Mind the Gap: Disciplinary Dissonance, Gender, and the Environment

Abstract

This article investigates the treatment of gender issues in “research for development” natural resources management (NRM) projects. Through discussion of an NRM research project in the United Kingdom and India, the article explores how the use of inaccurate gender stereotypes results in projects being compromised. The article seeks to explain why this happens despite widespread appreciation of the centrality of gender issues to NRM and poverty. In explanation the article identifies the significance of difficulties in the partnerships between the natural and social science dimensions of these projects. The study demonstrates that instead of easy and equal partnership, the relationship between natural and social science practitioners and practices remains characterized by inequality and poor communication, with serious consequences for the understanding of, and response to, gender issues.

Keywords:

• disciplinarity gender
• environment
• natural resources management
• research

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their detailed comments on this article.

Notes

We recognize that the natural and social sciences are not disciplines as such. Indeed, the epistemological differences between, for example, two social sciences such as anthropology and economics can be significant and have been widely debated. However, in the context of this article, the distinction between natural and social sciences is one that is meaningful for current discussions of interdisciplinarity.

The findings described have also been influenced by field research into gender in NRM research for development projects in Ghana. The processes identified in the Ghana study are beyond the scope of this article. Direct quotes in the article are from individual or group interviews in the United Kingdom and India carried out by the authors.

Internal program document.

This approach also means that in the FLDs, the NRM researchers were working with the landed, by definition not the most poor.

One exception to this overall pattern is the social scientist who oversaw the project as a whole in India. She supported the present research and used it as an opportunity to introduce the team to more nuanced ideas about gender relations and also to discuss the possibility of working more explicitly to transform gender and other hierarchies. These ideas were received with mixed results and some resistance. These developments were too emergent to be studied effectively and are also beyond the scope of this article.