Logo

Encounters of Another Kind: Women and Development Economics brings together Devaki Jain’s essays which engage with public policy, development economics and women. In the 1970s and 1980s, as a fallout of the First World Conference of Women, held in Mexico in 1975, then the Women’s Decade (1975–85), followed by the Second World Conference in 1985 in Nairobi, governments energized their bureaucracies to address women’s inclusion in development programmes. Thereby began the work of gendering development, and as a result of challenging the existing ideas, projects related to the design of development policies and programmes. However, most of these efforts were couched in the knowledge and experience of the global North since the efforts were largely led by the Northern intellectual community. In this volume therefore, Professor Jain highlights the ways in which the design of public policy has ignored the lived experience of what was being offered in India as development.

Contents: Foreword. Introduction. 1. Letting the Worm Turn: A Comment on Innovative Poverty Alleviation. 2. Development Theory and Practice: Insights Emerging from Women’s Experience. 3. Gender and Poverty in India: Comment on a World Bank Country Study. 4. Healing the Wounds of Development. 5. Valuing Work: Time as a Measure. 6. Nuancing Globalisation, or Mainstreaming the Downstream, or Reforming Reform. 7. Food Battles, or Battling for Food. 8. Are We Knowledge-Proof? Development as Waste. 9. A View from the South: A Story of Intersections. 10. Women, Public Policy and the New World Order. 11. Growth, Poverty and Inequality: The Linkages and Relevance of Macro-economic Policies. 12. Walking Together: The Journey of the Non-Aligned Movement and the Women’s Movement. 13. Morals in Politics: The Gandhian Touch. 14. Exploring Economic Inequality: From Piketty through Adiga to Gandhi. 15. The New World Re-order: An Opportunity to Build a Feminist Political Economy. Bibliography. Index.