2.2 Organizing for Change and Revisiting Organizing Strategies

The orchestration of change will be only as good as our understanding of the connections and linkages between seemingly different but uniformly coercive and anti-poor people/country policies enacted in the name of controlling immigration, conserving the environment, stressing the negative role of population growth, and propelling a lop-sided development. Each one of these policies [coming at different junctures across space and time] deflects attention from the real forces destroying the environment, our livelihoods and therefore our lives. The complex nature of the issues involved, the different levels at which they need to be dealt with [for example, from the scene of action on the ground to the body involved in policy making; the latter could be within the country or outside], the range of people that need to be brought together [not just segments of the population but also personnel such as doctors, lawyers, environmentalists, etc.,] – all these imply the need for continued alertness, preparedness, information sharing and strategizing, which in turn renders networking imperative. Lessons learnt from extant and/or existing forms of resistance to coercive and exploitative policies need to be center-staged so that their potential for up-scaling across other groups and regions can be explored.

Strategizing, building and re-building movements for transformation while imperative is increasingly complex. To enumerate some of the contradictions:

• Reproductive rights language of the women’s movements has become official language in the 1990s. How have we dealt with issues of ‘co-option’, ‘collaboration’ and ‘autonomy’?
• The notion of ‘choice’ has always evoked mixed reactions from feminists of the North and South. However, it was held benignly along with rights. Now we are confounded with the choice language for sex-selection, pre-selection and motherhood for postmenopausal women. How do we conceptualize ‘choices’ now?
• Identity politics has given the scope for the articulation of concerns of ‘invisibility’, ‘marginalization’, ‘representation’, etc. At this point, how do we explore the possibilities of common agenda for advocacy, struggles and campaigns.
• Women from many parts of the world questioned language that homogenized experiences and universalized ‘sisterhood’. Can we now explore the possibility of evolving global feminist concerns that accommodate and respect difference and diversity?

A dialogue on a number of these questions can facilitate our conceptualization of strategies for change. Lessons learnt from existing forms of resistance to coercive and exploitative policies need to be center-staged so that their potential for up-scaling across other groups and regions can be explored.