• Gender

Gender

The purpose of this paper is to show why gender issues are important in local natural resource management; to examine in what ways and with what effects environmental policies and programmes have attempted to incorporate concerns for women in the past; and to suggest how the situation can be improved in future.

This introductory chapter discusses the importance of including the social dimension, including understanding of gender relations, in development interventions affecting natural resource management. It also summarises the main concepts involved in the analysis of social relations of gender and has shown how these have evolved over time, first under the WID, then under the GAD approach.

Chapter 2 describes the ways in which environmental policies and field interventions have up to now taken account of the position of women. This entails analysis of changes over time in the approach to social questions, and within that, of the attempts that have been made to incorporate gender analysis in policies and programmes in different natural resource management sectors. We cover the forestry, water resources management, rangeland management, soil conservation, integrated pest management, and urban environmental sub-sectors, and also examine cross-cutting policy approaches to legal and institutional reforms and to environmental economics policy approaches.

Chapter 3 gives an overall evaluation of these attempts to incorporate gender analysis and attempts to explain their intellectual origins. There are striking similarities across the sectors in the policy approaches that have been (and are still being) introduced. Although detailed evaluations of projects are not generally available, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that past efforts have rarely been beneficial to women, and have often actually been damaging. We attribute this outcome, not to mischievous intent or maladministration of projects, but to misunderstanding of the character of social institutions, and flaws in the conceptualisation of social relations of gender and their relation to environmental change, underlying the measures used. Those measures stemmed from the recommendations advanced by two schools of thought about the relation between gender and environment: the 'women as environmental managers' or women, environment and development school, and (certain strands of) ecofeminism. Both of these schools have elements in common with the WID approach. Thus the failings of attempts at gender-sensitivity in the environmental field parallel the failings of policies based on the WID approach in other development sectors. [author]

Chapter 4 moves on to present recommendations for the future integration of gender analysis in environment research and policy. We draw on various alternative conceptualisations of gender-environment relations here, which can roughly be thought of as translations of GAD into the environment domain. Policy lessons are presented for gender sensitisation both of local level interventions at the programme and project level and of macro-level policies, especially those stemming from the application of environmental economics.

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