Gender, Economic Integration, and Cross-border Road Infrastructure Development

International workshop on Gender, Economic Integration, and Cross-border Road Infrastructure Development

As Saskia Sassen noted, globalization is a process of differentiation. This workshop discusses how regional economic integration strengthened by cross-border road networks has differentiated effect based on gender, ethnicity and class.

Asia has historically experienced high intra-mobility of goods and people, but in the recent years, the quantum of such mobility has increased dramatically. Various factors have contributed to this increase, including economic disparity within the region; differences in economic/ employment/business opportunities; transportation and communication infrastructure development, education opportunities, and a wider network of migrants in major cities and industrial areas in the region.

The workshop explores how mobility of goods and people are changing as a result of road infrastructure development and economic integration policies, how such changes affect the livelihoods of the people along the road, and how such changes further affect the way of life and practices of local women and men, especially in terms of gender-based power relations. The effects can be varied for different communities, ethnicity, gender and age, and their coping/ adaptation strategies will also be different.

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