Volume 24, number 3 (2003)
Articles
Global Movements, Global Opposition: Sexual Rights Claims and Christian Conservatism
Sexual minority movements worldwide have defined their collective identities in paradoxical ways, deploying more and less fixed conceptions of sexual identity, sometimes simultaneously, as they encounter Christian conservative attacks on their rights claims. Sexual minority groups alternately use fixed identities such as gay or lesbian, fluid identities such as queer, or reject any identity in favour of a claim for universal sexual autonomy. This article reviews how selected sexual minority movements, at the United Nations, in the Philippines, and in Argentina, have used paradoxical and contradictory identity-related strategies in their struggles for rights and recognition in the context of Christian conservative opposition.
Adaptive Co-Management: Lessons from Coastal Cambodia
This paper focuses on how community-based management is unfolding in coastal Cambodia through the facilitation of a donor-funded, Cambodian-led government research team. Coastal communities in Peam Krasaop Wildlife Sanctuary illustrate the strong potential for community-government partnerships. Several lessons are highlighted: community-based management requires support from the provincial and national level; facilitation between stakeholders is important; and experimentation is an essential component of management. Creative models of community-based management, emerging despite the absence of a legal framework, may be best described as systems of adaptive co-management combining the elements of trial and error, learning-by-doing, and the sharing of management responsibility.
Logiciels libres et développement de l’Afrique : repenser la problématique ?
This article presents a critical reading of the few studies available on the contribution of free software (FS) to African development. It then examines the relevance of a few initiatives devoted to promoting this software on the African continent. The central concept of this analysis is that the current discourse and action favouring FS in Africa remains inadequate to incorporate FS into development. To achieve this goal, the focus must shift to the specific aspects of FS: availability of source code and the economical and ethical alternative this code provides. Since the issue is appropriation of source code, the real problems for Africa are the establishment of the software industry designed to capitalize on the openness of this code, cohabitation with proprietary software (PS), and solving migration problems from PS to FS.
Building Capacity for Sustainable Development: The Canada-Brazil Bilateral Co-operation Projects with SENAI
The co-operation between Brazil and Canada in support of projects with the the Serviço Nacional de Aprendizagem Industrial (SENAI) [National Service for Industrial Apprenticeship] has been seen in both countries as a history of successes. The paper describes the Canadian supported projects developed and implemented at SENAI, and considers the many lessons learned from over 20 years of co-operation. Both the process of learning and the strategic application of the lessons learned have contributed to the success of the projects. It is hoped that they can also contribute to the development of new projects at SENAI, in Brazil, and to Canadian supported projects elsewhere.
How ‘Civil’ is Civil Society? Authoritarian State, Partisan Civil Society, and the Struggle for Democratic Development in Bangladesh
This paper disputes the widely held assumption that civil society is the site for democracy and development. By exploring the emerging case of Bangladesh, it calls into question the popular belief that civil society aims to protect the interests of ordinary citizens. While it recognizes the ability of civil society groups to create a political space necessary for bringing the poor out of poverty, it challenges the notion that civil society maintains its autonomy vis-à-vis the state and other political forces.
When Culture Trumps Ideology: Micro-Enterprise and the Empowerment of Women in Bangladesh
This paper offers a perspective of micro-enterprise as an instrument for facilitating the empowerment of women, as seen through the experiences of women in Bangladesh. It is usual to treat empowerment as an individual pursuit and, therefore, as a particularized endeavour that is of a short-term and potentially temporary nature. This, by implication, diminishes the importance of structural approaches to changes in society that have long-term and quasi-permanent consequences. The article distinguishes between the woman as a person and the social nature of her existence. Empowerment is situated in the context of two important parameters: (1) culture is seen as the significant environmental variable — as opposed to the conventional posture of ideology (for example, capitalism) as dominant; (2) the group and the constituent members are treated as subjects in the discourse on development — as opposed to being treated as objects. The resulting focus is on the woman as a member of a household and a chosen community that generate social income and social capital. The article uses first-person narratives as evidence of women’s ownership of their empowering experiences.
Micro-Credit, Empowerment, and Agency: Re-Evaluating the Discourse
The discussion around gender and development has come to focus on the “empowerment” of women, and has become quite central to development discourse. The empowerment of women also increasingly appears among the stated objectives of NGOs and other development agencies, to the extent that efforts to empower women have come to be an expected component of any credible development project or strategy. By critically assessing the discourse of empowerment as it pertains to the micro-credit program of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, this paper challenges the prevailing concept of empowerment and highlights the potential dangers and limitations that it entails for women by reducing them to objects — as opposed to agents — in the process of their own empowerment and by appropriating their struggles for liberation.
Reviews
Global Shaping and its Alternatives, Y. Atasoy and W. Carroll (eds.)
Toxic Exports: The Transfer of Hazardous Wastes from Rich to Poor Countries, Jennifer Clapp
Capitalist Development in the Twentieth Century, John Cornwall and Wendy Cornwall
Feeding the Market: South American Farmers, Trade and Globalization, Jon Hellin and Sophie Higman
Water Resources and Economic Development, Maria R. Saleth
Power and Wealth in Rural China: The Political Economy of Institutional Change, Susan H. Whiting