Women, ICT for Development, and Multistakeholder Partnerships: Individualism, Collectivism, and Neoliberal Flexibility

• In Event: Feminist Contributions to Global Communications Governance and Policy

Abstract

Public-private partnerships (PPPs), encouraged by international development agencies, have become the norm in approaches to information and communication technology for development (ICTD). Public-private partnership schemes—where governments, communities, the business sector, civil society organizations, and development programs—are said to allow government enablement of both markets and communities. This policy arrangement now is the norm in ‘development’. However, even if PPPs are able to create wealth, the equitable distribution of that wealth does not follow; almost invariably, the business and government sectors benefit more than do members of the community, enjoying a financial largesse that the women who have become attractive targets for PPPs will never experience. The key concern of most development programs is service delivery. On the contrary, I address the power relations and gender-centered contexts within which PPPs are implemented in India. Unlike the common North American interpretation of labor organizations, the ‘woman problem’ in India does not always center on how to incorporate women into already-existing trade unions and worker federations. Women worker associations sector are abundant in India, particularly in the informal sector. Information technology companies flock to India in order to engage in PPPs that create an extensive worker and consumer base. The women targeted by these PPPs are positioned discursively as self-reliant ‘entrepreneurs’, ‘enterprising women’ who will become empowered individuals despite the likelihood that their ICT skills training tends to open the door to low-paid, low-skilled information worker, purportedly linking their enterprises to the national and global economy. Women's ICT entrepreneurship programs appear troubled by a situation in which neoliberalization erodes affinities that exist within women’s collectives and leads to atomistic individualism (the un-doing of feminist potential), In this paper, based in empirical analysis, the conceptual framework focuses on the extraordinary flexibility of neoliberal policies, thereby necessitating that individualism and collectivism co-exist and are co-implicated from the inception of a PPP to the ongoing experiences of women targeted by them. This is central to the neoliberal imaginary as it pertains to women in today’s society.

Author

• Lisa M. McLaughlin, Miami U - Ohio