Indigenous women, political rights and development decision-making in Ecuador: Spaces of engagement for gendered and ethnic citizens

Lead Research Organisation: University of Cambridge
Department Name: Geography

Abstract

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Description The research found that current development policy for poverty alleviation approaches social diversity in reduced and narrow ways, largely through the lens of gender, or race-ethnicity, or rural areas, or vulnerability. By working with indigenous women in two ethnic populations in Ecuador, the research found that although indigenous women might be rural, women, indigenous and poor, that they were often excluded from development programmes. Using women's experiences and insights into this exclusion, the research identified persistent frameworks about the relative utility of different kinds of people - and their diversity - that forged and justified patterns of exclusion. The research also documented how indigenous women draw upon their experience of intersectional exclusion to draw up new agendas and creative practices through which to change development thinking.

The findings from this research are integral to current analysis of the policy challenges and conceptual understandings of overlapping inequalities in the global development field.
Exploitation Route The research should inform development thinking and policy making to take social differences more seriously, and to think critically and self-reflexively on the limited attention so far given to the dilemmas of difference within development.
The findings are also proving useful to indigenous women and other subaltern women's groups in providing a framework through which to extend their critiques and efforts to reformulate development and public policy.
Sectors Government, Democracy and Justice,Other
 
Description They have been used extensively in publications - major monograph, journal articles, and in many conference papers and plenary lectures. The research also informed a consultancy undertaken with Oxfam America and GIZ on indigenous women, Afro-Ecuadorian women and development agendas, which occurred in 2012-14, and was published in Quito in 2014 and taken to the World Conference of Indigenous Peoples in New York, September 2014
First Year Of Impact 2008
Sector Government, Democracy and Justice,Other
Impact Types Societal