© 2002 Current Issues In Comparative Education Teachers College, Columbia University, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Current Issues In Comparative Education, Vol. 5(1) 51 Constructing Consensus: The feminist modern and the reconstruction of gender[1] Frances Vavrus Teachers College, Columbia University Women and girls play a particular role in these 'redemptive' [policy] declarations. Out of all the groups who have suffered in the twentieth century, their experiences are drawn upon and identified in such reports. On one level, this is a welcome development for feminists, who have long criticised the absence of any international recognition of the educational demands of girls and women. On the other hand, the special significance given to women by such diverse bodies as the World Bank and small NGOs (non-governmental organisations) raises questions about such a consensus. -Elaine Unterhalter, 2000 Some of the most important questions for feminist researchers in comparative and international education concern the consensus about women's education that has emerged in recent years across a vast array of development discourses.[2] What recent shifts in the terrain of international development account for women's "special significance" today? And what might widespread agreement about women's "educational demands" reveal more broadly about changing relations between the public and private sectors? In the 1970s, the Women in Development (WID) movement drew attention to women's critical yet neglected role in public (state-orchestrated) economic development initiatives; however, it is only since the early 1990s that education for women has become "[p]erhaps the cause célèbre of education and development" among international financial institutions, government officials, and NGOs alike (Sutton, 2001, p. 78; emphasis in original). The growing influence of feminist research and advocacy within international development agencies and in the associated fields of demography, education, environmental studies, and public health partially explains recent changes in policy priorities. Yet another reason has to do with changes in prevailing opinions within the field of development economics: from the 1950s and 1960s, when an interventionist state was considered critical for the facilitation of the modernization process in the Third World [3]; to the 1970s and 1980s, when neoliberalism championed a small state and free markets as the key to development; to the mid 1990s and into the present, when public-private provision of basic social services, such as education and health, is seen as essential to economic growth (Vines, 2001). In this article, I explore how neoliberalism has contributed to the construction of a consensus about women's education in international development discourses. I argue that the heightened visibility of women, and of education, exemplifies a broader shift in development priorities away from physical capital projects dependent upon state involvement to human capital programs designed to "empower" individuals and communities through their participation in decentered development schemes. The female figure that emerges in these more recent development discourse--"the feminist Frances Vavrus 52 December 16, 2002 modern"--embodies many of the qualities considered necessary for the success of decentralized micro-development (Greene, 1999, p. 227). The feminist modern marks a welcome departure from the representation of women in the Third World as inevitably passive and oppressed (Mohanty, 1991). However, this discursive shift does not necessarily mark a radical re-construction of gender because the development "crisis" it signals fails to call into question the foundational economic rationale for expanding women's education that permeates international policy.[4] The following sections focus on the construction of a consensus about women's education in international development policy and on the function of the feminist modern figure in contemporary development discourses. The final section considers the challenges put forth in this issue of CICE to formulate democratic re-constructions of gender. Neoliberalism and the "Crisis" of Culture Neoliberalism has become a catchall term in development and in "anti-development" discourses (Elyachar, 2002, p. 495), but I use it to describe specifically the articulation of a set of political policies, neoclassical economics principles, and human capital theory.[5] The pro-privatization and decentralization policies of the Reagan and Thatcher governments in the 1980s illustrate the "evil government view" common to most neoliberal political administrations (Adelman, 2001, p. 113). The Reagan-Thatcher opposition to state regulation, for instance, complemented neoclassical economic theory that was gaining prominence in international development discourses at this time. Neoclassical economics contends that open markets with minimal government interference will lead to national economic growth. According to Meier, "correct [neoliberal] policies were to move from inward-looking strategies toward liberalization of the foreign trade regime and export promotion; to submit to stabilization programs; to privatize state-owned enterprises; and to follow the dictates of the market" (2001, p. 19). Meier explains that along with a reduced role for the state in orchestrating development came a move away from physical capital investments to human capital development. From a neoliberal perspective, economic growth does not come about through state planning so much as by cultivating the knowledge and skills of a country's human capital, particularly when "accumulated" in "forward-looking, profit-maximizing agents" (Romer, 1986, cited in Meier, 2001, p. 19). Neoliberalism, in its political and economic facets, has had a profound effect on development policies in the Third World, owing to the fact that the leading international financial institutions--the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB)- -have generally embraced the view that the role of the state should be minimized in the development process (Adelman, 2001). For instance, during the global economic crisis of the 1980s, the WB issued loans to poor countries to support broad structural adjustment programs (SAPs). These loans required approval from the IMF, and its strict anti- inflationary programs called for sharp reductions in state provision of social services, such as health care and education. To compensate for the loss of government funding for these services, the populace was brought into cost sharing, or cost recovery, programs that require payment of fees for services that were previously provided for free or for a nominal charge (Turshen, 1999). As Stiglitz (2002) argues, IMF conditions on structural adjustment loans may have reduced government expenditures and reduced inflation, but they have also increased the financial burden on poor families to educate their male- -and female--children. He notes, "families in many developing countries, having to pay Constructing Consensus: The feminist modern and the reconstruction of gender Current Issues In Comparative Education, Vol. 5(1) 53 for their children's education under so-called cost recovery programs, make the painful choice not to send their daughters to school" (p. 20). The "small state" philosophy that has dominated international development for the past few decades provides a rationale for promoting women's education--of a particular type--in the Third World. Jones (1997) argues that the WB began a "crusade" in the 1970s, urging borrowing countries to make public investment in primary schooling while imposing user fees at the secondary and tertiary levels (p. 122). Coupled with this policy imperative were two others: equity and decentralization. According to Jones, Bank economists contended that these were two issues to which countries should commit themselves because they would improve the quality of human capital and the efficiency of the education system, respectively. Taking Jones's analysis a step further, women's education became an ideal target for development interventions because it tapped into equity and decentralization concerns without calling into question the social and economic disparities compounded by structural adjustment policies. Since only modest gender gaps exist at the primary level in most regions of the world today, with the exceptions of South Asia and some Arab states, socioeconomic disparities rather than the gender gap could have become the cause championed by international development institutions (Knodel & Jones, 1996). Along with the issue of equity, the promotion of decentralization through community "empowerment" and management helped to focus attention on women as pivotal local stakeholders and as potential entrepreneurs (Elyachar, 2002). These decentralization discourses were circulating through development institutions at the same time that feminist researchers and activists were making significant inroads in international policy circles. In particular, the articulation of decentralization with women's education was facilitated by the formation of the "triple roles framework" in the 1980s that drew attention to the multiple demands on many women as mothers, wage earners, and community managers (Moser, 1989). The framework contained a critique of development agencies that treated women "as cheap labour for a variety of interventions" (Kabeer, 1994, p. 276); however, its focus on the local, i.e., the household and the community, also had the effect of essentializing women's roles and insufficiently analyzed gender relations in the context of changing patterns of governance between the state and the populace. Feminist interventions, as well as neoliberalism, have helped reshape international policy over the past decade to create a new visibility for women's education in many different areas of development. Although feminist rationales for promoting education for women are often quite different from those of neoliberal politicians and economists, there is a consensus among these different groups of actors regarding education as a panacea for a wide range of development problems.[6] This consensus was evident as early as the 1990 World Conference on Education for All held in Jomtien, Thailand, where women's education was cited as a top priority for international development agencies. The policies that emerged from the Jomtien conference constituted a shift in the very meaning of basic education because of its new linkage to words like women, empowerment, the environment, and population: "Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that Jomtien marked the emergence of an international consensus that education is the single Frances Vavrus 54 December 16, 2002 most vital element in combating poverty, empowering women, promoting human rights and democracy, protecting the environment and controlling population growth" (UNICEF, 1999, p. 13). In the years since Jomtien, a number of international conferences have been held that strengthen the consensus regarding women's education as the primary solution to complex development problems, such as overpopulation, HIV/AIDS, and environmental degradation. Despite the significant decrease in the gender gap in primary school education in most regions, the "crisis" in international education has been defined primarily in terms of women's lack of access to schooling. Policymakers and activists are rightly concerned about cultural barriers to female enrollment and achievement wherever they exist, but the narrow focus on gender discrimination as the primary obstacle to development obscures other crises that deeply affect women's lives. My use of the term crisis, taken from Stuart Hall et al.'s Policing the Crisis (1978), suggests that crises are produced through a complex process in which popular and scholarly attention is drawn to certain problems but not to others. Hall and his co-authors examine the panic about Black youth and violence that swept Britain after several highly publicized muggings and escalated into a crisis in public opinion. However, they show that the small number of such attacks did not warrant such public outcry, leading them to consider how the media represented these events in relation to other racial and economic tensions in the country. Although gender-based discrimination is a serious problem that keeps girls out of school in many places, I contend that crises triggered by neoliberal policies have not received the attention they deserve, in part because doing so would call into question the "cookie-cutter approach" to structural adjustment formulated by international financial institutions (Adelman, 2001, p. 118). We can begin to consider the ways that crises are policed by examining the problems and solutions specified in international development policies, such as those addressing the critical issues of population, HIV/AIDS, and environmental degradation. Two of the most influential conferences of the past decade were the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio and the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development that took place in Cairo (ICPD).[7] While there have been a number of important conferences on HIV/AIDS in recent years, the World Bank's influence in international education deems it necessary to consider its current position on the role of women's education in combating the disease (Samoff, 1999). The Bank's views are clearly presented in its recent report entitled Education and HIV/AIDS: A Window of Hope (2002). Taking the UNCED, ICPD, and WB documents as examples of contemporary international development discourse, I look at how they represent women's education vis-à-vis the disparate development problems they seek to solve. In particular, I am interested in the categories and assumptions that hold developmentalism together as an influential body of discourse and give it the authority to turn discursive representation into action. To conduct such an analysis, I turn to the seminal work in postcolonial studies by Edward Said. In his groundbreaking book Orientalism, Said explains his method for studying the discursive construction of the Orient (1978). The task, he writes, is to understand "the sheer knitted-together strength of Orientalist discourse, its very close ties to the enabling socio-economic and political institutions, and its redoubtable durability" (1978, p. 6). To Constructing Consensus: The feminist modern and the reconstruction of gender Current Issues In Comparative Education, Vol. 5(1) 55 accomplish this formidable undertaking, Said uses a method he calls "strategic formation" to study the connections among texts and between texts and society (p. 20).[8] He does this by looking at stylistic features of Orientalist narratives and the socio- historical context in which they were written to demonstrate that these texts are representations and not descriptions of reality. Substituting "developmentalism" for "Orientalism", I adopt a similar strategy to examine the discursive devices in development policies to understand how they produce the representations that give shape to the problems that women's education is supposed to solve. There are many intertexual references in the UNCED, ICPD, and WB documents that merit discussion, but I limit my comments to three particularly prominent ones: culture, human capital, and women's empowerment. Beginning with the concept of culture, it is important to note that culture evades simple definition in the anthropological literature as well as in development discourses. In general, however, contemporary anthropologists use the term to describe common beliefs and patterns of living that are mutable from one generation to another and contested among those whose lives they govern. In the field of international development, there remains a tension surrounding education and culture that emerged during the colonial period and lingers into the present. For instance, in colonial Tanganyika, British education and health officials vacillated between a view of "African culture" as the cure for myriad development problems in the territory, and African culture as the very cause of these problems. These are the "culture-as-cure" and "culture-as-cause" perspectives described perceptively in Colwell's work on maternal and child health policies in Tanganyika to which I make reference below (2001). In contemporary development discourses, one also observes this tension between embracing "indigenous knowledge" and local customs on the one hand, and blaming "traditional" attitudes and values on the other. For example, the UNCED document states repeatedly that education about child spacing (p. 28), family size (p. 42), and reproductive health services (p. 47) should be "in keeping with freedom, dignity and personally held values and taking into account ethical and cultural considerations." The ICPD policy is more specific about how to incorporate cultural considerations into population and health education so long as they do not compromise the accuracy of the scientific knowledge conveyed: "Information, education and communication activities should rely on up-to-date research findings to determine information needs and the most effective culturally acceptable ways of reaching intended audiences" (p. 60). If materials about reproductive health and HIV/AIDS are not already in existence in the schools, then the ICPD suggests that "education projects should be based on the findings of sociocultural studies and should involve the active participation of parents and families, women, youth, the elderly and community leaders" (p. 61). These two documents, especially the policy from the ICPD, recognize the importance of cultural dimensions of reproductive health and of different cultural contexts in which population and health education occur. This is a welcome change from the population discourses of the 1970s and 1980s, when population control and family planning took precedence over women's reproductive health rights (Greene, 1999). However, policies that adhere to a culture-as-cure perspective are typically based on the functionalist assumption that "society is underpinned by a value consensus and that the various Frances Vavrus 56 December 16, 2002 institutions in society contribute to the ongoing stability of the whole" (Taylor et al., 1997, p. 24). In other words, these policies suggest that young women, elderly men, and community leaders share a set of cultural precepts by virtue of living in the same community and that these shared values will lead to a consensus about how to teach contentious issues like reproductive health in the schools. The culture-as-cause perspective tends to present an even more simplified view of culture because it divorces the cultural dimensions of population and health from the political-economic ones. For instance, the WB policy on education and AIDS begins with a section entitled "How we got here" (p. 3). Only one of the seven items on this list mentions political-economic factors by name (in reference to commercial sex); moreover, it is assumed throughout the document that the WB's macroeconomic reform program-- SAPs--will alleviate rather than exacerbate the spread of the disease (p. 55). Instead of considering its own culpability, the WB is exculpated in the text because the primary obstacles to AIDS prevention are cultural and not political-economic. For instance, phrases like "extended family networks" and "cultural and religious conservatism" focus attention on culture as the cause rather than cultural considerations being one of several factors contributing to the spread of HIV/AIDS (p. 3). When disease is constructed primarily as a cultural problem, education becomes a logical solution because it assumes that a lack of modern, scientific knowledge leads people to engage in high-risk sex. The WB document suggests, for example, that schools by their very definition "have the benefit of staff equipped with the tools of teaching and learning," and that they are normally places "where adolescents can obtain accurate information on reproductive health" (p. 30). In both the culture-as-cause and culture-as-cure perspectives, one finds a normative view of schools as sites where up-to-date knowledge is conveyed even though ethnographic research on reproductive health education shows that this is often far from the case (Vavrus, forthcoming). In addition to culture, a second common theme in the UNCED, ICPD, and WB policies is human capital. More specifically, these influential documents produce and reproduce the assertion that the development of women's human capital is the sine qua non of national development. Explicit and implicit references to human capital theory abound in these texts as they explain why women's education programs will ameliorate the problems of high fertility, AIDS, and environmental degradation. While education and health--the twin pillars of human capital--are critical for women and men, developmentalism links them primarily to women and to the state's need for cost- effective development. The WB document, in particular, makes many efficiency arguments about the critical role of women's education for human capital development: • Girls' education can go far in slowing and reversing the spread of HIV by contributing to female economic independence, delayed marriage, family planning, and work outside the home. (p. xvii) • It [education] is highly cost-effective as a prevention mechanism, because the school system brings together students, teachers, parents, and the community, and preventing AIDS through education avoids the major AIDS-related costs of health care and additional educational supply. (ibid.) • Secondary school education is what really makes a difference to increasing age at marriage, delaying first sexual encounters, improving negotiation for protected sex, and promoting other risk-reducing behaviours. Ensuring girls' access to secondary Constructing Consensus: The feminist modern and the reconstruction of gender Current Issues In Comparative Education, Vol. 5(1) 57 school is also key to better employment opportunities for women, and often an opportunity to break the cycle of poverty and reduce the risk of exposure to HIV. (p. 47) Women's human capital development is also discursively linked to cost-effective national development strategies in the UNCED and ICPD policies, but these documents situate the discussion within broader discourses of poverty alleviation and female empowerment.[9] For instance, the UNCED text identifies education and women's rights as an "effective strategy" for dealing with environment and development problems. It continues with its four primary objectives of sustainable development and poverty alleviation, one of which is to "create a focus in national development plans and budgets on investment in human capital, with special policies and programmes directed at rural areas, the urban poor, women and children" (p. 27). The ICPD document reinforces the UNCED's articulation of sustainable development and human capital in its explanation about why women's education is critical to population reduction and national development: "Education is a key factor in sustainable development (...). The reduction of fertility, morbidity and mortality rates, the empowerment of women, the improvement in the quality of the working population and the promotion of genuine democracy are largely assisted by progress in education" (p. 57). Echoing the UNCED, the ICPD places education--women's education, in particular--at the center of "population-environment relationships" because of the positive benefit it is assumed to have on the protection of natural resources (p. 60). This recognition of women's role in population change and environmental conservation is a positive shift away from the era when women were barely visible in development discourses, but the unproblematic use of economic and demographic terminology to justify schooling for females raises questions about the kind of education international institutions are likely to support. For instance, will higher education in the Third World ever be supported by the WB with the same zeal that basic education receives today (Spivak, 1999)? Will arguments for women's schooling move beyond rates-of-return analyses to include a broader humanistic rationale for education? And will international financial institutions support education in the Third World that emphasizes the humanities rather than the mastery of basic skills in a move that might counter the "dehumanization of education" in recent years (Andreas Kazamias, personal communication, November 18, 2002)? These are critical queries for scholars in the field of comparative and international education, and I will return to them in the final section below. Before concluding, however, I want to consider the third recurring theme in the policies under discussion, namely, the theme of women's empowerment. My position is one of strong support for empowerment if it means reducing women and men's vulnerability to forces they cannot control (cf. Markee, 1997). However, the discourse of empowerment illustrated in these policies constructs, to varying degrees, a highly autonomous female subject upon whom much of the responsibility for national development falls. Consider the following examples: • Empowerment of women is essential and should be assured through education, training and policies to accord and improve women's rights and access to assets (...). Population/environment programs must enable women to mobilize themselves to Frances Vavrus 58 December 16, 2002 alleviate their burden and improve their capacity to participate in and benefit from socio-economic development. (UNCED, p. 39) • These events [other UN conferences] are expected to highlight further the call of the 1994 Conference for greater investment in people, and for a new action agenda for the empowerment of women to ensure their full participation at all levels in the social, economic and political lives of their communities. (ICPD, p. 6). • Girls' education can go far in slowing and reversing the spread of HIV by contributing to poverty reduction, gender equality, female empowerment, and awareness of human rights. It also has crucial implications for female economic independence, delayed marriage, family planning, and work outside the home. (WB, p. 7) The repetition of key phrases, such as "empowerment", "mobilize themselves", and "female economic independence", illustrates the process Said described as strategic formation, whereby a body of discourse becomes authoritative through intertexual references to the same phenomenon (1978, p. 20). In this case, the authority of developmentalism to mobilize policy about women in the Third World is derived, in part, from a common vocabulary about education leading inevitably to female empowerment. International Development and the Feminist Modern The categories and assumptions inscribed in development discourses are somewhat unstable because of changing currents in the international arena. For instance, we can consider Mohanty's analysis of the representation of women in an earlier generation of development texts: This average third world woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and her being 'third world' (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.). This, I suggest, is in contrast to the (implicit) self-representation of Western women as educated, as modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own decisions. (1991, p. 56) In contrast to the "truncated life" of the oppressed Third World woman described above, the female figure who has emerged in development discourses since the early 1990s can be described as "the feminist modern" (Greene, 1999, p. 226). This woman is assumed to have far more agency to change her own circumstances than one finds in population discourses from the 1960s to the 1980s. According to Greene, "Thus, what marks the feminist modern as modern is the emphasis on women as subjects capable of performing on their own, or with the help of experts, particular techniques to improve their health and welfare" (1999, p. 227). Greene appropriately notes the importance of supporting efforts to make women subjects, rather than objects, of development policies. However, he also challenges us to think about the complexity of modernity and the ways that we "conceptualize ourselves as subjects capable of transforming ourselves as particular objects for improvement" (ibid.). In other words, developmentalism conceptualizes women in the Third World as capable of transforming themselves, but it presupposes a particular kind of improved person with "modern" beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Constructing Consensus: The feminist modern and the reconstruction of gender Current Issues In Comparative Education, Vol. 5(1) 59 If we consider Greene's notion of the feminist modern in relation to the UNCED, ICPD, and WB documents, what would it reveal about the themes of culture, human capital, and empowerment? First, the feminist modern emphasizes the problem noted above that culturalist arguments tend to downplay the role of political-economic forces in shaping development dilemmas. A recent statement on women's education by the Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund, Nafis Sadik, exemplifies this tendency: There are many obstacles to closing the continuing gender gap in education, but none of them are insurmountable. Many of these are solely in the mind (…). Poverty is frequently offered as a reason for marrying off young girls, but I think a far more powerful motive is the cultural conservatism that assigns no value to girls except as future wives and mothers. A girl's future is often predetermined and her choices and options pre-empted by cultural norms and practices. Culture that denies choice to women must be changed. (cited in UNESCO, 2000, p. 18) This construction of the problem leaves little room for disagreement because, certainly, conservative views do curtail women's education and health options under certain circumstances. However, Greene reminds us that when patriarchal culture becomes the primary target of development interventions, it diverts attention away from "countercausalities--political and economic forces--that also have a profound effect on women's lives (1999, p. 224). Second, the feminist modern reveals the impact of neoliberalism on the field of international development during the past few decades. For instance, human capital and cost-benefit concepts have so permeated development discourses that it now seems like common sense to discuss policymaking as a technical, economic matter rather than as a political process where different groups vie for representation. Finally, neoliberal equity arguments have become closely linked to the meaning of women's empowerment so as to depoliticize the term and to make changing power relations the responsibility of individual female actors (Vavrus, 2000). Despite the desirability of a scenario in which education leads to a reduction in vulnerability over forces a woman does not control, this remains a potentiality rather than a promise that education can always fulfill. Conclusions The discursive shift from the "always oppressed" Third World woman Mohanty critiqued to the female figure cogently described by Greene illustrates a recent re- construction of women in international development. Yet is the feminist modern an example of the "democratic re-construction of gender" under consideration in this issue of CICE? I believe it is not, for two primary reasons. First, one must be careful not to equate "democratic" with neoliberal policies promoting a "shift to the people and away from the developmentalist state" (Elyachar, 2002, p. 510). The co-optation of potentially democratic development practices, such as participatory rural appraisal and microenterprise strategies, by international financial institutions raises questions about whether these moves usher in a more democratic post-development era or whether they simply relocate the onus of development from Third World states to female entrepreneurs. In particular, does the embrace of local knowledge and culture inevitably lead to democratic participation in development, or is culture "a new type of discipline Frances Vavrus 60 December 16, 2002 that circumvents the state by ways of [micro]finance and NGOs" (Elyachar, 2002, p. 511)? Circumventing state control over development projects is certainly, in some cases, a necessary and desirable strategy for effecting social change, but there is also the possibility that bypassing micro-level development schemes may be essential when such programs contribute to the further disenfranchisement of the poor. A second reason for doubting the democratic potential of the feminist modern stems from its emphasis on women as individual targets for intervention rather than on gender relations as the site for social re-construction. I contend that developmentalism has made women visible without a concomitant re-visioning of the macroeconomic environment that shapes gender relations. The narrow focus on the individual in these discourses lifts the burden for development from international financial institutions and national policy makers and places it squarely on communities and individuals, especially on women. At first glance, discourses of decentralization appear empowering for women because of their potential for granting greater control of economic and political decision making to female actors, and this may, indeed, be the case in some situations. However, the reconfiguration of public (state)-private (community/individual) relationships will not necessarily bring about democratic transformations in gender relations without concomitant changes in the national and international political-economic climate. It is imperative that those of us in the fields of comparative and international education pay greater attention to how development crises are policed and that we work to "arrest" those representations that do not promote the democratic re-constructions sorely needed today. Notes 1 I would like to thank Monisha Bajaj and Audrey Bryan for their important contributions to this article. 2 The term "discourse" is widely used in gender and development studies but often left undefined. In this article, I draw on the discourse theory of development outlined by Peet and Watts: "A "discourse" is an area of language use expressing a particular standpoint and related to a certain set of institutions. Concerned with a limited range of objects, a discourse emphasizes some concepts at the expense of others (…). Discourses vary among what are often competing, even conflicting, cultural, racial, gender, class, regional, and other differing interests, although they may uneasily coexist within relatively stable ("hegemonic") discursive formations" (1996, p. 14). 3 I shall use the term Third World in this article even though it is often used today as a synonym for "underdeveloped". The term was first used by representatives at the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia to express their countries' non-alignment with either capitalist or socialist world powers. Robert Young suggests using Third World "as a positive term of radical critique even if it also necessarily signals its negative sense of economic dependency and exploitation" (1990, p. 12). It is this dual sense of Third World that I intend to highlight in the following pages. 4 There are many definitions of policy, with most of them based on "rational models" that assume consensus among different social institutions (a functionalist model) and linear stages of policy development, from conception to implementation to evaluation Constructing Consensus: The feminist modern and the reconstruction of gender Current Issues In Comparative Education, Vol. 5(1) 61 (an evolutionary model) (Taylor et al., 1997, pp. 24-25). In contrast, my notion of policy is derived from a sociocultural approach that emphasizes process, power, and practice (Ball, 1994; Shore & Wright, 1997; Sutton & Levinson, 2001). This approach suggests that policy is a statement of an institution's stance on an issue, and that every stance is a political strategy designed to effect change in a particular direction. Additionally, a sociocultural approach to policy analysis is concerned with practice, or "what is enacted as well as what is intended" (Ball, 1994, p. 10). 5 I use the term articulation as described by Stuart Hall in the following passage: "A connection or link which is not necessarily given in all cases, as a law or fact of life, but requires particular conditions of existence to appear at all . . . which can under certain circumstances disappear or be overthrown, leading to the old linkages being dissolved and new connections--rearticulations--being forged. It is also important that an articulation between different practices does not mean that they become identical or that one dissolves into the other. Each retains its distinct determination and conditions of existence. However, once an articulation is made, the two practices function together, not as an immediate unity (. . .) but as 'distinctions within a unity.'" (cited in Greene, 1999, p. 10) 6 I develop the education-as-panacea concept further in Desire and Decline: Schooling Amid Crisis in Tanzania (forthcoming, Peter Lang Publishing). 7 The UNCED document I examined is entitled Agenda 21: Programme of Action for Sustainable Development (available at gopher://gopher.un.org/11/esc/cn17/unced). It conveys the final set of agreements negotiated among the governments at UNCED. The ICPD document is entitled Population and Development: Programme of Action adopted at the International Conference on Population and Development, Cairo, 5-13 September 1994 (available at gopher://gopher.undp.org:70/00/ungophers/popin/icpd/conference/offeng/poa.txt). 8 The other method of discursive analysis used by Said is "strategic location," which means locating an author in relation to the entire corpus of Orientalist literature (1978, p. 20). It is this process that most clearly distinguishes Said's method of analysis from Foucault's archaeological approach, to which Said repeatedly notes his debt. Whereas Foucault questions the importance of determining authorship of texts, Said believes that the durability of Orientalism derives from authors referencing of the representations of one another. The issue of authorship is not central to my analysis because the UNCED, ICPD, and WB texts were written by committees and not by individuals. However, I do note occasions where a text references one of the others because, like Said, I believe this cross-referencing process helps create the "knitted-together strength" of developmentalism (1978, p. 6). 9 Unterhalter (2000) provides a useful discussion of the distinctions among several other important education and development policies in the 1990s: the 1990 Education for All conference in Jomtien, Thailand, the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women, and the World Bank's 1995 Priorities and Strategies for Education. The ICPD, like the Beijing conference, pays far more attention to poverty alleviation as a precursor to women's empowerment than either the 1995 or the 2002 World Bank texts. Although I am looking Frances Vavrus 62 December 16, 2002 at discursive similarities in the ICPD, UNCED, and WB documents, there are also subtle yet significant differences among them that warrant further study. References Adelman, I. (2001). 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