Document(s) 3 of 6

This paper fleshes out some tentative conclusions about the state of research on gender and natural resource management (NRM) in Latin America. These conclusions are drawn from a review of available literature on the subject and from interviews with gender and NRM scholars working in the field.

A critical gap in ongoing research activity about gender and NRM in various contexts in Latin America was found to be the lack of research examining the gendered nature of local institutional arrangements for community-based NRM. The paper concentrates on developing this theme and argues for its importance, given the critical significance of such knowledge for informing appropriate interventions intended to contribute to equitable and sustainable NRM in Latin America.

The paper has been written to provide guidance to IDRC’s MINGA Program Initiative, as relates to the team’s search for appropriate research strategies for strengthening gender equity as it pertains to NRM in the region.

It needs to be recognized from the outset that ‘Northern’ scholars have written much of the academic work on gender and NRM to date. This reflects the reality of a significant North-South imbalance, in which the North has been the locus of (formal, academic) knowledge production, both for gender issues and for other areas of academic scholarship generally. As Paulson and Calla (2000) point out about gender studies in Bolivia, and as does Cuvi Sanchez (2000) in Ecuador, academic scholars residing in the North have funded and framed most of this work. As a counterbalance, there is a critical need to support local spaces for endogenous thinking on these issues, as grounded in the historical, social, cultural, political and economic realities of the different contexts of Latin America.

This paper focuses on an area of research that has yet to be fully explored in either the Southern or Northern academic literature and that bears significant potential as an entry point for strengthening the development of spaces for endogenous scholarship. The paper draws upon the academic literature the author was able to locate that specifically addresses the gendered nature of local institutional arrangements for NRM. Needless to say, this amounts to a few key pieces of work. The fact that Northern academics have written the majority of these pieces is the logical consequence of (a) funding availability for independent academic research in the North on a scale far exceeding that available in the ‘South’, and (b) the extremely nascent nature of the study of the gendered nature of local institutional arrangements for NRM.

This paper does not intend to contribute to the dominant position of the North as the locus of knowledge production on gender issues. The author is motivated by a desire to promote the development of endogenous spaces of critical thinking in relation to gender frameworks of analysis posited from the North. I put forward the pieces presented in this paper as early sketches of a possible framework to guide detailed studies of local institutional arrangements for NRM in Latin America. This research area is itself a research gap brought to the author’s attention by voices among Latin American researchers working on these issues in the field, but among whom this research has not yet been initiated because of limited funding for independent (i.e., non-project-related) research. As such, it presents a ripe opportunity to support endogenous spaces of scholarship, while contributing to filling a critical knowledge gap in understanding how local power dynamics shape access to, control over, and sustainable management of, natural resources.

Document(s) 3 of 6