Project 6: Gender and REDD – Climate change and changing forest governance
Department of Urban and Rural Development
Popular summary
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) programs are for the moment, a framework most countries can agree on, in otherwise fairly beleaguered climate negotiations. The aim of the current project is to do multisite and multilevel studies focusing on REDD+ but in the larger context of changing environmental governance. The point is to study how gender is conceived in these programs at different levels and analyze how the REDD mechanisms might affect different groups of men and women.
Often when technologies or markets do not appear to work, a common refrain among policy makers, practitioners and researchers is to fall back on the need to for better governance. What this really means in different contexts is often a black box that is also convenient to blame when things do not turn out the way they were meant to. But is program failure only the result of bad implementation of programs and bad governance? Or is there something in the language and aims of policy prescriptions and programs that might lead to the inability of these problems to address questions of development and gender equality? What might be the gendered impacts of REDD policies at project sites but also in government offices and donor negotiations? How does the work of men and women at different levels interact to produce specific interpretations of what needs to be done? Studies in the three countries will investigate the gendered features of these programs, what gendered aspects of the environmental solutions that are on offer and the institutions that are established around them.
The studies are to be carried out in Tanzania which already has a number of pilot projects, in Burkina Faso where negotiations are ongoing as well as in Mozambique. Master or PhD students from the University of Sokoine, University of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso and the Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique are paired with three students in Sweden. The SLU students will pair up with the students in the country and conduct a three week study together at each site. They will all take part in a course on natural resources and gender at SLU and present their results at workshop in Wondo Genet in Ethiopia in November 2012 that will be an open workshop for other participants especially students and development practitioners in Ethiopia.