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All Hands on Deck: International Organizations, Local Multistakeholder Organizing, and the Coproduction of Knowledge on Female Economic Empowerment in Lebanon
Abstract
This project examines the role of international organizations as tools versus agents for women’s economic empowerment in Lebanon. Leveraging Blowfield’s (2012) distinction between development tools versus development agents, as well as feminist approaches to relational analysis (Nussbaum et al., 2012; Metcalfe, 2011), we are interested in exploring how international organizations’ financial awards take shape (i.e., concrete examples), function (i.e., how they work), and play out (i.e., the consequences) in the context of local multi-stakeholder mobilizing. Through a case-based analysis of a 2-year U.S. Department of State-funded project, The Knowledge is Power or KIP Project, we explore the narratives of local multi-stakeholder organizers around economic empowerment of women. A central question concerns how funding efforts to support and broaden opportunities for female economic empowerment are perceived by various actors on the ground. How is knowledge coproduced and shaped (reshapes) by the different stakeholders? Centralizing these questions, we analyze transcripts that capture indigenous voices of multiple, local, multi-sector activists and organizers debating and discussing economic empowerment of women in Lebanon. Engaging in an iterative qualitative analysis guided by the Gioia Method (Corley and Gioia, 2004; Gioia, Corley, and Hamilton, 2013), we begin with an inductive (i.e., 1st-order coding capturing the participants language and key notions) and then interpretive (i.e., 2nd-order axial coding capturing relationships among these categories and vis-à-vis our central theoretical frameworks) approach to the data. Our results suggest that such awards can serve as a facilitating tool for localized coproduction and sharing of knowledge and practices. We also argue that adopting a multistakeholder starting point facilitates the coproduce of hybrid and polyvalent feminist knowledge surrounding women’s economic empowerment. We reflect on these results in relation to the Business Case for Economic Empowerment, often even adopted by international organizations themselves (Chant, 2013). That is, in relation to the criticisms against supporting women’s economic empowerment increasingly positioned within neoliberal frameworks (Eisenstein, 2005). Such frameworks asserts that an investment in women is important because it creates new forms of business and it raises national/global economic productivity (Moser 1993). Although we acknowledge such cautionary notes, we focus explicitly on the generative instances of such mobilizing for local change. Stepping away from the specific narratives, we explore further for patterns and interconnectedness, searching specifically for variations in the neoliberal economic logics embedded within feminist narratives and for coproduced forms that involve hybrid, mutated and radicalized logics. Our results demonstrate manifestations of generative organizing.
Discipline
Economics
Geographic Area
Lebanon
Sub Area
Development