises. Harvesting and bringing to bear women's knowledge into development though design and action is needed to address the crises and achieve a more equitable, sustainable and just development for all. Move to economic thinking that
Section II
Identify the crises:
Crisis of inequality between classes, countries, gender, ethnic groups, rural and urban populations including their lack of representation, presence and participation.
Crisis of poverty in which people are deprived of basic goods and services, even in the midst of rapid growth, with women experiencing different and deeper forms of poverty than men.
Crisis of care, in which there is an increase in demands for care as a result of the increasing prevalence of disease, and of the aging population, while at the same time, time for care is squeezed by demands on women to increase their participation in care work.
Crisis of the environment arising from the unsustainable lifestyles of the North and increasingly of the South
Crisis in livelihoods due to increasing risk of economics and precariousness of work.
Crisis in culture-where culture is used to oppress rather than liberate, with pressure on the marketization and homogenization of culture.
Crisis in finance for development (inadequate taxation, inadequate international transfers, over-restrictive fiscal space-countries not allowed by IMF to spend additional aid).
Section III
Analysis:
The private rate of return is emphasized at the expense of the social rate of return resulting in an erosion of social and economic rights, and a steady increase in the commercialization and marketization of all aspects of life.
Flawed indicators to measure the progress of economies-SNA needs to include women's neglected contributions-a step in reorienting development design and practice.
The ideas of modernization that are driving growth in the South are of consumerism, ideas that also shaped modernization in the North.
Shift gender roles to dual earner, dual career gender order where male breadwinner model is out of the window. Women as well as men contribute cash income to families but gender discrimination keeps women's earnings low and women still do most of the unpaid work of looking after families.
Section IV
Ways of meeting these challenges by Re-imagining:
modernization
measures-integrating unpaid work into national accounts, deprivation and poverty
knowledge by validating and liberating indigenous knowledge
work-reconciliation of productive and reproductive and labor standards
distribution and redistribution
social protections
the state-also in light of issues of global governance and builds democratic institutions at all levels
justice to reemphasize economic and social rights and include poverty as a violation of the state of their Obligation to Human Rights
identity
security
Revisiting and redefining the concept of modernity
Diane Elson began with discussing alternative forms of modernization in ways that would link with some of the key issues raised in Casablanca. This means including the issue of better indicators and measures to capture what the Casablanca Group were interested in and expanding the range of actors. According to Elson, there has been too much focus on the state, the market and civil society, creating a need to think of new hybrid forms of actors such as the trade unions. There should not just be dialogue between this group and governments, there should also be inter-governmental organizations so that there is a range of actors.
After rehashing what the group had discussed in Casablanca, Diane Elson touched on the possibilities of using of international law bodies such as ICC and human rights reporting system to make a connection between international law and economic and social rights-highlighting the deprivations of these rights. As an example, Elson suggested discussing with actors such as Paul Hunt, the UN special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, the kind of indicators to measure whether a government is running a health system that complies with its obligations in international law under the right to health.
Starting from the crises identified in Casablanca, Elson discussed the paradox of the balance of economic power. The economic power of the industrialized west is being challenged by China, India, South Africa, Brazil and smaller countries enjoying economic growth more now that they did in the 1980s and 1990s. This is very positive however, at the same time this is a growth model that is modeled on the kind of growth strategies that the industrialized west implemented-around industrialization, consumerism and private investment to satisfy private needs. This is leading to an enormous imbalance in who can enjoy all the privately purchased goods such as mobile phones, ipods etc. The successful growth countries are following a similar trajectory as the US-an unsustainable trajectory. Could there be different kinds of growth that lead to alternative modernities for everybody-modernizing in a better, more sustainable way?
The Consumerist model of growth:
According to Elson, the kind of modernization we are seeing everywhere is very unbalanced because it is over-reliant on private investment to meet private consumption wants-shaped and promoted by the very same companies that make a profit by producing goods and services to satisfy them. Advertising of wants that people did not know they had five years ago stimulates richer people and middle-income groups to want more and more, want that are then satisfied by the companies that make a profit out of doing this. On the other hand, there are other people who do not have the basic necessities. To illustrate this, Elson used the example of how we do not need a lot of advertising to stimulate a demand for clean water because everybody wants it. But to convince people the buy the latest version of a car or an ipod, you need advertising and you get a vicious cycle-a one-sided growth accompanied by inequality and insecurity and a distortion of humanity. "This is not a sustainable model," stated Elson, "If everyone was living this kind off consumerist lifestyle, we wouldn't need one planet, we would need three."
Social Rate of Return vs Private rate of Return
"This is an initiative that countries in the South can take up-moving towards different ways to being modern, where they might focus more on social investments for social consumption," Elson suggested, adding, "The use of the word social is to emphasize that this is not a purely state led model (history has shown us how unsustainable purely state-led modernization models have been) Using social instead of state helps in thinking of the whole range of actors and the different ways they may combine with one another."
These actors include the central state, local state, cooperatives, community-based enterprises, social enterprises and hybrids, (for example, women's cooperatives setting up childcare provisions and the local state buying half the places on the grounds they provide a free service to families that cannot afford to pay, and the other half can supply the service to women who can pay).
Thinking of the benefits of actions not in terms of how much money is being made for the shareholders, (which is imperative if one is private company,) but in terms of the benefits to the society and to the individual. This involves putting in place systems that produce non-quantifiable, non-monetary benefits.
Balance between the public and private
Elson defined social investments as transforming a society for the next generation and Social Consumption as the things we do together. For example, in purely private provision of childcare, we hire a nanny to come into our homes and take care of our children but in the social consumption of childcare, our children meet with other children in the nursery and they get that social education through interacting with children from different families. There are social benefits from social consumption, in terms of the way we interact with each other in society. This is a powerful way of trying to overcome some of the inequalities because you get to meet people from other income groups, other kinds of ethnic groups and religious beliefs.
The Gender dimension to alternative modernization
The things women need to make it easier to manage and raise their families are things best provided in a public way, i.e. water, electricity, education, public transport-rich women can purchase their way out of them but poor women are burdened. Women do extra work when there is a mismatch between the pattern of provision of goods and services and what their families can afford. They are the ones to do the extra work to bridge the gap.
"Culturally, one of ways the consumerist model of growth builds extra wants is to encourage women to think of themselves as commodities and to think the way they realize themselves as women is through what they buy," Elson pointed out. It is the balance between the kinds of aspirations women have of what it means to be a liberated and empowered woman, that fosters alternative modernization.
Social Investments
These investments include a broad range of infrastructure including:
Clean sustainable water and sanitation, Public transport and sustainable energy, sustainable and affordable housing and community buildings, care services, health and education and sustainable food provision.
Building an investment strategy around the above requires development of new technologies, creation of jobs, changes in changing global economic policy rules, trade policy, the way the IMF sets conditions for countries and governments set rules on economic policy. Elson asked how these issues be framed at the core of economic modernization strategy, what that would mean in terms of the investments and the implementing partners because of the mix of actors. This involves formulating the trade policies, taxation (social investments for social needs requires paying 30% ratio of tax revenue to GNP of 30%) etc.
To conclude, Elson discussed the need for transformation in both the way governments and markets run, urging that this while this will require technical analysis that members such as Solita Monsod can help with, a lot of it requires mobilization of people from the grassroots up to demand a different kind of strategy. Some of it can be done in a very decentralized way using new hybrids developing from local level up and other systems which require scaling up "economies of scale" at higher tiers of governments and bigger enterprises. For a forward-looking strategy to work, we do need investments, modernization and economic transformation. It is essential to use examples from different parts of the world where there is already movement in this direction. For example, the city in Brazil that has developed a wonderful public transport system that has been attracting European planners, as they prioritize efficient and accessible transportation to building more roads for private cars.
Yassine Fall added to Elson's presentation by highlighting the context the Casablanca Group is attempting to contest. Changing the global economic rules within a macro-economic environment of trade liberalization and globalization is very complex. She explained some critical questions that need to be incorporated into the dialogue. With regards to taxation, Fall pointed out that there is a limit to what people can pay. In least developed countries where people are extremely poor and earn less than a dollar a day, assuming that people will pay taxes while corporations are enjoying decreases in corporate and environment tax and increases in benefits from tampering with labor laws, is a great paradox. The other issue is valuing women's unpaid work as a social tax. When governments cut 70% of social expenditure and pushes it back to women's arena in terms of unpaid work, so that the woman is providing all of these health services, should be considered when raising taxes. "Why does this woman have to pay more taxes?" stated Fall, adding, "discussing and revisiting these innovative frameworks after better packaging them and carrying them on a movement along with women on the local level should be a priority."
Solita Monsod added that "this kind of alternative modernization is essentially a product of women's thinking, it is not self-centered it is wide and so beneficial because we are thinking of the whole world." She discussed employment, and illustrated how employment definitions have made women invisible. According to Monsod, because the employment definition follows the UN System of National Accounts (SNA) definition which talks about economic activity of women as activity that is market oriented, developing countries are forced to accept it. She stressed that this is an arbitrary imposition by a developed country perspective where most of the activity is in the market, stating, "In talking about the alternative, we have to talk about one that encompasses a more rational perspective of what employment is all about. We first must disabuse people's minds of the notion that women are an economically inactive population." In support, Elson added, "Our women's perspective is more rational, because it is less self-centered."
Zanele Mbeki concluded this discussion by mentioning the importance of clarity in definitions. "In the concept paper, do not take anything for granted particularly in terms of language. Have a glossary on women redefining development for all. That should be explicitly put out in the introduction, rather than having people inferring this," she offered. Employment definition should also be defined clearly. Terms like modernization may be problematic in certain spaces. Modernization is often associated with industrialization. She suggested using inclusive modernization that is integrative because it is difficult to determine what we mean today by modernization.
Panel Discussion at GEM-IWG. 25th July 2007.
To open this panel discussion presentation of the Casablanca Dream to the GEM-IWG participants, Nomboniso Gasa introduced the notion of experience as a form of knowledge. According to Gasa, the current global macroeconomic landscape and the ways in which our countries and the international dominant ethos is disempowering countries is experienced even by academics and practitioners irrespective of where we allocate it.
If we shift the focus to the most disempowered and marginalized, we believe that marginalization is a space of location and this does not necessarily inform knowledge-whether you know or you do not know. In those areas of people who live beyond the margins, there is a theory and wealth of experience in terms of surviving and dealing with a whole range of different things including contributions to the economy not being acknowledged. In Casablanca we also acknowledged the need to find other networks, hence the presentation at GEM-IWG.
Nilufer Cagatay spoke to the complementarities of GEM and Casablanca. She stated that GEM is responsible for producing and sharing knowledge in ways that are empowering for people in the grassroots, academia and policy-makers. GEM and the Casa group share the same vision of a just world. GEM can act as the support for the actions of the Casa Group in terms of knowledge production and sharing. On the other hand, the Casa Group can bring what is being produced by GEM and other sister networks to new fora, new political spaces-an enormously important organic relationship.
Devaki Jain explained to the participants where the name Casablanca Dream came from. Jain acknowledged the contributions of Fatema Mernisi. The idea was to have a feminist woman address the crisis in a very informal, unstructured, non-network and non-monetized way and the intellectual umbrella to have this dialogue was Fatema Mernisi in Casablanca. According to Jain, Mernisi has a huge mind that is capable of weaving together every scholarly discipline in a coherent fashion-from the economics of migration, to history and Islam. The idea of Dream also came from her and it is important to acknowledge her. In addition, Jain observed how refreshing it was to see all the ways in which the GEM group has created a community of knowledge. She said that in India, people only see knowledge as the IT industry, which is called the Knowledge Industry.
According to Jain, knowledge creation also has its oppression. We inherit the paradigms, the reasoning of the content and terminology, and part of the battle is to remove the oppression of this given knowledge. "The touchstone of all our arguments, including those that have been here in my writings is always the social science terminologies that are part of what is called the given method of looking at social science," Jain stated, adding that, "It is not only money and power that we worry about which comes from the north, but it is also the intentional power of this social science terminology which however much we try to undermine, it's always basketted terminology, such that if you do that you are a 'subaltern' or you are 'post-modernist', so that within a minute, any attempt to re-content that vocabulary is given a brand, in which we remain." The Casablanca Dream is attempting to reassemble these terminologies. It is therefore important to deconstruct and reconstruct.
The Majoritarian Landscape of Thought
One of the greatest contributions of feminist research is to give new content to old words. Despite the fact that many women are recognized scholars, there is a certain amount of exclusion amongst the intellectual crowd. This is the concept Devaki Jain calls the majoritarian landscape of thought-meaning that the majority in this landscape have the advantage of always challenging the recreation of these terminologies. Accepting these challenges requires deconstructing and reconstructing-a very time consuming and oppressive phenomena.
Inclusive Growth
As part of terminology building and rebuilding, the Casablanca Group want to rethink modernization. Part of this process involves redefining "inclusive growth," a terminology that is very current with the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, UNDP and leaders of most developing countries. This cuts back to some form of redistributive justice. For instance, employment guarantee scheme in India is seen as inclusive growth. Growth that compensates for leaving the poor behind by giving them the wage work, and including them in the prosperity of the country-redistributive economic policy. According to Jain, inclusive growth should be inclusive of people as agents, using their mental strength and knowledgge from the very beginning-the model building stages. Jain finished by observing the need for a movement to reclaim the language of the social sciences and to support the history, preoccupations and capabilities of the South.
Solita Monsod spoke about the disparate backgrounds of the Casablanca Group, elaborating on the difficult of coming to conclusion with such a dynamic group. She discussed the role of the Casablanca Dream in intervening in changing the flaws in economic policies and economic models that have caused the inequality and crises-in care, in government, in environment. She criticized the tremendous focus on growth that in the process, distribution and equity for welfare and wellbeing (the end of growth is supposed to be development) is erroneously assumed to be automatically part of this growth process. The reason why these models are so flawed is because they are based on Andro-centric, Eurocentric assumptions that we sometimes fail to question because they have been there since time immemorial. In addition, Monsod added that these models and policies have ignored the most important source of contributions to this growth-the role of women, especially the contributions of women in households.
Water Women and Wealth
Yassine Fall discussed the formation of a Casablanca Dream secretariat at AWOMI as well as important issues of the Dream. She touched on the entry points for addressing all of the issues addressed-women, water and wealth.
Women
There is a need to refocus on women, their knowledge and contributions. Even today, there are many people who do not have a clear idea of what gender equality. "How do we twist the arms of policy-makers to change from business as usual," stated Fall, adding that "this can be done by social mobilization. We will never be able to do this if we do not go back to women who can see themselves in what we are analyzing."
Gender Budget Analysis by women at the local level
According to Fall, women from the rural areas and urban slums are able to make the same analysis that those sitting in the ivory towers can make, the only difference is that they did not go to schools. She described a woman she had met in Zambia who explained how she caring for ten persons on less than a dollar a day. By describing what she was doing, how much she was earning, the cost she was paying when the children had diseases like malaria and TB, or measuring the CD4 counts for those who were HIV positive. This woman accounted for everything she was paying in taxes and transportation. She not only did a gender budget analysis, she presented her unpaid care work and contribution to financial growth.
Water
Today, water is the most important issue that is causing contradiction between communities, governments and international financial institutions. Privatization is forcing people who cannot afford to pay for it to walk long distances to get unsafe water, increasing outbreaks of diseases such as cholera. This is a very important issue that will bring micro-level realities of unpaid work, the meso-level decisions of privatization and policy instruments and international policy-making to highlight the appalling effects of cost-recovery fees for example, that are preventing girls from going to school when they have their periods because of lack of water in their homes.
Contributions and questions from GEM-IWG participants.
One participant observed that there should be clear linkage between activism and knowledge creation. This is important in disseminating and translating key concrete policy recommendations at the national and international level in such a way that the women in the grassroots movement can also understand and talk in the same paradigm and language. Information and messages from the grassroots such as the example of the woman living on less than a dollar a day need to packaged and translated.
Andrea Cornea pointed out that the issue the Casablanca Group was putting out seemed to be an issue of mobilization, especially on the level of political mobilization. "Are women able to mobilize enough to campaign and convince other members of society that we need a different paradigm. That is more difficult to do because women are not only women, they also belong to social classes, races and religions," Cornea stated. They are multi-faceted and gender is one of those facets. If one looks at the workers struggle for example, they were exploited and they mobilized under a clear, conceived common interest. "Do women have a clear common interest? In terms of theories of mobilization, this is very critical."
On the issue of unpaid work, Rania Antonopoulos reminded the group that the problem was not only collecting the data but also helping to put models in place that the governments will use to evaluate and also be held accountable to. For example, if one has a model today that predicts three percent inflationary pressure because of the monetary policy one is planning to use and it turns out inflation is ten percent, there is a consequence-the government will get voted out. But if it turns out that the government implements a policy that says privatize and shift the care of the sick back to private companies, or in order to increase the productivity of the health care sector, the government sends patients home one day after they get an operation to be taken care of by their families-shifting the burden to volunteerism, at the end of the day the budget is held where it needs to be fiscally but there is a tremendous increase in unpaid work, with adverse effects on education, health and time-use. "We need to push for modeling that tells the government and World Bank here is an alternative," Antonopoulos claimed. Give compelling reasons why for example, time-use (women and girls spend three months out of the year going to collect water) and unpaid work are all burdens to women and should get picked up, acknowledged and put into models that governments should use.
For example illustrate to the World Bank that no matter what their models predict there are invisible factors they are leaving out, i.e. women's unpaid work. Women are subsidizing daily through direct transfers to the market (gifts they are not asked if they want to give), and which no one acknowledges. Women also subsidize the state so the state can tax less the component of the economy that is marketized and can reduce its expenditures. "When we go through structural adjustment or any crisis, one can see very easily the burden but no one acknowledges it because there is someone doing the work," Antonopoulos stated.
She added that state policies are not entirely responsible for where we are today. These state policies are being made in a context of a capitalism that has gone off kilter because the needs of financial sector have superceded the needs of human beings. If we look at the institutional changes that have occurred worldwide in the last ten to fifteen years, it is clear that institutions are facilitating not only mergers and acquisitions but also a liberalization state that allows and empowers financial capital to dominate what happens at the level of markets, production and reproduction. And it is within this context that governments are being squeezed to adapt policies that do not marginalize the country within the global context. This globalization is therefore taking place within a setup that produces financial instability and requires the accommodation of the governments.
The Casablanca Group needs to revolutionalize this kind of thinking. She pointed out that, "There is something wrong with financial institutions getting the upper hand and dictating what is happening in the country." This alternative framework puts human beings and the reproduction needs of people at the center. In this vein Nilufer Cagatay added that "the ways we produce knowledge, the content of the knowledge, the way we take and understand experiences of knowledge must all be contested. It is only out of contestation that we get strong objectivity, which is not a characteristic of individual or societies but rather of the process of knowledge production. This process knowledge production must be inclusive not only of women and men but also people who occupy different class positions. People who have been excluded from formal processes of knowledge production."
CSW
Present the papers or the knowledge at the CSW through ground level practices. Use testimonials from the ground as a means of communication and as part of the design of the Round Table. Speak out of reality, put positive and negative, give best practices as well as show the absurdity of some of the ways the policies are being made.
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