Abstract
Developed organizations have increasingly garnered numerous indicators to measure gender and development outcomes. Yet, measurements themselves reflect a logic of the arenas where development occurs and can be captured, and therefore reflect where women are imagined to predominantly exist. Based on the analysis of 1,298 indicators across 15 major development databases covering African countries, this article argues that mainstream development organizations predominantly understand gender in terms of institutional sites. Sometimes these were sites for intervention, or a place for institutional ‘betterment’ (a hospital, a work place, and a school). Other times, these sites were conceptualized as natural places where women would be (the family and the nation state). We identify the spatial logics underpinning these development indicators, and link them to larger historical gendered and racialized colonial logics organizing diverse social, economic, and cultural lives, where economic and institutional sites are promoted, a more nuanced and relational one is displaced. Ultimately, these spatial imaginings extend to the larger context of where debates about peace and security are situated—namely in largely individual, state-driven, and institutional-centric ways.
I. Introduction
In recent years, there has been a significant push to ‘mainstream gender’ by development organizations, with an aim to recognize and integrate women’s roles and impacts on policy, including peacebuilding. The celebration and elevation of gender equality has dominated policy arenas relating to gender and development. Particularly since 2000, the discourse of gender equality in mainstream development agencies often is a stand-in for institutionalizing the link between gender equality (vis-à-vis women’s rights and women’s security) and state security. For instance, there has been widespread recognition among nation states and international actors of the critical roles that women play in creating, maintaining, and reclaiming peace and security in their communities, societies, and countries. Many of the gender and development policies still dominantly rely on an orientation in which women are imagined and understood largely within visible spheres—either as individual citizens within a nation state or as situated within health or economic systems. Until now, there has been little evidence to link such deep-seated state or institutional assumptions present within the larger gender and development field to the bases for measuring and conceptualising gendered outcomes.
This article argues that the very indicators development agencies use in mainstream databases to capture and report on gendered outcomes are, in and of themselves, sources for knowledge about the ways that much of the development field thinks about, describes and even disciplines gender. Drawing on data from across 15 development organizations and 1,298 indicators employed by various mainstream development databases, this article argues that the metrics and indicators used to capture gender principally locate and imagine women within mainstream institutional arrangements: work, families and the state. These three domains are not only the key sites where mainstream development organizations understand women to be, but are also grounded in longstanding gendered, racialized and colonial logics (see Pailey, 2020). Other relational, historical or collective ways of conceptualizing gender, let alone experiencing it, get dropped from such a view. This article’s analysis of relevant gender and development databases provides a window into how women’s rights and security are enveloped in development imaginations, which evoke ideas of linear progress and achievements. Mapping and analysing the indicators used in selected development databases sheds light on these normative logics and situates their historical relevance and political implications.
The origins for this line of inquiry began in 2016, when an experimental Women, Peace and Security (WPS) pilot programme embarked on a two-year listening tour among grassroots activists and those working in the areas of gender justice to advance critical thinking about the field, its assumptions and where change is needed. In dominant peace and security framings, tropes of women are simultaneously grouped and isolated, often classifying women either as mass victims of war and/or individual leaders for peace. For example, the United Nations WPS 1325 agenda has remained largely state-centric, overlapping with institutional paradigms found in international development (Parashar, 2019) and a spatial orientation that largely feminises peace (Shepherd, 2017). The programme heard from grassroots changemakers directly that one of the key things missing from the field of WPS is a more complex and nuanced picture of collective movement-building, everyday care practices as peace work, and the axiological challenge of recognizing and embracing the value of marginalized forms of knowledge. 1 The feedback that key policy tools, especially as related to gender, peace and development, were fundamentally missing critical interpretative actions sparked our interest in the ways artefacts, measurement and indicators can deepen, disrupt or complicate this omission. When ‘security’ is seen as dominantly linked to economic and state functions, and ‘peace’ is linked to militarization and protection, policy questions of conflict, peace and gender are often understood through development practices such as good governance, empowerment and resilience-building.
Based on our previous research with WPS changemakers, we decided to broaden our focus on the larger field of international development rather than more narrowly on WPS because of the dominant ways peace and security are largely understood as located within an international development frame (see Aoláin and Valji, 2019; Cornwall and Rivas, 2015; Gbowee, 2019; Heathcote and Otto, 2014; Luttrell-Rowland et al., 2021). We placed a particular focus on indicators measuring African contexts in order to speak directly to the intertwined historical projects of gendered and racialized understandings of conflict, peace and development (Mama, 1997) and how common insecurity and civil unrest are presented as largely occurring in the Global South. Rather than taking a more dominant WPS approach that often limits questions of security and peace to that of formal wars and orients towards (state) security, our choice to situate WPS within a wider gender and development frame was purposeful and reflected our theoretical understandings of the possibilities for the field of WPS: deliberately broad, expansive and larger than just an institutional or the United Nations approach represented in 1325 (Wibben et al., 2019). Furthermore, this strategy made sense since the measurements that often serve as the basis for measuring progress with the WPS agenda are drawn from the larger umbrella of international development. Ultimately, this article aims to extend the measurement debates occurring within gender and development, and with special reference to WPS, to illuminate the continuing ways in which the dominance of state and institutional centric interpretations still shape much of how the field of development is understood.
Our findings, based on a general survey of indicators used in the field of WPS, show how mainstream development organizations put forward a specific, institutional and spatial interpretation of gender. In so doing, this article problematizes what is largely normalized in the areas of gender and development, highlighting how narrowly gender is widely treated and understood. Rather than just see these indicators as a given or ‘natural’ way to measure and understand gender, we shed light on the understandings of gender that are both opened up, and constrained, by these mainstream development measurements. In tracing how a range of dominant development agencies conceptualize and measure gender as first and foremost as about individual subjects (women) located in specific sites (institutions and states), we map what kinds of questions and considerations are asked, as well as what kinds of logics are displaced through these measurement processes. 2
This article looks at the specific spatial, legal and institutional logics employed in current development databases based on the specific indicators used to measure gender and development. 3 Looking at indicators themselves elucidates their framing power in shaping gender and development in general, as well as in the field of WPS. Geoffrey Bowker notes, ‘the database itself will ultimately shape the world in its image: it will be performative. If we are only saving what we are counting, and if our counts are skewed in many different ways [such as what gets counted and what does not], then we are creating a new world in which those counts become more and more normalized’ [Should be 2000: 675]. In the case of WPS, feminist scholars have noted the normative ways that the widespread policy focus on National Action Plans (NAPs), for example, has largely skewed international attention towards the ‘protection pillar’ and that locates women first and foremost, within states and nations (Aoláin and Valji, 2019; Martin de Almagro, 2018). Exploring the ways gender is counted and measured and the dominant indicators that are used surfaces some of the larger discursive practices that produce and reproduce dominant worldviews, as well as the policies, prescriptions and actions located therein.
More specifically, we argue that one discursive element of the measurements is the way gender is largely captured through general institutional sites (work, family and state) which in and of itself posits particular linear narratives about individuals, institutions and rationality. Such an interpretation of gender, while not explicit, works to displace other more relational stories. But, as we suggest, these findings also reveal important implications around the long-standing rationalities and frameworks used in measurements employed by development organizations themselves. We discuss how logics of institutional intervention, progress and gendered spaces raise important questions, perhaps particularly for expanding conversations about ‘development’ and measurement, with ramifications on cross-cutting fields including peace and security.
What Does It Mean to Measure Gender and Development?
There is both a history and a widespread debate about how development organizations have long relied on rational and technical logics. Some authors argue indicators are a part of a working hierarchy in international politics where power and knowledge are reinforced among dominant state and non-state actors like development agencies (Löwenheim, 2008). One way in which power and knowledge intersect is through a ‘technical/rational’ understanding of policy, often prevalent in Eurocentric paradigms for conceptualizing policy, and taken up by dominant development practitioners such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade organization and the United Nations. This approach treats policy largely as problems to solve, and sees these problems as being easily identifiable. In turn, technical/rational policy approaches are primarily concerned with action, impact and measurement.
An alternative perspective extends beyond indicators as a tool of rational paradigms; others argue that indicators reflect the judgements of those who create them and wield additional agenda-setting and framing powers (Liebowitz and Zwingel, 2014; Merry, 2011). Making visible these decisions and attending to their meaning is not inherently harmful, but rather something to be curious about and that opens up multiplicities of meaning. Anthropologist Sally Merry argues that the very creation of indicators falls within, and reflects, existing power relations of global governance (Merry, 2012). She describes indicators as a group of rank order data that claims to portray the past or future performance of different units that can themselves influence the very concepts they were created to measure through the self-reinforcing loops in which they operate: to define, measure and re-define concepts (Merry, 2011, 2012). Elucidating these framing powers, and making visible their meaning, allows for better seeing. This kind of analysis recognizes, as Kathleen Pine and Max Liboiron note, ‘measurement as a moral act, one that embodies a particular set of values and principles of conduct’ (Pine & Liboiron, 2015: 3). Attending to how indicators and measurement are political goes against the dominant understanding among most development agencies that they are objective. Indeed, much mainstream international development discourse subscribes to the idea that it would be better to measure data in ways that are objective and politically neutral. Yet, ‘measurements are not just political in the sense that they are used in governance; they are also political in that they exercise covert political power by bringing certain things into spreadsheets and data infrastructures, and thus into management and policy, while leaving other things out’ (Pine & Liboiron 2015, 3).
Guises of Technocratic Policy: Colonial Legacies and Gendered Implications.
Critical development scholars have discussed how technical tools in development projects often limit and/or shape political analysis and have analysed how this phenomenon is connected to historical patterns of depoliticising development projects as part of colonial and neoliberal endeavours. Currently, mainstream development agencies predominantly understand measurement as about individual action, which can easily be identified and measured (Hout, 2012). These measurements are often closely related to particular logics that emphasize formal systems such as the political state or the markets over structural patterns and relationality. Key to this measurement approach is the emphasis on technical means for policy measurement and making, which has allowed questions of power, exploitation and subjugation to lay moot (Ziai, 2019).
Such binary logics of empirical evidence, reflected in technical measurements and mainstream policy, grow out of a long colonial history (Darian-Smith, 2013; Eslava et al., 2017; Hout, 2012; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018) in which rational or technical choices of ‘civilized’ administrators and intervenors are implicitly imagined as set against the irrational or emotional behaviours of the ‘savage other’ (Chatterjee, 2001; Mbembe, 2017; Seed, 1993; Todorov, 1984). Some argue that patterns of global capital accumulation and overexploitation that depend on racial ideologies of difference continue to exist, even if rendered hidden (Mbembe, 2017). The invisibility of hierarchical logics is made possible through the depoliticization of measurement, further linked to the emergence of neo-liberal economics, during a time of significant globalisation and technological shifts (Radice, 2008), and through an increase of technical indicators and measurements (Löwenheim, 2008).
However, such binary logics of the ‘developed’ and the ‘imagined other’ in development discourses and practices are not inevitable or set in stone. For decades, activists and scholars have offered alternative frames aimed to dislodge and deepen the largely technocratic practices emerging from main- stream development institutions (see Dixon and Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2019; Smith, 2012; Spade, 2020). Ongoing movements and thought leaders from environmental justice, critical-race studies, anti-colonialism studies and gender justice continue to challenge key assumptions built into the logics of technocratic thinking. In particular, movements have brought attention not only to how technocratic tools influence everyday material existences (or ‘materiality’), but also how such ‘discourse shapes and defines different realities’ (Kothari, 2005: 48).
A range of detailed ethnographic accounts demonstrate the ways the technical tools used in development projects can limit or constrain political or social interpretations, perhaps leading to the persistence of patterns of oppression and harm originating in colonization (Ferguson, 1994; Gupta, 2012; Li, 2007). In this vein, social movements and critical theorists have worked to expose how the frames of development, in turn, are tied to the types of solutions that are able to be made or imagined (Eslava, 2015; Pahuja, 2011; Smith, 2012). For instance, illuminating the ways that technical solutions to social problems can distract or undermine questions of relationship, structure and power is an important contribution to understanding how persistent issues in development, such as poverty and inequality, perpetually remain largely ‘unsolved’ by policy (Escobar, 2011; Gupta, 2012; Li, 2007). Rarely are the root causes and structural aspects of violence and unequal access to rights able to be fully explored or revealed.
Rather than take these development indicators at face value, we argue that there are valuable lessons to learn by analysing how the dominance of individual and institutional interpretations that are embedded in most gender and development databases shape not just discourses about gender, but also those about peace and justice. Indeed, the measurements and indicators of mainstream development databases influence the dominant imaginary of where gender is understood to operate—particularly work, family and the state. But how does this interpretation of gender as largely located within these institutional and economics ‘sites’ affect the themes that development organizations address when they work on gender?
II. Measuring Gender, Mapping Themes
Whilst there are few WPS databases, those that are available mostly pull selected data from larger gender and development databases. By outlining both an analysis of the indicators used across a variety of key development databases, especially as related to gender, peace and everyday (in)security, as well as outlining their historical and political lineage, this article comments on how what is measured within development databases influences the gender themes that developed organizations work on and how this in turn shapes gender in the field of WPS’. Thus, research for this article is based on the qualitative analysis of 15 of the key databases for gender and development (Table 1). We analysed 1,298 indicators across these 15 databases and organized into them into elicited themes (see Table 2) to clarify both what is being both promoted and obscured across the databases as related to gender and development in Africa. 4
Summary of the Databases Selected for Analysis Which Met the Selection Criteria Around Women, Gender and Development Databases from Development Organisations.
Common Themes in Aggregate Numbers in Selected Databases and Indicators.
To collect relevant databases, we first conducted a thorough search of available databases using key terms. We utilised key search phrases such as ‘gender databases’, ‘Africa databases’, and ‘peace and security databases in Africa.’ Extensive literature reviews were also conducted to ensure coverage of all relevant sources. Our criteria included that the database must focus on Women, Gender or Development, and include some coverage of data in Africa, and that they contained sex-disaggregated data. While more databases exist that touch upon these themes, several were excluded from the final list due to their reliance on larger databases already included in the presented data. For instance, we purposefully did not include the OECD’s International Development Statistics, UNDP’s Human Development Data and World Bank’s Little Data Book on Gender, as we aimed to include the larger repositories of the data instead that are found below.
Ultimately, we selected 15 databases for compilation and analysis (Table 1). These sampled databases propose a myriad of understandings of gender and development. The databases draw on multiple fields, including economics, political science, international relations, psychology, geography and health.
Next, we compiled all of the indicators related to gender from each of the 15 selected databases. We noted each indictor’s descriptions and from whom the data was collected. We uploaded this data onto qualitative analysis software NVivo, which aided us in further organizing the databases using classification attributes such as which organization’s database the indicator was from and geographic focus, in order to investigate what types of databases focused on which themes.
For our analysis, we used an inductive process to pull out key themes found across the databases related to broader existing narratives around gender and development. This entailed grouping and categorizing indicators according to their topic and orientation. We initially found that the databases themselves emphasized a wide variety of development objectives. For instance, the Sustainable Development Goals Indicator Database and UNICEF Data on Gender Equality focus on tracking progress towards tracking the SDGs, including gender equality. The World Bank Gender Portal and OECD Gender Data Portal both provide gendered data on education, health, economic opportunities, public life and decision making, agency, development and governance. Similarly, both the Africa Gender Equality Index (GEI) and The Evidence and Data for Gender Equality (EDGE) focus on gender equality in health, education, employment, entrepreneurship and asset ownership and rights. At a more institutional level, the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI), Social Institutions and Gender Index, Gender Inequality Index (GII) and Gender, Institutions and Development Database aim to measure gender inequality in development and social institutions. Likewise, the International Household Survey Network indicators measure economic and social structures, and Afrobarometer data contains pan-African, public attitude surveys on democracy, governance, the economy and society. In contrast, the Gender and Land Rights Database (GLRD) focuses specifically on land rights institutions. Finally, DHS Stats and African Health Stats focused largely on sexual and reproductive health and rights.
In their attempts to measure individual, social, political and institutional performance, the 1,298 indicators across the 15 databases revealed a consistent, yet perhaps unsurprising, picture of measurement in gender and development. The three most common overarching aggregate themes were Health (14 databases), Legal and State Institutions (13) and Economics (12) (Table 2). These overarching themes align with the dominant discourse of mainstream development organizations as related to gender (Wilson, 2011), as will be discussed in the following sections. When understanding the indicators through a lens of emergent themes, what stood out was the ways gender is largely treated in relation to a site—a place. Sometimes these were sites for intervention, a place for institutional ‘betterment’ (a hospital, a work place and a school). Other times, these sites were conceptualized in terms of natural places where women would be (the family, nation and state). Across all databases, gender was something captured through an institutional, rather than relational, orientation. Below, we describe both the substantive and spatial implications of the top three elicited themes found throughout the database indicators.
Health: Sites of Institutional Engagement
Health, broadly speaking, is the most dominant aggregated theme (14 of 15 databases) of the selected gender and development databases, with each database measuring different aspects of health or healthcare. Under the Health theme, there are some measurements related to the body and embodiment—such as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), Health Measurements, Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH), Healthcare Access, Nutrition and Sanitation. But the most prevalent granular measurements revolve around healthcare institutions and Healthcare Access (10 of 15 databases), Maternal Health (9 of 15) and Contraceptives (9 of 15). Across all measures, Health is understood as grounded in institutions and measured in terms of sites for engagement, rather than relationships. For instance, the most common words found in the indicator labels after conducting a word frequency search under the theme were ‘age’, ‘percentage’, ‘female’ and ‘male’, affirming a description of data that privilege measurable individuality over social relationality.
Moreover, the majority of indicators under Maternal Health measure gender in relation to an institutionalized health system, such as counting the proportion of births at a healthcare centre, and the proportion of births attended by a skilled professional. There are no indicators about social/interpersonal determinants of maternal health, such as where pregnant women receive information/advice, their birthing plans or their support systems throughout pregnancy and post-pregnancy. When focusing on contraception, the indicators measure how many women were using any form of contraception, and the demand being met, for contraception. 5 But there were no indicators about social/interpersonal determinants of contraception used, or where individuals receive information/advice about contraception or family planning.
The trend of measuring institutional interactions extended to measurements of Healthcare Access; a word frequency criteria search revealed that top words across the indicators dealing with healthcare access included ‘care’, ‘receiving’, ‘test’, ‘distribution’, ‘expenditure’ and ‘women’, which emphasizes operationalized chains of health services received in certain established locations. While ‘care’ connotes a relational exchange between people, within the Health theme, ‘care’ was most often preceded by ‘antenatal’, ‘postnatal’, ‘postpartum’ or ‘health’ and ‘medical’ care. In effect, ‘care’ acted mainly as a function of healthcare or pregnancy, with a focus on institutional and medical care, versus care relationships, and with an assumption of gender as linked of motherhood. Some databases mention ‘skilled providers’ (DHS Statistics) and ‘health personnel’ (SDG Indicators), as well as measuring public health expenditures (African Health Stats) and access to antiretroviral treatments and maternal care. Overall, the conceptual interpretation of Health, as measured and taken up by development indicators, is dominantly captured as located in a healthcare site, a place. This was expressed largely in terms of reproduction and motherhood (hospitals), or links to formalized institutionalized health care as service beneficiaries or ‘clients’ (Escobar, 2011). Relatedly, the theme of Education drew upon similar conceptualisations of the disembedded individual by mainly measuring enrolment in school and achievement at individual levels, or at accredited formal educational institutions. In comparison, little focus was devoted to the relational environment that may influence a woman’s participation/attainment in education.
On the whole, the indicators for Health across the databases draw attention to an elevation of the individual’s access to institutions and services. Measuring the health of the individual as something that can be read off from their contacts with an institutional system is one very specific interpretation, one that does not capture, for example, how an individual’s health is shaped by community and environmental aspects. Individuals are part of dynamic ecosystems that influence health outcomes of that individual via direct and indirect interactions and relationships. By taking a more strictly institutional interpretation, and set of measures, for health and gender, many of the ecosystem and relational dynamics, and certainly that of social and political systems, become lost or at least obscured. 6
Legal and State Institutions: Sites of Legality
A second central measurement across the selected databases was the measure of Legal and State Institutions (13 of 15). Nearly all development organizations in the sample featured the law in relation to the state imagined as a particular site of significance for gender. For example, the most prevalent granular measurements were Legal Rights, specifically Land Rights (9 of 15) and Citizenship and Political Rights (7 of 15). Rights, in this view, are granted by governmental institutions (citizenship rights and land rights) making the state the site and measure of legality. This was also true of workplace rights (6 of 15), emphasizing legal rights and benefits. That measuring Legal and State institutions ranks the second most common among these databases itself speaks to the preference and dominance given to governing and administrative apparatuses. But this institutional lens—in which the interpretation of the state as the right-bearer and individuals as recipients—is not the only way legality could be measured or conceptualized. This pattern harkens to colonial relationships, where state-building and property regimes rested upon the imposition of legal authority as a worldview.
In contrast, socio-legal, critical race theorists and feminist scholars have collectively put forward an important body of work interrogating doctrinal assumptions about the state and statehood that portray the state as static, monolith and tied to nationhood (Assis, 2021; Darian-Smith, 2013; Hernández, 2016). Relatedly, rather than seeing law and legality primarily in terms of rules and norms as dictated from above, critical research conveys the need to understand law as about the consciousness embedded in everyday lives and practices (Ewick and Silbey, 1998).
The consistent legal institutional view embedded across the dominant databases is best exemplified via Land Rights. For example, many of the indicators use land rights to indirectly measure household wealth, implying that land is an asset to be extracted, where land tenure can grant economic value. The majority of indicators under Land Rights capture ownership in terms of security in legal frameworks, individual land titles and deeds, and gendered distribution. Only one database mentioned customary law frameworks when measuring rights (SDG Indicators), and one database accounted for bribes when registering land (Afrobarometer). The overwhelming emphasis on property administration and property rights implies a formal institutional (state) lens, removed from informal everyday practices and relationship to the land, but instead one that furthers a belief that land security comes from the state. The indicators across databases largely all frame the law and state as the primary entities through which to grant individual land access and rights. This trend also makes broader assertions that ownership and access are the proper indicators for measuring development, and further supports an imagined role of the state in promoting ‘individual productivity’ through legal security (Krever, 2013) and land as an individual resource for extraction and even profit.
Other legal viewpoints, such as Citizenship and Political Rights were found in 7 out of 15 databases, with similar patterns of an institutional dominant interpretation of gender. Indicators measuring gendered development progress such as citizenship rights emphasize security within legal frameworks, with no mention of customary law frameworks, environmental justice or collective practices. From the perspective put forward through the databases, law and legality are largely a story of states and rights, and of individual (citizens) and formal institutions. Gender, as told through their indicators, is subsumed and captured though understanding or measuring those types of (formal) institutional formations.
Economics: Sites of Commerce and Market
Economics, the third highest-ranking common theme with mentions in 12 of 15 databases, was largely measured through indicators focusing on aspects of Employment, Wealth and Financial Services, revealing a particular interpretation of the economy and economic systems. Specifically, Employment, measured in terms of the actual sites and places one is employed, was the category that was mentioned the most out of the major themes present under Economics, in 11 out of 15 databases. The most prominent category under Employment measured women’s presence in managerial and governmental roles and in senior positions, under the sub-theme Leadership (9 of 15). Such an indicator is directly linked to formal employment, management and an interpretation of the formal market as indicators of progress.
Other prominent themes under Employment include measuring Employment Access (8 of 15) and Status (8 of 15). Such themes focus on individual successes and failures in relation to workplace institutions. Individual access to Financial Services is another indicator of gender and economics that is also heavily measured (9 of 15), as well as measurements of Household Economic Wealth (9 of 15). Across the Economics theme, measurements broadly relied on an imagery of individual economic actors, located within ‘local’ but formal financial systems in isolation (i.e., in workplaces, banking and financial institutions or households). For example, a given household’s access to wealth is largely measured via access to income and institutional assets such as bank accounts or businesses.
Distant in such a portrayal of households/individuals are their relationships, networks and communities. Surprisingly, the word ‘family’ appeared only in 5 indicators across the 377 indicators under Economics mostly in the context of ‘contributing family workers’; ‘remittance’ appeared only once (Afrobarometer). There was no mention of other words including ‘network’, ‘relationships’ or ‘community’ that would suggest that databases are looking beyond an individual or a household’s direct assets and employment as measures of economic value.
More specifically, the trend of detaching individuals and households from the contexts of their relationships was significantly pronounced in the theme of Wealth Measurement. Besides words referring specifically to gender, the top words were ‘households’, ‘house’ and ‘alone.’ The indicators portrayed individuals and households as silos and individual units without assessing the relationships with the family or a community that contribute to a household’s or an individual’s wealth. Mobility was mentioned sparsely, and National Wealth Measurements, although different from how an individual/household wealth measurement would be measured, also focused on the individual nation state and not its relationship with other nation states that could influence wealth and economic stance. This finding speaks to previous analyses of development discourse as dominated by an economic emphasis without multidisciplinary engagement (Jackson, 2002), and privileging the individual at the expense of the substantive and/or the structural (Hickel, 2014; Wilson, 2015). Economic measurements are not neutral, but often rest on, and drive, fundamental assumptions about individual self-maximising behaviour. We found these assumptions to be reflected even at the level of gender indicators across mainstream development organizations, revealing an orientation towards the economic discipline that is so widespread and persistent it goes unstated.
III. Gendered Indicators, Colonial Logics
What social and conceptual implications do these specific spatial and thematic imaginings across these databases offer, and what kinds of logics are employed? As shown here, Health, Legal and State Institutions and Economics were the most prominent topics for the 15 databases in terms of measuring and conceptualizing gender and development. Within these themes, individual actors and formal institutions were more prominently displayed than relational or structural aspects of development. As noted earlier, this has ramifications not only in perpetuating technocratic understandings of ‘problems’ and ‘development’ in gender, but also in feeding back to particular imaginaries of women as located within particular sites. Indicators implying sites of formal and legal state institutions serve to legitimize entrenched frames about gender as located within these sites (hospitals, schools and banks). Here, the individual imagined woman is disembedded from social connections, and with the same stroke, is seen as a rights-bearing recipient of an abstracted institutional sphere. Such spatial logics within development indicators can be linked to colonial patterns of ‘institutionalised configurations of power’, privileging areas of state visibility and interaction (Li, 2007). Underlying these dominant measurement frames is a fidelity to a binary and linear logic, an orientation towards empiricism and the pre-eminence of the abstracted, individual citizen. The rights-bearing citizen is created through a product of ‘civilizing’ and ‘developing’ missions (Mamdani, 2018), and yet is also abstracted through technocratic policy arenas relying on legacies of (colonial) state projects.
What are the implications of these foundational logics in the reification of certain orientations of gender and development, particularly in policies as related to peace and justice? All databases in the sample centred and celebrated a state-centric approach and they all revealed a spatial logic of gender as being able to be measured through and where women are located and imagined to be. Such a promotion, as Tanya Li notes, obscures ‘how power works to constitute distinctive spaces and how, conversely, the arrangement of space generates the effect of power’ (Li, 2005: 386). In this case, the social and political use of space reflected in these databases mirrors longstanding neoliberal policy paradigms by development organizations promulgating formal economic marketplaces of individuals supported by state security. The ‘localness’ of these gendered indicators as located within particular institutional sites is not neutral, but rather, are assumed to be within supposedly bound and static nation states. Namely, each category (health, law and economics) puts forward an imagined subject embedded within a [national] state system. Such logics, and metrics, are continually being employed at the exact moment when scholars and activists alike are making compelling cases for further research as to how dynamic transnational and translocal encounters happen, and should be considered, beyond a dominant state actor, and nation state, frame (Canfield et al., 2021; Darian-Smith, 2013).
There is increasing recognition, both in policy and through social movements, that sites of collective action hold power and authority, in addition to formal institutions (Dehm, 2021). For example, in this current moment of crisis through the COVID-19 global pandemic, communities around the globe are increasingly relying on collective spaces to provide vital support and drive policy change as active participants towards health equity (Isasi et al., 2021). Through the rise of mutual aid movements, people are leading self-organized, lateral solidarity networks within and among communities to provide collective spaces for assistance for material needs (Chevée, 2022; Domínguez et al., 2020). When looking solely at the spaces imagined by indicators in the databases, such spaces as those created by mutual aid are rendered invisible, as are many other types of community-based and neighbourly solidarity relationships that shape critical tangible and intangible aspects of everyday life (Spade, 2020). Sites that are grounded in collectivity largely fall out of the measurement frames employed by mainstream development organisations, as collectivity itself is principally outside the individual/state central logics, and such liminal spaces cannot easily be captured or measured.
To be clear, our point is not simply a call to create new or additional indicators to improve measurement regimes. Simply adding increased numbers of indicators to depict that which does not fall along the dominant imaginary (such as capturing gendered community action, or LGBTIQ, non-binary, and gender non-conforming persons’ contributions or mutual aid movements) would fundamentally miss the point of what we are trying to argue. The solution is not aiming for the recreation or replacement of additional indicators, especially if they still rely on the same spatial logics that displace the role of power and that focus on gender as primarily located within institutional arrangements. Increasing data collection may only serve to perpetuate the same cycles of linearity, even if the indicators change (Fuentes and Cookson, 2019; Fejerskov, 2017). As Sondarjee (2020) explores, inclusive knowledge—potentially radical new knowledge—has previously been ‘translated’ through dominant neoliberal technocratic rationalities by development organisations such as the World Bank and others. Such translation of initiatives to increase inclusion has often seen their subsumption into continued technocratic practices, continuing instead to reify the dominant development status quo.
The point instead is to draw attention to the underlying logics used by these mainstream organizations and the bases of knowledge and action which the data refracted through these indicators might inform, as reflected by the indicators development agencies create and use for measurements. What are the implications of these logics in perpetuating imaginaries of women as wards of the state, or of the market, in conversations of gender and development? Are there are new forms or ways of relating to gendered data, or even to understanding gender, that may be lost with the very practice of technocratic knowledge reductionism? Lost are stories of relationships among everyday citizens, ways people relate to, and depend on, each other. In everyday examples, people learn from and rely on each other. Contrary to what mainstream development databases show, it is not always the state granting people access (to rights, to citizenship and to formal healthcare) but rather it is also through daily acts of solidarity and relationships among people that allows them to get through times of crisis and unrest.
Lost also, and importantly, are examples of current day violence that are deep-seated, historical, and multi-scalar. Presentations of violence as perpetrated primarily by individuals, rather than institutions, feeds an interpretation of violence that locates accountability at the individual level and often sidesteps discussions of historical, institutional and structural violence (see Dixon and Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2019; Eslava et al., 2017; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018). To measure land, for example, primarily as an economic resource through a technical interpretation of law, deeds and currency, for example, dulls the possible analysis of power relations and systems of oppression behind such models of ownership and control.
This article thus situates its contribution within calls for further scrutiny of both the micro-mechanisms, and macro-logics, used when capturing gender across these mainstream development agencies. It is not just that the indicators used in these databases leave out and exclude important elements of gender, but also that these measures promote specific institutional and spatial interpretations. Such interpretations are not neutral or ahistorical, but rather grounded in much larger histories of exclusion and domination in terms of knowledge production and how to ‘count’ or capture social categories (Collins, 2019; Mama, 1997; Okech, 2020; Smith, 2012). Further, they give context for, and better explain why, critical mainstream policies affecting women around the globe remain so firmly tied to framing gender in largely individual, state-driven and institutional-centric ways.
IV. Conclusion
Calls for actions grounded on existing sites of collectivity are already occurring in intertwined movements critically engaging with the harms of colonial and neoliberal legacies. For instance, activists and scholars have pointed to the radical emancipatory nature of environmental movements that link social and ecological justice, human rights and identity. With increasing awareness of both the capitalistic roots of the environmental crisis and the neoliberal co-optation of technocratic ‘solutions’, there has been real engagement towards recognizing democratic anti-capitalist struggles as true nodes of environmental change (Büscher and Fletcher, 2020; Fairhead et al., 2012).
Underlining these interlinked movements is the political and ontological questioning of often-invisible, dominant frames that both inform the dimensions of the problems and the limits of imaginaries of change. The grassroots women peacebuilders featured at the beginning of this article noted other ways of being, includ- ing spaces of talking, processing and thinking, as integral to stories of gender and development, pointing to the need for the field of WPS to centre relational concepts and contexts. These spaces do not depend on an individual household’s income, nor the rights granted by the state forming part of the ‘protection pillar’; rather they exist in the interstices, in the recognition of collective contribution and care.
Based on prominent international development databases, this article analysed the key measurement that are dominant within mainstream development agencies and NGOs. As part of the technocratic imperative, development databases are designed to compute, understand and grasp what is measured in terms of gender and development. Questions of gender, peace and security are structured within the larger field of development and peace, and a robust interrogation of the pervasive ‘protection pillar’ warrants an expansive scrutiny on how gender is measured. Through the analysis 1,298 indicators measuring gender and development across 15 different databases, we have argued that mainstream development indicators and by extension, the field of WPS, promote spatial understandings of a socially disembedded individual placed within a state-centric, institutional frame (e.g., the home the hospital and the workplace). What emerges is a vivid picture about women’s imagined placements—sites for their engagement—as well as women’s imagined relationships to work, to family and to the state. In turn, these imaginaries shape debates about where ‘progress’ in gender and development, including peacebuilding and health, can occur. As such, it is important to not skate over the significance that indicators and measurements have, not only for policy, but also for their everyday epistemic implications (i.e., what we can imagine it is possible to be and do). Indeed, tracing the continuities between historical colonial logics and neoliberal development logics within these measurements provides a basis to make explicit underlying rationalities, which linger and reside even within projects in the name of gendered justice, peace and security.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We give our sincere thanks to Meredith Forsyth, Joan C. Lopez and Mariana Prandini Assis for their thoughtful comments of this article. Thanks also to Leymah Gbowee, for her visionary leadership of the WPS program and her everyday activism on the ground. Finally, we thank the anonymous reviewers of this piece and the journal’s editors for their helpful and rigorous feedback.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.