Women’s Resistance: An Alternative Perspective to Women’s Participation in Community-Driven Development
通过西非马里的民族志研究，发现女性在社区驱动发展项目中通过隐蔽抵抗而非公开参与来实现自我赋权，建议采用更全面的评估方法捕捉这种变化。
Community-Driven Development (CDD) programs compel communities to adopt egalitarian decision-making processes for the duration of the project. However, dominant groups use their power to orchestrate a public performance of social domination and subordinated groups combat social domination via subtle acts of resistance. Rather than conceptualizing social transformation from a holistic perspective that includes subtle acts of resistance and incremental forms of self-empowerment, CDD implementation and monitoring focusses on women’s public performance in community meetings, and this approach generally fails to produce social transformation. We conducted an ethnography of an unconditional direct transfer to a village in Western Mali. We used Bourdieu’s approach to investigate how rural Malian women resist domination and empower themselves in this unfettered CDD project. We observed the women strategically submit to patriarchal forms of domination during the public decision-making processes but resist male domination over their labour. Our results suggest that CDD can better achieve enduring forms of social change when it builds off local women’s self-directed forms of resistance. To better capture women’s resistance and self-empowerment, CDD should adopt a more holistic and open impact assessment approach, such as the Most Significant Change technique and Culturally Responsive Evaluation.