Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) is a transnational feminist network of scholars, researchers and activists from the global South.

[3] DAWN economists Gita Sen and Caren Grown presented a platform for a feminist economics at the 1985 World Conference on Women in Nairobi.

[5] The ideas which circulated there were later published as a book, Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions, Third World Women's Perspectives, considered to be DAWN’s manifesto.

Authored by feminist academics, policymakers, and activists from the global South, the book argued that effective development can only stem from taking the standpoints of poor Third World women.

[7][8] Yet, as DAWN maintains close connections to activist communities, its project is equally focused on ‘networking’ with social movements, as well as on ‘training.’[9] Such networking involves engaging extensively and dialogically with grassroots movements (through seminars and workshops), which allows for the production of bottom-up knowledge with them, as well as bringing to them interlinkage analyses that are more structural and critical and which together contest neoliberal capitalism’s dominant narrative.