The View from the Farm: Gendered Contradictions of the Measurement Imperative in Global Goals

Abstract

How do global development goals translate into local action? How do such goals support or undermine already existing efforts, at the local level, to build robust and sustainable communities? In this article we examine the experience of a women’s cooperative vegetable farm in rural South Africa, considering the on-the-ground consequences of high-level planning for development and, in particular, the measurement and accountability demands associated with such initiatives. We focus on the broad aims of Sustainable Development Goals 2 (to end hunger) and 5 (to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment). We explore farmers’ responses to external demands for measurement and accountability, some of which they are not well equipped to meet and others of which collide with their own priorities to support their households and wider community. We find a major problem of translation between global goals and the needs of people on the ground: far from resulting in material support for small-scale farmers, the daily burdens of the ‘audit society’ directly impede aims like ending hunger and achieving gender equality. The first section of the paper briefly canvasses recent efforts at global goal setting, considering the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and SDGs in turn. The longer second section offers the case study of the women’s farm, examining how the measurement demands related to global goals impact locally generated priorities.

Keywords:

• Capabilities
• Gender
• Human development
• Human rights
• Measurement
• Sustainability
• Global goals
• SDG

About the Author(s)

Astrid Pérez Piñán is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria. Her main research interests are gender and international development, decolonization, and aid effectiveness.

Elizabeth Vibert is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Victoria. Her main research interests are colonialism, food sovereignty, history of poverty, and the cultural construction of race and gender.

Notes

1 Capabilities foster ‘the opportunity to achieve valuable combinations of human functionings—what a person is able to do or be’; the substantive freedoms to live the kind of life one values (Sen 2005).

2 This analysis draws on more than 110 oral history interviews and conversations carried out by Elizabeth Vibert with 27 individual farmers as well as age cohorts at Hleketani Community Garden between 2012 and 2019. She also interviewed family members, the village head and hosi, youth farmers, and extension officer William Mabundza, and used participant observation and formal questionnaires. All attributed and unattributed comments are drawn from those interviews and conversations; recordings in the possession of EV. The research would not have been possible without the interpretation and research assistance of Basani Ngobeni. The ‘live narrative’ style is purposeful: the sequential, unfolding narrative brings to life the one-thing-after-another-ness of the experience of intersecting exclusions, in a context where economy is officially articulated in its instrumental mode and those who seek other values are pushed to the margins.

3 Some 80 women were involved the first year, a number that soon fell to 30 committed members. Two dozen women remain actively involved today. A pseudonym is used for the village to protect the community’s privacy. Farmers request that their names be used, in standard oral history practice.

4 The farm might well have folded at this point, had modest cash donations from abroad not become available.