A communication from Devaki Jain, Dec 2, 2006
Section I: The concerns or What stimulated me to strive for such a meeting
Section II: In search of an idea
1. Dismissing the old: not wanting to tinker at the edges
2. Invoking the intellectual: knowledge as capital
Section III: Some “new” ideas
1. Another way of building security?
2. Invoking history for enabling self confidence or security rather than through guns
3. Engaging with inequality, as a source of conflict
4. Measuring differently: challenging the growth paradigm
5. Governance and enabling laws and institutions
Preamble
I am trying to shape the focus of our Casablanca Meeting. I am laying out below some of the knowledge and concerns that started me off on the quest, and bringing in your voices to find the convergence of concern and thought. In the note below we try to resonate your voices towards a thought supported by the voices of other thinkers and activists. Section I: The concerns or What stimulated me to strive for such a meeting One of the deep concerns of the international women movement as it is today is the noticeable disjunction between the visibility, articulation, collective efforts and knowledge conduiting that the world wide women’s movement have been able to achieve, a true revolution in terms of the consciousness of an issue and the building of a constituency; and the reality on the ground.
There is an extraordinary flood of reports, local and global, across the board by scholars, voices from the ground as well as officialdom, on the incarceration women are facing under the current global order, which suggest that the gains resulting from neoliberal “development” have not alleviated the magnitude of poverty and inequality. Here are some of your voices , considerations by members of the Casablanca group which seem to support this point. I have taken them from some of your papers that I already had besides some other voices .
Lourdes Beneria: “Increasing informality and the deterioration of working conditions in developing countries during the past two decades have taken place in a climate that has emphasized citizenship, political rights, individual agency, and democracy. Hence the contradictions and social tensions between these discourses emphasizing empowerment and equality on the one hand, and the realities of precariousness, poverty, and powerlessness associated with informality on the other. Globalization has intensified these tensions by enlarging their scope and sphere of reference, and by contributing to the factors that generate informality.”
Diane Elson: “As is now abundantly clear, neither the project of national development nor the neoliberal project of global consumer choice has adequately fulfilled the hope for the substantial reduction of poverty and inequality. “
Shahra Razavi: “Unilinear accounts of progress tend to focus on broad trends and fail to capture some of the contradictory effects of development processes. For example, while declining fertility continues to improve women’s life chances in their reproductive years in most countries of the world, in some it has been associated with an increase in artificially high ratios of males to females (sex ratios) in the population”
Nilufer Cagatay and Korkuk Erturk: “Much recent evidence points in the direction of increased inequality, although some controversy still exists on issues of definition, measurement and data sources. ..In fact, detailed estimates of the size distribution of world income (which takes into account inequalities within individual countries) show that income distribution in the world economy has indeed worsened. Other measures of inequality, such as the skill wage gap between workers (highly skilled versus unskilled workers), have widened in many parts of the world, especially in Latin America, which is quite contrary to what would be expected on the basis of standard trade theory.”
Yassine Fall: “We see that inequalities within the home and in gender relations within society in general, aggravate when economic policies and reforms that are market oriented are implemented. We also see that macro-economic policies do affect women differently – just as the availability of public services affect women differently than men. So I think we should go a little beyond when we look at the community and the relations between people and see how their way of managing poverty and finding ways to cope is shouldered by women.”
Praful Bidwai, Visiting Professor at the Nelson Mandela Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, writing in the issue of WHAT NEXT of the Dag Hammerskjold Foundation: “Today’s globalised world is deeply contradictory. On the one hand, there is growing interdependence, exchange and interaction between many different parts of the globe. On the other, there are huge swathes of land that are virtually excluded from any meaningful interaction with the rest of the world. They have experienced stagnation or decline, want and insecurity, mounting social chaos, and even outright economic and political devastation through war and famine. About two-fifths of the world’s people live in such societies. … What has actually emerged in place of these visions and proposals is a world that is better in some respects, considerably worse in many more respects and, in a few respects at least, a monstrosity.”
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