Gender, governance and the global political economy

Abstract

This article considers a range of governance actors (including also the role of political enquiry into the global political economy in and of itself) to analyse how neo-liberal governance strategies seek to socialise human bodies (female, male or otherwise) into a global system of neo-liberal economic productivity. Contemporary mechanisms of global governance, it is suggested, seek to engineer a capitalist ‘market society’ while claiming to ‘empower’ poor people. In recent years, ‘empowerment’ rhetoric in global governance has increasingly depended on measuring the ‘economic’ role(s) of women in developing countries, judging their contributions productive only where they can be gauged to directly contribute to ‘formal economy’ growth. Reinforcing the assumption that ‘formal’ contributions are the only contributions worth measuring, such rhetoric simultaneously eradicates all other (non-competitive and/or non-entrepreneurial) behavioural possibilities for women, while clearly excluding all those who are not ‘women’. Against the instrumentalisation of gender (as a category pertaining only to women and studies of women), this article argues that gender in global governance means much more than simply describing whether people are male or female and quantifying their productive capacities accordingly. As a broad and complex category of analysis, gender enriches the dynamism both of our studies of and practices in the global political economy. To ignore gender's role in the global political economy is to fail to see the power that gender (as a composite part of the relations of power that drive systems of economic development and growth) brings to our everyday understandings, and especially to our understandings of economic ‘common sense’.

Notes

1. So-called ‘market imperfections’ might include, for example, the presence of monopolies, ‘borrowing constraints’, ‘imperfect information’, the uneven access to ‘public goods’ and ‘imperfect competition’.

2. Carroll's (2001) paper for the ADB is particularly keen to emphasise the empowerment successes generated by microcredit federations in South India: ‘To see these women in their rented second story “office” holding their cluster meeting against the backdrop of neatly stitched gunny bags of rice, was to see something far more significant than just a source of credit. In addition to the financial capital that they had built up through recycling their modest savings, these women had by working together in a group, built up social capital that enabled them to reduce their vulnerability in other ways’ (Bennett 1996, quoted in Carroll 2001: 93).

3. Oxfam International (2008), as one organisational example among many of ‘gender’ as a category applicable only to women and studies of women, cites achieving ‘gender justice’ as ‘ensuring women and men benefit equally from [their] work’. In practical terms, gender justice equates, however, to ensuring ‘equality for women’. ‘Gender justice’ could also quite feasibly include tackling violence, discrimination and injustice aimed at any conceivable male, female, transgender, transsexual, hermaphrodite, androgynous, polyamorous, polyandrous (etc.) individual, group and/or community. That it does not is interesting, but also troubling.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Penny Griffin

Penny Griffin is Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of New South Wales. She is the author of Gendering the World Bank (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)