UC Berkeley

This dissertation is a critical exploration and analysis of women and girl’s empowerment in global development in South Asia. Gender approaches in global development have gone through iterations since US President Truman’s Four Point Plan in the 1940s. “Third-World” South Asian Women have been recipients of development aid to mixed results and in many cases, expanded economic and social inequalities. Local resistance and feminist critiques attempt to transform the norms and practices of the development epistemic community, which absorbs these critiques into reforms without challenging the values of the liberal democratic capitalist class. The current iteration of development is a continued emphasis on rationality and individualism, but the focus is on adolescent girls viewed as champions for economic and social prosperity. I explore the norms and values of development efforts in “empowering” adolescent girls. In Chapter 2, I evaluated the impact of The Girl Icon Program, a girls’ leadership program in Northern India, on girls’ resiliency, self-efficacy, and their attitudes related to gender norms. I identify micro-empowerment practices feasible for adolescent girls. This is significant because most adolescent empowerment measures are tailored for adults, not for the specific challenges and opportunities of the adolescent age group. In addition, elder brothers are valuable social support systems; incorporating sibling relationships into adolescent empowerment programs could strengthen girls’ empowerment. In Chapter 3, I conduct a scoping review of adolescent empowerment measures in South Asia (1990-2022). I identify a landscape of adolescent empowerment theories and use the concept of epistemic community as an analytical tool to compare their research gestalt. In Chapter 4, drawing from the empirical findings in Chapter 3, I use the analytical lens of ‘epistemic governance’ to examine the theoretical shortcomings of the post-positive quantitative publications. I compare the post-positivist conceptualizations of empowerment with critical realist and interpretive epistemic communities and explore potential possibilities of maintaining the liberatory imagination within empowerment while also examining the specific benefits of quantification.