Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) is a transnational feminist network of scholars, researchers and activists from the global South. DAWN works under the gender, ecology and economic justice (GEEJ) framework, which highlights the linkages between these three advocacy areas. The network offers a forum for feminist advocacy, research, and analysis on global social, political, and economic issues affecting women, with a focus on poor and marginalized women of the global South. This was a shift from the association of feminism with white, middle-class women of the global North common at the time of DAWN’s formation and into the present-day.[1]Rafia Zakaria, author of Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption, argues that DAWN and its empowerment approach to development offer a successful example of a bottom-up, antiracist alternative to political mobilization that decentres the whiteness prominent in dominant feminist development projects.[2]
A group of DAWN members and partners at the Intergenerational Dialogues meeting, Mexico City, 2019
Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions critiqued mainstream development programs and envisioned an alternative feminist “paradigm” focusing on women’s empowerment.[6]
The groundbreaking work included both broad, political analysis and practical advice for women’s organizations, connecting the more familiar, grassroots work that many women engaged in with macroeconomic analysis and critique of the neoliberal development practices responsible for women’s unfavourable circumstances globally.[1][6] For instance, a food crisis in Africa, a crisis of poverty in South Asia, militarism in the Pacific Islands, and the Latin American debt crisis. It criticized the “integrationist” approach of the current “Women in Development” perspective for its assumption that “women’s main problem in the Third World is insufficient participation in an otherwise benevolent process of growth and development”. Instead, the “manifesto” claimed that structural and systemic change would do the work of eliminating inequality based on gender, race, and class everywhere and between nations.
This alternative left feminist vision emphasized “autonomous and equitable development” and focused on satisfying people’s basic needs. It situated women’s self-organization and empowerment as essential to realizing this vision. Authored by feminist academics, policymakers, and activists from the global South, the book argued that effective development can only stem from taking the standpoints of poor Third World women.[6]
DAWN's first book, "Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions: Third World Women's Perspectives," (1985).
Goals and activities
Engaging in both analysis and advocacy efforts, DAWN focuses on five key areas:
Work stemming from these research themes make up a number of books and publications, and have formed the basis of advocacy within intergovernmental processes (including for example RIO+20).[7][8] Yet, as DAWN maintains close connections to activist communities, its project is equally focused on ‘networking’ with social movements, as well as on ‘training.’[9] Such networking involves engaging extensively and dialogically with grassroots movements (through seminars and workshops), which allows for the production of bottom-up knowledge with them, as well as bringing to them interlinkage analyses that are more structural and critical and which together contest neoliberal capitalism’s dominant narrative.[8] Training (which is accomplished through the creation of training institutes that act as spaces for intensive participatory education), is a way to multiply this analysis and knowledge, so that new feminists can use it for change. DAWN publishes a variety of articles, papers and multimedia content, most of which can be found on its website.
^ abcBiewener, Carole; Bacque, Marie-Helen (Summer 2015). "Feminism and the politics of empowerment in international development". Air & Space Power Journal - Africa and Francophonie. 6: 58+ – via Gale Academic OneFile.
