DAWN, in collaboration with Movimiento Manuela Ramos, organized a public panel titled “Gendered social contracts: struggles for equality and women’s human rights” in Lima, Peru on June 2nd 2017. Over one hundred persons from feminist organizations, social movements and academia, as well as others, attended. They contributed to an interactive discussion with the panelists, examining how critical concepts such as gender equality, women’s empowerment, gender mainstreaming and social inclusion, fought for by women’s movements everywhere, are now being co-opted by both the State and major neoliberal institutions. In this co-option, they noted the absence of adequate discussion on the challenges posed by intersecting forms of social injustice, the structural bases of inequality, and illiberal democracy. Drawing from global and local experience, panelists from Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, Fiji and India shared their insights on these important challenges and their impact on the framing and implementation of public policies from a feminist perspective.

From Peru, Victoria Villanueva, Director of Movimiento Manuela Ramos reviewed the trajectory of the feminist movement in Peru and struggles for gender equality and social transformation. She critically examined gains and discussed continuing challenges especially in the realization of economic rights for women, the struggle to engage politically, to eradicate gender-based violence and to protect and ensure women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights. Patricia Carrillo, member of Grupo Impulsar Mujer y Cambio Climático, shared the improvements and shortcomings of gender equality mainstreaming policies in Peru, highlighting key concerns such as gender violence, political participation and access to economic resources independently of their role as care givers.

DAWN Executive Committee member Corina Rodríguez argued that, despite policies that seek to promote and protect economic, social and cultural rights of women and to reduce gender gaps relating to economic rights, there are still glaring disparities and inequalities, and persistent obstacles to achieving gender equality and social transformation in Latin America. She said these included the lack of political will to ensure implementation of progressive policies. She further highlighted the non-transformative aspect of a narrow focus on women entrepreneurs, and spoke of the need to value women’s unpaid care work and ensure its redistribution. More worrisome, she noted, was the growing power and influence of the private sector in development policy, which makes public policy not an instrument of social transformation but an instrument of legitimation for capital accumulation.

DAWN Board Chair, Claire Slatter, discussed the growing problem of illiberal democracy and the challenges it poses to human rights and feminist advocacy in many countries. She detailed Fiji’s history of military coups and its return to democracy in 2014, with the election of a populist government. The government’s strong commitment to delivering economic, social and cultural rights was not matched by a respect for civil and political rights. The 2013 Constitution prohibited legal challenge of any decrees introduced between 2006 and 2014. Fundamental rights and freedoms may be restricted under certain circumstances, including to ‘allow orderly elections’. NGOs that receive foreign funds are prohibited under the Electoral Decree from ‘campaigning’ on election issues, which rules out organising debates, panel discussions or publishing information. Media freedom and trade union rights remain restricted by law and a proposed new law seeks to punish by imprisonment and/or heavy fines anyone who criticizes Members (or a Committee) of Parliament or the Speaker. Feminist activism to advance women’s rights under Fiji’s illiberal democracy has been blunted and feminist groups have been challenged to find new ways of working in this constrained political context.

In concluding comments, DAWN co-coordinator Gita Sen warned that the ‘age of innocence is over’ signaling that we now live not merely in a fierce new world but also in a ‘tricky new world’. She noted that in this complex world both state and non state entities may at times appear to support some aspects of a progressive feminist agenda while working in other ways to oppose it. She used multiple examples, including the Bretton Woods institutions, which favor women’s entry and engagement in the labour force while continuing to enforce fiscal expenditure reduction and to restrict social spending with serious detrimental effects on women’s ability to engage in paid work on equal terms with men. Other examples included the current US president’s opposition to regional trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership while strongly opposing women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights, and diluting environmental and labor laws, standards and agreements such as the Paris Agenda. Conversely, the current president of the Philippines supports the implementation of the country’s landmark Reproductive Health law while promoting extra-judicial killings of so-called drug offenders on a large scale. She warned that, in many countries, populism is growing hand in hand with illiberal democracy. She argued that a much stronger private corporate sector is a critical force behind these illiberal trends, playing a growing role not only in the economic but in the political sphere, as was apparent in Brazil’s toppling of the Workers’ Party government of Dilma Roussef. She also warned of the dangerous trajectory toward public-private partnerships where the private sector is accessing public money as much as it is influencing political life. In this ‘tricky new world’ she said ‘the old enemy may not be the enemy; the friend is not the friend’. She challenged feminist organizations to revisit the meaning of democracy and how to re-build it, and said now is the time for creating new alliances for the long haul. She ended by saying that we can no longer hope for progress only through incremental policy and programme changes, and argued that the time has come around for us to return to public mobilization and activism “in the streets”.