The Gender Box: A Framework for Analysing Gender Roles in Forest Management

"I have become convinced that the sustainability of forests depends fundamentally on better treatment of the people living in and around them. Half of those are women." - Carol J. Pierce Colfer

This analysis on gender issues and forestry usage and management is "designed to clarify key social issues foresters need to address if they want forest management to benefit both the trees and the people who live among them..... [The author has] sought to identify the kinds of factors that condition gender differentials in participation in decision making in forest use and management..., and to cluster them into manageable categories [see Tables 1 and 2 of the document]), [as a guide to a] more equitable and effective approach in managing forests." (Footnotes removed by the editor.)

For this project, carried out as part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (CRP6) and the gender programme of the Center for International Forestry Research in Bogor, Indonesia, the author did a literature review in which she identified issues on who (men or women) are involved in forests and management, as well as how and why. She examined 42 issues that emerged from the readings and clustered them into the 11 topics represented in the "gender box" and considered, on the scales of macro, meso, and micro, layers of influence on any given woman (or man). She states that the mandate for those working in forestry is to "examine and consider which of these forces - whether formal or informal - are affecting men and women in the areas where [they] work. How are global policies and laws and global values, for instance, affecting local men and women, respectively? And are there ways to use them to leverage better success at the local level?" Gender issues include:

1. Formal laws/policies
2. Cultural/religious trends
3. Access to natural resources
4. Norms of behaviour
5. Access to education
6. Access to cash
7. Day to day economic roles
8. Demographic issues
9. Domestic roles
10. Intra-household power dynamics
11. Available economic alternatives

The document concludes with recommendations for more examination and assessment of cultural assumptions and practices and more identification and awareness of gender-related issues when making decisions affecting forest management. The author's recommendations include:

• "Be more equitable in research and development efforts - examining and incorporating both men’s and women’s needs, interests, behaviours, values, and expectations/hopes for the future, into the planning, implementation, assessment and recurrent revisions of natural resource management, development and conservation plans.
• Pay less attention to cash, more to non-monetary values that men and women assign to forests...
• Situate our efforts time-wise, by examining local historical contexts/trends and identifying the often-differing preferences of men and women about future expectations and desires....
• Attend more seriously to the recurring dilemma of how much effort to expend within existing gendered patterns of behaviour (helping women with fuel wood collection, for instance); and how much on riskier, but potentially more powerful approaches, ones that can more effectively begin to level the playing field (collaborative gender assessment of winners and losers in a local forest, for instance).
• Work more on strategies that can enlist the help of both men and women in equity enhancement in forests, publicly and privately. Identifying good strategies is a legitimate research topic; and working on equity explicitly with communities has shown good results.
• Strengthen our abilities as professionals to work together in genuinely interdisciplinary fashion and across-scale. The interactions among features at different scales have been widely ignored, despite increasingly obvious impacts. Similarly, looking backwards and forward in time has not been adequately valued - as we try to fit management plans to local contexts. Both scale and time issues require input from multiple disciplines."