Kalpana Kalpana (Editor)

Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era

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Abbreviation
  
DAWN

Location
  
Global South

Founded
  
1984

Legal status
  
Transnational alternative policy group, network of feminist scholars

Focus
  
economic and gender justice, ecological sustainability, democracy

Product
  
Critical research, policy analysis, advocacy and political education/training

Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) is a transnational alternative policy group and network of feminist scholars, researchers and activists from the Global South, who produce and disseminate analyses, proposals, and information tools oriented towards the enhancement of economic and gender justice and ecological sustainability.

DAWN was established in 1984, and launched publicly at the 1985 World Conference on Women at Nairobi.

Goals and activities

With its focus on economic and gender justice and sustainable democratic development, DAWN produces original research and analysis, as well as engaging in advocacy, training and social movement building. Its research and advocacy efforts are focused on four key areas:

  • Political Economy of Globalization
  • Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights
  • Political Restructuring and Social Transformation
  • Political Ecology and Sustainability
  • Based on work stemming from these themes, DAWN has published a number of books and reports, and engages extensively in advocacy within intergovernmental processes (including for example Rio+20), helping social movements to sharpen demands and push governments to enact change.Through its close connections to activist communities, DAWN is equally focused on ‘networking’ with social movements, as well as on ‘training.’Its networking efforts involve extensive dialogical engagement with grassroots movements through seminars and workshops. This allows for the production and co-creation of knowledge with them, as well as bringing to them feminist political economic and political ecological analyses, which together contest neoliberal globalization.Training is accomplished though the creation of training institutes, which act as spaces for intensive participatory education. This provides an avenue for the dissemination and mobilization of knowledge, so that new feminists can use it for change.

    DAWN's work is focused on women of the Global South, with active projects in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Pacific. Yet, through a holistic perspective that involves political- economic and political-ecological critique, it is firmly committed to global social and ecological justice and stands for overcoming all forms of oppression.

    References

    Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era Wikipedia