Self help or social transformation: The role of women in local governance in Kerala (India) and South Africa

The research project studies the conditions for and effects of women's economic and political participation in Kerala, India and South Africa. In both places, women enjoy supportive policy environments, yet patriarchal gender norms continue to limit women's agency. Drawing on interviews of two communities in Kerala and two communities in South Africa, we show that despite the conducive policy context, women face various challenges in practicing their agency and citizenship. The women we study in Kerala are organised through the Kudumbashree Mission. This is a state-wide anti-poverty programme that organises poor women into neighbourhood groups with the twin aim of economic and political empowerment. Through Kudumbashree, Kerala State has made poor women the main agents of its poverty eradication programme, as the neighbourhood groups are federated upwards into Area and Community Development Societies directly linked to the panchayat (local government) where it contributes to the planning process and often serves as nodal agency for the implementation of various state programmes. Through the analysis of the Kudumbashree local groups in slum upgrading programmes, we find that women utilises these invited spaces to exercise leadership and active participation in local governance systems. However, we also find that women leaders' authority is based on a different set of perceived moral grounds than men's. Both men and women's leadership authority build on earlier their former participation in political parties, and in political campaign. Women are in addition met with moral sanctions on what a good woman should be, with gossips around their private lives and sexual morals. In the two cases in South Africa, we study women who cooperate in economic income generation through cooperatives both in poor rural areas and poor urban townships. South Africa has instituted a Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment Policy, where one of its pillar is an encouragement for poor people to start up local cooperatives. They get initial funding for this, but our research show that there is little or no support structures connected to this programmes locally. The cooperatives therefore fails to act as an organising structure for the women in these areas. However, although many of the cooperatives fail, many of the cooperatives continue even with little income generation. Having access to some means of production through belonging to the cooperative, ensure these women a situation of risk reduction and improved security. Access to production facilities and land made available for food production are also perceived by the women as opportunities for inquiring about information and support from the state for these women. Taking part in the cooperatives may enhance their sense of citizenship, and the perceptions of right to resources, even in the face of high levels of frustration over missing resources. It is however, the local state, and not the political system and elected ward councillors they approach. Women in both Kerala and South Africa experience local level everyday politics as closely related to their basic livelihood challenges. Local level politics does not necessary mean taking part in elections, or standing as candidates in local government elections. It is more related to their ability to approach sources of economic resources and political power, necessary in their struggle for decent livelihood. We find that women's participation in formal local governance and political decision-making is less influenced by community-state relations, than by electoral dynamics and party politics. The history of the relations and networks that women are part of both collectively and individually though former political struggles, the anti-Apartheid struggles in South Africa and the political campaigns (literacy, people's science campaign) in Kerala is both a source of political authority and legitimacy, and allegiance to political parties holding power in the localities. We find that there is a need to revisit the concept of 'agency' in relation to the study of poor women in marginalised rural and urban communities. State social protection programs provide platforms and situations where women exercise important agency to access necessary resources both for themselves, but also for their communities. The project findings are in line with new global research on the need to widen the concept of 'agency' to better understand the women's possible alternatives and decisions of actions.

The project will investigate the conditions for and effects of increased participation of women in the local political sphere in contexts of a supportive policy environment that coincide with patriarchal gender norms limiting the agency of women. To what extent does women's political participation in diverse local civil-society organizations and local governments enhance substantive democracy (understood as capability to exercise rights and voice demands)? How is women's political participation structured by the kinds of political spaces the women are active in ('invited' or 'invented'). The contrast between 'invented' and 'invited' spaces for political participation and the interplay between these will allow the project to engage in an empirically inform ed theoretical discussion about women's agency, substantive democracy, and local politics and culture, including gender norms. Answers will be sought through a comparative case study of women's public participation in four localities, two in Kerala and two in South Africa. In each locality we will study how women act as elected councillors on local government bodies as well as women's participation in selected civil- society organisation operating locally. The different organisations selected for study represent different types of arenas or spaces within local civil society. This approach enables us to investigate the relationship between women's participation in civil society and women's political effectiveness as elected local councilors and the inter relationships between women officials in these diverse local organisations. The project will use qualitative research methodologies with a combination of semi-structured interviews, observation at local organisations' meetings and political events, analy sis of media, and collection of key documents from the archives of local governments and organisations.