In How Development Projects Persist Erin Beck examines microfinance NGOs working in Guatemala and problematizes the accepted wisdom of how NGOs function. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, she shows how development models and plans become entangled in the relationships among local actors in ways that alter what they are, how they are valued, and the conditions of their persistence. Beck focuses on two NGOs that use drastically different methods in working with poor rural women in Guatemala. She highlights how each program's beneficiaries—diverse groups of savvy women—exercise their agency by creatively appropriating, resisting, and reinterpreting the lessons of the NGOs to match their personal needs. Beck uses this dynamic—in which the goals of the developers and women do not often overlap—to theorize development projects as social interactions in which policymakers, workers, and beneficiaries critically shape what happens on the ground. This book displaces the notion that development projects are top-down northern interventions into a passive global south by offering a provocative account of how local conditions, ongoing interactions, and even fundamental tensions inherent in development work allow such projects to persist, but in new and unexpected ways.
In How Development Projects Persist Erin Beck examines microfinance NGOs working in Guatemala and problematizes the accepted wisdom of how NGOs function. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, she shows how development models and plans become entangled in the relationships among local actors in ways that alter what they are, how they are valued, and the conditions of their persistence. Beck focuses on two NGOs that use drastically different methods in working with poor rural women in Guatemala. She highlights how each program's beneficiaries—diverse groups of savvy women—exercise their agency by creatively appropriating, resisting, and reinterpreting the lessons of the NGOs to match their personal needs. Beck uses this dynamic—in which the goals of the developers and women do not often overlap—to theorize development projects as social interactions in which policymakers, workers, and beneficiaries critically shape what happens on the ground. This book displaces the notion that development projects are top-down northern interventions into a passive global south by offering a provocative account of how local conditions, ongoing interactions, and even fundamental tensions inherent in development work allow such projects to persist, but in new and unexpected ways.
Описание: Women in Social Change: Visions, Struggles and Persisting Concerns captures the evolution of key debates on women’s rights in independent India. Authored by eminent scholars and emerging experts of their time, the articles encapsulate developments which have given the women’s rights movement and women’s studies imaginative new models. They also indicate fundamental concerns that have endured over decades. The articles have been grouped into categories that cover diverse themes such as the conceptualization of women’s rights and laws pertaining to the same, changing notions of women as workers, women’s political participation and cultural representation, and, finally, the impediments, roadblocks and violence experienced by women. The editor’s introductions provide critical historical context for the juridico-political paradoxes and internal contradictions that confront the women’s rights movement today. The sectional introductions place each article in a larger context, pointing out the importance of their approach, methodology and salient arguments.
The series ‘Social Change in Contemporary India’ brings together key texts published in the prestigious journal Social Change, from 1971 till present times. These writings, most of which are considered canonical, address important issues in health, education, poverty and agriculture, with special focus on the disadvantaged groups. The essays will help readers identify key points in the history of policymaking in India and major discourses and debates and their impact.
Описание: This book illustrates the importance of focusing on the choices, constraints, and agency of women in science to understand which women, under what conditions, with what tools, successfully manage to navigate science or leave the discipline. The chapters in this volume apply the metaphor of the road to a variety of fields and moments that are characterized as exits, pathways, and potholes, which refocuses our attention on the challenges posed by and the conditions of scientific careers.
