Routledge Handbook of Gender and Agriculture

Carolyn E. Sachs, Leif Jensen, Paige Castellanos, Kathleen Sexsmith, Carolyn E. Sachs, Leif Jensen, Paige Castellanos, Kathleen Sexsmith, Carolyn E. Sachs, Leif Jensen, Paige Castellanos, Kathleen Sexsmith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429576355
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Agriculture covers major theoretical issues as well as critical empirical shifts in gender and agriculture.

Gender relations in agriculture are shifting in most regions of the world with changes in the structure of agriculture, the organization of production, international restructuring of value chains, climate change, the global pandemic, and national and multinational policy changes. This book provides a cutting-edge assessment of the field of gender and agriculture, with contributions from both leading scholars and up-and-coming academics as well as policymakers and practitioners.

The handbook is organized into four parts: part 1, institutions, markets, and policies; part 2, land, labor, and agrarian transformations; part 3, knowledge, methods, and access to information; and part 4, farming people and identities. The last chapter is an epilogue from many of the contributors focusing on gender, agriculture, and shifting food systems during the coronavirus pandemic. The chapters address both historical subjects as well as ground-breaking work on gender and agriculture, which will help to chart the future of the field. The handbook has an international focus with contributions examining issues at both the global and local levels with contributors from across the world.

With contributions from leading academics, policymakers, and practitioners, and with a global outlook, the Routledge Handbook of Gender and Agriculture is an essential reference volume for scholars, students, and practitioners interested in gender and agriculture.

Chapter 13 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

PART 1

Institutions, markets, and policies for gender and agriculture

1
Gender mainstreaming in agricultural and forestry institutions

Seema Arora-Jonsson and Stephanie Leder

Gender mainstreaming in agricultural and forestry institutions

Gender mainstreaming, as a necessity, comes up frequently in the realm of development and environmental governance and often in different places at different times. The push came first when feminists at the Beijing Conference on Women in 1995 made it an essential part of all national strategies. Since then, gender mainstreaming has come to mean many different things. In the world of agricultural institutions though, most meanings have hinged on the persons of “women” and their inclusion into mainstream programs and projects. Critics have argued that gender mainstreaming policies have served to bureaucratize gender and that adding women to existing programs underwrites their previous invisibility by reducing them to a tick mark on required forms. Such bureaucratic approaches, according to many, have absolved organizations from doing anything substantive about gender discrimination that arises out of inequalities in power relations. Some have, in fact, argued for doing away with the idea of gender mainstreaming altogether (see Arora-Jonsson, 2014, for an overview of this debate).

In this chapter, we take up the question of gender mainstreaming with an eye to how it has been undertaken in the global North and South, the obvious connections in the ways in which it is conceived in transnational spaces and institutions, but also some interesting disjunctures that make themselves apparent when seen in a North–South perspective.¹ At the core of the debates on mainstreaming has been that gender (read women) needs to be mainstreamed and brought into the fold—the fold being markets. And yet, research has also shown how women often choose to keep outside or negotiate their presence in markets in novel ways (e.g., Arora-Jonsson, 2013, p. 224; Newman, 2013).

In the following sections, we examine the issue of gender mainstreaming in agriculture and forestry in the North and South. There has been relatively less research on large agricultural and forestry organizations from a gender perspective, especially those based in the global South. Here, we take two examples of gender mainstreaming and draw upon existing research to illustrate some of the major dilemmas as well as parallels and disjunctures in gender mainstreaming across the North and South. The examples span cases from a global context: the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) to one of its organizations at a national level, the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in Nepal, and the Lantbrukarnas Riksförbund or Federation of Swedish Farmers (LRF)’s Gender Equality Academy in Sweden that was set up to mainstream gender among the members of the federation. We begin with a brief context of rural areas where gender is meant to be mainstreamed and go on to describe the cases briefly. We then take up four cross-cutting themes that emerge from the literature on gender mainstreaming² that we contextualize in relation to the three cases: 1) from gender mainstreaming being added on as an afterthought to the neoliberal critique and the focus on markets, 2) the lack of acknowledgment of women in on-farm and off-farm work (unpaid work), 3) the gap between policy rhetoric and practice and differences in top-down and culturally responsive gender mainstreaming, and 4) women’s presence in decision-making and men’s championship of gender mainstreaming.

The examples above are different, and gender mainstreaming attempts take place differently in the three contexts we study. CGIAR is a consortium of 15 organizations working on various aspects of agriculture, forestry, and livestock. These organizations work in the global South with international and national researchers in country offices. They carry out transdisciplinary research and work in close collaboration with partners responsible for project implementation. Among their many tasks, they also carry out training for CGIAR partners and villagers. Gender mainstreaming in the CGIAR involves discussions at a transnational level, and mainstreaming attempts on the ground are mediated by a range of actors from the global to the local level, with potentially different understandings of gender equality. These differences in conceptualizations of gender mainstreaming also recur at the LRF, although the LRF is somewhat different as its Gender Academy is seen as a thinktank to promote gender mainstreaming/integration among its members and is not as close to project implementation on the ground. Furthermore, the Gender Academy commissions academics and consultants to produce research reports on given topics and does not have the staff that do so themselves.

Methods

This chapter builds on a review of the literature on gender mainstreaming, primarily from English language journals and books and mainly from the late 1990s onwards when critiques of gender mainstreaming picked up in the literature. The discussion on the LRF is based on two interviews with a former and current employee at the LRF, a desk study of their documents, websites, and press releases,³ as well as Arora-Jonsson’s brief work for them as the co-author of the Academy’s first report. Both authors have been involved with the CGIAR institutions; Arora-Jonsson was invited to CGIAR gender meetings and to hold talks by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), one of the CGIAR organizations working with forests. Leder was employed as a postdoctoral fellow for gender, youth, and inclusive development at the CGIAR research program, Water, Land, and Ecosystems (WLE), at IWMI for three years as an effort by the organization to promote gender research and mainstreaming within the organization. During that time, she also developed a gender training for NGOs, government officials, and villagers in Nepal and India (Leder, Shrestha, and Das, 2019, for details on the process). The material on CGIAR also builds on reports, participant observation at the organization/s, and experiences of Leder’s first-hand work on gender mainstreaming at IWMI.

Mainstreaming in a context of gendered agrarian change

Gender mainstreaming is set within rapid agrarian change marked by rural out-migration, urbanization, technological change, market integration of rural areas, as well the falling status of farming, both in the global North and South, though it has taken place at different scales, times, and to different extents in the two contexts (Agarwal and Agrawal, 2017; Arora-Jonsson, 2013). In large parts of the global North, employment in farming has consistently declined (e.g., see Hedlund and Lundholm (2015) for Sweden). In many parts of the global South, non-farm employment has grown much slower, and vast numbers are confined to agriculture not out of choice but from a lack of alternatives (see Agarwal and Agrawal, 2017, for India).

Farming is also largely a family enterprise with family farming prevalent across the world, although in different ways. Both in the rural North and South, the effects of out-migration on agricultural institutions and gender relations show that these processes have been associated with new challenges for those “left behind.” Researchers have pointed to the extra burden on women when men migrate, especially in the absence of security of land tenure and ownership, as well as their marginalization from community-related political decision-making (see Matysiak, 2015, for such an argument in Poland and Giri and Darnhofer, 2010, in Nepal). Formal ownership of agricultural land across the globe is by and large vested in men. These differences suggest that the oft-cited “feminization of agriculture” tends to simplify complex social relationships. It is in such contexts that mainstreaming has been taken up by agricultural institutions in different parts of the world.

The cases

The CGIAR and IWMI

The CGIAR is a consortium of 15 international agricultural research-for-development organizations. Since its foundation in 1971, the CGIAR’s mandate has been the promotion of food security, rural poverty reduction, and sustainable natural resource management. International attention on the importance of gender in agriculture and natural resources became a part of the discussions in the 1970s, and some CGIAR centers turned to gender research in the 1980s (CGIAR-IEA, 2016). However, it was not until much later with the push for gender mainstreaming more widely (see Arora-Jonsson, 2014) and in line with the World Development Report on Gender Equality ⁴ that all CGIAR research programs were formally asked by the CGIAR Consortium Board to commit to gender mainstreaming and to prepare gender strategies in 2011. CGIAR gender mainstreaming has two objectives: to mainstream gender in research, and to promote diversity and gender at the workplace (CGIAR Consortium, 2011). These two objectives are expected to be reflected in the planning, budgeting, staffing, implementation, monitoring/accountability, and evaluation of CGIAR’s research-for-development projects. While the CGIAR is staffed mainly by natural scientists working with forests, agriculture, irrigation, seeds, and breeding, the number of social scientists increased from 17% in 1995 to 26.7% in 2008 (CGIAR Science Council, 2009). Social scientists are dominated by economists followed by rural sociologists, anthropologists, human geographers, and political scientists. The chair of the Independent Science and Partnership Council (ISPC), an independent scientific advisory body of the CGIAR, reflected after her attendance at a CGIAR conference on the impacts of international agricultural research in 2017 that with only 300 scientists with PhDs in the social sciences (of a total of more than 8,000 CGIAR researchers and staff), they are “spread quite thinly.”⁵

Between 2013 and 2016, CGIAR established 20 postdoctoral positions across several of its organizations to support gender research and mainstreaming within the organizations. Projects within the CGIAR research program were obliged to budget 10% of their total funding on gender aspects of their research. The postdocs were meant to advise others and be part of research projects. Recruited from universities in the global North, they came from the fields of economics, anthropology, human geography, sociology, agricultural sciences, and crop and soil sciences and diverse backgrounds in the global South and North. They were expected to build their expertise through fieldwork, publications, and training as well as network with each other across organizational boundaries. Along with others who identified themselves as gender researchers in the organizations, they communicated through monthly webinars and newsletters, as well as annual conferences to promote research results and gender research methods as well as networking and collaborating among themselves. In 2016, the Gender Research and Integrated Training (GRIT) program was set up in partnership with Penn State University in the USA to increase the quality of research. The African Women for Agricultural Research for Development (AWARD) leadership program was offered to support female scientists and managers at mid-level management positions in developing their leadership qualities under the often-challenging hierarchical and patriarchal circumstances in their organizations. Apart from CGIAR-wide initiatives, several organizations like IWMI, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), the International Potato Center (CIP), and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) created “gender focal points” within their organizations who collaborated with each other in working groups on topics such as water and gender, gender dynamics in seed systems, and gender and breeding (CGIAR Research Program on Water, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART 1 Institutions, markets, and policies for gender and agriculture
• PART 2 Land, labor, and agrarian transformation
• PART 3 Knowledge, methods, and access to information
• PART 4 Farming people and identities
• Index