IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/ctwqxx/v30y2009i2p285-300.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Choosing Words with Care? Shifting meanings of women's empowerment in international development

Author

Listed:
  • Rosalind Eyben
  • Rebecca Napier-Moore

Abstract

‘Women's empowerment’, as used by international development organisations, is a fuzzy concept. Historical textual analysis and interviews with officials in development agencies reveal its adaptability and capacity to carry multiple meanings that variously wax and wane in their discursive influence. Today a privileging of instrumentalist meanings of empowerment associated with efficiency and growth are crowding out more socially transformative meanings associated with rights and collective action. In their efforts to make headway in what has become an unfavourable policy environment, officials in development agencies with a commitment to a broader social change agenda juggle these different meanings, strategically exploiting the concept's polysemic nature to keep that agenda alive. We argue for a politics of solidarity between such officials and feminist activists. We encourage the latter to challenge the prevailing instrumentalist discourse of empowerment with a clear, well articulated call for social transformation, while alerting them to how those with the same agenda within international development agencies may well be choosing their words with care, even if what they say appears fuzzy.

Suggested Citation

  • Rosalind Eyben & Rebecca Napier-Moore, 2009. "Choosing Words with Care? Shifting meanings of women's empowerment in international development," Third World Quarterly, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 30(2), pages 285-300.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:ctwqxx:v:30:y:2009:i:2:p:285-300
    DOI: 10.1080/01436590802681066
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01436590802681066
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/01436590802681066?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Mohammad Muaz Jalil, 2023. "State versus Market Debate and Shaping of the Gender Empowerment Agenda," Review of Development and Change, , vol. 28(1), pages 45-66, June.
    2. Lars Engberg-Pedersen, 2018. "Do norms travel? The case of gender in Danish development cooperation," Progress in Development Studies, , vol. 18(3), pages 153-171, July.
    3. Niyonkuru, Pascal & Barrett, Hazel, 2021. "Gender and intergenerational challenges to Women’s economic empowerment initiatives in Rwanda," World Development Perspectives, Elsevier, vol. 23(C).
    4. Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde & Lars Engberg-Pedersen & Adam Moe Fejerskov, 2018. "Global norms and heterogeneous development organizations," Progress in Development Studies, , vol. 18(2), pages 77-94, April.
    5. A. Galiè & N. Teufel & L. Korir & I. Baltenweck & A. Webb Girard & P. Dominguez-Salas & K. M. Yount, 2019. "The Women’s Empowerment in Livestock Index," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 142(2), pages 799-825, April.
    6. Nassani, Abdelmohsen A. & Aldakhil, Abdullah Mohammed & Abro, Muhammad Moinuddin Qazi & Islam, Talat & Zaman, Khalid, 2019. "The impact of tourism and finance on women empowerment," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 41(2), pages 234-254.
    7. Narayanan, Sudha & Lentz, Erin & Fontana, Marzia & De, Anuradha & Kulkarni, Bharati, 2019. "Developing the Women's Empowerment in Nutrition Index in Two States of India," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 89(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:ctwqxx:v:30:y:2009:i:2:p:285-300. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/ctwq .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.