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Feminist Knowledge | Policy

*The Millennium Development Goals- a Feminist Development Economics Perspective by Diane Elson

Introduction

The Millennium Development Goals were agreed in September 2000 by the world's political leaders at the United Nations Millennium Summit. Views about their relevance are mixed. Not surprisingly, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is upbeat. In his 2004 report on the Implementation of the United Nations Millennium Declaration, he claims that:

‘In four short years, the eight Millennium Development Goals derived from the Millennium Declaration have transformed the face of global development cooperation. The broad global consensus around a set of clear, measurable and time-bound development goals has generated unprecedented, coordinated action, not only within the United Nations system, including the Bretton Woods institutions, but also within the wider donor community, and most importantly, within developing countries themselves.

The commitment of Governments, individually and collectively, to the Millennium Development Goals, and their integration into national and international development strategies, polices and actions is expected to produce improved development results.' (UN, 2004:10)

Others are more cynical. For instance, Peggy Antrobus, a leader of the women's movement in the Caribbean and a founder member of DAWN (Development Alternatives for Women in the New Era), argued, in a speech to the UNDP Caribbean Region MDG Conference in 2003, that MDG means ‘Most Distracting Gimmick', because the official literature about them contains no acknowledgment of adverse impacts of neo-liberal policies on progress towards the goals.

My own position, shared with other long-time advocates for gender equality, like Gita Sen (India) and Yassine Fall (Senegal), is that the MDGs constitute an arena for critical engagement which advocates of human, egalitarian, development should not cede to technocrats and bureaucrats. The broadly expressed Goals do encapsulate some important aspects of the agreements reached in the UN conferences of the 1990s, agreements on which international civil society networks had some influence. The problems come from their translation into a set of Targets and Indicators which is too narrow; and from the assumptions made about the economic policies required to reach the Goals. I believe that in order not to lose the broader vision of development at the international level, its important that some of us engage with the MDGs, with, as Yassine Fall puts it, both skepticism and hope (Fall, 2004).

From this standpoint I agreed to become a member of the UN MDG Taskforce for Goal 3, Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women . As my email inbox gets filled up with long drafts of Taskforce Reports on which I must send comments, I ruefully recall a warning from Joanna Kerr, Executive Director of the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID):

‘my fear is that too many of our hours will be caught up in the processes- reporting, monitoring, drafting, making the case, new research, etc, etc- with little result.' (Kerr, 2004:25)

Sometimes I fear that the best that can be achieved is damage limitation. At other times, I am optimistic that we may be able to advance a deeper and more critical understanding, on the part of those engaged with MDG policy, of what is required for human and egalitarian development; and to use the space provided by the MDGs to loosen some of the constraints on such development.

I want to draw upon this engagement with the MDGs to discuss what a feminist development economics perspective brings to the MDGs, exploring its distinctive contribution.

The Millennium Development Goals and Targets: A Brief Reminder

Let me first give just a brief reminder of the eight Goals and their associated Targets:

Goal 1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
Target 1.Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than one dollar a day
Target 2. Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger

Goal 2. Achieve universal primary education
Target 3. Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling

Goal 3. Promote gender equality and empower women
Target 4. Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015

Goal 4. Reduce child mortality
Target 5. Reduce by two thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the under-five mortality rate

Goal 5. Improve maternal health
Target 6. Reduce by three-quarters, between 1990 and 2015, the maternal mortality ratio

Goal 6. Combat HIV/Aids, malaria and other diseases
Target 7. Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDs
Target 8. Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases

Goal 7. Ensure environmental sustainability
Target 9. Integrate the principle of sustainable development into country polices and programmes and reverse the loss of environmental resources.
Target 10. Halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation
Target 11. By 2020, to have achieved significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers

Goal 8. Develop a global partnership for development
Target 12. Develop further an open, rule-based, predictable, non-discriminatory trading and financial system
Target 13. Address the special needs of the least developed countries
Target 14. Address the special needs of landlocked developing countries and small island developing states
Target 15. Deal comprehensively with the debt problems of developing countries through national and international measures in order to make debt sustainable in the long term
Target 16. In cooperation with developing countries, develop and implement strategies for decent and productive work for youth
Target 17. In cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, provide access to affordable essential drugs in developing countries
Target 18. In cooperation with the private sector, make available the benefits of new technologies, especially information and communications.

Forty-eight Indicators were agreed to monitor progress towards the goals and targets. I will not recite the list. They are readily available on the UN website ( http://millenniumindicators.un.org/unsd/mi/mi_goals.asp ).

The UN Statistical Office produces regular reports using these Indicators on progress towards achieving the Targets in developing countries. UNDP assists developing countries in producing country-level MDG reports and plans. The UN Millennium Project, lead by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, acts as an independent advisory body to the UN Secretary General, and seeks to identify the best strategies for meeting the MDGs (see www.unmillenniumproject.org) . Much of its work is carried out through ten taskforces, comprising scholars, policy makers and practitioners, with broad representation from both developed and developing countries, and from UN Agencies and the IMF and World Bank. (The scholars on these taskforces donate their time on a voluntary basis). The UN Millennium Campaign seeks to mobilise civil society in both developed and developing countries to achieve the MDGs. Bilateral donors structure their development aid around the MDGS. IMF and World Bank include the MDGs as part of their monitoring frameworks for the release of loans. There is now a fully fledged ‘development business' organized around the MDGs, providing employment for many officials and consultants.

The main argument for this business is that a focus on the achievement of a few time-bound targets will provide a powerful impetus to implement some key aspects of the worthy, but wordy, ‘Platforms for Action' that were agreed at the UN conferences of the 1990s. It is argued that the MDGs will improve transparency and accountability and be a better instrument for mobilising resources for development. It is suggested that they can provide the framework for what the 2003 Human Development Report called a ‘Millennium Development Compact':

‘a Compact through which the world community can work together to help poor countries to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. This Compact calls on all stakeholders to orient their efforts towards ensuring the success of the Goals, in a system of shared responsibilities. Poor countries can insist on increased donor assistance and better market access from rich countries. Poor people can hold their politicians accountable for achieving the poverty reduction targets within the specified timetable. And donors can insist on better governance in poor countries and greater accountability in the use of donor assistance.' (UNDP, 2003:15)

Sceptics argue that internationally-agreed time-bound development targets are not an altogether new phenomenon and those agreed in the past have not been achieved. Their existence does not miraculously empower poor people and governments of poor countries to insist on what they could not insist on before. Their skepticism will be reinforced by the fact that the first MDG target to fall due – eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education by 2005- will be missed in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Southern and Western Asia (UN, 2004:14).

Optimists argue that the MDGs can be used strategically to promote an escape from the straight-jacket of debt and tight constraints on public expenditure. Jeffrey Sachs, the Director of the Millennium Project, emphasises that in planning for the MDGs, the starting point should be estimates of the cost of the ‘interventions' (mainly in the form of public investments) required to achieve the MDGs in the specified timeframe, not the amount of spending currently allowed to developing countries by the IMF and World Bank, given their debt burdens and the niggardly inflows of official development assistance (Sachs, 2004). Such needs-based assessments reveal that the cost considerably outstrips what is currently available to poor countries, but could easily be met if donor countries provided overseas development assistance equivalent to 0.7 percent of their gross national income. (Provision of this level of aid is, of course, a long-standing target which has repeatedly been missed. Net official development assistance decreased over the 1990s and began the new millennium at an all-time low). The Millennium Development Compact, proposed by the Millennium Project Secretariat and the Human Development Report Office, argues that the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, which countries have to prepare in order to get World Bank loans, should be MDG-compliant, rather than the MDG plans being PRSP-compliant. Public investment should be re-invigorated and take a leading role. Moreover,

‘Debt servicing capacity should be assessed relative to the country's needs for achieving the goals. For many countries this will require full debt cancellation'. (UNDP, 2003:153)

Nevertheless, though the Millennium Development Compact goes beyond the Washington Consensus in advocating a bigger role for public investment and more debt relief, it does not call into question the benefits of liberalisation of international trade and finance. A limitation of the approach of the Millennium Project Secretariat is an overemphasis on a set of ‘interventions' with insufficient consideration of systemic issues, at both national and global levels.

Even prior to the setting up of the Millennium Project, the formulation of the Millennium Development Goals, Targets and Indicators had been criticised as a minimalist agenda; a lowest common denominator that sets a lower standard of achievement than that stipulated in international human rights treaties (Symington, 2004). The formulation of the poverty target (in terms of the proportion of people whose income is less than one dollar a day) has been widely criticised as ignoring the multi-dimensional and relational characteristics of poverty; and obscuring the continuing prevalence of poverty in developed countries. The Targets associated with Goal 8 are couched in vague terms; and there is no timetable for their achievement. Developed countries are not being systematically monitored on Goal 8 or being required to produce plans on how they will achieve this Goal. The focus has been switched from peer review of progress (as in the UN global conferences and the UN human rights reporting system) to one in which the main emphasis is on donors reviewing the progress of aid recipients.

Women's activists have been outraged at the omission of any specific target for the realisation of women's sexual and reproductive rights, despite the commitments in the Platform of Action agreed at the UN Population Conference in Cairo in 1994. They have pointed to the inadequacy of the target attached to Goal 3. The Goal is broad, and has relevance to all countries, no matter how rich: promote gender equality and women's empowerment is unfinished business everywhere. The Target is narrow: eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015. The Indicators for this Target are even narrower: the ratio of girls to boys in primary, secondary and tertiary education; and the ratio of literate women to men, age 15-24. For instance, there is no indicator to measure progress in reducing gendered stereotypes in the content of education.

However, two other Indicators are included for monitoring Goal 3 that do go beyond education. They are the share of women in wage employment in the non-agricultural sector; and the proportion of seats held by women in the national parliament. Taking a cue from this, a major message of Taskforce 3 has been that the promotion of gender equality and women's empowerment requires much more than a focus on education enrollment. It requires, at the very least, that attention is also paid to gender equality in the economy and in political life. Taskforce 3 has drawn upon some of the insights derived from feminist development economics, though in my view, there are several points at which it needs to go further.

Feminist Development Economics: A Brief Introduction

The ISS is the first institution in the world to introduce a course in feminist development economics. I particularly wish to congratulate Dr Irene van Staveren and Dr Haroon Akram-Lhodi for their initiative in developing this course and put on record how much I enjoyed lecturing on it this summer. It is a diploma course lasting several weeks, so in a few minutes, I can only give a brief introduction to the issues it covers, highlighting the points that I personally find most important.

Let me begin by saying that practitioners of feminist development economics look at the process of economic development through a ‘gender lens', making visible what is typically obscured by conventional economic analysis. We do this in the belief that this will contribute towards a more human and egalitarian development process.

Applying a gender lens means something much more than dividing economic actors into males and females. Disaggregating by sex is only part of the process of applying a ‘gender lens'. It is necessary but not sufficient. Disaggregating by sex does not in itself imply any particular concern with gender inequality or women's rights. It is perfectly compatible with a neo-liberal, methodological individualist, approach to economic development. By a ‘gender lens', I mean a way of seeing that recognises gender as a system of socially constructed power that tends to disadvantage women and girls as compared to men and boys. Men can learn to use a gender lens just as much as women; and some important contributions to feminist development economics have been made by men.

Gender is in many ways analogous to race as a system of social power. Both are constructed around, but not determined by, biological differences. Both permeate the whole gamut of economic, social and political institutions and relations. Both intersect with each other, and with other forms of power, such as those based on class, age, region and nation. And they permeate economic life. You cannot do a fully adequate analysis of the influence of gender or race on income or productivity simply by introducing into your equations variables to capture the sex or racial classification of the economic actors. All the other likely independent variables (education, labour market history, assets, membership of community organisations, etc) are also influenced by gender and race.

A key aspect of the way in which gender is constructed is through the division of labour. The unpaid work of looking after families and communities is disproportionately the responsibility of women and girls, though women and girls also undertake an increasing share of paid employment. In both paid and unpaid work, many tasks are stereotyped as ‘women's work' or ‘men's work'. Doing ‘women's work' tends to be demeaning to men; while doing ‘men's work' tends to be something of an honour for women (while at the same time it may call into question their femininity). Of course, these stereotypes are not the same the world over. Moreover, they are the historical outcomes of ambiguous and contradictory tendencies and are subject to change. But at any time and place, they have a very strong influence on the ways that people make a living.

Feminist development economics argues that economic analysis needs to take into account unpaid as well as paid work; and to understand economic relations as relations of gendered power as well as relations of exchange. This perspective is brought to bear in analysing economies at micro, meso and macro level (Elson, 1993; Gutierrez, (ed) 2003). At the micro level, feminist development economics argues that it is necessary to examine how gender structures the internal dynamics of households and enterprises. Both types of unit are arenas of both co-operation and conflict (Sen, 1990; Akram-Lodhi, 1997; Agarwal,1997) In neither, does human behaviour conform to the stereotype of ‘rational economic man', possessing a strong and coherent sense of self and a comprehensive, independently formulated and fully consistent set of preferences (Nelson and Ferber (eds.) 1993). In so far as some people come close to behaving like this stereotype, this is linked to their particular historical circumstances.

The meso level of the economy refers to the interaction of households and enterprises, mediated by market, state and community organisations. Most often, these mediating institutions are not explicitly gendered. They are peopled by buyers and sellers, citizens and officials, neighbours and members. But nevertheless, these institutions are not neutral. They are bearers of gender, in the sense that their formal and informal rules, norms and routines are inscribed with the prevailing gender relations (Harris-White, 1998; Elson, 1999; Akram-Lodhi, 2002).

At the macro level, feminist development economics insists that the use of time, as well as the use of money, counts and should be counted (van Staveren, 2001; Waring, 1999). The starting point is a static mapping of the unpaid work of looking after families and communities (the content and social organisation of which varies according the different modalities of development). But feminist development economics goes beyond that to articulate a view of the dynamics of capitalist economic development stemming from a tension-ridden interaction between the domains of finance, production and social reproduction. By social reproduction is meant the process of sustaining and recreating the population of a country on a daily and intergenerational basis, not only in physical terms but also in terms of a historical legacy of skills, knowledge and moral values. This process is carried out in families, in communities, and through state agencies. It is oriented to provisioning, and regulating, people's needs; rather than being oriented to making money. It is disproportionately reliant on the unpaid work of women and girls in the family and community and the paid work of women employed by state agencies (Elson, 1998).

The unpaid work required for social reproduction makes huge demands on the time and energy of poor women in poor countries; but even when these demands are reduced by the provision of public services, there are specific difficulties attached to this work. The difficulties lie:

‘in the struggle to give priority to the needs of people within the constraints of profit. Women find themselves more and more isolated in this increasingly stressful effort to change the balance of social imperatives, because the market and other institutions respond mainly to the requirements of capitalist accumulation…..' (Picchio, 1992:6)

However, public services are important, not only for their immediate practical benefits, but also because of their potential for articulating collective and solidaristic forms of provisioning. This potential is, regrettably, far from being realised in many countries, as state agencies all too often serve the needs of their employees, and of urban elites, rather than the public as a whole, on an inclusive and egalitarian basis. However, I would argue, this needs to be addressed by reforms of the public sector to move towards fulfilling this potential; rather than wholesale privatisation, which destroys this potential and reinforces individualistic, market-conforming forms of behaviour.

Social reproduction is typically taken for granted in macroeconomic analysis and policy, both neo-liberal and alternative, heterodox varieties (such as Keynesian, structuralist and human development varieties). It is assumed that women's unpaid work will be done regardless of the ups and downs of the gross national product and public expenditure; and can be relied upon to act as a safety net of last resort in times of economic crisis; and to smooth the accommodation of demographic changes. Feminist development economics calls that assumption into question. It points to the tendency in the 1980s and 1990s to ‘reprivatise' social reproduction by diminishing the role of public sector provision (Bakker, 2003); and to empirical evidence of the limits to the safety net that can be provided by women's unpaid work (Elson, 1991; Moser, 1996; Gonzalez de la Rocha, 2003).

Feminist development economics, in the way that it is practiced at ISS, agrees with heterodox macroeconomics that development is ‘crowded in' not ‘crowded out' by public investment; and that trade and finance need to be managed (rather than liberalised), so that they serve the real economy, with a focus on full employment with decent pay and conditions (For applications of heterodox macroeconomics to development see McKinley (ed.) 2001 and Chang (ed.) 2003). We agree that both deflationary bias (which overemphasises price stability at the expense of employment and growth); and privatisation bias (which overestimates the efficiency of private sector production in comparison with public sector production) should be avoided. But we argue that it is important to go beyond this, to promote the equal sharing of both paid and unpaid work, and money income, between men and women; and to ensure that public investment serves the needs of social reproduction as well as of marketed production.

The interaction between macro-level policy, and the meso-level policies that govern income distribution and social security, is critical. In the past this interaction has been characterised by a ‘male-breadwinner' bias that puts women in a position of economic dependency on men, and ignores the importance of investment to reduce the burden of unpaid work on women and girls by providing public services that are responsive to their needs. This kind of bias must be eliminated through gender-equitable public finance (Elson and Cagatay, 2000).

The global economic environment is critical for this. Currently it operates in ways that constrain and disable attempts to use public finance to promote equality and empowerment of those currently excluded from power (Cagatay, 2003). In the longer run, we need to work to develop governance of the global economy, and of national economies, that is not only ‘good' in the sense of being transparent and predictable, but also in the sense of supporting rather than undermining the egalitarian care and nurturance of human capabilities (Folbre, 2001; UNDP, 1999). Values of care and mutuality need reinforcing, and extending so that they become ‘masculine' values as well as ‘feminine' values.

Feminist development economics goes well beyond the ‘engendering development' approach proposed by the World Bank (World Bank, 2001). It does not assume that gender inequality in the economy is primarily a result of ‘traditional' social norms; and resides primarily in households. It shows how competitive markets are quite capable of creating and sustaining gender inequality. It does not assume that economic growth and gender equality are necessarily mutually reinforcing: it shows how fast rates of growth have gone together with some forms of gender inequality (Seguino, 2000). It argues not only that women should not be economically dependent on men, but also that national economies should not be dependent on poorly governed international markets; and that poor countries should not be dependent on rich countries (Cagatay, 2003; Zammit, 2004). It brings together a concern for women's human rights and the use of resources, arguing that economic and social policy must be consistent with human rights (Elson, 2004). It has a wholistic vision.

This does not mean that feminist development economics ignore questions of efficiency- who is not in favour of reducing waste? But it insists that efficiency has to be properly evaluated to take into account the total use of resources, including those that do not have to be paid for, as well as those that do; and that efficiency considerations cannot outweigh human rights considerations. It is useful to be able to identify ways in which the promotion of gender equality can simultaneously promote efficient use of resources and the achievement of other goals. But, as the MDGs recognise, gender equality and women's empowerment is an important objective in its own right, and should not be treated as simply a means to achieving other objectives.

Feminist Development Economics and the MDGs

Millennium Project Taskforce on Education and Gender Equality has made use of some of the insights of feminist development economics in drawing up its report on how to achieve Goal 3 (promote gender equality and women's empowerment). I will briefly discuss a few examples, drawing upon the Interim, and Draft Final, Reports of the Taskforce on Goal 3, prepared by Caren Grown and Geeta Rao Gupta (United Nations Millennium Project Taskforce on Education and Gender Equality, 2004a and b). I will discuss what has been achieved and where, in my view, the Taskforce needs to go further, especially in making more connections to the reconstruction of the global economic environment.

The Taskforce recognises that achieving Goal 3 requires going well beyond a focus on the immediate Target of eliminating gender disparity in education; and that the achievement of all the other MDGs is important for achieving Goal 3. It also recognises that promotion of gender equality and women's empowerment is critical to the achievement of all of the other MDGS, but it wishes to emphasise that gender equality is an important Goal in its own right, not only as a means to achieve the other Goals.

It has identified seven strategic priorities for action:

• Strengthening opportunities for post-primary education for girls, while simultaneously meeting commitments to universal primary education.

• Increasing adolescents and women's access to a broad range of sexual and reproductive health information and services.

• Investing in infrastructure designed to reduce women's time burdens.

• Guaranteeing women's property and inheritance rights.

• Eliminating inequality in employment by decreasing women's reliance on informal employment, closing gender gaps in earnings, and reducing occupational segregation.

• Increasing women's shares of seats in national parliaments and local government bodies.

• Significantly reducing violence against women and girls.

The influence of feminist development economics can be particularly seen in the choice of priorities 3, 4, 5; and in the way that the Taskforce addresses systemic issues, and does not just identify a list of required ‘interventions'.

Let us first consider priority 3: invest in infrastructure designed to reduce women's time burdens. The Taskforce reviews evidence on the large amount of unpaid time that poor women in poor countries currently spend on collecting water and fuel and transporting people and goods, as they try to combine their responsibilities to care for their families and generate an income. It identifies gender difference in rights, responsibilities and priorities in relation to water, energy and transport resources, operating in ways that frequently put poor women at a disadvantage. It calls for investment in infrastructure that will be responsive to these differences; and is designed in ways that overcome women's disadvantages, and effectively meet women's needs and release their time for other activities, including education, employment, participation in public bodies, leisure and sleep.

The Taskforce is still debating the controversial issues of user fees and privatisation of infrastructure. I am urging it to make more use of the insights of feminist development economics in three ways.

The first argument is in relation to judgments of ability to pay for water, energy and transport services, and the design of payment systems. Too often these are made on the basis of surveys about what people are willing to pay, and the level of per capita household income, regardless of how income is distributed within how households, and how expenditure decisions are made within households. Women may often express more willingness to pay for domestic water or electricity or transport than men, but have far less ability to pay than men. Judgments about ability to pay, and the design of payment systems, should be made on the basis of analysis that looks at the internal gender dynamics of households.

The second argument is in relation to judgments about efficiency. A broader view needs to be taken about what is ‘efficient'. The case for privatisation is often made in terms of their assumed superiority in promoting an efficient supply and use of resources. If water services are run on commercial lines and people have to pay the full cost of supplying water, then, goes the argument, they will be less inclined to waste it. Moreover, private investors will have more incentive to invest in improving the supply. Water privatisation has led to increased charges for domestic water in many developing countries. This may bring some improvements in supply in the long run, but there are immediate costs to pricing users out of the market, especially health hazards. The task of caring for the health of families is made more difficult; women's time burdens increase and disease spreads, putting at risk even those who have not been priced out of the market. Tariffs need to be set in ways that permit cross-subsidy between better-off and poorer users; and provide a certain amount of water free of charge to those who use less of it. (The level should be set in consultation with women from less well -off households, who are the experts on how much water they need). This is much easier to achieve with public services than via attempts to regulate private providers.

Third argument is in relation to how we can move to systems of governance of resources that support rather than undermine the egalitarian care and nurture of human capabilities.

The immediate implications of privatisation are contingent on particular circumstances. In some cases they may lead to improvements in meeting the practical needs of some women. But privatisation rules out strategies for creating collective, egalitarian and solidaristic ways of provisioning, that have more potential for promoting gender equality and the empowerment of all women, not just those women with sufficient purchasing power. It rules out other ways of reforming public provision through egalitarian public-social partnerships rather than through public-private partnerships.

Now let me turn to priority 4, guaranteeing women's property and inheritance rights. The Taskforce focuses primarily on land rights, drawing upon the work of Indian feminist economist, Bina Agarwal (2002), to argue that effective and independent land rights for women are important for women's welfare, equality and empowerment, while at the same time they can also promote more productive use of resources. The Taskforce calls for systemic changes to achieve such rights, including legal reform (including effective implementation); programmes to promote legal literacy, so that women know their rights and can exercise them; and action to monitor women's ownership of land through better recording of ownership. It is noteworthy that the Taskforce is careful to differentiate between the different aspects of land rights, including different ways of acquiring land (such as inheritance, transfer from the state, purchase in the market, and allocation through communal practices); and different ways of using land (such cultivation, leasing out, mortgaging and selling).It also points to joint and collective ways of exercising land rights, as well as rights exercised on an individual basis.

The Taskforce draws upon the work of feminist scholars Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena Leon ( 2001), which shows how recent agrarian reforms in a number of countries in Latin America have improved women's rights through joint-titling to both wife and husband, rather than to just the husband. But in other parts of the world, joint titling may not translate into effective rights, because of strong social norms. As the Taskforce reports, Agarwal shows that this tends to be the case in India . She identifies four other types of institutional arrangement through which women could hold effective and autonomous land rights, through hybrid forms involving both individual and collective rights, in which the latter are held jointly with other women.

The Taskforce points to the research by Deere and Leon showing that land markets are not gender neutral; and that discrimination against women often occurs. The critique could be taken beyond this to consider the dynamics of land markets, and how they lead to concentration of land in the hands of richer owners, including foreign-owned agribusiness. Where agricultural land becomes primarily a commercial commodity, women's ownership may be widespread only for a short moment, after which most women (and most men) working in agriculture become landless labourers or tenant farmers growing on sub-contract.

Let us now look at priority 5: eliminating inequality in employment. The Taskforce rightly insists that this is not just a matter of increasing women's share of paid employment, but also of reducing gender gaps in pay, job security, unemployment and social protection. It points to the persistence of occupational segregation, with the concentration of women in lower paying occupations which enjoy less social protection. It points to the growth of informal employment, in which gender gaps are even wider, and in which women are over-represented. It points to way that the responsibilities assigned to women for unpaid work in families and communities underpins labour market inequality.

The Taskforce calls for systemic changes to eliminate inequality in paid employment and social protection systems, not just interventions to invest more in education and training of girls and women. The Taskforce calls for improved anti-discrimination and equal opportunities legislation, extending to migrant workers as well as citizens. It calls for the extension of social protection to informal employment; mentioning innovative ways of doing this through partnerships between the state and trade unions, community-based associations and informal workers networks. It calls for the acceptance of public responsibility for sharing with parents the costs of rearing children and for more investment in public child care provision.

The Taskforce does not, however, point to the ways in which liberalisation of trade, investment and finance increases the participation of women in the labour market, while simultaneously undermining the quality of the jobs available, and reducing the capacity of the state to carry out the systemic changes required to reduce gender inequality in labour markets (Cagatay and Erturk, 2003; Seguino and Grown, 2002). The Taskforce could have highlighted this contradiction and drawn upon the work of Stephanie Seguino and Caren Grown to outline the kind of management of trade, investment and finance that would reduce these contradictions- an approach they call ‘industrial policy under conditions of strategic openness', as distinct from abandoning any policy for structural transformation and simply liberalising capital and trade flows.

The lack of attention to this point in the Reports to date reflects an overall weakness in the approach so far put forward by the Reports of the Taskforce: the failure to connect strategies for achieving Goal 3 with strategies for achieving Goal 8. The Interim Report argues that Goal 3 requires the creation of ‘women-friendly' governance structures at national and international level. At the national level it calls for:

• an effective national women's machinery;

• a strong presence of women in legislative bodies

• mechanisms for assessing progress and holding stakeholders accountable;

• knowledge of costs of gender inequality and expenditures required to promote gender equality.

At the international level, it calls for:

• gender mainstreaming within international agencies;

• mainstreaming of gender into donor-country policy processes;

• donor incentives for countries that institutionalise gender considerations;

• improved international data sets.

The work of feminist development economists suggests that much more will be required than this. At the international level, what is required is the creation of a very different global partnership for development than that which seems to be currently envisaged (Williams, 2004).

The Secretary-General's Report (UN, 2004) on MDG implementation discusses Goal 3 in relation to progress on three issues:

dismantling trade barriers maintained by developed countries;
widening debt relief;
expanding development assistance.

It concludes that ‘There has been some progress, particularly with regard to aid flows, but the scale of support falls well short of what is needed.' (The Millennium Project Taskforce on Trade has not yet posted its conclusions and its draft interim report is not yet available for quotation).

No reference is made to the importance of rethinking the rules inscribed in WTO agreements; and aid conditions; rules such as TRIMs, TRIPs, GATS; and conditions such as capital market liberalisation and privatisation. These rules and conditions, on the one hand, constrain the development strategies that governments can pursue; and, on the other, enlarge the scope for the operations of big businesses pursuing profits. There is a great deal of empirical evidence which shows how these rules and conditions have constrained the prospects for gender equality and women's empowerment, even as they have facilitated women's entry into paid employment ((Zammit, 2004).

Feminist development economics argues that what are needed instead are rules that permit governments to put the needs of social reproduction first; and to meet them in ways that promote equal sharing between women and men of both the burdens and pleasures of caring for others and of undertaking paid work (Cagatay 2003; Cagatay and Erturk, 2003; Seguino and Grown, 2002; Singh and Zammit, 2000). This implies rules that permit more government regulation of production, trade and finance than is currently allowed; and require more democracy in the framing and implementing of that regulation. It implies fewer conditions attached to aid and instead the creation of the beginnings of a global tax and transfer system. There is unfortunately no time to go into more detail in this lecture. Some of these arguments will be spelt out in more detail in a forthcoming UNRISD policy report on gender and development. Some will be explored in more detail in next year's ISS diploma in feminist economics.

Conclusions

The MDGs are still unfinished business. We do not yet know if the optimists or the pessimists will prove right. I hope that this lecture has indicated that feminist development economics contributes a critical yet constructive engagement to debates about how the Goals might be achieved; and that it has whetted your appetite for learning more.

References

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*Text of Dies Natalis Lecture Delivered by Diane Elson at the Institute of Social Studies, October 2004