Democratic citizenship or market based entitlements? : a gender perspective on social protection in South Asia

As livelihood insecurity rises and existing systems of social security are being eroded in South Asia, a number of social protection interventions have been proposed. Despite different frameworks, there appears to be convergence on the ground between contending pathways of social protection. Contemporary policies dealing with socio-economic/human insecurity and informalization of the labour market that propose trade-offs between citizenship-based and employment-based entitlements, either explicitly or implicitly, need to be critically examined and unpacked. citizenship-based, employment-based, community-based and market-based, linking to the broader discussion on commoditization/privatization of the social versus de-commoditization and a broader framework of democratic citizenship. Drawing on evidence from research, the paper explores, not only, the ways in which the design of interventions assume, incorporate or ignore gendered structures and gender ideologies, which impinge on the outcomes of these interventions, but also the ways in which women have articulated, fought for and gained better entitlements. It argues that both employment based and citizenship based entitlements are essential and these require the universalization of social protection and measures that ensure redistribution and recognition. The last section discusses some proposals along with suggestions for South Asian level regional interventions

Marital Violence and Women's Employment and Property Status: Evidence from North Indian Villages

Dominant development policy approaches recommend women's employment on the grounds that it facilitates their empowerment, which in turn is believed to be instrumental in enhancing women's well-being. However, empirical work on the relationship between women's employment status and their well-being as measured by freedom from marital violence yields an ambiguous picture. Motivated by this ambiguity, this paper draws on testimonies of men and women and data gathered from rural Uttar Pradesh, to examine the effect of women's employment and asset status as measured by their participation in paid work and their ownership of property, respectively, on spousal violence. Unlike the existing literature, we treat women's work status and violence as simultaneously determined and find that women's engagement in paid work and ownership of property, are associated with sharp reductions in marital violence.domestic violence, employment status, property ownership, India

Gender, poverty and social justice

Views on poverty are deeply rooted in cultural frameworks about the human condition shaped by histories. In the debate on modernity, perspec