ISTR Fifth International Conference Cape Town, South Africa / July 7-10, 2002 Transforming Civil Society, Citizenship and Governance: The Third Sector in an Era of Global (Dis)Order

Rachel Joffily Abath, Ph.D. email
Timothy D. Ireland, Ph.D. email

In the 1990s the notions of "transformation" and "empowerment" were increasingly identified with the process of social development. According to Esteval "development is growth plus change; change in turn is social and cultural and it is both quantitative and qualitative" (Esteval, quoted by Oakley et al.: 1998). In this respect, empowerment is central to women's struggle to attain their full potential for economic, political and social development (United Nations, 1995) and, hence, to achieve that true h uman development which takes as its base gender equity. The space in which women seek to plan and develop their struggle is known as the "women's movement" and is occupied by a multiplicity of heterogeneous groups all aimed at advancing the position of wo men in society and, in so doing, at transforming the gendered nature of social relations.

The Women's Forum, in the north-eastern state of Paraiba, is made up of 24 groups characterised as politically and socially heterogeneous with regard to: (i) type of organisation: organisations centred on women's issues (NGOs, associations) or part of a b roader civil society, state or church organisation (women's collective); (ii) scope: local, regional, national or international dimension of their activities; (iii) users: urban or rural women; middle or working class with different levels of schooling; ( iv) source of financial support: international agencies, Northern NGOs, state, membership, self-financed; (v) activities developed: courses, seminars, mobilisation on women's issues, counselling, workshops, meetings, visits, elaboration of projects to obt ain financial resources, theological studies, research, courses on income production and so on.

In this paper we propose to discuss and analyse the process of women's empowerment identified in these groups with regard to the principal characteristics of and relationships between the following categories: activists, users, interests, activities, netw orking and evaluation with a view to understanding a) the nature of the groups' internal organisation; b) their external relationships and c) the contribution of these diverse elements, in different levels, to the purported end of women's empowerment. We argue that the groups tend to give priority to those initiatives which articulate their commitments to sponsors' interests. Despite possessing a common goal, the distribution of power within the groups and their internal organisation reflect divergent vie ws of the democratic path to gender equity.

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