In Dilemmas of Difference Sarah A. Radcliffe explores the relationship of rural indigenous women in Ecuador to the development policies and actors that are ostensibly there to help ameliorate social and economic inequality. Radcliffe finds that development policies’s inability to recognize and reckon with the legacies of colonialism reinforces long-standing social hierarchies, thereby reproducing the very poverty and disempowerment they are there to solve. This ineffectiveness results from failures to acknowledge the local population's diversity and a lack of accounting for the complex intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and geography. As a result, projects often fail to match beneficiaries' needs, certain groups are made invisible, and indigenous women become excluded from positions of authority. Drawing from a mix of ethnographic fieldwork and postcolonial and social theory, Radcliffe centers the perspectives of indigenous women to show how they craft practices and epistemologies that critique ineffective development methods, inform their political agendas, and shape their strategic interventions in public policy debates. 

"Radcliffe’s book, well grounded in theory and research, is an important read for scholars of Latin American development and gender. Highly recommended." - Choice

"Sarah Radcliffe's recent book offers a rich ethnography of indigenous women in Ecuador which specifically addresses how they encounter and experience development interventions." - Journal of Development Studies

"Dilemmas of Difference represents a timely contribution to the critical literature on indigenous women and development and to the debate of neoliberal instrumentalization of difference.... Overall, with a genealogy of development frameworks contrasted with indigenous women’s experience, Radcliffe demonstrates the persistence of postcolonial stereotypes and colonial assumptions of social difference that produce indigenous women’s dissatisfaction with development." - American Anthropologist

"Radcliffe’s book represents a powerful contribution to critical development studies and the discipline of geography." - Journal of Latin American Geography