Thin vs. Thick Morality Ethics and Gender in International Development Programs

Abstract

This study examines the ethical dimensions of gender-focused international development initiatives undertaken by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and similar agencies. Specifically, it presents three case studies that depict how specific development initiatives in, respectively, India, Tanzania, and Senegal address gender disparities and power relationships. These case studies support the general conclusion that ethically committed development NGOs find difficulty in encouraging women (and men) to reverse oppressive power status-quos in messy contexts.

Notes

For example, Sebastian Charles (2009) argues, “a radical modernity characterized by the exacerbation and intensification of that modern logic by which human rights and democracy have been made into mandatory values, by the market having become a global economic reference system reaching into the remotest places on the planet and invading every sphere of our existence” (pp. 392).

The author is such a proponent.

However, following Gilligan’s reasoning, the detachment of the abstract, universal ideal of gender equality poses a tactical problem for women’s advocacy in certain contexts. Notably, it is argued that the abstraction of the ideal depoliticizes gender empowerment in ways that support the institutional status quo in development agencies (see Badin & Goetz, 1997, p. 9; Feldman, 2003, pp. 13–15).

All 192 UN member nations and many international organizations agreed to meet the eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015. The other seven call for eradicating extreme poverty and hunger; achieving universal primary education; reducing child mortality rates; improving maternal health; combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; and developing a global partnership for development.

Recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economic Science in 1998, Sen (1999) distinguishes himself from his neoliberal colleagues as a traditional economist (in the company of Aristotle, Lavoisier, and others) “motivated by the need to study the assessment of, and causal influences on, the opportunities that people have for good living [economists whose] attention was never confined to one concept [i.e., income] as instrumental and circumstantially contingent” (pp. 24–25). Sen drafted Development as Freedom from his lectures to World Bank economists in fall 1996 as a visiting fellow there. In the preface, he relates: “The World Bank has not invariably been my favorite organization. The power to do good goes almost always with the possibility to do the opposite … . All this made it particularly welcome to have the opportunity to present at the Bank my own views on development and on the making of public policy” (1999, p. xiii).

In this regard, Banerjee and Duflo (2011) maintain, “most vocal experts tend to be fixated on the ‘big questions’: What is the ultimate cause of poverty? How much faith should we place in free markets? Is democracy good for the poor? Does foreign aid have a role to play? And so on” (p. 3). They characterize “answers” on the ideological left as underscoring the necessity of foreign aid, and on the right as relying on free markets and appropriate incentives.

Banerjee and Duflo (2011) argue that no magic bullets are available to eradicate global poverty, but certain lessons have been learned. One such lesson is that “the poor bear responsibility for too many aspects of their lives. The richer you are, the more the ‘right’ decisions are made for you. [For example,] the poor have no piped water, and therefore do not benefit from the chlorine that the city government puts into the water supply. If they want clean drinking water, they have to purify it themselves” (p. 268; emphasis added).

Chambers (1994) indicates that this participatory approach is applicable in urban populations as well: “[The PRA] has been described as a growing family of approaches and methods to enable local (rural or urban) people to express, enhance, share and analyze their knowledge of life and conditions, to plan and to act” (p. 1253) In an article that predated the publication of Chambers’s Whose Reality Counts? by nearly two decades, David Korten recommended a community-based rural development approach (that closely paralleled Chambers’s PRA) as an alternative to conventional development practices (or blueprints). In fact, Korten (1980) took note of the enthusiastic support for “new directions” toward participatory approaches for the poor within both the U.S. Congress (regarding USAID priorities) and the World Bank during the early 1970s—enthusiasm that subsequently waned due to institutional inertia (pp. 482–483).

Another commentator poses the irony somewhat differently in her critical examination of the participatory approach:

Why is so little debate about these tensions [inherent in the participatory approach] seen in the development literature? Is it that development practitioners fear criticizing local practices and being seen as the professionals roundly condemned in Chambers’ work? Is there not a danger from swinging from one untenable position (“we know best”) to an equally untenable and damaging one (“they know best”)? (Cleaver, 2002, p. 233)

Among her other criteria for critiquing participation, Frances Cleaver (2002) elaborates on “myths of community” common in the participation discourse, namely that communities are unitary and easily identifiable, units of power solidarity, resourceful, and foundations of social cohesion (pp. 231–233). Regarding the myth of a unitary community, Cleaver asserts that “the very definition of community in development projects involves defining those who are ‘included’ in rights, activities, benefits and those who are excluded because they do not belong to the defined entity” (p. 231).

Elsewhere I formulate a program typology that can assist NGO leaders anticipate the effects of development program logics on gender politics in impacted locales. This typology is predicated on my hypothesis that the prospects of women’s empowerment lessen to the extent that access to money (fungible and easily diverted within family and community systems) is at the core of the “empowerment” strategy (Ghere, 2012, pp. 215–220). Along this scale, the microfinance (rural India) and adult education (Senegal) cases represent the expected extremes. Empowerment success in the Tanzanian case is more difficult to predict given the attempt to institutionalize gender planning into a technical assistance program (see Moser, 1993, pp. 108–138). There is, however, some evidence that influential men in some development locales can successfully lobby (or cajole) NGO officials to direct the use of technical assistance money toward their preferences (Makhoul & Harrison, 2002).

Although Leach and Sitaram do not identify the NGO, archival records of the UK Department for International Development (DFID) show that the Chamarajanagara Parish Society was responsible for the day-to-day implementation of this microcredit program. See http://sleekfreak.ath.cx:81/3wdev/HDLHTML/EDUCRES/H0695E/CH09.HTM, accessed July 15, 2011.

Easton and colleagues. (2003) relate that the imam advised the group not to “tell the villagers what to do, but rather what [other villages] had done, and why. Then let them tell their own stories and make their own decisions” (p. 449).

For example, Karlan and Appel (2011) maintain that cheap information and coercive environments through borrowing groups compensate for the unavailability of credit-rating information on poor women (p. 74). Mallick (2002) reports on extreme coercion whereby a microcredit organization in Bangladesh (the Grameen Bank) physically incarcerated women overnight in the bank for nonpayment on loans, which in turn led to their stigmatization within the community (p. 154).

Suzette Mitchell (1996) quotes Ela Bhatt in her commentary on gender and development (p. 140).