School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 1 of 1
-
ItemGender, climate change, and adaptation: investigating agrobiodiversity management practices in a mountain village of Nepal Himalayas( 2015)This research examines the interplay between gender and adaptation in the context of increasingly uncertain climate conditions and socio-economic transitions, taking a case study of a mountain village in Nepal. This study is conducted at a time when the evidence of climate change has become more visible and more widely accepted than in the past, and also when several other socio-economic changes such as male out-migration, feminization of agrobiodiversity management and increased road networks and market expansion, are also becoming increasingly noticeable throughout the Nepal Himalayas. Combining social-ecological systems with feminist political ecology lenses, this study has generated an in-depth account from a village-level case study of agrobiodiversity management in Kaski district of Nepal, along with the analysis of institutional and policy contexts. Through this, it has demonstrated how gender-based power relations and gender- differentiated knowledge shape adaptation practices in the case study village. It has, in particular, generated in-depth evidence of the ways in which men and women in the case study village respond to the impacts of multiple stressors/pressures in the daily business of managing the local agrobiodiversity, and demonstrates how gender-based power relations and knowledge shape the possibilities for adaptation. This research addresses a particular gap in current knowledge about whether the changing context (climate and social) can have a positive or negative impact towards closing the gender gap as communities and households undertake adaptive actions in agrobiodiversity management. It demonstrates that due to the lack of understanding of the dynamic interplay between gender and complex social-ecological systems (i.e. agrobiodiversity management systems) among policy makers, development agencies and extension groups, people are likely to benefit less from the current adaptation strategies and practices that are being promoted at the local level. Despite several technical innovations in agrobiodiversity management, traditional gender-based power relations have hardly changed, with women continuing to play the subordinate role, as the deeply internalized frame of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ does not normally allow the emergence of ‘critical awareness’ among local community members, particularly women. This thesis shows that the gender-agrobiodiversity adaptation link is not straightforward, requiring a nuanced view of the interplay between gendered forms of knowledge, power and decision-making practices within multiple arenas of agrobiodiversity management ranging from the household, community, national level policy formulation processes and beyond. Improved access to and control over household and community level agrobiodiversity resources, often assumed to have positive effects on gender-based power relations, do not necessarily lead to gender equitable adaptation practices unless we take structural complexity into account. The adaptive capacity of households and communities is to a large extent dependent on how gendered forms of knowledge and power are linked or disconnected across scales of multiple disciplines rather than confined to a single developmental discipline. Theoretically, this research demonstrates that bringing together the elements of social-ecological systems and feminist political ecology approaches is a constructive way to understand gender and adaptation linkages.