In her book, Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought (1994), Naila Kabeer undertakes a feminist critique of the mainstream understanding of the development process. She conceptually engages with varying streams of development thought, analytical tools and the relations between ideas and practice. Kabeer, a social economist, works primarily on gender, poverty and social exclusion focused in South and South-east Asia.
In the first four chapters, Kabeer deals with theoretical debates about feminism and development and proposes an alternative. She details the emergence of women as a constituency in development. After the Second World War, a conceptual link was formed between women’s issues and economic development. Women were included in the welfare programs as beneficiaries and not as agents; as reproductive, not productive; as recipients, not contributors.
The celebration of 1975 as the International Year for Women and the 1975-85 decade as the Decade for Women, and subsequent global recognition, led to the Women in Development (WID) framework’s evolution. The focus shifted from welfare to efficiency. WID’s achievements mainly were in terms of symbolic politics of representation and inclusion. It shared many assumptions of the liberal equilibrium world view, particularly in the emphasis on methodological individualism. The structuralists, who espoused the Women and Development (WAD) approach, were some of the fiercest critics of WID. The WAD approach shared a common starting point with Marxism in its analysis of capital accumulation as the driving force behind unequal development. They believed that an unequal international order systematically produced sexual inequality.
The social relations approach – a Marxist influenced explanation of sexual inequalities – which Kabeer favours, explores how the relations of class and gender mediate social realities. It extends the analysis from women as isolable categories to the broader interconnecting relationships through which women are positioned as a subordinate group. In the fourth chapter, the title comes into play when Kabeer approaches the concept of development from a gender perspective. She highlights the gender-blind treatment of inequalities and proposes a reversal of knowledge production and priorities. Dominant development agencies promote particular worldviews and a hierarchy of knowledge production, which privileges a reductionist approach that studies society as a sum of its components and studied in isolation. Kabeer argues for a reversal of the hierarchy of knowledge by legitimising local and subjective forms of knowledge.
From the deconstruction of dominant paradigms in development discourse, Kabeer moves on to micro-level aspects. She traces the theoretical evolution of the household as an economic unit and proposes an interdisciplinary approach, aided by anthropological perspectives. Kabeer turns to feminist anthropology with the question of cooperation and conflict within household decision-making. Anthropology suggests typologies of ideal-typical household forms based on observed patterns of norms and practices. Corporate households, stretching from northern Africa to Bangladesh, across the Middle East and the northern plains of India, are organised around cultural rules which focus on male power and are characterised by cooperation in decision making. The segmented households of the Caribbean, parts of Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa are characterised by conflict in decision making.
This perspective offers a way beyond the dichotomies imposed by economics models: individual/structure, economic/cultural and quantitative/qualitative. Kabeer then discusses the conceptualisation of poverty in mainstream development literature, the means (entitlements) perspective and the ends (needs) perspective – and the forms of measurement it follows. She argues for a gender perspective of labour, capital and household-based entitlements. She suggests viewing poverty as a dynamic phenomenon rather than a static event as ends and means are interrelated and hold different meanings for men and women. Kabeer then examines the social cost-benefit analysis (SCBA) and addresses its ‘claims and silences’. It is an extension of the cost-benefit analysis and considers intangible social cost and benefits through its monetary valuation and assuages equity concerns by assigning distributional weights. SCBA makes a case for efficiency and equity concerns but falls short in its methodological approach. Kabeer argues for a participatory approach instead of an interventionist one like SCBA. She suggests a cost-effectiveness analysis that captures the qualitative aspects of a project and relies on non-monetary indicators when meaningful monetary valuation cannot be done.
In the final three chapters, Kabeer traces the functioning of concepts in specific examples of practice. In the eighth chapter, Kabeer discusses the shifting perspectives in population policy over the past decades. She argues that a gender-aware population policy must be firmly grounded within a holistic framework. She suggests a population policy based on respect for human rights, reproductive choice, male responsibility and women’s enfranchisement. Kabeer outlines the elements and guidelines for a feminist population policy rooted in these principles. In the ninth chapter, Kabeer explores power and empowerment in grassroots organisations. She gives an account of The Grameen Bank and SEWA (Self-Employed Women’s Association) to argue for the participatory approach’s qualitative and interactive methodology, which picks up on gender differences in needs and priorities. She discusses grassroots organisations such as Nijera Kori, Saptagram, and WDP Rajasthan (Women’s Development Program), which also compensate for institutional failures. Drawing on these case studies, she emphasises the importance of power from solidarity and alliances.
This leads to the recognition of shared subordination and has transformative potential through mobilisation for change. In the tenth chapter, Kabeer examines three gender training frameworks – Gender Roles, Triple Roles and Social Relations Frameworks (GRF, TRF and SRF) – that seek to shift from gender-blind to gender-aware policy. GRF is a project-oriented analytical tool, which ensures that resources and responsibilities are channelled following the interests of efficiency. It oversimplifies women’s lives, abstracting them from their relationships and networks. TRF highlights women’s triple role in production, reproduction and community affairs. TRF underplays the conflictual aspects of gender relations and does not challenge the mainstream institutions and their class and gender interests. In SRF, planning is informed by a set of social relations through which production is organised and human needs are met. Kabeer argues for SRF as it looks at strategic gender ‘interests’ articulated by women, thereby opening up the planning process to movements from below. She suggests gender audit as a tool for providing a bottom-up flow of evaluative information into the planning process.
The book is positioned in an interdisciplinary space, formed particularly at the intersection of gender studies and development studies, while also rooting many economic thought and analysis chapters, drawing from her training as a socio-economist. As Kabeer herself says, the chapters were written at different points in time, and only the first three need to be read in sequence. Though this is advantageous to the revisiting reader, or the reader interested in only one of the various topics covered, it provides a challenging experience of developing one line of argument from a chapter to the next. She successfully keeps the book on track, even in the face of this challenge. Notably, in the final three chapters, Fraser’s ‘politics of needs’ acts as a uniting thread among these seemingly discrete chapters. One can observe the interplay of the concept of the household as an economic unit, the conceptualisation of poverty and the social cost-benefit analysis, which is quite effective in reinforcing her main arguments.
In this book, she concerns herself with two objectives: examining “the assumptions, procedures and practices by which feminist perspectives have been excluded from mainstream development or included in a highly diluted form” and “tracking the connections between ways of thinking and ways of doing” (Kabeer, 1994, p.ix). She derives her arguments from critical engagement with concepts, theoretical frameworks, existing literature, and empirical evidence. She combines an extensive critical review of theoretical literature on gender and development to depict material realities. She uses examples from all over the world, but predominantly the ‘Third World’ comprising mainly South Asian, South-East Asian and African countries.
The fifth to tenth chapters are rich in detail about the lives of women in these developing countries, and this can be seen as an instance of Kabeer practising what she preaches: adopting a bottom-up approach by relying on the lived realities of these women, especially given that some of these examples are derived from her first-hand experience of research. What makes the work even more accessible to a diverse audience of academics, policymakers and advocates, and practitioners is the lucid nature of writing sans complicated jargon. She guides the reader through to the end and does not stop short of prescribing solutions in the form of theoretical and practical alternatives.
She adopts an interdisciplinary and grounded problem-solving mechanism; she applies conceptual frameworks and arrives at solutions offered with the marriage of concepts from different disciplines – for instance, anthropology and economics in the case of the household as an economic unit; she also emphasises the importance of bottom-up solutions – for instance, the case of gender training and empowerment; she highlights the significance of analysing processes instead of events, the relevance of dynamicity over staticity – for example, the case of poverty measurement.
Kabeer has two central arguments in the book, each related to each of the objectives mentioned earlier and the idea of ‘reversal’ of hierarchies, values and knowledge production. One of her central arguments is that mainstream development policy, characterised by universalistic and top-down approaches, needs to be replaced by giving space to the voice and agency to the unofficial actors of development, particularly through grassroots organisations, solidarity and mobilisation, and to the subsequent presence of bottom-up approaches in planning and gender training frameworks as well.
Planners can be powerful allies in this enfranchisement process, but the main actors must be those whose voices have been suppressed for so long within the different areas of development. The second of her central arguments are rooted in the framework and approach she pushes for, throughout the book, in the conceptualisation of development, embedding gender within the development, and in the conceptualisation of household, poverty and cost-benefit analysis: a social relations approach, which focuses on hierarchical gender relations, the structures of institutions and the formation of gender as a cross-cutting theme. Crudely put, she argues for a relational approach to gender inequality.
Though the book was published more than two decades ago, many of the issues that Kabeer addresses are as relevant as ever. For instance, the issues Kabeer addresses in the chapter on reproductive rights echo the reality of many lives. Even in ‘developed’ countries, women face coercive practices and pro-natalist policies. The right to abortion is far from being universally guaranteed. It is contingent on the woman’s relationship status and the degree of harm the fetus can impose on the woman.
A concern Kabeer raises as a passing comment has been brought to the forefront recently in India. Though Kabeer argues for non-governmental grassroots organisations and bottom-up empowerment, she acknowledges that such organisations face major limitations as they tend to be “accountable upwards to governments or donors” and can be under “pressure to manage its activities around acceptable and predefined agendas” (ibid, p.262). In the light of the recent Foreign Contribution Regulation (Amendment) Act (FCRA), 2020, in India, NGOs have been facing more red tape, the depravity of funds and an inability to pay employees. Soon after, Amnesty International (India) halted operations owing to “reprisals” from the government undertaking a “witch-hunt” against human rights organisations (“Amnesty India Halts Work”, 2020).
The timeless nature of some of these issues does not necessarily ensure that the book has aged well in all senses. A particular oddity is the complete absence of any mention of the LGBTQIA+ community. This aberration becomes particularly evident given Kabeer’s emphasis on ‘gender’ relations over women as an analytical unit. Given that trans or non-binary people do not get represented even in the context of ‘gender’ being highlighted, there occurs a reinforcement of the male-female binary. “Sexuality” is also used ten-odd times throughout the book. However, each time, it refers to only the sexual rights of women and not to sexual orientations, as a result of which the book is cognizant of only heterosexuality. This might be attributed to the book’s focus being not on the queer community. However, it seems fair to expect a disclaimer, given how Kabeer is self-reflexive about her usage of the term ‘Third World’ and how she does not grant much space in the discussions to the development needs of the First World.
Despite the minor shortcomings, Kabeer’s Reversed Realities is significant and indispensable in the domain of gender and development because of its theoretical depth and novelty in argumentation and the emphasis on processes and the explanatory power of the assemblage of concepts, frameworks and theorists. Kabeer shapes the book in the form of a dialogue, a debate, a dialectical process. She begins her chapters with quotations of advocates of diametrically opposite positions. Through the course of these chapters, she takes the readers through opposing stances, intermediate positions, and the ones in transition before she seeks to turn mainstream thought on its head and propose an alternative viewpoint. She puts distance between her training as an economist and a sociologist and aims to disband the elegance of economics and argue for a messier understanding. She complicates theories, bringing them closer to realities, all the while reversing solidified assumptions and dichotomies, granting meaning to the title “Reversed Realities.”
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Varsha Gopal is pursuing her Master’s in Development Studies at IIT Madras. Her research interests are at the intersection of gender and sexuality.