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The intertwined crises of climate change, deepening inequalities, deteriorating democratic space and growing fundamentalisms have serious ramifications for the poor and marginalized women of Asia Pacific. To address the challenges of these crises, Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD), a regional feminist network in Asia and the Pacific, is working to empower rural, indigenous, migrant and urban poor women in the region. Using the conceptual framework of Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR), APWLD is supporting some of the most affected grassroots communities to build their capacities by documenting their concerns, local experiences of human rights violations, recommendations for solutions, and engaging in advocacy. This paper will look at case stories of how FPAR has been helping to bring about structural change and strengthen feminist movements across the Asia Pacific region.
Keywords: feminist movements; Asia Pacific; development; human rights; climate justice
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Introduction: Failure of the neo-liberal development model
The neoliberal growth and development model is not working for the poor and marginalized women of Asia Pacific. The current global system of governance prioritizes the securing of profits for a tiny minority of obscenely rich individuals over protecting the human rights of the underprivileged. The dominant worldview that wealth would trickle down to the poor and marginalized through higher economic growth has been proven wrong. In the past decades, we have seen inequalities between countries, within countries and between men and women rise significantly. A recent Oxfam report revealed that the richest 1 percent now have more wealth than the rest of the world combined, while 62 individuals are estimated to have wealth equal to half of the world's population (Hardoon, Fuentes-Nieva, & Ayele, 2016).
The architecture of globalization has created policies that benefit multi-national corporations by pushing workers and a disproportionate number of women into low-paid precarious forms of work with no social protection. Trade liberalization is allowing large corporations to enter markets and making it impossible for smallscale agriculture and small business owners to compete. Globalisation has fostered industrial production, transportation and deforestation, often at the expense of the environment (Razavi, Arza, Braunstein, Cook & Goulding, 2012).
The growth-focused economy has caused the triple global crises of finance, climate change and food security...