Holding the State Accountable: Feminising Work and Responsibility

Abstract

The article discusses an increasingly commonplace phenomenon whereby women take on the formidable challenge of holding state actors accountable for the survival and well-being of their working class and land-poor communities. Women provide the bottom-up pressure, be it through negotiations or agitational collective action, that pushes the state to fulfils its commitment to provide water, subsidised food, essential household commodities, public transport and sanitation facilities. This article argues that this labour is both skill-building and exhausting and points to its ‘irreducibly political’ nature. The article also discusses the parallels with the women members of self-help groups relentlessly conducting complex negotiations with multiple institutional actors in order to realise their policy entitlements of bank linkage and anti-poverty loans. While some forms of women’s action vis-à-vis state actors are collaborative in nature, others are more conflictual and confrontationist, depending on local contexts and conditions.