Gender Mainstreaming in Community-Oriented Wildlife Conservation: Experiences from Nongovernmental Conservation Organizations in India

Abstract

Gender mainstreaming (GM) is the promotion of gender equity and women's empowerment in institutional policy and practice. GM can potentially improve community-oriented conservation outcomes because gender roles often shape values, knowledge, use, and access/control of environmental resources. Through a mixed-methods study of 52 nongovernmental organization (NGO)-based, community-oriented wildlife conservation projects in India, this article examines supervisors’ perceptions of the effectiveness of GM in achieving conservation outcomes. While many projects did include elements of GM (specifically, gender analysis and support for women's empowerment), approaches tended to be ad hoc and not empirically grounded. To overcome obstacles to integration of GM in conservation, NGOs would benefit from the creation of formal gender policies to guide baseline data collection and analysis, professional development, and related empirical research. Ultimately, the study illustrates various ways in which gender and conservation issues intersect, and helps to demonstrate when a GM approach can promote the success of specific conservation projects.

Keywords:

• community-based conservation (CBC)
• India
• NGOs
• operational activities
• participation
• wildlife conservation
• women

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for fieldwork and research support provided by Gettysburg College's Chang-Burton Research Fund and RPD grant 1406540, and acknowledge the meaningful contributions of the many survey participants, NGO directors, conservation and gender consultants, colleagues in both the United States and India, and anonymous referees who generously offered their time and energies in support of this research.

Notes

^a Small = 1–49 employees; medium = 50–99 employees; large = 100 or more employees.

^a These data were sought as text, but some respondents did not provide both categories of information.

^b Fields reported and coded as “natural sciences”: biology, botany, computer engineering, conservation biology, ecology, environmental engineering, environmental management, environmental science, marine sciences, natural resource management, soil science, wildlife science, zoology.

^c Fields reported and coded as “social sciences”: anthropology, development studies, economics, social work, sociology, psychology.

^d Fields reported and coded as “interdisciplinary”: geography, human ecology; combination of fields contained in both of the categories given earlier.

For example, “women's work” typically includes processing wild meat or marine products and collecting fallen wood, fodder, water, and minor forest products such as medicinal and edible plants. In contrast, “men's work” tends to focus on wage labor, and extractive activities such as timber collection, hunting, and offshore fishing.

Also spelled as “Qalandar.”

That is, when women are discouraged from interaction with men from outside of the household, and are expected to remain primarily in the home.