2002) ‘Making Feminist Sense of Neoliberalism: The Institutionalisation of Women’s Struggles for Survival in Ecuador and Bolivia

Since the early 1980s, community-based women’s organizations have emerged throughout Ecuador and Bolivia in response to persistent poverty, economic crisis, neoliberal-devel-opment policies and related political and cultural crises. In Ecuador, women and men cur-rently face an unprecedented financial crisis, the “dollarization, ” and the new 1998 Constitution. In Bolivia, various sectors of women have addressed the harsh economic measures implemented since 1985, growing tensions surrounding migration, rising home-lessness and poverty rates, and the “War on Drugs. ” In both countries, women have been among the first to make connections among everyday life and development policies. In this article I examine the contradictions organized women face as they struggle for economic and political empowerment in the context of neoliberal development. I argue that devel-opment policies that rely upon women’s unpaid labor sometimes contribute to institution-alizing women’s struggles for survival rather than merely empowering them, as they hope to do, through their community participation