Gender planning is not an end in itself but a means by which women, through a process of empowerment, can emancipate themselves. Ultimately, its success depends on the capacity of women's ...organizations to confront subordination and create successful alliances which will provide constructive support in negotiating women's needs at the level of household, civil society, the state and the global system.Gender Planning and Development provides an introduction to an issue of primary importance and constant debate. It will be essential reading for academics, practitioners, undergraduates and trainees in anthropology, development studies, women's studies and social policy.
Fifty years after Oscar Lewis's famous depiction of five Mexican families caught in a "culture of poverty," Caroline Moser tells a very different story of five neighborhood women and their families ...strategically accumulating assets to escape poverty in the Ecuadoran city of Guayaquil. In Ordinary Families, Extraordinary Lives, Moser shows how a more sophisticated understanding of the complexities of asset accumulation as well as poverty itself can help counter inaccurate stereotypes about global poverty. It provides invaluable insight into strategies that may help people in developing countries improve their wellbeing. The similar socioeconomic characteristics and economic circumstances of the Guayaquil families in 1978, when Moser began her research, set the stage for a natural experiment. By 2004, these circumstances varied widely. Moser captures the causes and consequences of these developments through economic data, anthropological narrative, and personal photos. She then places this compelling story within the broader context of political, economic, and spatial changes in Guayaquil and Ecuador. Moser describes how households in a Third World urban slum relentlessly and systematically fought to accumulate human, social, and financial capital assets. Her longitudinal account of their odyssey captures long-term trends and changes in perception that are missed in snapshot assessments. Chapters in this holistic story cover diverse issues such as housing and infrastructure, community mobilization and political negotiation, employment, family dynamics, violence, and emigration.
The 2016 Habitat III conference in Quito provides a challenging opportunity to address widespread, persistent urban gender inequalities through the elaboration of a New Urban Agenda (NUA). To achieve ...the identified radical paradigm shift calls for critical reflection and clarification of the meaning of gender transformation as against gender mainstreaming, and the elaboration of a conceptual and operational framework that identifies urban pathways not only to empower individual women but also to collectively transform fundamental gender power relations. This paper describes the gender asset accumulation framework as one such approach, and identifies the existing evidence base on urban transformative gendered interventions in land tenure and housing, safety in public spaces, and informal economy activities. In assessing gender-related contributions to the Habitat III process, it highlights a conjuncture in the identification of the same three gender-transformative interventions in the Transformative Commitments section of the Zero Draft NUA. However, these have been diluted in the Revised Zero Draft, which does not create optimism for the final NUA. The paper concludes by suggesting that a potential strategy for the global urban gender networks and multiple voices of civil society and grassroots groups is to reach a consensus on a priority agenda, and post-Quito to collectively contest and negotiate its implementation.
This paper describes the role of intergenerational processes in increasing or reducing multidimensional inequality in Indio Guayas, a low-income peripheral settlement in Guayaquil, Ecuador. It also ...examines the importance of family social capital, irrespective of spatial location, as against household social capital in these processes. This longitudinal case study included a dataset on trends from 1978 through 1992 to 2004, in-depth studies over the decades, and further comparative research in 2018. The anthropological narrative is provided by the voices of three women and their families over 40 years. In 2018, interviews my son and I undertook for the documentary film Calle K demonstrated the importance of family social capital in the intergenerational reciprocity among mothers, daughters, fathers and sons, while illustrating different intergenerational trajectories addressing the challenges of inequality at this micro-level. The postscript points to the likely critical importance of family social capital in the context of the appalling COVID-19 pandemic.
In 1967 my husband, Brian Moser directed a film about the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia for UK Granada TV's series World in Action (1963-1998), with me working alongside him, as an unpaid, ...non-unionized, member of the film crew. This Viewpoint article recollects my contribution to documenting this history-changing event, how I came to be there, and how my positionality as a wife meant that I was made invisible, or 'invisibilised'. The meant that, despite my participation, I never allowed myself to recognise that this exciting experience, or the subsequent prize-winning film, was mine to 'own'. I use Callan and Ardner's early 1980s feminist concept of the 'incorporated wife' to explore my contradictory positionality, as well as my subsequent long-term admiration for women guerrilla combatants. This started with Brian's photo of Che Guevara, taken before rigor mortis had set in, wearing socks that I thought belonged to Tania, the East German courier, who, caught behind the lines, nursed the asthmatic Guevara, and was soon killed in battle. As I later came to know Colombian women ex-combatants, Tania's socks became symbolic to me of the role so frequently ascribed to them, if not exactly 'incorporated wives', nevertheless still 'invisibilised', and dismissed in guerrilla conflicts, amid the celebration of the heroism of men combatants such as Ernesto Guevarra, nicknamed 'Che'.
Identifying what the poor have, rather than what they do not have, focuses on their assets. This paper contributes to the extensive vulnerability/assets literature, by categorizing the assets of the ...urban poor in terms of an “asset vulnerability framework.” These include both tangible assets, such as labor and human capital, less familiar productive assets, such as housing, as well as intangible assets, such as household relations and social capital. Results from a recent urban study show that the poor are managers of complex asset portfolios, and illustrate how asset management affects household poverty and vulnerability. Translated into operational practice this framework facilitates interventions promoting opportunities, as well as removing obstacles, to ensure the urban poor use their assets productively.
Latin America is both the world's most urbanized fastest developing regions, where the links between social exclusion, inequality and violence are clearly visible. The banal, ubiquitous nature of ...drug crime, robbery, gang and intra-family violence destabilizes countries' economies and harms their people and social structures. Encounters with Violence & Crime in Latin America explores the meaning of violence and insecurity in nine towns and cities in Columbia and Guatemala to create a framework of how and why daily violence takes place at the community level. It uses pioneering new methods of participatory urban appraisal to ask local people about their own perceptions of violence as mediated by family, gender, ethnicity and age. It develops a typology which distinguishes between the political, social, and economic violence that afflicts communities, and which assesses the costs of consequences of violence in terms of community cohesion and social capital. This gives voice to those whose daily lives and dominated by widespread aggression, and provides important new insights for researchers and policy-makers.
Given the lack of adequate universal social welfare for those unable to find jobs in the salaried formal sector, the livelihoods and well-being of most poor people depends heavily on their asset ...base. This includes their ability to access and accumulate assets, obtain decent returns from these assets, and use their asset base to manage risks. Assets, Livelihoods, and Social Policy discusse the diverse strategies adopted by people in different contexts to accumulate assets through migration, housing investments, natural resources management, and informal businesses. An asset-based social policy can strengthen asset accumulation strategies as well as help the poor overcome the constraints of unfavorable institutional environments. To a considerable extent, asset accumulation strategies depend on the agency exercised by people themselves through individual or collective action. At the same time, the status of policies and institutions can enable or hinder these strategies and affect livelihood outcomes. In synthesis, the case studies lead to the differentiation among three different types of policies: policies that affect outcomes by directly influencing access to assets by the poorsuch as land, housing, natural resources, or credit. policies and public investments that change the nature of returns on assetssuch as investments in rural roads, agricultural inputs, and market development. policies that transform the value of assets held by the poor by virtue of administrative decisions that increase or reduce valuesuch as re-classification of land from arable or pasture to protected lands, land use regulations affecting resource use, or modification in regulations governing labor rights or migration.
Despite growing recognition of urban violence being a serious development constraint in Latin America, there is contestation concerning its categorization, underlying causes, costs and consequences, ...and violence-reduction solutions. This article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the complexity of everyday violence in poor urban communities in terms of both ongoing analytical debates as well as operational solutions. Drawing on the research literature, as well as recent participatory urban appraisals of violence in Colombia and Guatemala, and Central American violence-reduction guidelines, it develops a framework to explain the holistic nature of violence and to provide operationally relevant methodological tools to facilitate cross-sectoral violence-reduction interventions.
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