Economic Alternatives for Gender and Social Justice: Voices and Visions from India and Latin America

By Christa Wichterich and Patricia Muñoz Cabrera

, by Wide Network

Introduction

With the dominant neoliberal model of the economy causing one crisis after another, the search for alternative development pathways has become an urgent necessity. By linking the macro and the micro economic levels, WIDE wants to facilitate and support processes which challenge mainstream economic thinking from a feminist perspective and start thinking outside the box. In many parts of the world women are developing conceptual and practical alternatives in a local context, in everyday life or on a macro level. By compiling experiences from different regions and countries, promoting transnational feminist dialogues and linking alternatives, WIDE wishes to contribute to the “fierce struggle to recreate the world” (Paolo Freire) and to the decolonisation of the mind.

This briefing paper is based on two earlier publications by WIDE: In Search of Economic Alternatives for Gender and Social Justice: Voices from India and Economic Alternatives for Gender and Social Justice: Voices and Visions from Latin America. These publications contain short articles collected from India and Latin America [1]. The essays not only suggest new and alternative ideas to achieve sustainable development, social and gender justice in the context of the globalised neoliberal model, at the same time they draft some general guiding principles and building blocks for identifying and shaping pathways towards an alternative micro- and macro-economic development agenda. Each of them proves that women are developing transformative agency on a conceptual and a practical level, demystifying the TINA ideology (“There Is No Alternative!”) and are on their way to make TATA a reality: “There Are a Thousand Alternatives”.

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