ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a gender-aware analysis of contemporary globalization and highlights the ways in which neoliberalism has transformed economic landscapes affecting women and men across the globe. These transformations have had contradictory effects on different groups, both exacerbating problems that emerged in the 1980s and originating new problems that represent enormous challenges for human development. The chapter discusses many of these challenges from a feminist perspective. The chapter problematizes the continuing inability of "development as we know it" to generate people-centered development. For the most part, the official development agenda of the early twenty-first century has focused on three core initiatives—Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the Doha Round, and microfinance programs—promoted through multilateral organizations and various donor agencies. The multilateral framework to support poverty reduction goals also needs to be strengthened, based on recognition that the root causes of the persistence of poverty lie in the workings of the international rules governing trade and finance and neoliberal macroeconomic policies.
