Conference Agenda

Recent years have seen an increased focus on women’s empowerment in the agricultural sector, as well as interest in improving the measurement of women’s empowerment (Alkire et al., 2013; Diiro et al., 2018; Galiè et al., 2018). There has been a considerable focus on indicator development (Galiè et al., 2018; Narayanan et al., 2019; O’Hara & Clement, 2018), as well as the measurement properties of newly developed instruments (Alkire & Foster, 2011; Miedema et al., 2018; Yount et al., 2019), but considerably less focus on reporting the results of methods used to ensure that respondents understand the questions. According to Willis and Miller (2011), discrepancies between how researchers ask questions and how respondents interpret them may occur at any pointas a respondent interprets a question, recalls the information requested, or responds to a question. Cognitive interviewing is a qualitative approach for identifying sources of error in how respondents respond to survey items, specifically by examining four specific cognitive processes: comprehension, retrieval, judgment, and response (Willis, 2004).

In this study, we applied cognitive interviewing to nine survey modules that were being developed for the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index for Market Inclusion (pro-WEAI+MI) in Benin and Malawi. The nine modules tested were: time-use agency; freedom of movement; autonomy in decision-making; entrepreneurial mindset; experiences with sexual harassment when traveling; experiences with sexual harassment in the working environment; access to reliable sanitation; agency over menstrual hygiene management; and entrepreneurship and business management. We interviewed 51 respondents (22 men and 29 women) in Malawi and 74 respondents (29 men and 45 women) in Benin. We compared these findings for women and men, across countries, and language groups within countries. We found comprehension errors in all nine modules. Retrieval errors emerged in time-use agency and freedom of movement. Response errors were found in entrepreneurial mindset and the experiences with sexual harassment when traveling. The freedom of movement and experiences with sexual harassment when traveling modules had judgment errors. Despite the errors we identified, most of the proposed pro-WEAI+MI questions were well understood, and respondents felt comfortable answering them. The errors informed revisions to the survey items, including: rephrasing questions, combining questions, revising response options, and eliminating questions. More broadly, the findings from cognitive testing also offer insights into how to best design modules used for monitoring progress toward gender equality in agricultural value chains and development efforts overall.

In this paper, we explore the importance of feminist and popular movements during the cracks in institutional politics in Chile from 2019 to 2022. This was a period marked by massive social mobilisations at the end of 2019, which resulted in a constitutional process from 2020 to 2022 and the election of a new leftist government in 2021. This opened institutional spaces for feminist and popular movements to enter, dispute and propose new ways of understanding care in Chile. This paper focuses on the perspectives of organisations working with direct and environmental. By examining the care politics of five organisations we visualise how their understandings of care can be understood as a trialectic (with-against-and-beyond) of relating to the state (Angel and Loftus, 2017). We analyse the bridges among the different understandings of care, in terms of the distribution, conditions and recognition of this labour, and their positions regarding the state's role in the social organisation of care. We then delve into how these organisations’ various positions on care guide their actions in relation to state institutions. Firstly, caregivers’ organisations during this period had very active policy agendas at both central and local levels. Some found resonance in the “Caring State” agenda of the new government and have directly pushed care policies in coordination with the central government. Others based their work more directly in local care policies. Their experiences show the possibility of generating community care networks with municipal support and recognition of their labour as caregivers and activists. By doing so, they advocate against the centralisation of care policy and reconfigure the apparatus of the state at the local level. Both approaches provide key tools to understand how they engage with the state, while also pushing against and transforming the logics of state institutions. Secondly, the paper explores expressions of care inside ecofeminist organisations, which practice the production of the commons as an expression of care. These organisations integrate collective care practices, generate spaces for community deliberation and integrate nature as an agent in the social organisation of care. Their experiences reveal the need to think about the social organisation of care beyond the framework of state institutions. This range of care politics grounds the investigation’s proposal for understanding care politics in Chile as being in a trialectic relation with, against, and beyond the state.

Since at least 2012 South Africa (SA) has explicitly implemented a fiscal consolidation approach to budgeting - to reduce debt - despite the global evidence that this has significant implications for the economy and households. The country is projected to achieve a primary budget surplus in 2023/24 (earlier than projected).

There have been real per capita declines in expenditure on health, education, and other sectors critical to the basic survival of the majority who rely on public services. Evidence post the global financial crisis shows that austerity policies have dismantled the mechanisms that “reduce inequality and enable equitable growth” (Oxfam, 2013). When people needed the welfare and social protection systems the most, they were crumbling, as a result of budget reductions (Gomes, 2015).

The failure to systematically change the economy (and society more broadly) in SA, as a result of orthodoxy, has perpetuated high levels of unemployment, poverty, and inequality that are intersectional. Government’s focus has been more on achieving stability than addressing the deep inequities and projected distress of households - a continuation of Apartheid policies. The policies have also failed to reduce debt. Despite COVID-19 shocks and global lessons, SA has not changed trajectory.

In 2022, President Cyril Ramaphosa has highlighted the gendered nature of poverty in SA, stating that “African women are the face of poverty”. Notably, after Australia, SA was one of the few nations to consider Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB) worldwide. SA had two GRB initiatives in the 1990s – one involving civil society and parliamentarians, and another within the national government and led by the Finance Ministry. GRB has re-entered (more strongly) into the policy domain with government seeking to advance a Gender-Responsive Planning, Budgeting, Monitoring, Evaluation & Auditing Framework and Country Gender Indicator Framework (GRPBMEAF). In the 2022 Budget, the Treasury announced that they will begin implementing GRB in the 2023 Medium Term Budget Policy Statement. There are at least three critical concerns with the current approach: the extent to which this framework: 1.will really challenge socioeconomic power (versus gender mainstreaming) 2. can be implemented in the context of austerity and, 3. will consider the revenue side.

This paper assesses the impact of austerity on households through a feminist economic lens. The assessment applies an intersectional lens that takes into account class, gender, geographic, and racial inequalities which reproduce power inequalities within society. It proposes ways in which GRB should be considered in the current context.

A full understanding of economic deprivation requires attention to money income, the value of unpaid household services, and leisure. These concepts can be defined either in terms of subjective utility or measurable expenditures and time-use, and much depends on how they are theorized. Most analyses of time and income poverty focus on possible deficits resulting from inadequate time for unpaid household services after specifying a minimum requirement for leisure time. However, replacement cost valuation of unpaid household services can have the opposite effect, lifting some families out of poverty. This paper provides methodological approaches and estimates of thresholds, substitutability and minima for unpaid work, leisure and monetary income to construct appropriate time and income poverty measures. The application of the bivariate relative poverty line, which takes into account the joint distribution of leisure and extended income uncovers intersectional differences in bidimensional poverty. Using the 2019 U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics shows that fewer households are considered bidimensionally poor, highlighting the importance of considering household unpaid work in poverty measures. The implications of such efforts extend beyond issues of poverty to encompass definitions of a living wage and measures of overall inequality in living standards in the U.S.