Between affiliation and autonomy: navigating pathways of women's empowerment and gender justice in rural Bangladesh

Inasmuch as women's subordinate status is a product of the patriarchal structures of constraint that prevail in specific contexts, pathways of women's empowerment are likely to be "path dependent." They will be shaped by women's struggles to act on the constraints that prevail in their societies, as much by what they seek to defend as by what they seek to change. The universal value that many feminists claim for individual autonomy may not therefore have the same purchase in all contexts. This article examines processes of empowerment as they play out in the lives of women associated with social mobilization organizations in the specific context of rural Bangladesh. It draws on their narratives to explore the collective strategies through which these organizations sought to empower the women and how they in turn drew on their newly established "communities of practice" to navigate their own pathways to wider social change. It concludes that while the value attached to social affiliations by the women in the study is clearly a product of the societies in which they have grown up, it may be no more context-specific than the apparently universal value attached to individual autonomy by many feminists.     

Resources,Agency, Achievements: Reflections on the Measurement of Women's Empowerment

This paper begins from the understanding that women's empowerment is about the process by which those who have been denied the ability to make strategic life choices acquire such an ability. A wide gap separates this processual understanding of empowerment from the more instrumentalist forms of advocacy which have required the measurement and quantification of empowerment. The ability to exercise choice incorporates three inter-related dimensions: resources (defined broadly to include not only access, but also future claims, to both material and human and social resources); agency (including processes of decision making, as well as less measurable manifestations of agency such as negotiation, deception and manipulation); and achievements (well-being outcomes). A number of studies of women's empowerment are analysed to make some important methodological points about the measurement of empowerment. The paper argues that these three dimensions of choice are indivisible in determining the meaning of an indicator and hence its validity as a measure of empowerment. The notion of choice is further qualified by referring to the conditions of choice, its content and consequences. These qualifications represent an attempt to incorporate the structural parameters of individual choice in the analysis of women's empowerment.     

Women Workers and the Politics of Claims Making: The Local and the Global

This article analyses the evolving politics of claims making in relation to women workers in the global South. It asks what claims are being made and by whom, who these claims are addressed to and what strategies are being employed to press these claims. It distinguishes between women working for global markets and those working for domestic markets in order to identify possible differences in constraints, priorities and opportunities underlying these strategies. It also distinguishes between the different kinds of organizations involved in making claims: organizations of women workers, organizations working with women workers and organizations working on behalf of women workers. The article is one of several papers forming a cluster on feminist mobilizations.     

Evaluating Cost-Benefit Analysis as a Tool for Gender Planning

This article evaluates the usefulness of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) in the field of gender and development planning. While the incorporation of distributional considerations into CBA would appear to have made it more sensitive to gender differentials, the article argues that it is limited by a number of factors. These include both its own methodological biases, such as the bias towards marketed activities and quantifiable indicators, as well as the political economy of gender at different stages of the project cycle. Empirical examples from both First and Third World contexts are drawn on to demonstrate how these biases work in practice. The article concludes that CBA is best suited to interventionist, rather than participatory projects; to efficiency, rather than equity goals; and, where equity is the goal, to women's practical needs rather than their strategic gender interests.     

The Structure of ‘Revealed‘ Preference: Race,Community and Female Labour Supply in the London Clothing Industry

This article takes as its starting point the overwhelming concentration of Bangladeshi women in the homeworking sector of the clothing industry in London. This pattern forms a contrast to the large numbers of male Bangladeshi workers also concentrated in the garment industry but who are to be found mainly in the factories and sweatshops. The article uses the accounts given by the Bangladeshi homeworkers themselves for their concentration in this form of work to explore different theoretical explanations of female labour supply behaviour, focusing in particular on questions of choice and constraint, culture and economy. The study suggests that the ‘preferences' revealed by the labour market behaviour of Bangladeshi women cannot be attributed solely to them, but must be seen in terms of bargaining and negotiation with other, more powerful members of the family. Furthermore, the intra-household decision-making process is itself embedded within a broader institutional environment which determines the access enjoyed by different groups to socially-valued resources. For Bangladeshis, a key factor in this broader environment is the operation of racially-based forms of exclusion from the mainstream opportunities. Consequently, community solidarity and networks represent important symbolic and material resources for members. However, these resources are distributed in highly gender-specific ways, with very clear implications for women's place within the community. The article argues therefore that any attempt to explain Bangladeshi women's concentration in homework has to move beyond a focus on either individual circumstances or cultural norms to an exploration of the interaction of racism, community identity and gender relations in shaping women's labour market options.     

Contested Understandings in the Global Garment Industry after Rana Plaza

This Introduction synthesizes the key themes of this special cluster of articles and explores the implications of the three contributions on garment supply chains after the Rana Plaza disaster. The three articles examine the perspectives of key stakeholders in garment value chains — global buyers, managers of garment factories in Bangladesh, and workers at these factories — and analyses their responses to the new governance initiatives that emerged in the aftermath of Rana Plaza. Placing the contrasting perspectives of these stakeholders alongside each other starkly reveals how their different positions within hierarchically organized global value chains form the particular lens through which they view post-Rana Plaza initiatives. This special cluster scrutinizes the particular understandings of these stakeholders and reveals the very different capacity for voice and influence that they bring to bear in shaping outcomes. It reflects on the contradictory imperatives faced by actors in the garment industry caught between a logic of competition on the one hand and global labour standards norms on the other. The Introduction concludes by examining the prospects for a re-embedding of the market in global value chains via the activation of civil society.     

Paradigm Shift or Business as Usual? Workers’ Views on Multi-stakeholder Initiatives in Bangladesh

The scale of the tragedy at Rana Plaza in Bangladesh, in which more than 1,000 garment factory workers died when the building collapsed in April 2013, galvanized a range of stakeholders to take action to prevent future disasters and to acknowledge that business as usual was not an option. Prominent in these efforts were the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (hereafter the Accord) and the Alliance for Bangladesh Workers’ Safety (hereafter the Alliance), two multi-stakeholder agreements that brought global buyers together in a coordinated effort to improve health and safety conditions in the ready-made garment industry. These agreements represented a move away from the buyer-driven, compliance-based model, which hitherto dominated corporate social responsibility initiatives, to a new cooperation-based approach. The Accord in particular, which included global union federations and their local union partners as signatories and held global firms legally accountable, was described as a ‘paradigm shift’ with the potential to improve industrial democracy in Bangladesh. This article is concerned with the experiences and perceptions of workers in the Bangladesh garment industry regarding these new initiatives. It uses a purposively designed survey to explore the extent to which these initiatives brought about improvements in wages and working conditions in the garment industry, to identify where change was slowest or absent and to ask whether the initiatives did indeed represent a paradigm shift in efforts to enforce the rights of workers.     

Women,Wages and Intra-household Power Relations in Urban Bangladesh

This article examines the implications of women's access to income-earning opportunities for their position in intra-household relationships. For those who believe that such relationships are egalitarian, this issue may not appear relevant; for others, however, there is a divergence of views between those who offer an optimistic analysis of the effects of earning power for women's status, and those who provide a more pessimistic prognosis. In exploring this issue, the article makes use of first-hand accounts of women workers in the recently emergent export-oriented garment factories in Bangladesh, both in order to evaluate the ‘fit’ with theoretical insights of intra-household relations from the social science literature, and to assess what the ‘everyday lived realities’ described by the women workers tell us about the workings of power within family-based households in urban Bangladesh.