| I address three philosophical questions about justice in global development, with a particular concern for gender justice. First, by what standard of justice can we evaluate the success of contemporary development policies to promote gender just Human Development (HD)? Second, to what extent does the contemporary global development policy framework, as reflected in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), meet the conditions of gender just HD? Finally, if contemporary policies in global development fail to promote gender justice, what, if anything, ought to be done to ensure more just visions and policies of development? I do not purport to offer a comprehensive answer to these questions, since doing so would be beyond the scope of any one project. Rather, my aim is to offer some insight into what I take to be key normative concerns about issues of global gender justice in development. I do so by engaging in critical, normative analysis that begins from within and focuses on actual claims of justice and injustice that arise in the non-ideal ideal world in which we live. Rather than appealing to an external or independently grounded conception of justice to ground my analysis, the normative basis for my critical reflections are those ideals of justice that are implicit in the vision of HD espoused by development institutions.;Using these ideals, I offer a gendered institutional analysis of international development, which contributes to philosophical thinking about global development and justice in two main ways: First, by focusing on the structural aspects of development my project advances the relatively new approach in philosophical thinking about development, which moves from the field of interpersonal ethics to that of political philosophy. Second, by focusing on gender justice in development, my analysis addresses important concerns of justice, on which philosophers have been relatively silent and, in so doing, shows how attention to gender can illuminate all thinking about development. |
