Kate Bedford's multi-pronged and multi-level examination of the post-Washington Consensus World Bank gender policy is a contribution to what Saskia Sassen (“Countergeographies of Globalization: Feminization of Survival,” in Kriemild Saunders, ed., Feminist Post-Development Thought, 2002) has termed the “third phase” in gender and globalization literature, which includes inquiry into the production of new subjectivities in the context of neoliberal restructuring. The book reveals the contradictions and problematics associated with the Bank's new development model, which assumes that if women “work harder” in the public realm and men “love better” in the private realm, poverty will be reduced in the global South. This new development model is rooted in feminist critiques of neoliberal structural adjustment policies of the 1980s, which argued that these privatizing mechanisms were exhausting women under the triple burden of productive, reproductive, and community work, thus resulting in a crisis in social reproduction that, indeed, came to pass. The model was championed by former World Bank President James Wolfensohn starting in the mid-1990s in the face of the crisis in social reproduction and continued impoverishment that put the neoliberal Washington Consensus on structural adjustment in retreat. Nevertheless, this new model is still based, according to Bedford, on neoliberal principles of market efficiency. The Bank's new emphasis on encouraging poor men to share in reproductive work to lessen the household burdens on their wives to better release them for remunerated labor outside the home is far less about a commitment to gender equality and far more about socially engineering families and the people within them to be better market actors while resolving the crisis of social reproduction on the cheap—that is, through the privatized, albeit shared, reproductive labor of family members without having to invest public resources for social welfare.

Moreover, this new model is explicitly based not on the principle of gender equality, but rather on the principle of gender complementarity, which has justified a shift to targeting poor men along with, and often at the expense of, poor women. Again, the new focus of the World Bank on men has feminist precedents in that some feminist development scholars—who, as a result of gender mainstreaming directives, have become World Bank gender experts in its Washington, DC, headquarters and particularly in Latin America, where Bedford concentrates her analysis—argued for more attention to men to deal with the domestic violence and lack of support women were experiencing in their households and to gain buy-in from men for gender and development (GAD) strategies. This approach was particularly influential in the context of ethnodevelopment projects that assume that gender complementarity, and not gender equality, constitutes the “authentic” cultural basis of indigenous communities. However, as Bedford points out, many of these GAD experts inside the Bank and the feminist movements at national and grassroots levels with which they often work remain critical of the neoliberal imperatives of the Bank, arguing that such strategies result in economic and social violence against poor women (and poor men). These GAD experts had never intended for GAD strategies to preempt support for women, particularly to escape men, or for gender equality. Nevertheless, the seemingly promising strategic marriage between feminists and the Bank ended up divorcing “feminist politics” from “feminist economics” through a “neoclassical teleology of market liberation” (p. 124).

For Bedford, what lies at the core of the Bank's relatively new embrace of and problematic approach to GAD is its commitment to enforcing heteronormativity (or an “adjusted” or “respectable heterosexuality”) to resolve the crisis of social reproduction. Such a claim situates Bedford's work at the forefront of a new literature on sexuality and globalization from a largely queer perspective, a literature that follows feminist interventions on gender and globalization and postcolonial interventions on race and globalization. Just as feminist postcolonial scholars have exposed the interstructured gendered and racialized foundations and processes of the global political economy, queer scholars have furthered intersectional analysis by examining what Bedford coined in her earlier work (“Governing Intimacy at the World Bank,” in Shirin M. Rai and Georgina Waylen, eds., Global Governance: Feminist Perspectives, 2008) the global “governance of intimacy” through which LGBTQ (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgendered/queer) and straight relations are policed and disciplined by market forces and actors, including international financial institutions (IFIs).

Bedford employs a pluralist methodology, combining textual analysis of Bank documents, interviews with Bank gender program designers and implementers, and fieldwork observations of Bank GAD projects in Ecuador and Argentina. She carefully traces how “the restructuring of normative heterosexuality has … been positioned as empowering of the poor” by those “interested in reforming men, in reviving gender harmony, and in regenerating the family” (p. xxix) as an answer to economic crisis. While feminists share some of these interests to the degree that they empower women, Bedford finds that more conservative forces, ranging from the Bank and the Catholic Church to hegemonic male politicians and community leaders, are given far more space by such an agenda to further regulate rather than liberate poor women and men. Such conservative forces have marshaled a range of faulty assumptions and hysterical claims to pathologize, in racist, classist, and colonial fashion, what they perceive as non-normative and economically non-functional sexual identities and relations, ranging from female-headed households to polygamous men. As Bedford delineates, among the faulty neoliberal assumptions are the idea that women are always empowered by work outside the home (despite evidence that this depends on the kind and conditions of that work) and the notion that poor (and racialized) men are more violent against “their” women (despite data that indicates domestic violence is prevalent across all social classes and is more commonly wielded against employed women, again complicating the idea that work outside the home automatically empowers women). Similarly, despite hysterical claims by the Bank and “pro-family” conservatives that female-headed households “are the epitome of disempowerment” (p. 60), the Bank's own research shows such family forms have minimal impact on levels of poverty and perform better than male-headed households in keeping children in school. Moreover, fears about “wounded masculinity” from male unemployment are funneled through heterosexual family restoration projects rather than a thoroughgoing critique of neoliberal dictates that impoverish both women and men in the global South. Such heterosexual restoration projects (that are practiced by conservative regimes in the North as well) have also eclipsed the most obvious, but most economically inconvenient (neoliberally speaking), solution to the crisis of social reproduction—publicly funded and accessible childcare.

In sum, Developing Partnerships is a sophisticated, carefully designed, and readable analysis of the intersection of the World Bank with sexual politics. Bedford, although respectful of the feminist labor it has taken for gender to be taken seriously by and in IFIs, has critically and effectively shown how GAD strategies have also been used in the service of “entrenching profoundly conservative” (p. 214) ideas about gender and sexuality. Her book succeeds both as a cautionary tale and as a call for continued counter-hegemonic efforts within and outside the Bank.