From Developmentalism to the HIV/AIDS Crisis

Abstract

Contrasting the socio-political contexts of large-scale development and the HIV/AIDS crisis in Lesotho, our analysis captures important historical conjunctures that expanded opportunities for the mobilization of women's rights as human rights. Local women's rights organizations, such as Women and Law in Southern Africa (WLSA), found greater support and resonance for women's rights claims amid the socio-political context of the AIDS crisis, in marked contrast to the stifling of those same claims during a period of neoliberal, nationalist development initiatives in Lesotho. The AIDS crisis in particular introduced new international actors that helped support a ‘frame bridging’ strategy whereby women's rights were characterized as health rights, rooted in a critique of the AIDS crisis that identified the role of gender inequality as an important driver of the epidemic. These links to transnational feminist networks as well as to international health agencies bolstered the critiques of gender inequality articulated by WLSA and other women's rights advocates, helping usher in a series of legal changes in Lesotho in 2003 and 2006.

Keywords:

• women's rights
• human rights
• Lesotho
• gender politics of HIV/AIDS
• gender politics of development

Notes

Political opportunity structures, as defined in the social movement literature, encompass elements of the socio-political context that encourage collective action as a means for addressing grievances (see Tarrow 2005). Changes in the political context may open or close opportunities (perceived or actual) for effective challenges to the status quo, including, among other things, political re-alignments among elites; the presence of new allies, domestically or internationally; or societal crises, such as war, famine, or a pandemic, like HIV/AIDS.

UNAIDS is the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, drawing resources from ten UN system organizations for a coordinated response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in over 80 countries.

While our narrative is focused on these distinct processes in Lesotho, we also locate these processes and Lesotho in the larger regional context of Southern African countries, sharing economic, political, legal, and cultural similarities in relation to both the substantive issues at hand – the status of women and girls and the crisis of HIV/AIDS – and the institutions and actors across the region that are central to shaping policies and practices.

This movement, and the South African government's response to it, indicates how politics and institutional change are regional in Southern Africa. While the HIV/AIDS activist movement in South Africa did not guarantee any political change in Lesotho, it helped create a regional agenda rooted in shared problems, many stemming in part from the patriarchal sex norms that set the foundation for the unique magnitude of the AIDS crisis.

South African President Thabo Mbeki took some controversial positions on HIV/AIDS and its treatment. He famously questioned whether HIV led to AIDS and if antiretroviral treatments (ARV) were safe and effective. AIDS activists were effective in pressuring the administration through highly publicized legal challenges and protests. Their legal success forced the government to distribute ARV medicines and, in 2006, Mbeki publicly committed to increased availability of ARVs.

South Africa's Medicines Control Act, which attempted to reduce the costs of essential medicines, irked large pharmaceutical corporations, prompting a series of legal challenges at the national and transnational (e.g. World Trade Organization) levels. Protecting the market and property rights of large pharmaceutical corporations was the central rationale in the corporate challenge to the constitutionality of the amendments to the Act, reminding us that neoliberal principles enable corporate interests to be framed as human rights. The 1998 legal battle helped give rise to the kind of AIDS activism in South Africa that linked HIV/AIDS to socioeconomic conditions, effectively raising questions of power and rights (Johnson 2006).

We do not suggest that neoliberalism is confined to this developmentalist period. We do emphasize, however, that the rise of neoliberal economic policies and developmentalist agendas in Lesotho in the late 1980s and 1990s contributed to the marginalization of claims by women's rights advocates. By the time of the increasing national acknowledgement of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the late 1990s, neoliberal agendas were still very much in place in Lesotho but the public health crisis was enough of an economic disaster that women's rights advocates were able to capitalize on these political opportunities to make advances, however limited.

‘Basotho’ refers to people of Sotho origin (singular, Mosotho) in Sesotho, the primary language of Lesotho. Where necessary, we use identifiers for an English audience that would be redundant in Sesotho (e.g., Basotho people).

Women's rights advocates in Lesotho have pointed to the contradictions of neoliberal development and gender inequality, particularly as they witnessed a ‘rolling back’ of their de facto rights during the LHWP. Regional feminist scholars and activists (personal communications 1997, 2001) have argued two main points: first, this developmentalist period could have been a moment to push progressive legal reform for women amidst the many other societal changes it involved; and second, women's rights were not on the agenda precisely because the economic ideology that undergirded the LHWP was elite driven, not relevant to the lives or needs of poor women, and not human centered or life affirming in ways that would most benefit women and, for that matter, all people.

The Southern African Development Community (SADC), formerly SADCC, is an economic community focused on regional cooperation and integration between the major countries and peoples of Southern Africa.