Gender, Culture, and Consent: Doing Development with (not to) Indigenous and Local Communities
If a development project arrives with the best of intentions but the wrong assumptions, it can still cause harm. That risk is especially high when “gender solutions” are copied from Western contexts and dropped into Indigenous or other local communities without real partnership. This post lays out why culture and lived realities matter, what international law already requires, what the evidence shows when we ignore that, and how to design projects that are both gender-responsive and community-led. Why culture and lived realities matter for “gender work” “Gender” isn’t a single, universal experience; it’s shaped by race, class, language, age, disability, land ties, and more. Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) named this the problem of intersectionality: people sit at the intersection of multiple power structures, so one-size-fits-all gender fixes often fail, or even reproduce inequality. UN Women (2022) operationalizes this by urging intersectional gender analysis across the full pr...