This book brings together leading researchers and policy advocates to explore whether the concept of women's empowerment is useful for an understanding of key demographic processes. Its contributors identify new directions for demographic research from the analysis of available data that measure women's empowerment, and point to the implications for population-related policies.

In this volume, scholars, policy-makers and women's health advocates suggest a new consensus on population policy directions for the 21st century, centred on health, women's empowerment, and human rights. They argue that public policy should assure the rights and well-being of people, rather than simply attempting to limit the ultimate size of the world's population.

More than half of the world's farmers are women. They are the majority of the poor, the uneducated and are the first to suffer from drought and famine. This book analyzes the policies towards Third World women. It focuses on global economic and political crises such as debt, famine, militarization, fundamentalism.

Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) argues that social contracts must be recreated if they are to fulfil the promise of human rights. In The Remaking of Social Contracts, leading thinkers and activists address a wide range of concerns - global economic governance, militarism, ecological tipping points, the nation state, movement-building, sexuality and reproduction, and religious fundamentalism. These themes are of wide-ranging importance for the survival and well-being of us all, and reflect the many dimensions and inter-connectedness of our lives. Using feminist lenses,...