Can anti-poverty interventions alter entrenched gender norms?

This paper brings together  sociological theories of culture and gender to answer the question – how do  large-scale development interventions induce cultural change? Through three  years of ethnographic work in rural Bihar, the authors examine this question in  the context of JEEViKA, a World Bank-assisted poverty alleviation project  targeted at women, and find support for an integrative view of culture. The  paper argues that JEEViKA created new “cultural configurations” by giving  economically and socially disadvantaged women access to a well-defined network  of people and new systems of knowledge, which changed women’s habitus and broke down normative restrictions constitutive of the symbolic boundary of gender.