A Igualdade de Gênero na agenda política do Banco Mundial: pressupostos, objetivos, contradições e limites (1995 – 2012)

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes World Bank documentation, namely its World Development Reports (WDR’s) and sectoral publications, between 1979 and 2012, in order to understand how the institution handled the categories "woman" and "gender" in their broader approaches to development. The research emphasizes the conflicts surrounding strategies for women and/or gender relations and the interactions established between the Bank and women's organizations. The Bank's approaches to the subject, as documentary analysis has shown, have varied amid the tensions of contemporary capitalism and become limited in the face of economic crises and the intensification of class conflict in the world. In two moments (first at the 1970s and later in 1990s), the World Bank had to respond to growing social controversy about its performance in order to secure its position as a laboratory of capitalist development theories and practices. During this process, feminism became a broad-based movement and women's claims reached the status of a fundamental socio-economic issue. Amidst the World Bank's efforts to establish a framework for interpreting poverty and ways to diminish it, segments of feminism confronted international bureaucracies aiming the institutionalization of women's demands on the global development agenda. The first part of this research analyzes the approximation between the neoliberal agenda and feminist demands of specific sections, through the examination of class differences among working women, their dispersion in-between different political arenas and the co-optation and de-politicization of women-related matters. The following is a discussion about how feminist ideas were manipulate by financial agencies that consolidated public policies for women through dominant economic science’s assumptions. Next, is an analysis of how this process occurred in the World Bank, both in its internal functioning and structure, but mainly in the recommendations and publications on the subject since the 1970s. The World Development Report of 2012, the only one that addresses the theme "gender equality and development" was the last report analyzed. It was possible to conclude that it has instrumentalised women in two ways: (i) through the appropriation and resignification of certain feminist demands; (ii) as an alibi for low capitalist growth, at the claim of its low "productivity" throughout the process of capital accumulation.