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Isabella Bakker
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 Chair,
Political Science Department
York University, Canada
Research: Governance, Gender and Social Reproduction
in an Era of Intensified Globalization
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Isabella Bakker is Professor and Chair, Department of Political
Science, York University, Toronto. She has held visiting
positions at the European University Institute, Free University
Berlin, and Rutgers University. Her published work includes
The Strategic Silence: Gender and Economic Policy (1994),
Rethinking Restructuring: Gender and Change in Canada
(1996), and numerous other works on Gender and Restructuring,
Fiscal Policy, Political Economy of State Finance, Governance
and Globalization. Bakker has been a Principal Consultant
to the UNDP for the 1999 and 2002 Human Development Reports
and Senior Consultant to the UN/UNIFEM report, The Progress
of the World's Women (2000). She is a past Executive
Member of the International Association for Feminist Economics
(IAFFE).
Professor Bakker has maintained an involvement with NGOs
and international agencies, writing and lecturing internationally
on engendering economic policy and alternative women's budgets.
She has been involved in a variety of consultation projects
with such diverse organizations as the North-South Institute,
the Canadian International Development Agency (both in Ottawa),
Status of Women Canada, the National Action Committee on
the Status of Women (Canada), the United Nations Development
Program, UNIFEM (both in New York), APEC, and the Commonwealth
Secretariat in London.
Her most recent book is: Power, Production and Social Reproduction:
Human In/Security in the Global Political Economy
(Palgrave, 2003, editor, with Stephen Gill).
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Governance, Gender and Social Reproduction in an
Era of Intensified Globalization
My book project seeks to show how major frameworks of global
economic governance connected to macroeconomic (monetary
and fiscal) policies as well as trade policies in an era
of intensified globalization operate with respect to equality
between men and women, and to point out how such frameworks
can be made more accountable and responsive to the basic
needs of especially poor women. Such economic policies are
widely assumed to be generic and gender-neutral in their
effects. Not only does my work challenge this assumption,
but also what is different and I believe original about
my approach is that it situates the problem of global economic
governance in the wider and more fundamental context of
what feminist political economy calls social reproduction.
It therefore evaluates policies that regulate the basic
socio-economic frameworks that underpin possibilities for
the empowerment of women.
For example, since my work relates to trade and investment,
including trade in services, my research relates to the
restructuring of the governance frameworks and government
policies connected to health, education, provisioning and
what has been called the "care economy" (i.e.
basic frameworks of social reproduction). My work will explain
precisely how certain types of macroeconomic and microeconomic
policies have differentiated consequences for men and women
at different levels in society in both the global North
and South, with unequal effects on their lives.
I foresee the practical outputs of this research as two-fold:
- Applying a framework of social reproduction to review
the stated commitments of governments and international
organisations to human security, development, gender equality
and the empowerment of women; and
- Creating analytical tools and principles of auditing
as means to specify links between stated government commitments
(such as the Millennium Development Goals) and practical
outcomes.
I very much look forward to working with the high caliber
of Fulbright scholars from a range of disciplines with insights
into developing instruments of accountability for realizing
gender equality goals. In particular I would welcome links
with those with expertise in legal frameworks of international
governance, and others interested in the components of social
reproduction and the changing conditions thereof in a comparative
context.
I propose to be based in the United Nation's Division for
the Advancement of Women (DAW) within the Department of
Economic and Social Affairs (DESA). This venue offers incomparable
opportunities to conduct comparative, international research
that is both methodologically and empirically relevant to
scholars and practitioners dedicated to the global empowerment
of women. I will also use the opportunity to bring New York-based
scholars from various disciplines into a dialogue with UN
experts.
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