Contested narratives of ‘development’: women’s experiences of power and identity in an urban informal settlement of Cambodia

Abstract

Community self-help has gained increasing prominence in Cambodia, and elsewhere, as an urban poverty reduction strategy of non-government organisations and the state. Embedded in this approach are assumptions of ‘community’ as a site of cooperation and ‘women’ as an inherently cohesive social group with a shared identity. If such interventions are to be effective and inclusive it is critical to understand how the practices and discourses that underscore them interact with local struggles to produce new forms of power. A qualitative case study of an urban informal settlement in Phnom Penh involving multiple semi-structured interviews with 25 women residents and staff of a nongovernment organisation identified differing perspectives of how development interventions worked and what they were supposed to achieve. Divergent motivations for participation, the selves women constructed as distinct from the identities they were expected to perform by non-government organisation staff, parallel group membership pathways controlled by wealthier residents, and the silencing of violence experienced by women illustrated these cleavages. In response to these misalignments women found alternate ways to assert entitlement and subvert social power to further their respective interests. This thesis makes three arguments. First, that in this settlement development and aid were a both a struggle over redistribution of resources and a symbolic struggle over morality and entitlement. Second, that development adapted to social structures by entrenching the power of existing elites, while social structure adapted to development by creating parallel discourses and modes of participation. Third, that women were both oppressed (by local authorities, men, landlords, and police) and oppressors (of each other). These themes have important implications for self-reliance groups that mobilise women on the assumption that economic marginalisation will shape collective identity. Gender-based group formation offers the potential to transcend and transform the exclusions that women in urban informal settlements encounter in their everyday lives. Attention, however, must be paid to gradients of power and social hierarchy within and across groups – beyond the state/citizen dyad – and an understanding of ‘development’ as embedded in everyday politics.