Women’s Empowerment, Impact Assessment of Development Programs, and
Forms of Knowledge:
New Horizons for Cross Disciplinary and Participative Research Methods

A knowledge exchange organized by
Emory University’s Center for the Study of Public Scholarship
and CARE USA
and sponsored by Emory’s Office of International Affairs

July 14-15, 2006

This invitation-only event will take place at Emory University and bring together a dozen scholars and researchers from five continents and multiple disciplines; Emory professors interested in questions of methods, development, or gender; select graduate students; and staff from CARE. 

A major goal of the two days is pragmatic and practical:  CARE is two years into a global research project to rigorously assess its impacts on women’s empowerment.  Working with diverse partners – academic, NGO, research institutes, and independent consultants – CARE has amassed research experience in more than 20 sites on four continents and also pursued novel global methods that help triangulate on field research.  The workshop, therefore, will offer scholars a unique entrée and access to this wealth of methodological and empirical material, opportunities for mutual learning, and a chance to engage in in-depth conversations that bridge academic and professional research approaches, levels of rigor and proof, and ideas about what constitutes knowledge.  More broadly, the exchange will be firmly situated within the larger and longer term dialogue about empowerment and issues of gender equity in international development, a dialogue that has deepened and gained momentum in the past five years.  We hope that the two days will forge new insights about effective methods for assessing impacts on empowerment and foster new interdisciplinary links among scholars.  And finally, we hope that the event will lead to new and longer term research partnerships between CARE USA and participants.

The structure and approach will be active, hands-on, and dialogic.  CARE case material – actual empowerment research challenges that the organization has faced or will face soon – will be workshopped in the true sense of that word.  Participants will be asked to think and search outside their disciplinary confines, discuss and debate disciplinary conventions, and then pushed to find creative new methodological spaces at the interfaces of disciplines and professions, between academia and development practitioners.  Importantly, the workshop will also be a chance to challenge CARE and its assumptions, to consider wider constraints in the organizational and institutional field of development, and to perhaps imagine what new and different development policy spaces might look like. 

BACKGROUND

In the past five years, “women’s empowerment” has captured the policy imaginations of a wide range of development organizations, symbolized best by the publication in 2005 of The World Bank’s Measuring Empowerment: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives. Much valuable conceptual and strategic work has been done during this time, including progress on how to define and understand women’s empowerment, operationalize it at national levels, and measure whether or not interventions, strategies, approaches, or policies lead to it.  There are a number of parallels in the emergence of women’s empowerment as an object of development and earlier gender trends such as Women in Development (WID) and Gender and Development (GAD).  These parallels raise intriguing questions about the nature of policies aimed to improve women’s social positions, how policies change or resist change, and the forms of knowledge – and the research methods that generate them – that convince decision-makers to alter strategies and definitions of success.  Indeed, many gender specialists and activists would, today, argue that while knowledge of and agreement over the kinds of changes needed to improve gender equity in the developing world have grown over the past twenty years, international commitments to promote them have lagged considerably.  There is an increasing call by donors, NGOs, and researchers for a new narrative, one that bridges lived realities of women and men and decision makers at all levels and offers new strategies and approaches for addressing gender inequities.

This global policy environment sets the context for the Knowledge Exchange.  At the broadest level, the exchange will focus on accountability of development decision-makers to poor and marginalized women, on ways to increase the power of women to both define success and drive development agendas in their “lived realities”, and on processes through which women are agents, rather than objects, of research intended to judge effectiveness of women’s empowerment efforts.  More specifically, however, the exchange centers on CARE’s multi-year commitment to measure the impact of its programs on women’s empowerment.  This will provide a pragmatic focus for this two-day event, as CARE seeks external new methodological insights that it can deploy immediately in its ongoing research.  The exchange will be framed by three sets of questions:

1. Are disconnects between gender policies and lived realities of women due, at least in part, to some of the very research approaches and methods that high-level decision makers find persuasive and which exclude women?  Is it, on the other hand, simply that well-known social science methods have not been rigorously enough applied to development?
2. What are the real possibilities of impact research approaches and methods that both a) enhance the power of poor and marginalized women themselves to design research, gather data, and evaluate the impacts of programs designed to empower them, and b) produce the kinds of proof that policy and decision makers find persuasive?   Can what many would consider to be radically different forms of knowledge – the knowledge of the policy maker and the knowledge of poor women – be bridged?  Here we will be interested in probing the potentials and pitfalls of what O’Leary (2004) terms “action research” which seeks to provoke change in a system and/or emancipate actors through the research process, and “critical/radical ethnography” that seeks to expose and change a dominant system.   What other research methods/approaches, such as those from the humanities or psychology, might break new ground?
3. Is it truly possible that impact research approaches and methods themselves can challenge gendered power inequalities within the development industry?  Can poor women themselves, researchers, academics, and professionals use the process of impact evaluation as a lever towards altering how development itself is organized, to altering business as usual?  Or is, on the other hand, research into development impacts – its forms, norms, and uses – overdetermined by its own institutional environment?

At the heart of this exchange will be a goal of building – not burning – bridges between normal social science research methods and those that many scholars and practitioners consider more participatory and empowering for women themselves.