Exploring Gender Tenure Security And Landscape Governance Approaches And Findings Lessons From Eight Years Of Research

This brief synthesizes approaches and findings from gender research conducted by the CGIAR Program on Policy, Institutions, and Markets (PIM). The focus of this work is the governance of natural resources and policy and institutions for improved natural resources management. This body of research analyzes how tenure security affects sustainable management and how individuals, groups, and communities govern land, water, fish stocks, and forests. An important focus of this work involves the following questions: (1) who has what rights with respect to these resources (particularly for women and members of marginalized groups), (2) what are their roles in managing natural resources, and (3) what livelihood benefits do they receive? Without a contextualized understanding of these questions, policies and practices can inadvertently exclude women, reinforce historical practices of gender injustice, or introduce new inequalities that worsen natural resource management and poverty.

Gender relations influence people’s access to, use and management of land and other natural resources. They also influence, and are influenced by, ownership, tenure and user rights to land and forests. Policies and interventions aimed at improving the governance of natural resources and landscapes need to benefit women as well as men. A failure to address differing needs, roles and responsibilities of women and men, and underlying gender relations and how they are changing, reduces their effectiveness and will risk perpetuating gender inequality. This study synthesizes the contribution of the CGIAR Program on Policy, Institutions and Markets (PIM) flagship on Governance of Natural Resources to knowledge regarding gender and its influence on tenure security and landscape governance. It discusses the scientific contributions to the broader wealth of related literature by analyzing and summarizing key lessons about gender from these studies, where possible, with respect to outcomes and impacts in natural resource management, food security, and poverty alleviation. This information will help researchers better communicate the salience of the Flagship’s research for current and prospective donors and other partners, in order to influence strategies and interventions aimed at addressing challenges related to these three arenas.

Gender relations shape women’s and men’s identities, norms, rules, and responsibilities. They influence people’s access to, use, and management of land and other natural resources, including ownership, tenure, and user rights to land and forests. A substantial body of research on these issues comes from the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM), through its Flagship 5 research theme. Flagship 5 focused on gender and social inclusion in relation to land and natural resource tenure and to landscape governance, and analyzed how tenure security affects sustainable management of land, water, fish stocks, and forests. This Food Policy Report reviews the scientific contributions from Flagship 5 to the broader wealth of related literature, including key lessons about gender from these studies with respect to outcomes and impacts on natural resource management, food security, and poverty alleviation.

Since CIFOR last presented a 10-year strategy in 2008, we find ourselves in a world with continually evolving development and environment challenges. Millions of hectares of tropical forests have been converted to agriculture, degraded landscapes amount to nearly 2 billion hectares, and inequality has grown in countries around the world. Yet, there is reason to be optimistic: forest expansion and restoration are gaining ground, the rate of deforestation is slowing, and awareness of the importance of forests is spreading among governments, corporations and the global public In 2015, key developments such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Climate Agreement formed the basis of a new global development framework, at the forefront of which is forestry and landscapes. CIFOR’s 2016-2025 strategy builds explicitly on this new framework, defining the ways in which our forestry research, capacity development and engagement will support and inform the emerging development agenda.

This book explores the gendered dimensions of recent land governance transformations across the globe in the wake of unprecedented pressures on land and natural resources. These complex contemporary forces are reconfiguring livelihoods and impacting women’s positions, their tenure security and well-being, and that of their families. Bringing together fourteen empirical community case studies from around the world, the book examines governance transformations of land and land-based resources resulting from four major processes of tenure change: commercial land based investments, the formalization of customary tenure, the privatization of communal lands, and post-conflict resettlement and redistribution reforms. Each contribution carefully analyses the gendered dimensions of these transformations, exploring both the gender impact of the land tenure reforms and the social and political economy within which these reforms materialize. The cases provide important insights for decision makers to better promote and design an effective gender lens into land tenure reforms and natural resource management policies. This book will be of great interest to researchers engaging with land and natural resource management issues from a wide variety of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, development studies, and political science, as well as policy makers, practitioners, and activists concerned with environment, development, and social equity.

This enlightening book brings together the work of gender and forestry specialists from various backgrounds and fields of research and action to analyse global gender conditions as related to forests. Using a variety of methods and approaches, they build on a spectrum of theoretical perspectives to bring depth and breadth to the relevant issues and address timely and under-studied themes. Focusing particularly on tropical forests, the book presents both local case studies and global comparative studies from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as the US and Europe. The studies range from personal histories of elderly American women’s attitudes toward conservation, to a combined qualitative / quantitative international comparative study on REDD+, to a longitudinal examination of oil palm and gender roles over time in Kalimantan. Issues are examined across scales, from the household to the nation state and the global arena; and reach back to the past to inform present and future considerations. The collection will be of relevance to academics, researchers, policy makers and advocates with different levels of familiarity with gender issues in the field of forestry.