Limited Options—Rethinking Women’s Empowerment ‘Projects’ in Development Discourses: A Case from Rural India

Abstract

Very often developmental initiatives that look relatively better-conceptualized and inclusive at the outset fail to impact on several basic issues embedded in asymmetrical gendered power dynamics, despite creating some supportive structures for women’s empowerment. Based on a case study from rural northern India, this article illustrates how the failure to address issues such as the survival chances of girl children or the prevalence of child marriages in the project region stems from its misplaced and limited notions about women’s empowerment. The author argues that the project approach is essentially women-centered and focuses at women’s individual and collective levels without addressing the relational domains of women vis-à-vis men in every day existential lives dominated by the extreme patriarchy for which the project site is known. Neither does the project envisage that any transformative social change implicit in trying to ‘empower’ women needs to look critically at broader economical, social and political structures that might require participation by stakeholders other than women alone in dealing with different forms of gender cooperation and conflicts at different levels. The article throws open several theoretical questions and broader issues of how empowerment is a double-edged and contested concept and what women-centric state discourses can or cannot achieve. It is suggested that given the local specificities and embedded structures, a spatially contextualized approach has to be in place as there cannot be a meta-narrative or a blueprint for women’s empowerment.