Abstract
The water-energy-food security nexus concept is a widely recognized analytical approach to achieve sustainable development goals. However, to date, related thinking has mostly been applied at higher scales in a top-down manner, while bottom-up and local scale applications remain limited. This includes the gender dimension of the nexus, which is one of the sustainable development goals. Narrowing this gap, this paper describes and assesses the food-energy-land nexus from a smallholder farm household perspective in the context of rural Ethiopia through a gender-specific lens. To explore the differences between men and women perspective of the nexus, we adopted the Actors, Resources, Dynamics and Interactions (ARDI) to co-develop a mental model of the nexus concept combined with statistical analysis. Using this approach, we examined the key direct actors and the linkages between major resources including the processes that affect the management by gender. The results indicate that there are four aspects that differentiate male and female perspectives with respect to the water-energy-food nexus. These differences include (1) access to external actors, (2) perceptions of target resources, (3) gender specific productive roles, and (4) decision making with respect to target resource management and utilization, which may affect the dynamics and governance of the water-energy-food nexus. With regards to factors associated with time spent for collecting water and fuel and crop production vary according to gender type. Overlooking these differences could make the nexus approach unrealistic to achieve gender equity while further aggrevating the already burdening roles of women including children within households.
Highlights
We explore gender as one of many factors influencing perspectives of the WEF nexus concept at the local household level using a conceptual model of nexus systems (Villamor, 2014)
We describe the role of WEF nexus resources in the livelihoods, as well as, the processes driving changes in WEF nexus and usage of WEF resources according to gender
Conceptualizing the WEF nexus at the local level and according to gender types using ARDI approach allowed to identify the areas of gender differences: Access to External Actors That Shapes the Dynamics of the WEF Nexus Our findings show that male and female farmers have differential access to external actors
Summary
The water-energy-food (WEF) nexus concept has become central to sustainable development (Allouche et al, 2015), for technical assessments to improve resource recovery and system efficiency (Hoff, 2011; Scott et al, 2015), for identifying trade-offs and optimizing synergies across nexus sectors (Bazilian et al, 2011; Howells et al, 2013), and for designing efforts to alleviate poverty and food insecurity (Hoff, 2011; Ringler et al, 2013; Guta et al, 2017). Gender-Specific Perspectives on Food-Energy-Land Nexus Issues nexus concept has received considerable attention in government agenda (Allouche et al, 2015), the current nexus concept frameworks are often focused on macro-level drivers of resource consumption patterns (Biggs et al, 2015) and a few focus on a micro-level scale (Endo et al, 2017). Security of WEF resources remains the core element of the nexus challenge (Hoff, 2011; Bizikova et al, 2013) and it goes beyond access to related resources, which includes the capacity to utilize these resources as well as the social dynamics and power relationships that affect the management of these resources (Biggs et al, 2015). We explore the different factors affecting the male and female time allocation for utilizing nexus resources
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