Following the formal announcement of the Sustainable Development Goals, Naila Kabeer reflects on lessons from the Millennium Development Goals through a feminist lens, which she argues were weakened by their very narrow interpretation of women’s empowerment. She writes that much more is needed to dismantle the more resilient structures of inequality, and while the SDGs offer some grounds for cautious optimism, there is a continued lack of emphasis on rights

Kabeer, Naila

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2015-10-5Gender equality, the MDGs and the SDGs: Achievements,lessons and concernsblogs.lse.ac.uk /southasia/2015/10/05/gender-equality-the-mdgs-and-the-sdgs-achievements-lessons-and-concerns/Following the formal announcement of the Sustainable Development Goals, Naila Kabeer reflects onlessons from the Millennium Development Goals through a feminist lens, which she argues wereweakened by their very narrow interpretation of women’s empowerment. She writes that much moreis needed to dismantle the more resilient structures of inequality, and while the SDGs offer somegrounds for cautious optimism, there is a continued lack of emphasis on rights.For feminists in general, the MDGs came as a disappointment.  After the enormous progress madeon women’s rights during the major conferences of the 1990s, particularly the InternationalConference on Population and Development in 1994 and the Beijing Conference on Women in 1995, and after thestirring declaration of the Millennium Declaration that men and women have the right to live their lives and raise theirchildren in dignity, free from hunger and free from fear, the MDGs were an anti-climax, offering a very narrowdefinition of human capabilities as its vision and no reference to human rights at all – for men, women or children. Nevertheless, many feminists opted to take a pragmatic approach – ‘we have to work with what we’ve got’ – and getinvolved with the gender politics of the MDGs.  There was at one major advantage to this strategy which was that itbrought feminist issues into the mainstream of development. This was an agenda to which the world’s heads ofstates had signed up, rather than the heads of sector-specific or women’s ministries, not always the most influentialin government.To a certain extent, their pragmatism was justified.  As Sanjay Reddy and Ingrid Kvangraven point out, the adoptionof a common development agenda has demonstrated the ability to co-ordinate and mobilise internationaldevelopment efforts to an extent hitherto unknown. Thanks to a major global monitoring effort, we now have a farbetter knowledge base on how different countries have fared on selected aspects of poverty and wellbeing thanwould have been the case in the absence of the MDGs.In terms of what the MDGs actually achieved, the picture is highly uneven.  While the overarching goal of halvingworld poverty may have been achieved, it is largely thanks to the massive poverty reductions reported by India andChina, two of the countries that were not particularly tied to the MDG agenda. For many countries, the MDGscontinued to be perceived as a donor agenda and it is in the most aid-dependent countries that they probably hadthe greatest impact.From a gender equality perspective, there are a number of lessons we can take away from the MDG experience. First of all, MDG 3 is a particularly graphic example of the problem of the mismatch between goals, targets andindicators discussed by Reddy and Kvangraven.  MDG 3 commits to gender equality and women’s empowerment;the intermediate target is elimination of gender disparity at all levels of education; and the indicators to measureprogress are reduction of the gender gap in education, increasing women’s share in non-agricultural wageemployment and increasing the percentage of women in parliaments.  The assumption is that progress on educationwill contribute to progress on these other measures.  In fact, progress on these other measures has been slow.  UNWomen has estimated that, at the present pace of change, it will take 50 years before we achieve parity inparliament and 80 years to achieve equality in the economy.What is clear is that valuable as education is as a dimension of women’s empowerment, much more is needed todismantle the more resilient structures of inequality in the market place and the political sphere.  The fact thatcountries with extremely repressive patriarchal regimes have achieved the target on education tells us that it ispossible to educate women without weakening these structures.  Similarly important lessons about the systemic1/2nature of certain forms of inequality can be drawn from the very slow progress on maternal mortality (MDG 5),dubbed the ‘hardest to reach’ of the MDGs.  Not only is 99% of maternal mortality concentrated in low incomecountries, it is also concentrated among their poorest population, women at the intersection of class, gender, race,ethnic and geographical inequality.Along with the broader challenge of addressing the structural causes of gender inequality, the other key lesson totake away is that technocrats can only go so far when the problems to be tackled are symptoms of deeplyentrenched, often hidden structures of power. We need to pay more attention to the substance of the changes wewant to see, not just their form, to the quality of the solutions we achieve, not just their quantity, and we need to paymore attention to the process by which we achieve our goals, to questions of participation, inclusion andaccountability, because this is how we can achieve substance, quality and structural transformation.Looking forward to the SDGs, there are grounds for cautious optimism.  In contrast to the deafening silence whichsurrounded the drawing up of the MDGs, and the conspicuous absence of civil society players, the consultationsaround the post-MDG agenda can be described as satisfyingly noisy. There has been a commendable effort on thepart of the UN Secretary General to create multiple channels through which various different constituencies canparticipate while civil society actors have also played a pro-active role in getting their voices heard.   Incomeinequality is a stand-alone goal along with recognition of the various other forms that inequality can take.  The SDGsare not confined to the ‘developing world’ alone, an acknowledgement that they touch on problems that are relevantin  rich as well as poor countries as well as the  fact that the affluent countries that bear a disproportionateresponsibility for destroying the environment must also bear a disproportionate responsibility for its renewal.For feminists, the SDG agenda has been described as a bitter-sweet victory.   It incorporates the two-track strategythat feminists fought hard for: a stand-alone goal on gender equality, women’s empowerment and women’s rights(under threat by those who wanted it subsumed under ‘social inequalities’ more generally), and integration of genderequality concerns in other key goals.   But it is a watered-down version of feminist demands since the rightsperspective is largely missing. What the goal does incorporate are some of the key issues that feminists have soughtrecognition for: the unfair gender division of unpaid productive and reproductive activity that curtails women’s abilityto participation in the public sphere of market and politics; violence against women and girls, the issue that appearsto have the support of feminist organisations across the world; and reproductive and sexual health and reproductiverights. The odd phrasing of the third issue reflects the fact that yet again, we have failed to get sufficiently stronginternational support for sexual rights, thus failing all those who are oppressed by repressive forms of sexuality – notonly the LGBTI community but also many heterosexual men and women. The other bitter aspect of the SDGs is theunwavering commitment to economic growth and the private sector to generate the resources necessary to translatethese goals into concrete outcomes, rather than seeking redistribution of gross global and national inequalities inwealth and income. This makes a mockery of the commitment to the reduction of inequality and means that theagenda has been largely left to the vagaries of market place and the whims of unaccountable global corporations.Cover image credit: flickr/Asian Development Bank CC BY-NC 2.0Note:  This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the South Asia @ LSE blog, nor of theLondon School of Economics. Please read ourcomments policy before posting.About the AuthorNaila Kabeer is Professor of Gender and Development at the Gender Institute. Her researchinterests include gender, poverty, social exclusion, labour markets and livelihoods, social protectionand citizenship and much of her research is focused on South and South East Asia. Copyright © 2016 London School of Economics2/2

Gender equality, the MDGs and the SDGs: achievements, lessons and concerns

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