Conference Program

Prevailing development approaches to women’s empowerment have been widely criticized by scholars and practitioners for failing to pursue transformative change that addresses the root causes of gender inequality. Moreover, scholars have suggested that women’s organisations from diverse global regions have undergone a process of ‘NGOisation,’ transforming them from overt political actors to donor-reliant development NGOs. In Southwest Asia and North Africa, restrictive political environments have also had the effect of orienting women’s movements toward the development sphere. This research adopts Amman, Jordan as a case study that explores how women’s NGOs navigate the donor-driven development environment considering their own situated agendas for women’s rights and empowerment. Drawing on three months of fieldwork, the study is based on 14 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with practitioners from Amman-based women’s NGOs. It suggests that women’s NGOs exceed the prevailing neoliberal approaches to empowerment, constructing their own distinct perspectives from historically and politically embedded positions. These positions in turn shape how women’s NGOs engage with international development donors. From their situated positions, women’s NGOs can be seen to rework the terms of engagement with the development system through their selective engagement with development donors and reconceptualization of development projects in ways that resonate locally, as well as efforts to sustain their cause beyond the system of donor dependence. This study aims to contribute to debates in development studies on women’s empowerment by demonstrating that women’s NGOs are not simply positioned between ‘global’ and ‘local’ paradigms but are actively engaged in producing their own agendas and interpretations. In doing so, it offers insights into forms of global solidarity that may be practiced from within systems that sustain more restrictive views of development.

Gender and disaster scholarship and broader disaster risk reduction policy frameworks (e.g. Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015-2030) have largely approached vulnerability through gendered binaries that privilege women as the primary subjects of disaster risk, while rendering sexual and gender minorities largely invisible. While emerging gender and disaster scholarship documents unequal disaster experiences of sexual and gender minorities, it remains heavily grounded in Western-centric understanding of gender minorities, emphasizing individual sexual desires and sexual orientation as the core axis of their marginalization. Such framing inadequately conceptualize gender-diverse formations in many non-Western contexts, where gender identity is not primarily understood through sexuality but through socio-cultural roles, ritual functions, and kinship structures. In South Asia, Transgender persons, locally known as, Khawaj Sira and Hijra, as a gender minority community, cannot be meaningfully understood through the sole lens of sexual orientation. Their gender identity is historically constituted through distinct social-cultural roles, prestigious social status, and kinship system (e.g. guru-chela relations) though altered and criminalized during British colonial rule in South during 1857-1947 through discriminatory laws such as Criminal Tribes Act (1871), and Indian Penal Code (1860), and strict control and surveillance on their behavior and practices assumed contrary to the European codes of morality. I argue that coloniality of power and legacies continue to reproduce through postcolonial state institutions, laws, social structure, and DRR policies and practices that shape the post-disaster experiences of transgender persons. By integrating critical feminist (postcolonialism) and queer (queer intersectionality) theories, this research explores how colonial legacies continue to shape the contemporary DRR policies, and practices, and how these legacies were reflected in the post-disaster experiences of transgender persons in the face of 2022 floods in Pakistan.

Social entrepreneurship has gained increasing prominence as a sustainable development approach that offers an alternative to mainstream development programs, which are often constrained by limited and inconsistent donor funding. As a result, social entrepreneurship education and training is increasingly being adopted by grassroots organizations across the Global South. This study examines the role of social entrepreneurship in empowering women heads of families in Indonesia, a population that remains legally unrecognized and socially marginalized.

The research was conducted in collaboration with PEKKA (Female-Headed Family Empowerment), a national grassroots organization that promotes the economic, social, political, and legal empowerment of women-headed families. This study draws on qualitative data from 16 semi-structured interviews with PEKKA participants across three locations, Jakarta, Cianjur, and West Lombok. It is embedded in the principles of Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) and adopts a grounded theory approach to explore the challenges and opportunities faced by women social entrepreneurs. Findings highlight the key role of collective action in shaping social enterprise activity, with a shared identity among PEKKA members fostering solidarity, confidence, mutual support, and eventually, political change.

Participation in member-based saving and borrowing cooperatives strengthens solidarity. At the same time, participants highlighted the vulnerability of their enterprises to shifting government policies that directly influence access to funding, resources, and institutional support. This study demonstrates how organizations such as PEKKA are embedded in broader movement-building efforts, creating pathways within which the rights and economic empowerment of women heads of families can be legitimized. This research highlights both the transformative potential and structural limitations of grassroots-led economic initiatives.

By situating social entrepreneurship within collective and political processes, this research contributes to debates on gender, development, and political economy.

Women in politics and income inequality have become two prominent issues in developing regions and remain a topic of ongoing debate. To achieve sustained economic transformation, economies across Sub-Saharan Africa urgently need to adapt to sustainable development practices to reduce the risk of experiencing persistently weak economic outlooks. However, the gap in the existing literature is the relationship between women in politics, income inequality, and the well-being of people, which has not received sufficient attention thus far. To fill this gap, this study aims to assess how income inequality and women in politics affect the social and economic well-being of Sub-Saharan African countries. This study adopts a panel dataset from 2000 to 2020 in a panel regression model and performs a fixed-effects analysis of the relationship among these factors. Interestingly, we show no significant association between women in politics and human development. In contrast, we confirm a positive and significant relationship between women in politics and gross national savings as well as renewable energy supply. Moreover, we confirm the key role of income and poverty levels in triggering social and economic well-being, as it shows a significant and negative relationship in all of our models. These original findings have several practical implications for policymakers and contribute to the current debate on the role of women in politics and income inequality across Sub-Saharan African countries.