ZEF Master Course 2006 "Gender and Development"
Overview and Conclusions
by Dr. Akram-Lodhi, <!--StartFragment --> ISS The Hague
The Workshop was held on April 3 and 4 2006. The Workshop offered an opportunity for researchers, whether they were people starting their PhD research, nearing completion of their PhD research, having recently completed their PhD research, or having established research reputations, to receive comments, criticisms and corrections from their peers, along with hearing views on their work from three ‘expert’ facilitators, myself, Dr F Cleaver, and Dr P Mollinga. The facilitators were intended to provide reflections upon the conceptualization of the theme, with the literature and within a gender-reflective approach, as well as the argumentative structure of the paper. Each researcher had their paper presented by one of their peers, comments from two discussants drawn from their peers, and comments from the three facilitators. The structure of the Workshop, by encouraging discussion, resulted in an intense and fruitful 2 day Workshop that not only offered a means for researchers to improve their papers but also opened up a range of avenues for further research that has, as yet, not been fully integrated into the scientific literature. In this sense, then, the Workshop fostered the emergence of an implicit ‘state-of-the-art’ research agenda for researchers in ZEF—and the invited facilitators—to pursue.
The workshop’s topics were selected according to ongoing projects and research activities at ZEF and were as follows:
- Governance and institutions
- Livelihood strategies
- Property rights (land and water)
List of participants and papers & proposal titles
Resource persons
Dr Frances Cleaver, Bradford University, UK
Title: The inequality of social capital and the reproduction of chronic poverty (published in World Development, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 893-906)
Dr Haroon Akram-Lodhi, ISS The Hague, The Netherlands
Title: “You are not excused from cooking”: Peasants and the Gender Division of Labor in Pakistan (published in Feminist Economics, vol. 2, no. 2, 1996, pp. 1354-5701)
Researchers
Stéphanie Cassilde - economist
Title: ‘To be a woman in Brazil: Racial and gender discrimination’ (research proposal)
Bettina Bock (sociologist) & Peter Mollinga (organiser)
Title: ‘Gender dimensions of emerging rural entrepreneurship in Uzbekistan: diversification, migration and trust’ (INTAS project proposal)
Irit Eguavoen – social anthropologist
Title: ‘Household Water in Northern Ghana: water needs, water rights and practices of water allocation’ (paper)
Manuela Peters –social geographer
Title: ‘Women’s resilience to AIDS: A study of low-income women’s perceptions of sexuality & AIDS in Yogyakarta, Central Java, Indonesia’ (research proposal)
Franklin Simtowe – economist
Title: ‘Gender and livelihood strategies in Malawi’ (paper)
Holger Seebens – economist
Title: ‘Bargaining over fertility in rural Ethiopia’ (paper)
Eva Youkhana – social anthropologist
Title: ‘Tourism and peasant-artisan women – an example from rural Mexico (paper)
Without papers:
Adelia Branco
Gabi Waibel
Charlotte van der Schaaf (organiser)
Concluding Comments
In terms of research agendas, the Workshop demonstrated that classic conceptualizations of structure and agency may be problematic in situations of extreme constraints that place people within chronic poverty processes. The Workshop also reinforced a deepening view that household structure(s) need to be rethought. Indeed, these two aspects of possible research agendas are interrelated: household structure shapes and is shaped by the ‘6 dimensions of agency’ identified by one of the facilitators, which apparently may contain within it the material dimensions of the bargaining approach.
In terms of research methodologies, it is clear that the quantitative/qualitative distinction is artificial, rooted in the transformation of political economy into neoclassical economics and the separation of economics from other social science disciplines. Research wants to find patterns of variation; numbers are often compressed in a way that minimizes variation and facilitates an answer to ‘what’ without explaining ‘how’ and ‘why’. However, much qualitative analysis can be analyzed quantitatively, and much quantitative analysis requires qualitative assessment and understanding. All social science research uses data analysis—quantitative and qualitative—that is theory driven. Quantitative and qualitative data is used to test ideas, to choose between ideas, and to develop new ideas. There is a clear need amongst researchers to go further into reconciling the mutually reinforcing. The web based materials available from Ravi Kanbur’s Q2 center at the University of Toronto can be a guide here.
Finally, in terms of disciplinary approaches, economists have a very different way of seeing things when compared to other social science; not better, or worse, just different. If activities like the Workshop are continued in future, there is a need to ensure that the invited facilitators represent different disciplines but are used to working interdisciplinarily.
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