Reframing women’s empowerment in water security programmes in Western Nepal

Leder, Stephanie; Clément, Floriane; Karki, Emma

doi:10.1080/13552074.2017.1335452

Cited by 48 publications

(64 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…FPE embraces an intersectional analysis (2) to demonstrate how differentiated access, use and control over natural resources such as water is conditioned by poverty, livelihoods and landlessness (Harris 2008). In South Asia, axes of social and economic differences in terms of age, ethnicity and caste shape water access and irrigation management (O'Reilly 2006;Sugden et al 2014;Leder et al 2017a;Panta and Resurrección 2017;Leder 2018). FPE can help to understand how subjectivities emerge (Nightingale 2011a(Nightingale , 2017, that is how social difference such as gender, age, or class, is produced and performed in collective resource management.…”

Section: Collective Resource Management and Feminist Political Ecologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Harris (2006), for example, demonstrated that new established water user groups reproduce old power relations. Water and agrarian developmental programmes are often designed by apolitical and technologically driven approaches and run the risk of reproducing or even exacerbating gender and other local power relations when neglecting intersectional approaches (Leder et al 2017a).…”

Section: Collective Resource Management and Feminist Political Ecologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Secondly, we explore the ways farming collective practices are produced by intersectionality, with a focus on gender, class, (e.g. shaped by land ownership, remittances received), caste, age, or individual's household position and family composition (Harris 2006;Nightingale 2011b;Leder et al 2017a). These complex social relations are often hidden in commons research but are vital for understanding how power relations shape resource management.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Ambivalences of collective farming: Feminist political ecologies from the Eastern Gangetic Plains

et al. 2019

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Collective farming has been suggested as a potentially useful approach for reducing inequality and transforming peasant agriculture. In collectives, farmers pool land, labor, irrigation infrastructure, agricultural inputs and harvest to overcome resource constraints and to increase their bargaining power. Employing a feminist political ecology lens, we reflect on the extent to which collective farming enables marginalized groups to engage in smallholder agriculture. We examine the establishment of 18 farmer collectives by an action research project in the Eastern Gangetic Plains, a region characterised by fragmented and small landholdings and a high rate of marginalised and landless farmers. We analyze ambivalances of collective farming practices with regard to (1) social relations across 106 Stephanie Leder et al. scales, (2) intersectionality and (3) emotional attachment. Our results in Saptari/ Eastern Terai in Nepal, Madhubani/Bihar, and Cooch Behar/West Bengal in India demonstrate how intra-household, group and community relations and emotional attachments to the family and neighbors mediate the redistribution of labor, land, produce and capital. We find that unequal gender relations, intersected by class, age, ethnicity and caste, are reproduced in collective action, land tenure and water management, and argue that a critical feminist perspective can support a more reflective and relational understanding of collective farming processes. Our analysis demonstrates that feminist political ecology can complement commons studies by providing meaningful insights on ambivalences around approaches such as collective farming.

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Section: Collective Resource Management and Feminist Political Ecologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Collective Resource Management and Feminist Political Ecologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Ambivalences of collective farming: Feminist political ecologies from the Eastern Gangetic Plains

et al. 2019

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“…Similarly, water policy discourses rely on the assumption that developing or rehabilitating local water supply infrastructures is a sufficient condition to improve women's livelihoods: 'the government stated: one house, one tap, if access to water supply is improved, then gender equity is addressed' (interview, male sociologist, government line agency). Yet, intra-household negotiations (Regmi & Fawcett, 1999), as well as gender, caste and local power hierarchies intersect to shape access to water with large inequalities among women from different age, class and caste (Leder et al, 2017).…”

Section: Policy Narrativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Policies are interacting with other strong drivers of change, some of which have aggravated gendered inequities, such as neoliberal reforms favouring water privatisation and marketisation (Ahlers & Zwarteveen, 2009;Harris, 2009;O'Reilly, 2011) and other political economic and environmental changes (Buechler & Hanson, 2015). Gender intersects with other social markers such as caste, ethnicity, class, age or religion in water injustices (Harris, 2008;O'Reilly, 2011;Leder et al, 2017). Several scholars have also pointed to how water management is embedded in day-today norms, social relations and practices ( Joshi, 2005;Vera Delgado & Zwarteveen, 2007;Ahlers & Zwarteveen, 2009;Sultana, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unravelling gendered practices in the public water sector in Nepal

Shrestha¹,

Clément

2019

Water Policy

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Despite decades of gender mainstreaming in the water sector, a wide gap between policy commitments and outcomes remains. This study aims at offering a fresh perspective on such policy gaps, by analysing how gendered discourses, institutions and professional culture contribute to policy gaps. We rely on a conceptual framework originally developed for analysing strategic change, which is used to analyse gender in the public water sector in Nepal. Our analysis relies on a review of national water policies and a series of semi-structured interviews with male and female water professionals from several public agencies. Our findings evidence how dominant discourses, formal rules and professional culture intersect to support and reproduce hegemonic masculine attitudes and practices of water professionals. Such attitudes and practices in turn favour a technocratic implementation of policy measures. We argue that gender equality policy initiatives in the water sector have overly focused on local level formal institutions and have not adequately considered the effects of masculine discourses, norms and culture to be effective in making progress towards gender equity. We conclude with policy recommendations.

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Gender inequality in urban water governance: Continuity and change in two towns of Nepal

Bhattarai¹,

Upadhyaya²,

Neupane³

et al. 2021

World Water Policy

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Gender‐based inequality has long been recognized as a challenge in water governance and urban development. Women do most of the water collection‐related tasks in the majority of low‐income country's urban areas, as they do in rural areas for drinking, household consumption, kitchen gardening, and farming. However, their voice is rarely heard in water governance. When climate change exacerbates water scarcity, it becomes harder for people to secure water with more pronounced effects on women. Drawing on the narratives of men and women involved in water management practices and also the views of the stakeholders who are part of water resource management in two towns in Nepal, this paper demonstrates emerging forms of gender inequality concerning access to and control over water resources, as well as associated services such as sanitation. We found that women's voice in water governance is systematically excluded, and such gender‐based disadvantage intersects with economic disadvantage as women in low‐income poor urban settlements are experiencing additional difficulty in accessing water and sanitation services. Gender inequity persists in the urban water sector, and of course the wider social structures, despite some progressive policy changes in recent years, such as the 30% quota reserved for women in local‐level water management bodies in Nepal. The paper concludes that tackling gender inequity in water management requires a transformative approach that seriously takes into account women's voice, critical awareness, and open deliberation over the causes and consequences of the current approaches and practices. Moreover, gender‐inclusive outcomes on water management are linked to changes in areas outside of the water sector, such as property ownership structures that constrain or enable women's access to water and related services.

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Reframing women’s empowerment in water security programmes in Western Nepal

Cited by 48 publications

References 7 publications

Ambivalences of collective farming: Feminist political ecologies from the Eastern Gangetic Plains

Ambivalences of collective farming: Feminist political ecologies from the Eastern Gangetic Plains

Unravelling gendered practices in the public water sector in Nepal

Gender inequality in urban water governance: Continuity and change in two towns of Nepal

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