Crossbreeding Institutions, Breeding Struggle: Women's Empowerment, Neoliberal Governmentality, and State (Re)Formation in India

Globalization and Postcolonial States

“…Placing this state-sponsored program at the intersection of these spatially differentiated factors and examining it in transnational terms reveals how its goals and practices intersect with state agencies and policy making, with local and regional social movements, and with the global regime of neoliberal governmentality. This multilayered spatial optic thus also illustrates the extent to which national development planning practices and the state are always already translocally shaped (see Sharma 2006). The empowerment agenda articulated by both the state's policy statement on women's education and the Mahila Samakhya program owes a great deal to the cross-border influence of Paolo Freire's work on conscientization and praxisoriented education (see Batliwala 1997;Townsend, Porter, and Mawdsley 2004).…”

“…Nina Singh, a high-ranking civil servant, told Sharma, The inception of the program and the government's deviation from the "business-as-usual" model of development in favor of the language of empowerment is a reflection of its education-related agenda but goes beyond it. The state's sponsorship of empowerment strategies is an overdetermined result of the confluence of several translocal processes, among them national policy priorities, Indian women's movements for change, transnational shifts in development discourse and economic ideologies, and interventions by supranational regulatory bodies such as the World Bank and the IMF (Sharma 2006). Placing this state-sponsored program at the intersection of these spatially differentiated factors and examining it in transnational terms reveals how its goals and practices intersect with state agencies and policy making, with local and regional social movements, and with the global regime of neoliberal governmentality.…”

If only they knew better: strengthening knowledge systems for social development?

“…It is worth noting here, as I analyse in-depth elsewhere (Narayanaswamy, forthcoming), that women are frequently identified as a target group for knowledge-based initiatives designed to achieve improved social welfare outcomes where Southern women s NGOs in particular frequently act as interlocutors. This raises questions about the gendered nature of the knowledge divide (see Hafkin and Huyer (2013) and the historical association of femininity with non-profit activity (see Sharma, 2006) which, whilst important, is beyond the remit of the present analysis. What is important about this engagement with women for the purposes of this analysis is Nagar and Raju s identification that many Southern women s NGOs actively engage with social welfare objectives including a focus on education communication and dissemination of information ibid .…”

“…This is problematic not only because of concerns around the fragmenting of knowledge processes that results from information supply-led approaches. More worryingly, the emphasis on the individual effectively obfuscates critical attention away from questions around context in relation to inequality and power imbalances that shape not just access to available information, but knowledge systems in their entirety (Mukherjee-Reed, 2000), ultimately side-lining the state and structural explanations of inequality and instead privileging the agency of the individual (Radhakrishnan, 2007;Sharma, 2008).…”

Policy Discourses and Marginal Places: Histories of Environmental Democracy in India and Sweden

“…While the geographical distance from the center of power in India did less to change local gender relations, nominally it opened up space for education for women and for them to be identified as independent citizens. It brought with it a repository of development programs aimed at them that created new relations and scales at which women and men would relate [26,27].…”