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Category: English | Posted By: Alicia | Rating: 
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Question 4: What is a countermovement and what characteristics make it different than other social movements? What organizing principles of the Globalization Project does the countermovement challenge and how? Which contradictions/disharmonies of the Globalization Project is this countermovement responding to and what change is the movement trying to create?
A countermovement is a resistance response in reaction to globalization, with its target being specific features of globalization and development, particularly the injustices or inequalities that occur as a result of these projects. Countermovements result when citizens disagree with the new and emerging rules of development that their government's often feel pressure to uphold and enforce, and these citizens opt for action. New opportunities for the people to renew the political process in areas where global restructuring has weakened nation-states; eroding their public welfare function, increasing social and regional polarization, and reducing state patronage systems. The vigorous and somewhat aggressive approach of these movements is what sets them apart from others, with their overwhelming aim around the globe being to clearly express the uncertainties and legitimacy deficit that populations endure as a result of the boundaries of developmentalism and the increasing exclusiveness of globalization. Countermovements share criticism of developmentalism, which advocates national and global economic management, heavy emphasis on industrialism and material abundance, and champions state and market institutions. The new movements tend to reject centralism and stress decentralized forms of social organization, emphasize appropriate technology and ecological balance, and seek autonomy and the implanting of markets in cooperative social arrangements. The new movements are marked by an expressive politics and their challenge to the economism and instrumental politics of the 'developed society' model. This movement has grown as the institutions of the welfare state have receded, and express the declining legitimacy of development in its national and global incarnations.
In the case of the feminism movement, much of its response to the Globalization Project is the result of women's contributions being made invisible by economic statistics that measure contributions to development only in terms of waged labor and commercial enterprises. While the development of feminism can be traced back many years before the Globalization Project took place, the fact remains that many of the early problems were never addressed, and in some cases these problems were magnified by global development and its organization. In the 1970s feminism took a new turn, with the move to integrate women into development arising. After the first global conference on women took place in 1975, the approach shifted from integration to 'agenda-setting', a transformation of the development model, challenging the existing development system of thought with a feminist viewpoint. One of the goals was to include women as decision makers concerned with empowering all women in their varying living situations. The women's position emerged to address the absence of gender issues in development theory and practice, an old argument that had yet to be solved. By identifying problems and coming up with solutions the feminism movement carried out its challenge to the Development Project. With the modern WED feminist (women, environment, and alternative development) position came critiques and remedies of the globalization project, the remedies designed to carry out the conceptual shift from WID (women in development), a more rational approach, to the more mobile and diverse understanding of the world under WED ideas. WED feminism argued that development is a relative, not universal, process, and that women's role in sustaining cultural and ecological relations is complex, place specific, and incapable of being reduced to universal formulas.
Some of the critiques that arose were: conventional economics is hierarchical and male-oriented in its assumptions about development strategies and excludes the contributions of women and nature from its models, development practices reveal a predatory relationship in which women are exploited and socially and economically marginalized, and nature is plundered, an alternative understanding of the world needs to be developed, with the reality that a new development paradigm must be established because economic theory is incapable of reform due to its rationalist approach, and that the work of caring for the environment and women's roles as nurturers are undervalued in the development theories that are in place.
Feminism stresses that development is a relative, not a universal, process, and that awareness of how ideals shape assumptions about other societies need to be addressed. The belief that all countries should strive for a universal formula of development and success is incorrect and unrealistic. The role of women in the development and globalization projects is an issue that has gone ignored for far too long, and feminists are shining light on this arena and demanding that it be addressed and corrected. The primary changes that are desired are that women's contributions will no longer be invisible and undervalued, that they will be appreciated for the integral part that they play, the male-oriented nature of economics needs to be redeveloped to include women and the role that they play in a society, and the exploitation of women and the environment that has occurred as a result of the predatory relationship of development models must be stopped and repaired.
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