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Topic Discussion I
Politics of Hard Choices
Political Transition and Economic Restructuring
Room 3
(11 of 13 pages)
In relation to women, I wanted to mention that government is cognizant that there
is a huge productive force which they need to draw in to whole area of development and also to propose development.
We have been able to move forward on that also. Obviously I am sure that as the next days go by we will be able
to share more experiences on that front.
Lina Hamadeh-Banerjee: Last March we had a meeting on women's political park space and the challenges in
the 21st century. One of the issues that we looked at was the major challenge of women in the next century in accessing
the budget and changing it to make it gender sensitive. One of the major conclusions of our meeting was that the
budget is the most singularly political instrument and it is not an economic instrument as much as it is a political
one because it is an instrument of exclusion. We find that listening to you talking about economic reform and micro
economic changes like sector adjustment etc. No one has talked about the impact of these policies on women. We
find that in micro economic literature you find that there is a major impact on women. Had women been brought into
the fold rather than being excluded, particularly by the policies of the IMS and the World Bank, perhaps we would
have had a better, more human, economic reform. At present in several countries there are some experiments with
genderized budgets. Right now in New York the UNDP is holding a meeting on gendering micro economic policies and
they are looking at different experiments of gender budgets in Namibia, Barbados and South Africa. I would really
recommend to all of you that you become familiar with the work that is being carried out in South Africa because
it questions a lot of the issues that you are trying to address, but once you look at them from a gender perspective
you begin to realize that exclusion is not just exclusion of women, it is exclusion of almost every marginalized
group.
Speaker (from Namibia): I would like to make an observation but in an individual capacity and not from the
experience of my country or as a country representative. I think there is a general agreement that political and
economic reform goes hand in hand and to really get democracy established and development going or on track that
you need both political and economic reform. But I wanted to take note of the fact that if you look at the democraticatization
process in Europe and in America specifically you would realize that the democratic process basically started after
some substantial level of economic development or industrial development. There was already a substantial level
of development at that level and that is something that is really lacking when you look at the emerging democracy
that they do not have a broad base of economic development or does not have a broad base of established industrial
development. That in itself is already taking them back. If we are really committed to the process of democracy,
and we have realized that for true democracy to be maintained you need not only to have a political change but
you also need to have economic reform attached to that to make the process of democracy more established and more
permanent.
The delegate also mentioned that what has been lacking in these programs, and Namibia it was already mentioned
does not really have any experience of that because we are a very new country, is the fact that there has been
a lack of programs that addresses policy alleviation and the only way to really address policy alleviation as we
stated is by giving assets to the poor people or by creating employment. I think this can really only happen if
you look at emerging democracy by looking at the concept and trends of technology. Unless that happens, unless
we really equip the third world, or the emerging democracies, with the technology, and that means that the first
world must be committed to that concept. We must realize that a lot of these countries that are trying to engulf
or make democracy part of their system are either coming from conflict situations or they are coming from colonial
situations like in Namibia for example as a country.
Because of that they would need that kind of commitment from the first world for democracy to really be rooted
in this country. If that does not happen that means that government of emerging democracies will continue to introduce
programs out of desperation. We have learned that some countries when committed a true process of reform that government
becomes unpopular and as a result get voted out. Why does this happen? It is probably because people do not really
understand the importance of these programs and also because people cannot live with the consequences of these
programs as mentioned. If you look at the marginalized groups in speaking of reforming or the effects of under
groups you will realize that women are mostly marginalized by these programs. The governments are caught up between
the demands from the people and to be in line with outside developments in the first world and the institutes.
So I think that we really need to in the debate of democracy pay more attention to the issue of transfer of technology
if we really are interested in getting governments at a certain level of par.
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