Future perspectives of rural women's projects - intervention, interaction or empowerment?

Summery and introduction of the paper: Women's projects in the classical interventionist sense do not have any future, I would say. Not because they might be "accused" of concentrating in a feminist way only on women and thereby not bringing about the desired "integration in development", but because projects are concentrating on a much too narrow section of the economic and social reality. I think what is at stake is gender policy at different levels on which we should reflect here, and engendering development policy and co-operation in general. The problem with the so called "integrationist" or "women in development" approach is that it pretends to make equally accessible all activities and services for women, but then, development co-operation does not pay adequate attention to their world, their everyday situation and characteristics of women's economy. In the end, marginalized women's project or components are being implemented as interventions from outside. With regard to more recent so-called "gender approach", there is the risk that a gender specific analysis and procedures are postulated, but then the old agenda applies. The so-called participatory approaches do not take into account concepts of agency and interface, and do not pay attention to questions of legitimacy or gender structures of society and institutions. Gendered lifeworlds, women's economy and spaces therefore should be in the centre of development, to be analysed here by an interactionist interface approach (subsistence production / market, population / extension etc.). On the other hand, integration, and its different dimensions (co-operation, transfer, social security) of women's world into market, economy and politics become more and more important, in order to come to grips with unintended consequences of isolated projects. Engendering all policy fields including sector policies and structural adjustment programmes will be necessary, a task yet far from being achieved. The question of social organisation, including those of access to resource and development, has to be negotiated as playing a decisive role, with group approaches sometimes having been asked for in interventionist approaches, and sometimes not. What is important is access and entitlement beyond the houshold level, through relations and networks, and it is to be feared that within decentralisation and democratisation processes women will suffer backlash in this respect. One important field would be natural resource management. Another important dimension of integration of women's economy and spaces in society and overall policy is social security, which is constructed in a very different way for men and women, e.g. in credit projects not giving consumption credit. This issue, as well as sustainable livelihoods in general, has to be addressed on the intermediate level of organisation and policy. This approach would mean institutionalisation of gender policy in all development policies.