Social Relations Approach
Also known as: Social Relations Framework, Kabeer 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.
Key highlights
- Analyses gender inequality relationally and institutionally rather than reducing it to women's individual roles.
- Shows how supposedly gender-neutral institutions such as the market and the state actively reproduce inequality.
- Separates immediate, underlying, and structural causes, guarding against interventions that treat only symptoms.
- Keeps human well-being and empowerment, defined as the capacity for strategic choice, as the explicit goal of development.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use the Social Relations Approach when the aim is to understand and confront the institutional and structural roots of gender inequality rather than simply to catalogue women's roles, especially in policy analysis, programme design, and macro-level development work. It is well suited to revealing how the market, state, community, and family jointly produce disadvantage and to keeping empowerment and well-being as the measure of success. It is less appropriate when a rapid, concrete field profile is needed, since the framework is demanding, abstract, and data-hungry; its institutional and structural analysis can be hard to operationalise quickly and requires analysts comfortable with conceptual depth.
Strengths & limitations
- Analyses gender inequality relationally and institutionally rather than reducing it to women's individual roles.
- Shows how supposedly gender-neutral institutions such as the market and the state actively reproduce inequality.
- Separates immediate, underlying, and structural causes, guarding against interventions that treat only symptoms.
- Keeps human well-being and empowerment, defined as the capacity for strategic choice, as the explicit goal of development.
- Conceptually demanding and abstract, requiring analysts comfortable with institutional and structural analysis.
- Data-hungry and slow compared with concrete role-mapping tools, making it harder to apply rapidly in the field.
- Its breadth across four institutions and three causal levels can produce analyses too sprawling to translate into a focused plan.
- Offers a powerful diagnostic but relatively little prescriptive guidance on how to implement institutional change.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
How does the Social Relations Approach differ from the Harvard and Moser frameworks?
The Harvard Framework maps who does what and who controls what; the Moser Framework adds practical versus strategic needs and a policy spectrum. Kabeer's approach is more structural still: it treats gender as social relations embedded in four institutions — state, market, community, family — and traces causes at immediate, underlying, and structural levels. Where the others centre women's roles, the Social Relations Approach analyses the relations and institutions that produce inequality in the first place.
What are the four institutions in the framework?
The state, the market, the community, and the family or kinship. Each is examined along five dimensions — rules, resources, people, activities, and power. The central claim is that all four, including those that present themselves as gender-neutral such as the market and the state, carry and reproduce gender inequality, and that disadvantage is transmitted between them, so analysis cannot stop at the household.
How does Kabeer define empowerment in this framework?
In her 1999 article she defines empowerment as the process by which people who have been denied the ability to make strategic life choices acquire that ability. She breaks it into three interrelated dimensions — resources (the preconditions), agency (the process, including decision-making and bargaining), and achievements (the outcomes). This definition keeps the framework focused on expanding women's real capacity to choose, not merely on delivering inputs.
Sources
- 1.Kabeer, N. (1994). Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought. Verso, London.ISBN 9780860915843
- 2.Kabeer, N. (1999). Resources, agency, achievements: Reflections on the measurement of women's empowerment. Development and Change, 30(3), 435–464.
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Social Relations Approach. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/gender-studies/social-relations-approach