Gender Livelihoods Research Articles

Gendered livelihood impacts and responses to an invasive, transboundary weed in a rural Ethiopian community

Gender as unequal power relations intersects with global environmental change threatening agriculture-based livelihoods, including land degradation, increasing climate variability, and invasive alien plants. Commonly overlooked, invasive alien plants may have gendered impacts on everyday life that disproportionately affect the less powerful. Drawing on experiences of smallholder farmers in Ethiopia’s Oromia region with an invasive, transboundary weed, Parthenium hysterophorus L., this paper illustrates how environmental change interacts with pre-existing vulnerabilities to shape individual and household-level impacts and responses. We applied a feminist perspective in livelihoods and environmental change research and praxis to explore the intersection of gendered livelihoods and parthenium management in spaces of everyday life. While invasive plants, including parthenium, may be easily perceptible in the field, understanding impacts on livelihoods requires consideration of women’s and men’s roles and responsibilities within the broader household compound as well as intra-household decision-making. Parthenium can be harmful to environmental, animal, and human health, but unduly impacts women’s labor, spaces, and assets, including cows whose milk may be tainted by grazing in parthenium-infested fields. We demonstrate the importance of considering women’s social networks and so-called reproductive space and labor to understand gendered and place-based inequities of climate change. This study reveals intimate connections between environmental stressors and gendered livelihoods. Our findings demonstrate how inequalities can be reinforced by new forms of vulnerability, with response options socially differentiated. We argue that a feminist livelihood lens helps bridge the global scale of environmental change with local scales of gendered livelihood adaptation embedded within broader socio-environmental change.

Emotions and gendered experiences of livelihood migration: memos from Nicaragua and Guatemala

With increasingly difficult conditions for smallholder agricultural production, labor migration is an essential component of livelihoods for many rural families in the Global South. This migration is gendered and is often normalized as part of households’ livelihood portfolios. Yet it also can reproduce livelihood precarity and help maintain underlying structural inequalities. The role of labor migration as a livelihood strategy therefore requires continued research attention. Livelihood processes, including those connected to gendered labor migration, are infused with and shaped by a variety of emotions, including stress, longing, suffering, or contrastingly, aspiration, exhilaration, wellbeing, or happiness, that are experienced intersectionally. In this Viewpoint, we present our perspective that excluding analysis of emotional experience imperils comprehension of the drivers, motivations, and impacts of growing livelihood migration and other gendered livelihoods shifts. Emotions are core to migration decision-making, impact, and experience and therefore are central to any holistic understanding of the migration-livelihoods nexus. Paying attention to the role of emotion at the livelihood-migration nexus, where emotions often take center stage, is also a helpful entrée for taking both affect and intersectionality more seriously in the broader context of gendered livelihoods in general. We have developed this perspective while conducting fieldwork for research on labor migration and environmental change in Guatemala’s Pacific lowlands and Nicaragua’s northwest and draw upon that fieldwork to make our case.

Intergenerational gendered livelihoods: Marriage, matchmaking and Rural-Urban migration in China

This paper uses marriage as a lens to highlight norms, customs, identities and shared values that shape livelihoods and give meaning to intergenerational and gendered practices at the individual and household level. Drawing on feminist contributions to understanding power differences between women and men and between generations, this paper shows that while livelihood may be seen as involving mainly the economic and material aspects of living, it is equally a matter of how people pursue important goals in life such as marital formation, and how these goals are situated in social, cultural, historical and locational contexts. Based on interviews in Anhui and Sichuan provinces, I highlight how intergenerational livelihoods are influenced by gendered ideology and practice, in particular transactional marriage, parents’ and children’s responsibilities in enabling marital formation and lineage, and the pursuit of rural-urban migration to enhance men’s competitiveness in the marriage market. I foreground the voices and narratives of rural Chinese and rural-urban migrants, who share how they live their lives, resources that they have access to, strategies that they pursue, and their goals and desired outcomes that are situated in relevant social, cultural and spatial contexts. Quotes from interviewees underscore the deep-rooted patriarchy that has manifested itself through marriage, especially the traditions of patrilocal exogamy and transactional matchmaking. Specifically, I draw attention to the roles of house-building and bride price in marital formation, and their implications for rural-urban migration as a long-term household strategy and a way of life. By doing so, this paper emphasizes the social and cultural contexts, in particular gender and intergenerational relations, for research on rural-urban migration.

Implications of Land Use Land Cover Transformation for Gendered Livelihoods: Insights from Moyna Basin of Purba Medinipur, West Bengal, India

The Moyna basin of West Bengal is experiencing a rapid transformation in land use and land cover (LULC) as waterbodies are rapidly increasing at the expense of low-lying agricultural lands. The transformation in the LULC pattern in Moyna basin has been studied earlier based on the focus of climate change, biodiversity and other environmental issues. However, very little is known about the implications of this transformation on gender roles, responsibilities and livelihoods. This study examines the interconnectedness between LULC transformation and its differential impact on the livelihoods and workload of men and women using an intersectional perspective in three villages across Moyna block. The data were collected using a mixed-method approach and comprised of three major sources of information—observations, photographs and interviews. Results show that the changes in LULC have occurred partly as an impact of climate change and partly due to the inclination towards aquaculture due to decline in profitability of agriculture and farming practices. In the context of these livelihood changes, a fundamental shift in gendered roles has occurred. It has been found that the switch to aquaculture has led to two prominent outcomes, that is, depeasantisation of agricultural workers and defeminisation of the overall workforce. While women and men were equally displaced from agriculture with the advent of aquaculture, women were faced with additional challenges of unequal social gender norms and limited opportunities for alternative employment. It further shows that, the impacts of land use change on livelihoods are diverse and is a complex process as factors, like—class, caste, patriarchal family relations, family structure and the nature of the labour market intersect with gender and it also makes some women more vulnerable than other men and women.

Distilling Culture into Commodity? The Emergent Homemade Alcohol Trade and Gendered Livelihoods in Upland Northern Vietnam

Ethnic minorities in the uplands of northern Vietnam are experiencing rapid state- and market-induced economic and agrarian transformations. These communities are having to make important livelihood adaptations to adjust, while living at Vietnam’s economic and political margins. We analyse one such market-induced transformation that some upland communities are deciding to engage with, connected to an increasing demand for locally distilled alcohol. Against the backdrop of traditional production for domestic consumption, distilled alcoholic beverages are now (re)emerging as a cash-earning opportunity. Drawing on interviews and observations with ethnic minority Hmong and Yao women and men in Lào Cai Province, we analyse the degree to which household members have engaged with this market opportunity and the often complex reasons behind their choices. We reveal how an apparently simple shift in scale of a customary activity generates nuanced cultural, gendered and generational debates that, at times, are at odds with mere profitability.

The Forgotten Lives: Connecting Gender, Security, and Everyday Livelihoods in Ukraine's Conflict

Recent debates within Women, Peace and Security (WPS) scholarship (e.g., Bergeron, Cohn, and Duncanson 2017; Elias 2015; True 2015) have underlined the need to position the WPS agenda in the context of broader feminist security analysis as defined by early feminist international relations scholars (e.g., Tickner 1992). More precisely, this requires integrating feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist political economy (FPE). At the center of these largely theoretical reflections is a concern that gender-responsive peace-building efforts have too often been undermined by postwar neoliberal economic processes. This essay provides an empirical contribution to this debate, taking the case study of Ukraine as an atypical example of how WPS has been adopted and implemented for the first time during an active conflict. The integration of FPE and FSS proves especially relevant for a country in conflict, where economic austerity policies come along with increased military expenditure. The essay illustrates that the bridging of security and economy is entirely absent in Ukraine's WPS agenda, which has largely prioritized military security while failing to connect it to the austerity policies and the gendered structural inequalities deepened by the ongoing conflict.

The co-production of gendered livelihoods and seasonal livelihoods in the floodplains of the Peruvian Amazon

Gender is poorly understood in rural Amazonia. There remains limited understanding of how livelihoods are gendered or how labour is divided within the household. In this paper, I offer a conceptual framework for understanding gendered division of labour and gendered livelihoods in rural Amazonia. I draw on ethnographic data collected in two riverine mestizo villages located on the floodplains of the Ucayali River, Peru. I disaggregate riverine agro-fishing livelihoods by introducing the gendered and seasonal divisions of livelihood activities, highlighting how gender roles and livelihood seasonality need to be understood as co-produced. I suggest that rather than the annual flood being a ‘miserable’ period as previously suggested in the literature, the flood season and flood recession represent two socially distinct periods, with livelihoods rotationally focused within and beyond the household respectively. Gendered livelihoods are further complicated by household composition and life-stage, with single-headed households, particularly female-headed households, often over-burdened with productive and reproductive labour. This paper begins a necessary conversation of gender and social difference in Peruvian Amazonia, while questioning the relationship between gendered livelihoods and seasonality.

Renegotiating Gender Identities and Sexual Bodies: Zimbabwean Migrant Women’s Narratives of Everyday Life in South Africa

A wide range of literature reveals that women in many African societies have historically been faced with the challenge of patriarchy and lack of freedom in their households—a challenge also mirrored in institutions of education, the economy, law and politics. This gendered position produces gendered inequalities which lead women to experience poverty more severely than men. The feminisation of poverty has over the years resulted in the feminisation of migration, which implies a change in women’s migratory identities and roles, where women are increasingly migrating as independent migrants rather than to rejoin male family members. Often, women migrate due to a desire for greater autonomy and a decrease in social restrictions on their productive and reproductive bodies. They also migrate to enhance their economic opportunities and seek new survival strategies in their endeavour to cater for their family’s needs and those that pertain to their being. It is against this backdrop that this article explores the experiences of migrant women and the strategies they employ as they, against all odds, renegotiate and reconstitute their gendered identities and sexual bodies in order to survive the complex realities of living in a “foreign” space. The article focuses on 15 Zimbabwean migrant women’s experiences of feminised poverty that pushed them out of the boundaries of their homeland, and the sexual and gendered livelihoods that emerged as part of their survival strategies in South Africa. As the article engages with Zimbabwean migrant women’s experiences prior to and after moving to South Africa, it is at work to illuminate how sexuality and migration shape and reshape one another. The article analyses the role of sexuality in gender and migration research that has not been given the pre-eminence it should in the Global South. Overall, the article reveals that the often subsumed and hidden role of sexuality in gender and migration research adds another complex layer of vulnerability to the bodies, identities and roles of Zimbabwean migrant women in South Africa.

Changing Dynamics Of Gendered Livelihoods Practices In Post Crises Of Swat Northwest Pakistan

This research attempts to focus on the changing dynamics of livelihoods practices among gender, and how conflict and flood crises (2005-2010) effected the various needs of livelihoods of the social classes in Swat valley of northwest Pakistan. Qualitative methods; formal/informal interviews, focus groups discussion, key informant interviews and participant observation, were used to explore the dynamics of changes in occupations, household dependency and those factors which influenced the changes accessing livelihood resources. The paper revealed that those households depending agriculture, small business and labour in market have been highly affected during conflict and flood crises in comparison to those households who were depending on remittances, public and private jobs and skilled works. The study found that the livelihood dependency of the households in all villages was based on agricultural and natural resources, which has changed to market and jobs based oriented resources. The factors like economic development, migration, conflict and displacement, and post conflict development have created diverse opportunities of livelihood resources for men and women, which brought social and cultural changes in the livelihood practices between genders at household level. The research emphasizes on the long-term livelihoods strategies and gendered equal opportunity policies by government and NGOs after the crises, which may improve the social statuses of the men and women.

Changing Dynamics Of Gendered Livelihoods Practices In Post Crises Of Swat Northwest Pakistan

This research attempts to focus on the changing dynamics of livelihoods practices among gender, and how conflict and flood crises (2005-2010) effected the various needs of livelihoods of the social classes in Swat valley of northwest Pakistan. Qualitative methods; formal/informal interviews, focus groups discussion, key informant interviews and participant observation, were used to explore the dynamics of changes in occupations, household dependency and those factors which influenced the changes accessing livelihood resources. The paper revealed that those households depending agriculture, small business and labour in market have been highly affected during conflict and flood crises in comparison to those households who were depending on remittances, public and private jobs and skilled works. The study found that the livelihood dependency of the households in all villages was based on agricultural and natural resources, which has changed to market and jobs based oriented resources. The factors like economic development, migration, conflict and displacement, and post conflict development have created diverse opportunities of livelihood resources for men and women, which brought social and cultural changes in the livelihood practices between genders at household level. The research emphasizes on the long-term livelihoods strategies and gendered equal opportunity policies by government and NGOs after the crises, which may improve the social statuses of the men and women.

Land reform and changing gender patterns in rural farmland ownership

abstractThe implementation of land reform in South Africa intends to bring about equity and equality but has encountered unanticipated or unplanned outcomes that have unforeseen effects for the various actors involved, particularly women. In this paper, we focus on the emerging patterns in gender ownership of farmland made available through the farmland redistribution programme. Analysing data from a mixed methods approach that used a household survey instrument and was followed up with individual and group interviews, we examine the outcomes and consequences of land redistribution with respect to the gender ownership of redistributed land. The findings provisionally indicate that the farmland redistribution programme has influenced ownership patterns that tend to include women into joint land ownership agreements alongside men in far greater numbers than women-only headed households. A review of policy interventions indicates that this joint-ownership outcome was never proposed. It has its own consequences with regard to de jure and de facto ownership of and access to farmland. Furthermore, it is in stark contrast to the policy idea of increasing redistributed land ownership exclusively for women in order to address gender imbalances within land ownership by black farmers. Despite differences across provinces, men as individual owners are the main beneficiaries of land redistribution. Women tend to enter into arrangements with men to acquire land so that they can meet the own-contribution requirements of the redistribution applications. In doing so they now have legal rights, as opposed to customary and common law rights, to this land. The effect of these changing land ownership relationships and patterns requires deeper research across these and other areas of South Africa especially with regard to gender ownership and gender livelihoods at household level.

Gendered livelihoods and social change in post-apartheid South Africa

This article employs gendered livelihoods analysis and participatory methods to examine the politics of development among small-scale rooibos tea farmers in a rural coloured area of southwestern South Africa. Differentiating between sources of conflict and cohesion, I discuss how communities navigated resource scarcity, unstable markets, and shifting relations. While patriarchal dynamics informed livelihoods, with males and elders enjoying greater access than females and young adults, women took advantage of relatively fluid female roles to enter into agriculture and commerce. In contrast, rigid male roles and unattainable expectations of manhood isolated men, engendering destructive behaviors among young men in particular. Communities maintained social cohesion through democratic arrangements, and a politics of identification enabled research participants to relate to differential interests. In addition to providing situated and relational insight into the identitarian aspects of rural development, participatory gendered livelihoods analysis offers a critical means for deconstructing power and decolonizing knowledge.

The Stepping Stones and Creating Futures intervention to prevent intimate partner violence and HIV-risk behaviours in Durban, South Africa: study protocol for a cluster randomized control trial, and baseline characteristics

BackgroundPreventing intimate partner violence (IPV) remains a global public health challenge. Studies suggest urban informal settlements have particularly high levels of IPV and HIV-prevalence and these settlements are rapidly growing. The current evidence base of effective approaches to preventing IPV recognizes the potential of combining economic strengthening and gender transformative interventions. However, few of these interventions have been done in urban informal settlements, and almost none have included men as direct recipients of these interventions.MethodsStepping Stones and Creating Futures intervention is a participatory gender transformative and livelihoods strengthening intervention. It is being evaluated through a cluster randomized control trial amongst young women and men (18–30) living in urban informal settlements in eThekwini Municipality, South Africa. The evaluation includes a qualitative process evaluation and cost-effectiveness analysis. A comparison of baseline characteristics of participants is also included.DiscussionThis is one of the first large trials to prevent IPV and HIV-vulnerability amongst young women and men in urban informal settlements. Given the mixed methods evaluation, the results of this trial have the ability to develop a stronger understanding of what works to prevent violence against women and the processes of change in interventions.Trial registrationNCT03022370. Registered 13 January 2017, retrospectively registered.

Gender and sustainable livelihoods: linking gendered experiences of environment, community and self

In this essay I explore the economic, social, environmental and cultural changes taking place in Bolsena, Italy, where agricultural livelihoods have rapidly diminished in the last two decades. I examine how gender dynamics have shifted with the changing values and livelihoods of Bolsena through three women’s narratives detailing their gendered experiences of environment, community and self. I reflect on these changes with Sabrina, who is engaged in a feminist community-based organization; Anna, who is running an alternative wine bar; and Isabella, a jeweler, who is engaged in ecofeminist practices. My analysis is based on concepts developed by feminist political ecology: specifically, the theory of rooted networks from Dianne Rocheleau, Donna Haraway’s concept of naturecultures (and the work of J. K. Gibson-Graham on new economic imaginaries emerging from the politics of place. I aim to think with, reflect upon and provoke from the “otherwise”, taking into account the lived relations entwining nature and gender. My article looks at the interconnections of gender, environment and livelihoods, attentive to the daily needs, embodied interactions and labours of these three women as part of a reappropriation, reconstruction and reinvention of Bolsena’s lifeworld. By listening to the stories of their everyday lives and struggles, I show the dynamic potential of the politics of place and the efforts to build diverse economies and more ethical economic and ecological relationships based on gender-aware subjectivities and values.

Fisheries as a way of life: Gendered livelihoods, identities and perspectives of artisanal fisheries in eastern Brazil

Although women engage in small-scale fisheries around the globe, their roles, contributions and perspectives tend to be overlooked in policy making. In Brazil, although women account for almost half of the registered fishers in the country, their roles are absent from scholarship and policy-making decisions. This gap is addressed in this paper, which presents the case of artisanal fisheries in eastern Brazil where women play a major role in fisheries. Whereas, the majority of men engage in offshore fisheries, women prepare shrimp for the market, extract shellfish from near shore habitats, and preserve by-catch using traditional methods, for income and subsistence; activities enabling them to simultaneously supervise children. Fisher's activities are synergistic in maintaining household livelihoods, which are culturally embedded, and their identities are constituted from a young age when children participate in fishery activities. Both men and women choose fisheries as a way of life and they perceive change in fisheries differently based on the resources they extract. The findings are consistent with other scholarship demonstrating gendered contributions to fisheries, and how fisheries “are a way of life” constituted by deep social, cultural and ecological ties. Fishery policy makers need to better recognize the diverse roles and perspectives of men and women in fisheries in order to achieve equitable outcomes and livelihood sustainability goals.

(Re)constructing rural–urban spaces: gendered livelihoods, migration, and natural resources in South Africa

Critical approaches to development theory and practice provide alternative perspectives that focus on counterhegemonic and discursive dimensions of the development process. Feminist development is one such approach that opens up new spaces and opportunities to promote socially progressive and sustainable economic strategies. This paper uses feminist development geography as a framework to highlight the intersection of diverse spaces and economic strategies at the household and community levels. The analysis focuses on gendered livelihoods that are linked to circular migration and use of natural resources as a way to understand the integration of rural and urban spaces of development. The empirical section of this paper examines demographic patterns and socio-economic trends in Limpopo Province, South Africa as a context for the case study of two community-based women’s producer groups. These examples illustrate how economic strategies and social identities are embedded in and integrate both rural and urban spaces. This analysis contributes to feminist and post-structural development theory and practice by highlighting the potential for progressive forms of economic and social empowerment.

The irrelevance of access: theorising gender dilemmas and livelihoods

Arguments for improving the access of women to work and workplaces are seen as an important part of the social justice agenda or a business case for improving performance by drawing from a diverse workforce. Through our engagement with women from different work contexts, we attempt to discuss the implications of the concept of the access. We argue that the concept of access reinforces several marginalising discourses and provides legitimacy to dominant features of the employment relationship. We contend that an alternative feminist critique is necessary—one that recognises the cultural situatedness of women; the ability of culturally situated women to craft livelihoods that transcend the capitalist employment relationship; the need to dismantle the dualisms of several managerial frameworks instead of working within them; and the need to respectfully engage with feminist alternatives of organising rather than seek to render women subservient to current organisational frames.

A gendered perspective on energy poverty and livelihoods – Advancing the Millennium Development Goals in developing countries

abstract There is a growing need to advance access to energy services for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Globally, energy development largely underpins economic development and has differential impacts in developed and under-developed countries. At a micro-scale, the losers in the battle for access to energy resources are deemed to be the poor and within this category, women. This Article draws reciprocal synergies between energy production and use relationships, and the MDGs. It emphasises the importance of recognising the distinctly different situation of women and men in relation to energy consumption decisions, use arrangements and impacts. A gendered livelihoods framework presented in this Article draws largely from the work based on poverty, more specifically energy poverty and the resultant gender impacts which emphasise that issues related to income and ownership of resource assets (in this case, energy assets) is inadequate. This Article will thus argue that a more strategic focus should address the underlying structures that perpetuate poverty such as patriarchy, marginalisation, vulnerability, and exclusion from participation in decision-making processes. These are deemed as having a greater significance than mere quantifiable displays of poverty. The Article foregrounds that energy poverty has a distinctly female face and the attainment of the MDGs are unlikely to occur if both gender discrimination and energy poverty persist, although the MDGs were created to deal with inequitable practices and impacts. The Article advocates for efficient energy as well as developmental outcomes that are gender sensitive and that advance the needs of women in particular.

BOOK REVIEW: "Gender and Natural Resource Management Livelihoods, Mobility and Interventions" edited by Bernadette P. Resurreccion and Rebecca Elmhirst

BOOK REVIEW: "Gender and Natural Resource Management Livelihoods, Mobility and Interventions" edited by Bernadette P. Resurreccion and Rebecca Elmhirst

Gender and sustainable livelihoods: case study of South African farm workers

This study investigates how gender affects sustainable livelihoods in terms of the impact on food and nutrition security in farm worker households. Gender variables play a crucial role in the well-being of households, especially for women and children. A case study of South African farms shows that female-headed households, although having less access to earned income, take better care of the well-being of household members. While men remain the dominant earners, women have better access to social grants, remittances from relatives and informal incomes. Households led by women are found to have greater food security, defined as having physical, economic and social access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet dietary needs. The paper highlights the crucial role of women's access to resources and power relations within households for sustainable livelihoods and the need to include household and gender variables in demographic and health surveys.