They're opposed by Jon Cruddas, Miliband's policy man and "blue Labour" enthusiast, who wants a more "transformative" programme.
Lastly, practices based on citizens' participation, often presented as an antidote to deficiencies in the democratic process, require citizens to be exceptionally well organized and mobilized: can a transformative programme of this kind be sustained in a general context of growing individualization and social fragmentation?
For example, Stepping Stones is a socially transformative programme that promotes gender equality through participatory learning and action (37).
This investment marks an important moment, not just for adult social care, but for the role of social investment in enabling transformative programmes that tackle some of our most entrenched social issues.
In 2007, World Health Organization colleagues applied this framework and published a systematic review of the evidence base examining health interventions targeting men and found that gender-sensitive and transformative programmes (defined earlier) were more efficacious than gender-neutral programmes at improving a variety of health outcomes (Barker, Ricardo, and Nascimento 2007).
The study further supports the findings in existing literature that gender transformative programmes can have a positive influence on relationship equality and health both for men and for women (Peacock, Khumalo and McNab 2006; Barker, Ricardo, and Nascimento 2007; Dworkin et al. 2013).
Gender transformative programmes cannot simply emphasise how intersections of gender, class and race exacerbate violence in some groups, but it is also necessary to deconstruct social categories since there is otherwise a risk of essentialising certain groups of men as being more violent or oppressive than others (Gottzén and Jonsson 2012).
In our work that focused on the impact of a gender-transformative programme on gender ideologies, violence and HIV risks, some men reflected upon the pushback they received from their peers after receiving the intervention: What happened is that after the workshop, I met other guys in the village and had conversations with other men about what we had been taught.
The study advocated several improvements, suggesting that DfID should: focus on ensuring that all business cases have a clearly flagged statement of gender impact; increase the quality of gender analysis by, for instance, sharing good practice from gender-sensitive and gender-transformative programmes; and address issues of transparency.
These efforts may counter feelings that gender-transformative programmes are pinning gender equality and health changes on the shoulders of already marginalised groups of men.
Simultaneously, gender-transformative programmes are influenced by social science theories that view masculinities as socially constructed, contested, fluid and locally and regionally determined.
