Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode Title: Nayma Qayum, "Village Ties: Women, NGOs, and Informal Institutions in Rural Bangladesh" (Rutgers UP, 2021)
Host: Shraddha Chatterjee
Guest: Dr. Nayma Qayum
Date: November 16, 2025

This episode features Dr. Nayma Qayum, Associate Professor of Asian Studies and Global and International Studies at Manhattanville College, discussing her book, Village Ties: Women, NGOs, and Informal Institutions in Rural Bangladesh. The conversation explores the complex interplay of formal and informal institutions in rural Bangladesh, the transformative potential and challenges of women's NGOs, and the nuanced realities of collective action, empowerment, and social norms. Dr. Qayum provides an in-depth look at her fieldwork, methodologies, and the everyday negotiations of power and kinship among rural women.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Dr. Qayum’s Intellectual Journey and Motivations

• Personal Connection: Growing up in Bangladesh, Dr. Qayum felt a deep attachment but also unfamiliarity with her home country, prompting a "coming home" through her research.

  "I always felt like I didn't really know my country. So in many ways, the book was for me a sort of coming home in that way." (02:28, Nayma Qayum)

• Obsessed with Informality: Fascination with the "backdoor politics" and informal rules—like small bribes or social gifts—that govern daily life in Bangladesh and the global South.
• From Participation to Informality: Initially focused on political participation, Dr. Qayum shifted her research to the invisible, yet standardized, informal institutions shaping women's lives.

2. Context: What is BRAC?

• BRAC as a Global Leader:

  "BRAC is at this time, I believe, the world's largest nongovernmental organization. ... It was always woman centered. It was always centered on social development." (06:30, Nayma Qayum)

• Breadth of Engagement: Operating microfinance, legal aid, agriculture, and women-centered development programs.

3. Central Arguments & Book Structure

• Main Argument:

  "Women's development programs that center on the collective can empower rural women ... to bring about institutional change if they embrace certain characteristics." (07:56, Nayma Qayum)

• These characteristics are anti-oppression, deliberative, and embedded in communities.
• Challenge to Neoliberal Development:

  "[Service delivery programs] don't really empower women to challenge power structures around them." (08:23, Nayma Qayum)

• Structure:
  • Part I: History and context, including a nuanced gendered history of Bangladesh.
  • Part II: Quantitative quasi-experimental analysis of differences between areas with/without collective groups.
  • Part III: Qualitative exploration of how women negotiate new norms and reshape expectations.

4. Relationship between BRAC and Polish Shomaj (Community Groups)

• Polish Shomaj is one of BRAC's social development programs, often overlooked by donors, giving its members autonomy.
• Unique Character:

  "It was almost like that gave them the independence to do what they wanted ... because the donors weren't really invested in making this go in a certain direction." (18:23, Nayma Qayum)

5. Research Methodology & Fieldwork

• Immersive Mixed Methods:
  • 10 months of fieldwork, leading a team collecting over 6,000 interviews.
  • Both quantitative (comparative) and qualitative (immersion, ethnography) methods.

  "I traveled from site to site instead of being at one site for a long time ... it was pretty amazing to see how universal informal institutions are." (21:26, Nayma Qayum)

6. Ambivalence and Critique: NGOs, Neoliberalism, and the State

• Balanced Approach:

  "I found this debate [between celebration and critique of NGOs] to be both extremely important but also debilitating because it puts us in this deadlock and we can't seem to get out of it." (25:52, Nayma Qayum)

• Shadow State Phenomenon:
  • NGOs like BRAC often act as a "shadow state," delivering services in places beyond government reach.
  • Anecdotes of BRAC staff cycling to remote villages absent of state presence. (26:55)

7. Women, Power, and Collective Action

• Negotiating Power:
  • Women publicly debate who is most deserving of aid, often targeting the most disenfranchised.
  • Collective voice ensures accountability and transparency, counterbalancing local elites.

  "The collective voices will always drown you out. And also the leaders can be reelected every three years, so women can just vote you out if they don't like you." (41:22, Nayma Qayum)

• Bargaining with State and Society:
  • Women collectively challenge norms—for example, intervening to stop underage marriages or dowry abuses, often starting with internal debates and moving as a group.
• Internal Dynamics & Disagreements:
  • Disputes over resource allocation are common; scale and group procedures provide checks on domination by elites.

8. Friendship, Kinship, and Social Support

• Beyond Domestic Bonds:

  "There is a camaraderie ... for example, when they decide that this person's running for local election ... the women will band together and be like, we will go cook in our house today." (43:02, Nayma Qayum)

  • Acts of solidarity such as sharing household responsibilities or pooling travel money.
  • This opens up traditional, closed family structures to collective gendered support and mitigates the isolating effects of domesticity.

9. Impact on Social Norms: Successes and Limits

• Changes & Challenges:
  • Successful interventions against child marriage and dowry, especially within the group itself.
  • Domestic violence remains deeply entrenched:

    "I found there actually wasn't that much of a difference between Polish and non polici maj areas, which really shows ... the gravity of the problem." (47:45, Nayma Qayum)

• Space and Visibility: Public meetings legitimize women's presence and action in previously male-dominated arenas.

10. Researcher’s Positionality: Coming Home

• Navigating Insider/Outsider Status:

  "I got to travel a lot and do things, see my country in a whole new way." (48:51, Nayma Qayum)

• Language and Method: Analysis conducted in Bengali, with translation challenges foregrounded. The concept of shangshar kaura (doing the family) is untranslatable, centering women’s labor and social role.

11. Theoretical & Methodological Provocations

• Rethinking the 'Local':

  "We really need to understand the local not just for what it is, but also for how it changes our understanding of existing concepts and theories." (53:58, Nayma Qayum)

• Decolonizing Concepts:
  • Challenging the blanket categorization of informal transactionalism as "corruption."
  • Recognizing informal institutions as adaptive, potentially inclusive responses rather than mere pathologies.
• Blending Methods: Embracing both quantitative and qualitative methods to surface hidden institutional dynamics, despite disciplinary rigidities.

12. Future Directions and Takeaways

• Research Trajectories:
  • Studying social norms in health (e.g., pandemic behaviors)
  • Investigating informality in urban participation and its implications for decolonizing democratic concepts like "participation."
• Final Reflection:

  "Good research focuses on the participants, so the methods focus on that messiness." (61:11, Shraddha Chatterjee)

• Book’s Closing Quote:

  “Women can usher in development, but real transformation can only occur if instead of struggling to survive the institutions that hold them back, women overturn the institutions themselves.” (62:19, Nayma Qayum)

Notable Quotes (with Timestamps)

• On Informality:
  "I've always sort of thought about, okay, like, there is ways to get things done and what does that really mean for our politics and political life?" — Nayma Qayum (02:50)

• On NGOs as a 'Shadow State':
  "...NGOs such as Bragg are actually a sort of shadow state. Right. Because they do things that the state is not there to do." — Nayma Qayum (26:55)

• On Collective Power:
  "It creates accountability, it creates transparency... once they have made that decision together, that decision is there to stay." — Nayma Qayum (32:40)

• On Friendship as Strategy:
  "The women will band together and be like, we will go cook in our house today." — Nayma Qayum (43:07)

• On Language & Analysis:
  "...my challenge wasn't in writing English. My challenge was in how to write Bengali in English, right?" — Nayma Qayum (49:41)

• On Methodology:
  "I realized there was no way I could tell the story if I didn't blend this quasi experimental research with this sort of immersive, qualitative work." — Nayma Qayum (56:23)

• Closing Provocation:
  "Women can usher in development, but real transformation can only occur if instead of struggling to survive the institutions that hold them back, women overturn the institutions themselves." — Nayma Qayum, quoting her book (62:19, read by Shraddha Chatterjee)

Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:28] Dr. Qayum shares her intellectual journey and motivations
• [06:30] Introduction & explanation of BRAC
• [07:56] Central arguments and book structure
• [17:50] Relationship between BRAC and Polish Shomaj
• [20:28] Methodology and fieldwork experience
• [25:52] Ambivalence on neoliberalism/NGOization & state co-production
• [31:43] Navigating power/participation among women
• [39:35] How deserving recipients are selected
• [43:02] Dynamics of friendship, kinship, and mutual aid
• [47:54] Limits of transformation: domestic violence & entrenched norms
• [48:51] Personal connection and language challenges in fieldwork
• [53:58] Theoretical provocations: decolonizing concepts, transactionalism
• [56:23] Embracing methodological hybridity
• [62:19] Book’s concluding call to action (read by host)
• [63:14] Episode conclusion

Memorable Moments

• Anecdote about travel and local adaptation:
  Dr. Qayum vividly recalls being stuck on rural roads and witnessing BRAC's infrastructural reach—staff on bikes reaching villages missed by the state. (26:55)
• On women banding together for elections:
  The collective support for each other, from cooking for candidates to accompanying them to government offices, highlight shifting gender dynamics and supportive alliances. (43:07)
• Language as Methodological Challenge and Discovery:
  Wrestling with translating Bengali concepts into English expands how both Dr. Qayum and the audience understand the lived realities and theoretical relevance of her work. (49:41)

Summary

This episode is an insightful exploration of how Bangladeshi rural women, through collective action and informal institutions facilitated by NGOs like BRAC, negotiate power, resources, norms, and social change. Dr. Nayma Qayum's work illuminates not only the challenges and innovations in collective empowerment but also the theoretical, methodological, and personal dimensions of doing research at the intersection of global development, gender, and local experience.