Locating leverage: contesting “empowerment lite” from the lower rungs of an aid chain

ABSTRACT

The development sector’s adoption of private sector logics and practices has seen donors increasingly disburse funds using aid chains. Aid chains consist of at least two nodes, with work subcontracted from donors to organizations socially and geographically closer to beneficiaries. Aid chains enable “ethics dumping,” where subcontracting facilitates higher-tier actors distancing themselves from the messy work of engaging in the politics of interventions. The power inequalities of aid chains stand in sharp contrast to donors’ “partnership” rhetoric and raise the question of how lower-tier actors can challenge donors. This question is particularly pertinent for aid chains for women’s empowerment projects, given that the agenda of women’s empowerment has been instrumentalized. This article considers the resistance strategies used by lower-tier actors to contest policy. Analyzing a rare on-the-record case of resistance, it examines a women’s empowerment project implemented through a four-tier chain. The article documents the strategies deployed by a lower-tier actor to advance the understanding of women’s empowerment not as market inclusion but as originally conceived: as movement building. Its analysis offers insights into how feminist advocates can advance alternatives, as well as the impacts of aid subcontracting and how “partnership” is interpreted in practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Aid chains
• women’s empowerment
• partnership
• development
• resistance

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks to the staff at IWRAW-AP for answering my questions and providing access to project documentation and in-house training materials. I am also grateful for the excellent feedback provided by Melissa Johnston, along with three peer reviewers. Research for this article was supported by Australian Research Council funding for a Discovery Early Career Research Award (DE180101113).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See Murray and Overton (2016) for an overview of changes in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and the UK.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number: DE180101113].

Notes on contributors

Kelly Gerard

Kelly Gerard is an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia. Her research focuses on the political economy of development policymaking in Southeast Asia. Her current project examines the determinants of aid programming for women’s empowerment.