Gendered landscapes: Faith and rural development

Faith-based social development programmes (broadly understood) have a long history across different religions. Christian initiatives in the second half of the twentieth century sometimes faced the indictment of ‘propagating religious beliefs’ through development and practising ‘clerical neo-colonialism’, as Byrne and others put it.Footnote ¹³ In the end, though, Byrne was convinced that development was about ‘the creation and promotion of certain attitudes in the minds of the people, more especially attitudes of dignity, self-respect, achievement, self-reliance, total independence and adulthood’.Footnote ¹⁴ Byrne’s concepts of development had a stark resemblance to ideas of community development. This grassroots approach was en vogue in the 1950s and 1960s. The concept centred on ‘self-empowering’, not on handouts. In line with this perspective, Byrne considered his booklet not to be about ‘relief work but rather development’. Assistance should ‘promote and accelerate the whole process of self-reliance’, he wrote. And yet, certain people needed ‘more stimulation than others to develop themselves’, he stated the objective with confidence. At the heart of community development was the inclusion of local communities in the process of planning and practice of development. Byrne, too, emphasised that experience had shown ‘development plans made by Church workers themselves [were] often very inferior to those made by village groups’.Footnote ¹⁵

In the end, however, community development extended beyond the realm of faith-based social initiatives. As the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs noted in 1963, community development aimed ‘to contribute fully to national progress’. Local populations, it argued, should advance ‘the general improvement in the standard of living’ through collective action, relying as much as possible ‘on their own initiatives’.Footnote ¹⁶ Although the effectiveness of bottom-up development was difficult to measure, and scholars have since identified the ‘fall of community development’ in the mid- and late-1960s, some core aspects have endured. Key elements – such as nudging people towards the ‘right’ direction, encouraging a change in their mindset, and influencing decisions to promote ‘better’ choices – have a lasting impact. Indeed, ‘the lure of community development’ remains evident today, continuing to shape the agendas of NGOs and faith-based organisations alike.Footnote ¹⁷

UN experts identified the role of women in fostering community initiatives as a significant factor in most countries and highlighted that this aspect had not received adequate attention.Footnote ¹⁸ Actually, many rural development schemes drew a neat division between a public masculine sphere and a purported domestic feminine sphere, centred around the nuclear family, the home, and skills like childcare and domestic sciences. Women’s contributions to rural development were confined to the home with the aim of fostering a specific approach to rural femininity. Scrutinising the socially constructed roles assigned to (young) women in rural areas – such as those promoted through agricultural colleges – has seldom been central to analyses of international development. Nevertheless, gender awareness in the theory and practice of development (from approaches such as ‘women and development’ or ‘women in development’ to ‘women and environment’ or ‘gender and development’) has gained traction over the last sixty years.Footnote ¹⁹

Despite the fact that ‘in most developing countries, women make up the majority of the population working in agriculture’, their roles in rural development have long been underexplored.Footnote ²⁰ Frank Ellis and Stephen Biggs have shown that general policy trends concerning development were only applied to rural situations with a certain time lag.Footnote ²¹ Hence, it was in the 1980s, following the UN-sponsored International Women’s Year in 1975 and the subsequent UN Decade for Women, when there were more in-depth explorations of gender in development practices in rural areas.Footnote ²² However, rural realities reflect gendered inequalities throughout the second half of the twentieth century. For example, women’s access to land titles was restricted across the global south. Similarly, rural extension programmes predominantly benefitted men, while the significant contributions of women to agricultural production were underrated.Footnote ²³ Therefore, including the social construction of gender roles when examining faith-based and international rural development is particularly worthwhile.

In Chile, the vibrant environment of rural development was closely tied to the various attempts at agrarian reform that the country experienced from the 1960s to the 1970s.Footnote ²⁴ The presidencies of Jorge Alessandri (1958–1964) and Eduardo Frei (1964–1970) elaborated and passed different agricultural reform laws and set up new state-sponsored (educational) institutions in the service of the rural sector. However, it was the years under Frei and Salvador Allende (1970–1973) that saw the most comprehensive and, arguably, radical reform efforts. Both administrations did not shy away from large-scale expropriations and land redistribution, also facilitating strong farm worker unions and peasant organisations. In the pre-reform era, around two per cent of traditional landowners (latifundio) controlled almost 80 per cent of irrigated land, while the reform laws led to the expropriation and redistribution of between 60 and more than 80 per cent of such land in provinces like O’Higgins and Colchagua by 1973. From a comparative Latin American perspective, scholars have considered agrarian reform in Chile of the 1960s and early 1970s as ‘proportionally the most extensive and least violent land reform project carried out by democratically elected leaders without a prior armed revolution’. While the older literature has highlighted the reform’s shortcomings, recent analyses acknowledge the reform process as a ‘success story’, underscoring improvement of living conditions for large segments of the rural population.Footnote ²⁵

Reform and political organisation in rural Chile, though, addressed men and women in different ways, as historian Heidi Tinsman and others have shown. ‘Chile’s Agrarian Reform empowered men more than it did women’. In fact, the agrarian reform laws strengthened rural men’s social position as the main beneficiaries of land distribution, with 95 percent of recipients being males. ‘Men, not women, were defined as principal actors in creating a new world’. In a supportive role, however, (married) women were to contribute their part to rural modernisation, ‘keeping the house in order and the children clean and tidy’. Agrarian reform aimed at a rural world in which ‘a version of patriarchal family remained foundational to the way rural society was rebuilt’.Footnote ²⁶

This approach largely excluded the rural poor, as sociologist Patricia Garret pointed out, noting that ‘female headed households [were] disproportionately concentrated among the poorest strata of rural populations’. For younger women and teenage girls, though, the reform process provided further (educational) opportunities. Hence, the gendered agrarian reform process intersected with class, race, age, and marital status, bearing the potential of intergenerational conflicts. Interestingly, Frei’s Christian Democratic party, Allende’s socialist-leaning Popular Unity coalition, and the Catholic church broadly agreed on ‘gender mutualism’ – that is, different yet cooperative roles – as their vision of modern life in rural Chile. What was new with Allende was the recognition of indigenous land rights for the Mapuche in Chile’s south. Overall, the reform programme was about turning campesinos into Chilean citizens.Footnote ²⁷

Matters changed when General Augusto Pinochet and his civil-military junta violently ousted the Allende government in September 1973. After Pinochet took power, his regime rolled back agrarian reformism along with cooperative organisation and relentlessly suppressed peasant unions. The counter-reform reduced women’s roles in the countryside primarily to that of cheap seasonal labourers, picking and packing fruits for (inter)national markets in large agro-industry plants. These changes also affected the IER’s, the WFP’s, the ILO’s, and Misereor’s activities. Chile embarked on a path of ‘neoliberal authoritarianism’ until the end of military rule in 1989.Footnote ²⁸ It was under such volatile social, political, and environmental conditions that actors in rural development operated and tried to implement their programmes.

Competing visions: Coordination and conflict in rural development in Latin America

From 1952 to 1973, the ILO spearheaded a large Latin American development scheme, the Andean Programme (AP). This was a multi-agency large-scale rural development effort covering the Andes, including areas in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. In this Latin American context, the ILO and its experts produced a large body of readily accessible expertise, often in cooperation with local government organisations, NGOs, and other specialised UN agencies, such as the FAO (including the WFP from the mid-1960s onward), the World Health Organisation, and the Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). UN personnel supervised professional training and infrastructure programmes and set up rural advisory services.Footnote ²⁹

The AP aimed at integrating what UN development planners felt were isolated rural and particularly indigenous populations into the labour markets and economies of the Andean nations. On the one hand, this was perceived as inclusive (rural) development. On the other hand, these communities were expected to contribute more to the nation and its economies.Footnote ³⁰ Interestingly, the AP was gendered in a way familiar from Catholic social development: aiming at a strict differentiation of a supposedly female sphere by targeting the family and the household, promoting the nuclear family model headed by a male breadwinner. A racialised reading of rural populations, particularly of indigenous women, further complicated this programme. Courses for (young) rural women included literacy classes, home economics, hygiene, and childcare, among others. As anthropologist Mercedes Prieto put it, the Andean Programme ‘intended to promote a “modern” home, one that housed a nuclear family; a home run by educated mothers but under the authority of fathers’.Footnote ³¹ This vision was at odds with the longstanding social and economic realities of the Andes, where indigenous women had historically played active roles in productive labour and occupied positions of social power. Rather than fostering genuine inclusion, the UN’s development approach ultimately pursued ‘unequal development’, reinforcing gendered economic disparities, prioritising opportunities for men while limiting those available to women.Footnote ³² Despite these structural inequalities, the AP’s gendered framework did not go unchallenged. At times, local communities resisted these imposed ideals, reinterpreting them in ways that reflected their lived experiences and aspirations.Footnote ³³

Ironically, in Chile, the AP sought to drive social and economic change in rural areas by instrumentalising women. In Arica, in the extreme north of the country near the border with Peru, contemporary observers considered women to be in charge of their families and the community at large.Footnote ³⁴ National and international development followed the well-known colonial indictment of ‘Let’s win over the women and the rest will follow’, as Frantz Fanon described a common strategy in the late 1950s.Footnote ³⁵ Home educators along with social assistants toured the interior highlands, mobilising the señoras for the development effort. As an activity report laid out, home educators and social workers ‘carried out intense and fruitful tasks in these communities, working on home improvement, nutritional education, and handicrafts’. This was also about ‘rescuing’ young women in the countryside, another trope known from colonial rhetoric: Outside intervention would redeem girls and teenagers from ‘being the little slave[s] living a sad life’, as faith-based players argued.Footnote ³⁶

The AP was most active in Chilean projects during the 1960s and early 1970s, focusing primarily on the arid Arica region, which spans from the Pacific coast to the Andean highlands. By the late 1960s, plans were underway for further schemes in southern Chile, building on the AP’s broader experiences. As elsewhere, ILO officers and project managers of related UN agencies worked alongside national, regional, and local institutions and their personnel. In Chile, though, UN project officers co-operated from the very beginning with a regional development programme set up by the Chilean government, the Junta de Adelanto de Arica (1958–1976). It was with the Junta’s local practitioners that ILO officers had to negotiate visions of development. National and regional authorities as well as local populations (re)shaped the programme according to their necessities and preferences. Due to the social and political changes in Chile throughout the 1960s and 1970s – including a shift from Christian Democratic to socialist-leaning policies, as well as large-scale land expropriation and the nationalisation of key industries – the AP and the Junta had to repeatedly adjust their outlook to meet new political expectations and realities.Footnote ³⁷

Little changed, though, in relation to the high demand of UN experts, be it in rural sociology or rural education, to name just two fields of interest of subsequent Chilean Governments. Not only did national entities welcome expert-practitioners from abroad, NGOs such as Misereor were also eager to build on their expertise.Footnote ³⁸ From the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, the Catholic development agency regularly contacted the ILO in Geneva to request the support of their rural development specialists in evaluating local project applications from across the Americas. While the professional knowledge of UN officers was sought after, Misereor particularly valued their local expertise on social realities from Chile to Mexico. This local social and cultural knowledge, some acquired within the AP over the years, seemed crucial for assessing funding proposals. On an institutional level, in addition to regular written correspondence, there were both official visits of Misereor personnel to Geneva and of ILO representatives to Aachen to discuss possible areas of cooperation.Footnote ³⁹

This was by no means a one-way street. Misereor gained access to UN expert-practitioners from the AP in Latin America and placed its interns within the programme to gain valuable experience. At the same time, ILO officers saw Misereor, a major player in the NGO ecosystem, as a potential co-financer of projects with local churches or even a gateway to the resources and networks of faith-based and other NGOs in international development. Indeed, by the early 1960s the German NGO ‘was already considered the largest non-governmental aid organisation’, as Ulrich Koch, one of its collaborators and executive director between 1974 and 1995, noted not without pride in retrospect. Between 1959 and 1994 Misereor had co-financed more than 71,000 small- and large-scale projects in over a hundred countries, distributing some seven billion Marks.Footnote ⁴⁰

Across the globe, Misereor cooperated with local, national, and international organisations, among them the ILO. The Vatican’s permanent representation at the ILO often served as a first point of contact for Catholic NGOs such as Misereor. Indeed, Catholic players in international development frequently sought expertise or new avenues for cooperation through the Vatican’s delegate, a Jesuit priest, at the ILO in Geneva. For his part, the Vatican’s ILO delegate worked towards capitalising on synergies with faith-based institutions. However, taking a closer look Koch also noted in his memoirs that cooperation on a project level with the UN specialised agencies and their bureaucratic apparatuses was not the best fit for an organisation such as Misereor. Detachment between Misereor and the international organisation becomes apparent in internal ILO correspondence from AP project officers deployed in Latin America in the mid-1960s. They referred to the fact that, ‘the relationship with Misereor [was] practically paralyzed in spite of … specific pending matters’. For his part, Koch noted that the politicised UN agencies often relied on assessments grounded in models from industrialised countries, reflecting a technocratic mindset. He argued that while UN officers on the ground often had a positive view of Misereor’s grassroots projects, institutional constraints prevented them from abandoning their ‘top-down’ approach.Footnote ⁴¹ Koch certainly painted too rosy a picture of the benefits of a flexible NGO shaking up the development business from ‘below’. Building on historian Kevin O’Sullivan’s sober analysis, one may add that ‘the NGO model of development was broadly what the states and [Intergovernmental Organisations] made of it’.Footnote ⁴²

All the same, Koch’s point is illustrative. Catholic development practitioners such as Byrne sometimes expressed deep aversion towards development experts of any kind. Occasionally, he saw their interventions as ‘obstructive and authoritarian’. He argued that with their university background, they often had ‘little or no relationship to the social problems of the developing world’. And, Byrne continued, ‘Such people are often given the name of “experts” and even if they don’t call themselves experts they act as such’. The bureaucratic overkill was one of the sources of this discomfort: ‘They write lengthy letters to their co-partners …, sometimes asking the most irrelevant questions’.Footnote ⁴³ While the allegations may not all have been accurate regarding UN expert-practitioners within the AP, there was still a grain of truth. The overarching tendency to take over projects and the ambition to provide an umbrella for rural development schemes characterised international organisations such as the ILO.

In this regard, Jef Rens’ reflections from the mid-1960s on the purported lack of coordination in the development effort in Latin America are a case in point. When Rens, principal deputy director-general of the ILO, learned that Catholic groups were involved in ‘integration and rural development activities’ in an AP area, he believed that such projects should be coordinated with the UN agency. ‘I could not prevent myself from asking … why the Church should wish to launch action similar to that for which the I.L.O. is responsible in the same area’. Development work, he argued, ought to be done under one ‘coordinated body’. He continued,

Such ‘fragmentary activity [was] not the best way of ensuring progress in the development of the rural areas’, Rens concluded.Footnote ⁴⁴

Indeed, the lack of coordination of development schemes had been criticised from within the UN system and by external critics in the 1960s. By the late 1960s, a UN capacity report called for more inter-agency cooperation to transform a purportedly inefficient UN development apparatus into a modern entity.Footnote ⁴⁵ When it came to the Andean region, Rens insisted that ‘all elements … wishing to make a contribution should be co-ordinated under one machine’.Footnote ⁴⁶ He left no doubt about who should be in the driver’s seat of said machine: the ILO and their experts. While the ILO and the AP regularly cooperated with local faith-based actors, the statement reflected Rens’ personal view and the ILO’s ambition to be the leading force in rural development across Latin America.

Faith, food, and funding: The dynamics of rural development in Chile

Beyond the purported missteps of some faith-based initiatives in the development effort, there were concerted attempts to strengthen inter-agency cooperation in Chile throughout the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote ⁴⁷ During these decades, rural development faced particular challenges as political turmoil and severe droughts affected the northern provinces, including Arica, and extended to the central region, which was crucial for the country’s agricultural production. Reports described the droughts as ‘the worst catastrophe in the entire history of the country’ and underscored the importance of ‘bilateral and international assistance’. Food aid played a key role, and at the Chilean governments’ requests, the country regularly received WFP support from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.Footnote ⁴⁸ The FAO’s World Food Programme built on earlier US initiatives, such as ‘Food for Peace’, which had been distributing supplies throughout Latin America via its Catholic networks since the 1950s. Over the years, the WFP cooperated with various entities in rural development, including through food-for-work programmes in infrastructure projects. In addition, the WFP, along with the ILO, UNESCO, and WHO, supported educational programmes, further integrating food assistance into broader development efforts.Footnote ⁴⁹

In this context, the IER in Chile, with its rural education programmes, proved to be an ideal partner for the WFP. Reflecting the principles of Catholic social development sketched above, the Institute aimed, ‘within a global vision of humanity, [to] guide its activity in promoting the integration of individuals within a framework of active and conscious participation in society’. Its focus was on ‘achieving a high degree of organisation and self-determination for the Chilean peasantry’, as a report looking back on more than fifteen years of the IER’s activities in the realm of rural education explained.Footnote ⁵⁰

For their part, the WFP characterised the IER ‘as a non-profit foundation financially supported by multilateral and bilateral assistance and by some private organizations’. The IER received support from the Chilean Government since 1965. The Ministry of Agriculture funded IER staff salaries and contributed to the institute’s ongoing operational expenses. By the mid-1970s, the IER ran from its headquarters in Santiago de Chile some six regional offices and over thirty training centres across the country, employing more than 500 people among teachers and administrative personnel. Since its foundation in the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, nearly 35,000 students had been trained by the IER in community and cooperative organisation, farming techniques, dairy farming, as well as in domestic sciences, among other subjects; over 2800 projects had directly involved approximately 60,000 people, with more than 300,000 considered as beneficiaries, an IER leaflet boasted. While the available data on the IER’s students and teachers do not differentiate by sex, they do reflect a period of major expansion, as the Institute increasingly played a key role in Chilean rural development throughout the 1960s.Footnote ⁵¹

International food aid funnelled to the IER primarily aimed to enhance education and technical training in agriculture and handicrafts within rural areas, a focus implemented through this government-supported institute. WFP assistance freed up the IER’s budget. In the mid-1960s, about thirty percent of its funds were earmarked ‘to buy food to prepare meals for the students and trainees’.Footnote ⁵² Food aid distribution both for students and teachers within this rural education programme had started in June 1967 and continued until June 1974. When evaluating collaboration with the IER, the UN inter-agency analysis listed the successes in ‘planning’ and using ‘the limited resources available … in the best way possible’ among the ‘achievements’ of the project. What was considered a ‘considerable’ achievement seems to have been rather a modest accomplishment. For their part, the authors of the so-called ‘Terminal Report’ assessing the project in 1977 were cautious and acknowledged that ‘progress of the project was slower than planned’. Objectives, such as an increase in the number of students, were achieved eventually, the report’s summary stated. And: ‘Funds released as a result of WFP aid helped the Rural Education Institute to use part of its resources to improve teaching materials and to establish demonstration centres for agriculture and milk production’.Footnote ⁵³

Both reports were rather reserved regarding the changing Chilean political landscape throughout the duration of the project. The results of the WFP inter-agency mission were distributed in August 1973 and discussed in Rome in early October of that same year. That is less than a month after Pinochet’s coup. Maintaining silence about political circumstances reflected the international organisations’ intention ‘to keep food out of politics’. This was an illusion, though. What was dubbed technical assistance in the rural sector was in fact highly political.Footnote ⁵⁴

The authors of the 1977 ‘Terminal Report’ of the project providing food for the IER briefly hinted at the necessity for training of rural populations who benefited from Chile’s agrarian reform process. They particularly emphasised Frei’s 1967 reform law – an effort widely supported by the FAO through ICIRA, the Institute for Training and Research in Agrarian Reform. WFP officers saw the IER’s activities ‘as a step in this direction’. Hence, cooperatives and community leadership programmes figured high in the IER’s curriculum, but also teaching in pig or dairy production along with domestic sciences and home economics strengthening rural domesticity. Basic training courses were open to students of both sexes age sixteen and older. Upon completing age seventeen, students could enrol in technical training courses for adults. The educational offers aimed to ‘integrate the peasants into the productive process, to make them conscious of their personal and social responsibility toward the rural community and to up-grade their educational level’. The political thrust of rural education became clear at this point. Yet for the international organisation, it sufficed to point out that ‘the IER programmes were … in line with the Government’s development programmes and priorities’ at the time.Footnote ⁵⁵

Besides WFP, ILO, and UNESCO support, the IER secured funding from multiple donor organisations and various branches of government under successive Chilean administrations over the years. In the early 1960s, it received financial and material support from different Chilean ministries, including the ministries of education and agriculture, for rural educational projects such as ‘Surco y Semilla’, both a monthly magazine and a radio programme.Footnote ⁵⁶ Over shorter periods, mining enterprises such as Braden Copper Company (US-owned until 1967 and fully nationalised in 1971), the Corporación de Ventas de Salitre y Yodo de Chile, and Caritas Chile also supported IER activities across the country. Educational activities were similarly co-funded by several US-based development agencies, among them the NGO Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). IER programmes received further funding from the Alliance for Progress, a US policy scheme pushing for agrarian reform with the aim to contain the impact of the Cuban revolution throughout Latin America. Also volunteers of the recently established US Peace Corps contributed their share to IER projects in those years.Footnote ⁵⁷ Funding for the IER from US-based organisations was no accident, as Susan Fitzpatrick notes. In Cold War Latin America, Catholicism and US foreign policy were intrinsically intertwined, exerting a subtle yet widespread influence on religious, political, economic, and military affairs: ‘The Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, … and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID all funneled U.S. personnel and resources to Latin America through Catholic channels’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Yet among the most important long-term donor organisations was Misereor, the Catholic development agency from Germany.

In all these international rural development schemes implemented in Chile and the Andean countries discussed in this and the previous section, the gendered nature of rural education was often of little concern to both actors and analysts. One may read this silence as understandable in that international organisations and their predominantly male development experts also tended to implicitly follow a purportedly divinely ordained gender order: the rural space organised into a feminised realm of the home and a masculine one of mechanised agricultural production. WFP analysts were more concerned with IER’s funding opportunities than with critically reflecting the gendered nature of their programmes. They noted that ‘after more than 20 years of service to rural education, [the IER] has become a prestigious institution’ that ‘must unfortunately depend on donations or assistance from other sources to develop its programmes and activities’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Hence, it is worthwhile to further scrutinise not only funding but also the construction of gender in the IER’s and further faith-based players’ educational programmes on a project level.

Programmes: Rural domesticities

IER founder, the Chilean Monseñor Rafael Larraín Errázuriz (1915–1975), and his successors at the Institute applied for funding in Aachen for several projects over the years. Particularly southern Chile became a focus of Misereor co-funded rural development efforts. While UN country estimates pointed to Chile’s accelerating urbanisation overall, the southern regions – Araucanía, Bío Bío, and Lagos, among others – followed a different pattern well into the 1970s.Footnote ⁶⁰ In the southern province of Cautín (Araucanía), for instance, 55 per cent of its over 400,000 inhabitants were classified as ‘rural’, including 170,000 indigenous Mapuches. Agriculture remained the primary occupation for 60 per cent of the active population, with Temuco serving as the main urban centre.Footnote ⁶¹ Further south in the province of Chiloé (Lagos), nearly 70 per cent of the approximate 112,000 inhabitants worked in agriculture, particularly potato farming and fisheries. National and international development agencies considered the southern regions to be among the ‘poorest and most neglected areas of the country’.Footnote ⁶²

Some of the IER project applications from southern Chile were submitted in German, pointing to the involvement of collaborators with a German background active in Chile. In rhetoric and style, Misereor’s evaluations of project proposals at times reproduced prejudice and disdain conveyed towards rural communities, sometimes also adding their own. One such proposal, framed to address ‘economic and social hardship, disease, ignorance, and lethargy among the farm workers in 14 dioceses in Chile’, sought funding to support the ‘technical and social’ rural extension workers who were catering to over 500 communities in 1960. The 100 extension officers, half of them male and the other half female, were overwhelmed. Hoping to boost their numbers, the IER asked for 60,000 Marks. Along with other parts of the project – implementing an educational radio station for rural communities earmarked with an additional 80,000 Marks – the general evaluation stated, on the one hand, that ‘the work of the institute [was] certainly of great educational and social value’. On the other hand, the reviewer noticed that ‘certain paternalistic traits [were] evident’. In Aachen, there was indeed awareness and admission of the problematic setup of the educational programme. However, assessing the ‘social situation’ in Chile, Misereor considered it difficult to ‘openly confront paternalism’. All things considered, ‘the institute’s approach is exemplary from both organisational and educational standpoints’, the report concluded.Footnote ⁶³ Despite its limitations, the IER remained a valued partner in rural development.

Critical assessment was lost, though, when characterising the general situation of the Chilean rural population. This was particularly true for agricultural labourers on large estates or indigenous populations in the south. They were identified with characteristics such as ‘lethargy, indifference, mistrust, and existential fear’. These traits were often perceived as ‘part of the usual appearance of this segment of the population’. An IER assessment of ‘attitudes and behaviours characteristic of the peasant’ also noted that they were ‘in many cases apathetic, insecure, and fatalist’. The common prejudice of ‘resistance to change’ further completed this array of preconceived notions. A sound Catholic ideological foundation regarding gender roles may also have prevented critical (self-)reflection when it came to the educational programmes for rural working men, children, and women. As the description of educating rural extension workers had it, ‘in 5 schools, farm workers (inquilinos) and girls are instructed in three-month courses on agricultural (or domestic), health, social, and religious matters, as well as in all other areas of knowledge that can lead to an improvement in their standard of living’.Footnote ⁶⁴

Many rural education projects co-funded by Misereor adopted a lens that gendered the countryside into feminine ‘domestic’ and male ‘mechanised’ agricultural spheres. Photographs from projects in rural Chile held at the Misereor archive substantiate this point: Young women were portrayed while sewing, taking care of babies, working at the loom, or posing beside braided baskets and other handicrafts. Young males were represented sitting on tractors, learning how to drive.Footnote ⁶⁵ Indeed, ‘the domestic training of poor girls’ was often at the heart of Misereor’s co-financed projects for young women. In Temuco, southern Chile, in the early 1960s, the Schoenstatt Sisters of Mary offered an education initiative in domestic sciences and sewing classes aimed at young indigenous women. They had allegedly ‘morally and ethically sunk to an indescribable low’. The Sisters’ three-year programme was similar to the offers of the IER. It was free of charge and had, they claimed, produced visible success – their (former) students getting married was proof of their achievements. More valuable to the women may have been the diploma in domestic sciences or sewing they received upon completing training. Certificates were recognised nationally and opened pathways for a ‘sustainable and fulfilling way to earn a living’, the school principal assured.Footnote ⁶⁶

One of the few non-gendered professions within Misereor co-funded projects was in rural health. In Puerto Saavedra, in southern Chile, the IER provided courses for students from the southern provinces of Cautín, Bío-Bío, Arauco, Ñuble, and Osorno, some with the support of the National Health Service (Servicio Nacional de Salud), others assisted by the National Institute of Professional Training (Instituto Nacional de Capacitación Profesional). Registers about IER course offerings and attendance for 1973 and 1974 listed 42 males to be trained as rural nurses, among them 27 ‘Mapuche Indians’, as the records underscored. A long list of neatly gendered training opportunities with subsequent enrolments followed: carpentry, pig farming, machinery technology, agricultural machinery mechanics, and, for young women: introduction to sewing and dressmaking. There were further courses in nursing and childcare, attended by 27 young women and five men. Participants acted as voluntary aids for the medical services. For this course, the IER collaborated with the Fundación Baviera, a non-profit founded in 1966 and based in Temuco, and with students of medicine from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago.Footnote ⁶⁷

Among Misereor’s project files the agricultural women’s school of Lanco, also in southern Chile, stands out.Footnote ⁶⁸ In Purulón, close to the small town of Lanco, Misereor had been co-funding a women’s only agricultural college since the mid-1960s. The college was led by the Franciscan Sisters of the Divine Heart of Jesus, a congregation originating in the mid-19th century in Gengenbach, southern Germany. The aim of the school was to enable ‘girls … to receive training … that prepares them to manage their own land or enables them to take a responsible position in a larger agricultural operation’. This came close to Catholic-gendered empowerment. Indeed, this progressive programme aligned with only a handful of state-run coeducational schemes. As Tinsman notes, few state-run programmes ‘gave small numbers of young women an opportunity to discuss vegetable hybrids and drive tractors alongside young men’. The caveat of the Catholic women-only agricultural college: ‘The school may only be attended by girls whose parents own land’.Footnote ⁶⁹

Misereor sponsored the construction of the school with 120,000 Marks, and, archival documents suggest, another 60,000 for the kitchen.Footnote ⁷⁰ The rural college’s schedule shows, on the one hand, the familiar gendered and feminised tasks in home economics – ‘washing, ironing, needlework, darning and patching, cutting [fabrics] and knitting’ –, cooking, and childcare. Teachings in religion and morals, music education, and physical education were also part of the curriculum. On the other hand, the programme went beyond teaching rural domesticity and included courses in farming and land use, livestock breeding, dairy farming, and workshop activities. The curriculum of the agricultural women’s school of Lanco went beyond the usual focus on handicrafts, gardening, and small-animal breeding. In the end, the young women were ‘to be educated for life’ and they were expected ‘also to help many others progress through their knowledge and skills’.Footnote ⁷¹

The instrumental use of rudimentarily educated young women as agents of change – ‘passing on their knowledge as help to their people’, in contemporary parlance – was a common approach not only in faith-based rural development.Footnote ⁷² Some Misereor project evaluations were blunt when stating the aim of women’s education in rural areas: ‘Due to the practical training and the not too high level, it is guaranteed that the students will, for the most part, not migrate away but rather return to their farms and work accordingly’. It was all about determining the ‘right level’ of young women’s education.Footnote ⁷³

Still, a select few among the graduates from agricultural women’s colleges throughout Chile found their way to higher education and sometimes to positions of leadership. Even though a school may have aimed ‘to train competent housewives to improve the standard of living of the population’, some of its graduates later worked within the agricultural ministry. Others returned after further education to their areas as ‘agricultural practitioners’, as one school director highlighted with pride.Footnote ⁷⁴ The belief that feminine intuition naturally inclined women towards the role of the housewife clashed with their inventive determination. The contradictions and complexities in gendered rural education were palpable.Footnote ⁷⁵

Social politics, liberation theology, and authoritarianism in rural development

Politics was integral to rural development. In Chile, the IER had to establish its place within the changing political landscape. As the sections above have shown, the Institute was involved in co-operative projects with government bodies across different administrations from Frei in the 1960s to Allende and Pinochet in the 1970s. It collaborated with faith-based and other international NGOs and organisations. Yet political struggles also shook the IER from within. A first wave of progressive IER personnel left (or was forced to leave) the Institute in the mid-1960s. Furthermore, there was an influence from liberation theology, aiming to ‘enable the construction of a socialism that is eminently humanist and inspired by Christian principles’. The IER was not as monolithically conservative a body as the older literature had it.Footnote ⁷⁶ At the same time, the conservative strands of the founding years were still very much alive. What is more, Catholic IER representatives in the south rubbed shoulders with right-wing descendants of European immigrants, particularly with landowners of German origin. Their ancestors had settled in southern Chile in the second half of the nineteenth century, during the land-grab period dispossessing Mapuche communities.Footnote ⁷⁷ However, there were also recent immigrants, such as the German-born bishop in the southern Araucanía region, Wilhelm K. Hartl, who was heavily involved with IER activities in the area. Conservatives like Hartl were concerned that the IER might succumb to the allure of Marxism or communism in the early 1970s. They hoped that Misereor funding would provide greater independence from the socialist-leaning government bodies of the Allende administration.Footnote ⁷⁸

This conservative strand within the IER welcomed Pinochet’s putsch of September 1973, which they perceived as bringing law and order: ‘After the military change, there is order and security’, Hartl and his fellow campaigners informed Misereor in Aachen. A couple of months after the military coup, they contended that the IER’s centres in the south again ‘operate[d] at full capacity, supported and protected by government agencies’. Hartl further reported how they could count on the military that would support them with troops sent by helicopters when needed. ‘The regional director of the IER, Mr. Roberto Casanueva, achieved this thanks to his personal friendship with the commander’. They further maintained that ‘the new Government HONESTLY – not just in words – aims to promote Christian and vocational education of the poor masses’.Footnote ⁷⁹ From this local and conservative perspective, the Pinochet dictatorship embodied Misereor’s values.

Even though priests were among the early victims of repression after the coup, the Chilean Catholic church did not officially condemn military rule in the first Pinochet years. Rather, the Chilean church took an ambiguous position towards the new political realities and showed a willingness to engage in the so-called ‘national reconstruction’ the dictatorship envisioned. Over the years and after internal struggles, however, the Chilean Catholic church and its social institutions ‘ha[d] gained the reputation of being defenders of human rights and opponents of the military government’, religious studies scholar Brian H. Smith noted in the early 1980s. Misereor was no exception.Footnote ⁸⁰

Contradictory progressive and conservative perspectives characterised the Catholic Church in Chile, the IER, and Misereor.Footnote ⁸¹ They illustrate how Misereor found itself in the middle of political and social tension in the southern American country, a nation where liberation theology had a strong impact. There were, in addition, ardent debates within Catholic circles about liberation theology in the Federal Republic of Germany. German Catholic student groups welcomed the explanatory potential of liberation theology for understanding injustice in Latin America and beyond. ‘Liberation theology offered a radical critique of society and called on the Catholic Church to take a new role, one that was on the side of the poor and the oppressed’. Mainstream Catholicism and the Vatican, though, strongly rejected this line of thought. Fear of communism, Marxism, and condemnation of radicals for inciting violence to bring social change informed this repudiation.Footnote ⁸²

In its practice, however, Misereor’s work in social development overlapped with ideas of liberation theology. As Misereor researcher Peter Rottländer noted in his analysis, the Catholic NGO collaborated from its very beginning with institutes across Latin America (and the Philippines) that encapsulated many of the social and theological ideas that would consolidate the theology of liberation. Accusations at home and abroad about Misereor supporting religiously inspired Marxism or communism mushroomed. Even though the Catholic NGO did not directly support liberation theology, as Koch insisted in his memoirs, social justice and what was seen as necessary political and structural change was not easy to disentangle from many of liberation theology’s credos.Footnote ⁸³ Or, as one Chilean activist explained in retrospect: ‘One is a Communist in the way one approaches society but in his faith he is a Catholic. I have come across many poor people and friends that are Communists but also Catholics’.Footnote ⁸⁴ After all, there was no way to improve the situation of the poor without structural change and the respect of basic human rights.

This was particularly true regarding social and political realities after the authoritarian regime change in Chile. Rottländer described the years following Pinochet’s takeover as a point of inflection not only for Misereor but for Western Catholicism as a whole. The church, Misereor collaborators, and the projects they co-funded, operated within the constraints of a military regime that resorted to state terror, torturing and disappearing real and imagined opponents. Support of Chilean partners, protecting the persecuted, and assisting the marginalised and poor became a priority for Catholic institutions in Chile and beyond. While committed to social justice and human rights, within liberation theology gender-sensitivity and ‘the transgression of heterosexual norms’ were rather seen as ‘a distraction from the class struggle’ or as ‘“bourgeoise” issues … not relevant to the situation of the poor in Latin America’.Footnote ⁸⁵ A gendered reading of rural social realities of the 1960s and 1970s has neither been the liberationists’ nor Misereor’s strong suit.

Epilogue: Challenges in international and faith-based rural education

The role of gender in Misereor co-funded rural development projects largely depended on local clergy, religious sisters, and the specific situation in situ, Koch argued in retrospect.Footnote ⁸⁶ The claim holds some truth, as the Chilean examples of rural colleges discussed in this article suggest. However, the influence of decision-makers in evaluating projects and allocating funds from Aachen and elsewhere should not be underestimated. Their decisions also shaped the gendered nature of faith-based rural education and development. Notably, gender mutualism – defining cooperative yet distinct roles for men and women – was widespread amongst faith-based actors and international organisations such as the ILO and FAO from the 1950s to the 1980s, with the WFP, established within the FAO in 1961, later adopting g a similar approach. Similarly, widespread disdain for rural populations persisted across these initiatives, with peasants often labelled as lethargic and resistant to change.

Most institutions and programmes analysed for this article showed little gender awareness.Footnote ⁸⁷ Catholic-led projects typically adhered to rigid gender roles, aiming to instil an alleged ‘truly feminine sensibility’ among women in the Chilean countryside.Footnote ⁸⁸ International donors like the WFP did little to challenge these frameworks. Neither did Misereor. Instead, it was local programme officers and young local women themselves who directly contested gendered rural education programmes and carved out spaces for greater autonomy and participation. A short paragraph in Koch’s memoir, titled ‘Empowering Women with Their Rights’, suggests that by the mid-1980s, a shift in perspective had begun in Aachen. In 1984, two collaborators pushed for a gender empowerment plan, and by 1988, a working group had raised gender awareness among Misereor staff. According to Koch, ‘the role of women in development’ gained prominence towards the end of the decade.Footnote ⁸⁹ Yet, Koch himself acknowledged the shortcomings of earlier initiatives, admitting that home economics schools run by nuns sometimes failed to meet local women’s needs and interests.Footnote ⁹⁰

This article has shown that Catholic notions of domesticity, embedded in rural development projects, were not limited to religious initiatives but were also reinforced by international organisations such as the ILO and the WFP. Conceptionally, there were significant overlaps between these actors, even as they engaged in a ‘competitive collaboration’ to lead the development agenda. In particular, the ILO’s leadership sought to take the lead in rural development efforts, especially under the broad scope of the Andean Programme: ‘co-ordinated under one machine’, as one staff member succinctly put it.

Ironically, many married women in Chile embraced initiatives promoted by state agencies, the Instituto de Educación Rural, and internationally supported projects like the Andean Programme. These efforts promoted the so-called modern family model, where married women were positioned as development partners but relegated to a subordinate role. While men remained the primary breadwinners, this structure required shared authority and responsibilities. Despite women’s economic dependence on their husbands, rural domesticity still provided limited opportunities for personal growth and economic advancement, such as assisting in literacy courses or training as seamstresses.Footnote ⁹¹ Younger women, however, often defied these prescribed roles, leveraging their ‘creative will’ to enter the wage labour force.Footnote ⁹²

The Chilean example highlights the varied impacts of agrarian reformism across gender, age, and marital status. In this regard, this article aligns with existing research while extending the focus to how international donors amplified gender mutualism in Chilean and international rural politics. At times, these donors sought to steer rural development through their organisations. However, the rollback of agrarian reforms following Pinochet’s coup in September 1973 profoundly disrupted rural domesticity in Chile. The civil-military junta returned more than a third of the land expropriated under the Frei and Allende administrations to former owners, redistributed another third to the agro-industrial complex, and allocated the rest to politically inactive peasants. Many of these peasants were soon compelled to sell their plots to large estates. Although this was not a return to the old pre-reform latifundia system, it marked the end of rural domesticity as known before. The loss of land forced many married women and men into wage labour within the rapidly expanding agro-industry. As Tinsman reminds us, ‘temporary work became one of the only means of survival for both men and women’ in rural Chile.Footnote ⁹³ The counter-reform also undermined rural masculinities. The dictatorship, a former peasant union leader recalled, ‘broke us and reduced us to infants’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Yet it was the ‘feminisation of the [rural] workforce’, particularly in the central region, that profoundly reshaped rural gender relations. Women endured harsh working conditions characterised by seasonal employment, low pay, and long hours in the fruit exporting industries – issues that persist to this day.Footnote ⁹⁵

At the same time, many of the development approaches discussed in this article remain relevant today, albeit under new labels. Concepts such as community-based and community-driven development, integrated rural development, all highlighting local participation – along with the emphasis on rural education as a tool for improving livelihoods – continue to shape policy and practice.Footnote ⁹⁶ Yet, while rural development efforts in the 1960s and 1970s often reinforced rigid gender roles, contemporary programmes increasingly integrate gender-awareness and environmental concerns. Examining these historical trajectories highlights both continuity and change in development practices. It reveals tensions between top-down and bottom-up approaches, economic modernisation and social equity, and the diverse actors shaping rural realities. Though frameworks and terminologies have evolved, the challenges of ensuring participatory, inclusive, and sustainable development remain as urgent as ever.Footnote ⁹⁷