Social Relations Approach

The Social Relations Approach, developed by Naila Kabeer at the Institute of Development Studies in the early 1990s, is a framework for analysing gender inequality as a product of social relations embedded in institutions rather than as a matter of women's roles alone. It treats human well-being and empowerment as the goal of development, examines how four key institutions — the state, the market, the community, and the family or kinship — produce and reproduce inequality through their rules, resources, people, activities, and distribution of power, and traces the causes of inequality at immediate, underlying, and structural levels.