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Beyond Instrumentalism

Interrogating the Micro-dynamic and Gendered and Social Impacts of Remittances in Senegal

Marieme S. Lo, Department of Global Gender Studies, 712 Clemens Hall, State University of New York (SUNY) At Buffalo. NY 14260, United States. Email: mslo{at}buffalo.edu

Remittances have become orthodoxy in developing countries such as Senegal, prominently framed in development discourses, and premised on the assumptions that they are a pathway to poverty alleviation and household livelihood security. However, what eludes critical scrutiny are their micro-dynamic and gendered and social impacts in the context of a new wave of risky and deadly migration patterns in West Africa, stemming largely from the lure of an economic El Dorado in the peripheral centers of Western Europe.

This article engages in the gender dimensions and externalities of remittances by contrasting the trans-local connections (geographical, social and economic) and, their complex interplay with the instrumental paradigm of remittances. It argues that the instrumental paradigm of remittances misconstrues or ignores entrenched structural, relational and gendered dynamics that mediate such transfers. Remittances intersect with power structures that potentially reinforce dependency and economic vulnerability. The article shows the need to recast conceptually and analytically migration, trans-local connectivity and remittances in a more dynamic framework that accounts for the political economy of migration and its trans-local intersections and dynamics. The complex web of socio-economic relations, added to the ambivalent structure of remittances, merit critical inquiry to ensure that remittances translate into positive and broader socio-economic change, rather than becoming a social trap or fossilized and maladaptive circuits of dependency and subordination at the local, community and household levels.

Gender, Technology and Development, Vol. 12, No. 3, 413-437 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/097185240901200307


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