International Labour Organization
SEAPAT
South-East Asia and the Pacific Multidisciplinary Advisory Team

Some gender planning approaches and strategies

Social Relations Framework 

The social relations framework originated with academics led by Naila Kabeer at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex, UK. It is outlined in her book, Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development, Verso, 1994.

Aims of the framework

• To analyse existing gender inequalities in the distribution of resources, responsibilities, and power
• To analyse relationships between people, their relationship to resources and activities, and how they are reworked through institutions
• To emphasise human well-being as the final goal of development

The framework is based on the idea that the aim of development is human well-being, which consists of survival, security and autonomy. Production is seen as oriented not just to the market, but also to human well-being, including the reproduction of human labour, subsistence activities, and care for the environment.

Poverty is seen to arise out of unequal social relations, which result in unequal distribution of resources, claims and responsibilities. Gender relations are one such type of social relations. Social relations are not fixed or immutable. They can and do change through factors such as macro changes or human agency. Social relations include the resources people have. The poor, especially poor women, are often excluded from access and ownership of resources, and depend upon relationships of patronage or dependency for resources. Development can support the poor by building solidarity, reciprocity and autonomy in access to resources.

Institutions ensure the production, reinforcement and reproduction of social relations, and, thereby, social difference and inequality. Gender inequality is reproduced, not just in the household, but through a range of institutions, including the international community, the state and the market. Institutions are defined as distinct frameworks of rules for doing things and organisations as the specific structural forms that institutions take.

Gender analysis therefore entails looking at how institutions create and reproduce inequalities. There are four key institutional sites: the state, the market, the community and family/kinship.
 

Institutional location	Organisational/structural form
State	legal, military, administrative organisations
Market	firms, financial corporations, farming enterprises, multinationals
Community	village tribunals, voluntary associations, informal networks, patron-client relationships, NGOs
Family/kinship	household, extended families, lineage groupings

Five dimensions of institutional social relationships are especially relevant for gender analysis:

• Rules, or how things get done; do they enable or constrain? Rules may be written or unwritten, formal or informal
• Activities, or who does what, who gets what, and who can claim what. Activities may be productive, regulative, or distributive
• Resources, or what is used and what is produced, including human (labour, education), material (food, assets, capital), or intangible resources (goodwill, information, networks)
• People, or who is in, who is out and who does what. Institutions are selective in the way they include or exclude people, assign them resources and responsibilities, and position them in the hierarchy
• Power, or who decides, and whose interests are served.

Naila Kabeer classifies development policies as follows:

Gender-blind

• do not distinguish between men and women
• incorporate existing biases
• tend to exclude women

• recognise differences among men and women’s needs and priorities

• Can be used from project to policy level planning, even on an international basis

• Sees poverty as not just material deprivation but also social marginalisation.
• Conceptualises gender as central to development thinking, not an add-on.
• Links micro to macro factors.
• Highlights interactions between various forms of inequality: gender, class, race.
• Centres analysis around institutions; highlights the political aspects of institutions
• Dynamic; tries to uncover processes of impoverishment and empowerment
• Can be used for different levels of analysis

• Since it examine all cross-cutting inequalities, gender can get subsumed under other analytical categories
• Can appear complicated, detailed and demanding

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