Gender Equality in Conservation Management: Reproducing or Transforming Gender Differences through Local Participation?

Abstract

Increasing participation and community involvement in conservation is often argued to improve the legitimacy of policies and management practices. Persistent gender differences in local participation challenge this assumption. This study makes gender a primary focus in local participation in Norwegian conservation management by questioning whether recent gender equality policies have transformed, or rather reproduced, current masculine hierarchies. This study combines a quantitative overview of gender composition on conservation boards and stakeholder groups with qualitative interviews of actors at local and national level. The findings reveal that gender balance at the overall level in the conservation boards conceals systematic gender differences in representation and distribution of leadership positions. Moreover, actors at the local and national level do not regard gender equality as relevant for local participation. This study challenges the absence of gender in the literature and policies on nature conservation, and argues for including gender perspectives in future research.

Keywords:

• Conservation management
• gender
• gender equality
• participation
• protected areas
• Norway

Notes

Acknowledgments

In memory of friend and supervisor, Eirin Hongslo (1973–2017). The author would like to thank Hanne Haavind, Siri Gerrard, and Kristine Lien Skog for inputs on early drafts and four anonymous reviwers for valuble comments that have imporved the article significantly.

Notes

1 Following Reed and Mitchell (2003), I use the concept “gender taxonomy” to describe the process of counting and making gender differences in representation visible.

2 Other interests are represented on three boards: one landowner’s association, a Swedish Sami village, and a wild reindeer board.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Norwegian Research Council under Grant 203784.