Forests and Food Security: What’s Gender Got to Do with It?

Abstract

Hunger remains a key development problem in the 21st century. Within this context, there is renewed attention to the importance of forests and their role in supplementing the food and nutrition needs of rural populations. With a concurrent uptake of "gender mainstreaming" for sustainable development, there is also a call for understanding the gendered dynamics of forest governance and food security. In this paper, we reviewed emerging research (2009-2014) on forests and food security and on the ways gender is said to matter. As with previous work on gender and natural resource management, we found that gender is an important variable; but how, to what degree and why are different in every context. That is, despite the suggestion of clear linkages, the relationships between gender, forests and food security are not generalizable across contexts. Understanding the relationship between forest resources and food security requires attention to gender disparities at the local level, but also to the broader political and economic context in which those disparities are reinforced. We flag the need to guard against ahistorical and technical approaches to gender and suggest some example research questions that use a more relational view of gender-one that examines how political economy and social power structure access to resources at multiple scales.

Gender in the jungle: a critical assessment of women and gender in current (2014–2016) forestry research

“…On the ground, however, the realities are more complex than such binary representations indicate. Women and men play varying roles and hold diverse responsibilities in agricultural production and resource management (Agarwal 1992, Asher and Shattuck 2017, Elmhirst and Resurreccion 2008, Nightingale 2006. The analytical and empirical work on gender also reveals that there is much heterogeneity among women and that their social positions depend not just on their relations with men but are interconnected with their class, ethnicity, geographic location, and age.…”

Testing a model to assess women’s inclusion and participation in community-based resource management in Solomon Islands

“…Yet, this community focus often overlooks the fact that not all resource users are able to participate equally. Gender, age, insider/outsider dynamics, and religion, among other factors, influence power relations and individual agency, impacting how individuals and groups are able to participate in natural resource management (NRM) decision-making (Asher & Shattuck, 2017;FAO 2017;Fajber & Vernooy, 2006;Lawless et al, 2019). The intersectionality of these factors often sees women, youth, those with disabilities and other marginalised groups excluded from participating fully in NRM (World Bank, 2013).…”

Circuits of Social Reproduction: Nature, Labor, and Capitalism

“…Further, 6 percent to 44 percent of total imputed household income in the Global South is derived just from the forest commons (Angelsen et al 2014). This high reliance on nature and particularly the natural commons is predicated on nonwaged labor, and particularly women’s labor in the Global South (Asher and Shattuck 2017). Two points are important here.…”