Do environmental projects promote gender equity?

In the 1980s, governments and development agencies became much more aware of the need to consider gender issues in their environmental and natural resource management programmes. This led to changes in project design and implementation. It is too soon to say definitively how well this new gender-sensitive approach is working. But it may be a mistake to expect too much of the new style interventions.

Policy makers first came to appreciate that women 'play an essential role in the management of natural resources, including soil, water, forests and energy...and often have a profound traditional and contemporary knowledge of the natural world around them'. (World Bank, 1991). The exclusion of women from environmental projects - through outright neglect or belief in the gender neutrality of projects - would thus be a recipe for project failure.

Subsequently, donor agencies came to see women as especially vulnerable: 'their responsibilities as day-to-day environmental managers ...make women both victims of and contributors to the natural environment's degradation and pollution.' (Ibid).

On the other hand, gradually, awareness grew of many grassroots success stories of women fighting to conserve local resources - such as those described in Power to Change (Women's Feature Service, 1994). This then led to women being viewed as 'major local assets to be harnessed in the interests of better environmental management' (Davidson cited in Braidotti et al, 1994).

The new style of environmental project accordingly asks whether natural resource users are male or female and is concerned to 'reach the right people' in the delivery of services. For example, social forestry schemes have been redesigned, recognising the diverse uses of tree products and different species preferences of men and women: men typically want timber for construction and fencing, while women need fodder and woodfuel. And, in water and sanitation activities, women's participation on water committees or in maintaining facilities is becoming the rule rather than the exception.

"Women were seen as 'assets to be harnessed in the interests of better environmental management'".

But the ideas behind the new approach are not always honoured in practice. First, project intentions can be subverted. Leaving environmental management to community level institutions - such as those promoted by the Aga Khan programme in northern Pakistan - does not guarantee women's access to project resources. And the aim of involving women at all stages of the project cycle often translates into demands on women to do voluntary work, without giving them a fair share of project benefits.

Second, compared to a gender analysis of the underlying problems, environmental projects promote a limited set of aims. Policy documents (e.g. World Bank, 1991) acknowledge that lack of property rights reduces women's capacity to conserve environmental resources but the new approach does not address this issue. Donors still favour giving women access to credit, to help them manage resources and build up assets. This is naive in assuming that traditional male control over land and other assets will not extend to newly acquired natural resources. Trying to give women authority within isolated projects without taking into account their restricted property rights is almost bound to fail.

Is there any way of strengthening women's control over resources in environmental projects? Legal changes guaranteeing women independent property rights and increased political representation are needed at the national level. But such reforms take time. They also need to be complemented at the local level by building up women's capacity to claim the new rights attained.

One approach suggested for environmental projects is support for collective actions by women (Agarwal, 1994). This has the potential to confer inalienable use rights - though not necessarily property rights - over natural resources. Women have more chance of exercising rights as a group than as individuals. Wasteland development projects in India (such as the Bankora projects in West Bengal) have successfully supported women's group efforts to regenerate forest and improve land productivity. They also build on women's greater use rights over common property than on privatised lands. But women need to keep the initiative here: new government policies in India are formalising collective management of forests under male-dominated communal institutions, undermining women's traditional property rights in forest resources.

Support for women's collective actions in addressing natural resource management problems is one instance of a general strategy to strengthen women's bargaining power in their relations with men. Other examples need to be found to develop the policy relevance of this approach to a broad range of environmental problems.

Susan Joekes, IDS Fellow in http://www.gdrc.org/gender/gender-and-envi.html