Susanna Price

Kathryn Robinson

Social assessment for projects in China is an important emerging field. This collection of essays — from authors whose formative work has influenced the policies that shape practice in development-affected communities — locates recent Chinese experience of the development of social assessment practices (including in displacement and resettlement) in a historical and comparative perspective. Contributors — social scientists employed by international development banks, national government agencies, and sub-contracting groups — examine projects from a practitioner’s perspective. Real-life experiences are presented as case-specific praxis, theoretically informed insight, and pragmatic lessons-learned, grounded in the history of this field of development practice. They reflect on work where economic determinism reigns supreme, yet project failure or success often hinges upon sociopolitical and cultural factors.

Social Assessment Policy and Praxis and its Emergence in China

Making a Difference?

Sharon Bessell

Women in Indonesia: gender, equity and development.

Gender, Equity and Development

Women in Indonesia

Indonesia now has its first woman President -- Megawati Sukarnoputri. The debates surrounding her elevation to the presidency brought issues of gender and politics to the forefront of the public agenda, raising crucial questions about the role that women are to play in public life in post-Soeharo Indonesia. The struggle to achieve a democratic transition following the fall of Soeharto's New Order in 1998 has also focused attention on issues of equity and gender justice. This book explores gender relations in Indonesia and presents an overview of the political, social, cultural and economic situation of women. The volume is Indonesia Assessment 2001, a result of the annual Indonesia Update conference organized by the Indoneisa Project and the Department of Political and Social Change at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, ANU.

This book explores the relationship between gender, religion and political action in Indonesia, examining the patterns of gender orders that have prevailed in recent history, and demonstrating the different forms of social power this has afforded to women. It sets out the part played by women in the nationalist movement, and the role of the women’s movement in the structuring of the independent Indonesian state, the politics of the immediate post-independence period and the transition to the authoritarian New Order. It analyses in detail the gender relations of the New Order regime, focused around the unitary family form supposed by the family system expounded in the New Order ideology and the contradictory implications of the opening up of the economy to foreign capital and ideas, for gender relations. It examines the forms of political activism that were possible for the women’s movement under the New Order, and the role it played in the fall of Suharto and the transition to democracy. The relationship between Islam and women in Indonesia is also addressed, with particular focus on the way in which Islam became a critical focus for political dissent in the late New Order period. Overall, this book provides a thorough investigation of the relationship between gender, religion and democracy in Indonesia, and is a vital resource for students of gender studies and Indonesian affairs.

Kathryn Robinson

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