Gender and natural resource governance indicators: a need to assess and address ‘sensitive and taboo’ topics

Abstract

Gender and governance or management are topics that have been inadequately addressed by researchers, with resulting very slow progress towards gender equity globally. A collaborative landscape management project in South and Southeast Sulawesi (Indonesia) has been trying to strengthen women's voices in local management and governance and to encourage more equitable benefit distribution throughout the landscape. The need for a simple assessment of the project's success presented an opportunity for us to develop a set of indicators that we believe can be adapted and used more widely. Our indicators, presented below, differ from other indicator sets available, most fundamentally in their foci on (1) gender and governance/forest management, (2) a combination of production and other more sensitive issues central to women's lives, and (3) intra-household decision-making.

Keywords:

• empowerment
• decision-making
• skill
• participation
• forest
• Sulawesi

Acknowledgements

This article and the research on which it is based were supported by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and by the gender program of the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research Centers' (CGIAR) Collaborative Research Support Program, Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (CRP6), and its lead centre, CIFOR in Bogor, Indonesia. We acknowledge with gratitude the financial support of CIFOR's Gender Program, specifically that of Esther Mwangi, and the constructive critiques of Endri Martini, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, Elok Mulyoutami, Aulia Perdana, James Roshetko, and Terry Sunderland.

Notes

^1. Balang (Sahabat Alam Bantaeng or Friends of Bantaeng Nature) is a local NGO in South Sulawesi, focusing on better management of nature and the environment, and local people's livelihoods improvement.

^2. LepMil (Lembaga Pemberdayaan Masyarakat Pesisir dan Pedalaman, or Institute for Coastal and Interior People's Empowerment) is a local NGO in Southeast Sulawesi, focusing on empowerment of local peoples living in interior and coastal areas.

^3. See Van Esterik (2011), in which the author makes a cogent argument that much of our collective scholarly work has been based on ‘androcentric conceptual models’, which have paid inadequate attention to issues of nurture (necessary for human survival) – something she sees as particularly germane in Southeast Asia, where our current research is taking place. We have taken on some of this thinking, considering the effective involvement of women in governance (a goal of the project, discussed below) to require attention to women's (and men's) nurturing roles. We follow Kabeer's definition of empowerment; she sees ‘… empowerment as expansion of people's ability to make strategic life choices, particularly in contexts where this ability had been denied to them’ (quoted in Alkire et al., 2012, p. 1).

^4. The research and development project is in its first implementation year in South and Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia. Designed to be a five-year project, it is led overall by the World Agroforestry Center. CIFOR leads the governance component, which is one of three, the other two being environment and livelihoods. Using a participatory approach, the project strives to encourage collaborative management of landscapes initially in four districts (kabupaten): Bantaeng and Bulukumba in South Sulawesi, and Kolaka and Konawe in Southeast Sulawesi.

^5. Kabeer (1999) discusses Pahl's distinction between a ‘control’ or policy-making function in decisions about resource allocation and a ‘management’ function, which pertains to implementation. Here, we use governance and management rather interchangeably, with governance slightly more likely to be used for a broader scale of both policy and action. Functions parallel to governance, policy-making, and management all occur at various levels, including the household, and are particularly relevant for women's conditions.

^6. Here, we do not claim a comprehensive review of indicators literature, which has blossomed over the last two decades, since our initial involvement with it in the mid-1990s.

^7. We were fortunate in that the GDI and GEM were already examined at the provincial level by Mulyoutami et al., (2013) in connection with the livelihoods part of the project (in March/April 2012). They found female participation in decision-making to be ‘very low’ and women's contribution to incomes much lower than men's.

^8. We covered the items in bold, though differently, in our Sulawesi survey.

^9. Alkire et al., (2012) also provide an excellent overview of other national and international indicator sets, with critiques that are also relevant for our own interests in women's empowerment and landscape management.

^10. This group trip (CIFOR, Balang, and LepMil personnel) took place in February 2013; Yuliani, Achdiawan, Adnan, and Erni are ongoing members of the project team, located in country, and able to continue assessing the relevance of these indicators as the survey process progresses; Colfer has conducted research on gender in Indonesia periodically since 1979, and remains engaged from afar.

^11. The emic–etic distinction evolved as a cultural parallel to linguistic distinctions among sounds and words (introduced by linguist Kenneth Pike). The ‘emic’ (from phonemic or morphemic) refers to sounds or words/word fragments, respectively, characterized by ‘meaningful difference’ within a language; and in the cultural sense, it refers to ideas, concepts, behaviour seen/acknowledged/used differentially by those whose culture is being discussed. ‘Etic’ (from phonetic) refers to the ‘objective’ differences in sounds (as measured, for instance, by a spectrographic analysis, hertz, and decibels). Similarly, culturally, an etic analysis refers to identifiable patterns that can ideally be observed cross-culturally and more objectively measured for comparison.

^12. We shared Meinzen-Dick's and Agus Mulyana's perceptions (personal communication 2013) that, where communities are homogeneous, focus groups can work well, with emergent properties and social learning coming from group discussion rather than from individual responses. But significant intra-community variability is difficult to capture in that way, suggesting that surveys can be a better option.

^13. In contrast to the approach taken by WEAI (Alkire et al., 2012). We remain uncertain about which approach is better, as both have advantages.

^14. We chose to record the respondent's name, because the project is participatory in nature. We felt that knowing each individual's name could enhance our qualitative interpretation of findings (also potentially drawing from the experience of others within the team).

^15. We anticipate, though we cannot be certain, that this section of the indicators is most likely to need adaptation from one place to another.

^16. Although we understand the assumptions portrayed in Martini et al. (2013), we disagree with their conclusion that extension should be built only on current practice. These authors say, for instance, that ‘… agricultural extension needs by gender can be identified through time allocation for plot management … women have roles in plot maintenance, harvesting, post-harvest management, and product marketing, so … their capacity and skills need to be improved in these activities’ (p. 28). We argue here that genuine equity in NRM will require thinking beyond existing patterns – even reorienting our starting point to better incorporate women's fundamental concerns, as we have tried to do here.

^17. See Arora-Jonsson's (2005) excellent gender analysis of Indian and Swedish forest management, for a thorough exposition of the need for such re-focusing, if we truly want a more equitable kind of NRM.

^18. This set of questions, like those on marriage, was suggested by our coauthor Erni, a young woman from South Sulawesi, and they were vetted with other local people in both provinces.

^19. Female circumcision is extremely controversial in parts of East Africa, particularly, and globally it is symbolic of female oppression. The version traditionally practised in parts of Indonesia is far less extreme and damaging (often only a touch of a knife to the clitoris) than the East Africa version. Male circumcision is equivalent to the practice elsewhere.

^20. Naved (2000) notes that in Bangladesh ‘When women not only earn but also control the use of their income, they can use it more effectively as a bargaining chip with the implicit threat of withdrawing it from the household economy’ (p. 28).

^21. Yuliani has encountered, in other areas of Indonesia and in the media, men who reduced their own economic activity and depended solely on their wives' salaries, or even used income earned by wives working in other countries to support a second wife obtained with the added income from the first. We needed to know more about the attitudes towards such issues in Sulawesi.

^22. Among the Dayaks of Kalimantan, for instance, Colfer found it to be very rare.

^23. Esther Mwangi, a political scientist, relayed a dramatic and recent ‘gender and governance’ story from South America: a woman who was elected as a community representative expressed an opinion publicly with which her husband disagreed; her husband beat her severely, and she dared not express herself again publicly in her supposed representative role. In another example, another westerner recounted his surprise when he brought his Bugis wife (a local ethnic group) home to South Sulawesi, where her relatives promptly asked her how often he beat her. This behaviour was seen as the norm. Of course, many men also support their wives' political ambitions; but we need to have a better sense of how likely that is in any given locale.

^24. We built on the changes we saw resulting from work in CIFOR's Adaptive Collaborative Management Program (11 countries, 1998–2003+), their Rights and Resources work (10 countries, 2005–2008), and their Landscape Mosaics project (5 countries, 2007–2010).