Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice by Ariel Salleh

Author:Ariel Salleh
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780745328638
Publisher: Pluto Press

A set of rules for trade, development, and governance that insists on the centrality of market forces above persons, communities, and governments, that promotes the rights of the business sector over those of people, communities and states, and that continues to overlook the structural, institutional, and cultural barriers to women’s self autonomy, is immediately and fundamentally in discord with the visions and politics of gender transformation. To embark on gender mainstreaming in such a context is at once artificial and leads to the transmogrification of ‘gender’, something we are now witnessing in many places. The alternative is to reclaim, ‘gender’, and reposition it as a source of sound analysis and sharp critique of the mainstream’s politics, perspectives, documents, rules, and programmes.

For example, a gender analysis of the impact on poor women’s workload and social conditions of rapid liberalisation in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors provides us with enough evidence for demanding that the WTO immediately act on more than 100 cases of implementation issues lodged by developing countries. Such a gender analysis and critique inter-connect women’s organisations and networks to a broader range of civil society groups and social movements that continue to challenge and resist unfair and undemocratic WTO rules and processes, and to explore alternative trade, development, and governance arrangements. This – and not the mainstream – is the genuine place of gender, if it is to be a truly transformative project and process.

Peggy Antrobus, to the UNDP Caribbean Regional MDGs Conference, Barbados, July 2003:

I first heard of the Millennium Development Goals in the outraged response of the global feminist community when the hard-won goal of women’s sexual and reproductive rights was excluded from the list. This is even more inexcusable given that women’s sexual and reproductive rights is a crucial Target and/or Indicator of progress under at least four goals – MDG3 (women’s equality and empowerment), MDG4 (child mortality), MDG5 (maternal health), and MDG6 (combating HIV/AIDS). The deliberate exclusion of this fundamental indicator of women’s human rights and empowerment from the MDGs symbolises the struggle that lies ahead for anyone who seriously seeks equality, equity, and empowerment for women. In fact, a major problem of the MDGs is their abstraction from the social, political, and economic context in which they are to be implemented – the ‘political economy’ of the MDGs.

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