Rationalizing ‘gender-wash’: empowerment, efficiency and knowledge construction

Abstract

As support for the agenda of women’s empowerment has grown, its remit has narrowed. From transforming structural inequalities, donors have increasingly focused on women’s economic empowerment, and within this sphere, specific thematic areas dominate aid programming: access to finance, markets, skills training, business development services and social protection. This trajectory indicates the persistence of the ‘efficiency approach’ to gender programming, despite its inadequacies, raising questions regarding how knowledge on women’s empowerment is constructed. This article examines how the World Bank constructs knowledge on women’s empowerment by evaluating the design and reporting of the project, Results-Based Initiatives. It does so in light of the latest manifestation of the ‘Knowledge Bank’ agenda, focused on producing and disseminating evidence-based ‘knowledge products’, of which Results-Based Initiatives is one example. The article demonstrates that the claim that empowerment can be achieved through increased competition relies on the exclusion of key works when describing the relevant literature; the misrepresentation of the project’s methodology as objective and value-free; and apparent critical reflection on its design. It explains the persistence of the ‘efficiency approach’ to gender programming as reflecting the Bank’s conceptualization of development as a purely technocratic endeavor, and highlights how feminist advocates can advance alternatives.

Keywords:

• Empowerment
• gender policy
• feminist political economy
• World Bank
• efficiency
• competition
• economic development

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the journal’s two anonymous reviewers as well as Toby Carroll, Darryl Jarvis, and Judith Clifton for feedback on an earlier version of this article, along with participants in the workshop, ‘(Re-)Appropriation of Women’s Economic Empowerment: Collective Action & Contentious Politics’ at the International Feminist Journal of Politics 2018 conference, University of San Francisco, 2–3 April. I’m also grateful to Jacob Broom for his research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Kelly Gerard is a 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. Kelly is the author of ASEAN’s Engagement of Civil Society: Regulating Dissent (Palgrave 2014) and co-editor of the Palgrave series, Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy (with Toby Carroll, Darryl Jarvis and Paul Cammack).

Notes

1 Recent research highlights the significance of relational dynamics in the process of policy transfer (Bazbauers 2017), extending earlier work emphasizing the Bank’s coercive capacities (George and Sabelli 1994; Peet, Born, and Fehrer 2003).

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was supported by Australian Research Council funding for a Discovery Early Career Research Award (DE180101113).