Abstract
ABSTRACT Local gender norms constitute a critical component of the enabling (or disabling) environment for improved agricultural livelihoods – alongside policies, markets, and other institutional dimensions. Yet, they have been largely ignored in agricultural research for development. This viewpoint is based on many years of experience, including a recent major comparative research initiative, GENNOVATE, on how gender norms and agency interact to shape agricultural change at local levels. The evidence suggests that approaches which engage with normative dimensions of agricultural development and challenge underlying structures of inequality, are required to generate lasting gender-equitable development in agriculture and natural resource management.
Highlights
Strong evidence and compelling arguments have been marshalled to demonstrate how addressing gender disparities in agriculture contributes to poverty reduction and food and nutrition security
Local gender norms constitute a critical component of the enabling environment for improved agricultural livelihoods – alongside policies, markets, and other institutional dimensions. They have been largely ignored in agricultural research for development. This viewpoint is based on many years of experience, including a recent major comparative research initiative, GENNOVATE, on how gender norms and agency interact to shape agricultural change at local levels
The evidence suggests that approaches which engage with normative dimensions of agricultural development and challenge underlying structures of inequality, are required to generate lasting genderequitable development in agriculture and natural resource management
Summary
Strong evidence and compelling arguments have been marshalled to demonstrate how addressing gender disparities in agriculture contributes to poverty reduction and food and nutrition security. Whether externally introduced or developed by farmers themselves, agricultural innovation requires strong agency (the ability to make strategic decisions concerning one’s own life and to act upon them), but is contextually embedded and shaped by gender norms as well as other dimensions of what can be described as the local opportunity structure This comprises the specific combinations of agricultural and natural resource management (NRM) technologies, infrastructure, institutions, social organisation and other resources in a local context. Our model provides for diverse types of changes in the opportunity structure, illustrated with fuzzy lines, but emphasises the agentic “spark” that is indispensable for inclusive and empowering innovation processes Factors such as new agricultural technologies, jobs, education or ICT may enlarge women’s agency without necessarily having much effect on the norms that underpin gender roles and relations. In the field of AR4D, gender-transformative research is still relatively new territory, with great need for increased attention
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