participatory feminist development

La Foresta is a community academy that is located at the train station of Rovereto in the valley of Vallagarina, Trentino, an autonomous province in the North of Italy. The project was collectively founded in 2017, the initiators were motivated by the desire to create a space where different cultures and the various civic actors in the area could come together to learn from each other, both in theory and practice, in order to explore emerging commons and community economies.

It appears that an almost unquestioned development pathway for achieving gender equity and women’s empowerment has taken centre stage in mainstream development. This pathway focuses on economic outcomes that are assumed to be achieved by increasing women’s access to material things, including cash income, loans, physical assets, and to markets. Gender equity indicators, which measure progress toward these outcomes, cannot escape reinforcing them.