Indexing alternatives: Feminist development studies and global political economy

Priti Ramamurthy’s “Indexing alternatives” places feminist development studies in conversation with global political economy. The title signals a methodological problem: alternatives to dominant development are not found simply by declaring a single new model. They must be identified across scattered practices, analyses, and struggles, while asking what an “index” makes visible and what it leaves outside its frame. Feminist inquiry changes the map by treating households, informal labor, social reproduction, and gendered power as constitutive of economies rather than secondary social effects.

This intervention matters because conventional development measures can record growth, trade, or formal employment while missing the labor and dispossession through which those outcomes are produced. A feminist political economy asks who performs unpaid or underpaid work, who absorbs the costs of adjustment, and how global processes are experienced through locally specific relations of gender, class, caste, race, and nation. The language of alternatives also requires caution: a local practice is not automatically emancipatory, and celebrating women’s resilience can become a way of normalizing the burdens placed upon them.

The essay is best approached as a bridge between fields rather than a catalogue of ready-made policies. It invites readers to connect macroeconomic structures with everyday reproduction and to evaluate alternatives by their redistribution of resources, labor, and decision-making power. Because the SAGE record supplies bibliographic access but no public abstract, this FemRes guide deliberately avoids attributing detailed case studies not verifiable from the cited record. Readers seeking the article’s full examples and terminology should consult the original text through the DOI.