Implications of Legal Pluralism for Natural Resource Management

Summaries This article illustrates the implications of legal pluralism for our understanding of natural resource management and policies toward resource tenure, using the example of water rights. There is widespread recognition that property rights play a fundamental role in shaping how people manage natural resources. But many conceptions of property rights have focused only on static definitions, usually as defined in statutory law. The legal anthropological perspective highlights the coexistence and interaction between multiple legal orders such as state, customary, religious, project and local laws, all of which provide bases for claiming property rights. These multiple legal frameworks also facilitate considerable flexibility for people to manoeuvre in their use of natural resources, thus helping to cope with uncertainty. In many parts of the world, water rights are dynamic, flexible and subject to frequent negotiations because of uncertain water supply, damages to intake structures due to floods and landslides, and social, economic and political changes. The article demonstrates how multiple, flexible and dynamic legal orders are more responsive to these uncertainties and changes than a single, fixed legal system with a static property regim

Gendered opportunities for improving soil health: A conceptual framework to help set the research agenda

Healthy soils play a critical role in supporting agricultural productivity, climate change mitigation and resilience, and a range of ecosystem services. Degraded and poorly responsive soils cover large areas of Africa and represent the majority of poor farmers’ fields in certain regions. While there are hundreds of technical options for improving the sustainability of land management and preventing or reversing degradation, there are many sociocultural, institutional, economic, and policy barriers hindering their adoption at large scale. At the same time, there is an emerging consensus within the international development community that gender equality and women’s empowerment are both an end in themselves and an important means for achieving a range of economic and social development objectives such as improved food security, child nutrition and education, and women’s health. Yet, gender inequality remains a wicked problem, whose deep-seated socio-economic and ideological causes are difficult to recognize and address, and which require context- and culture-specific understandings and approaches, involving multiple stakeholders with different and sometimes conflicting interests and different positions within power hierarchies. There is an urgent need to make more rapid progress on restoring and sustaining soil productivity and ecosystem functions and also to leverage soil health management for progress on gender equality. While there are important interconnections between soil health and gender equality and empowerment, these are seldom recognized, and have not been addressed in a coherent or concerted manner. In this study, we have reviewed relevant gender literature and proposed a conceptual framework to help illuminate important gender considerations for soil health and land management. These considerations are essential for identifying gender-based constraints, opportunities, and unintended consequences in promoting soil management technologies. Moreover, the application of the framework can help guide in priority setting with respect to where gender-responsive interventions are essential. We make several recommendations for setting priorities for gender-soil health research

Women’s empowerment in agriculture: Lessons from qualitative research

There is growing recognition of the importance of women’s empowerment in its own right and for a range of development outcomes, but less understanding of what empowerment means to rural women and men. The challenge of measuring empowerment, particularly across cultures and contexts, is also garnering attention. This paper synthesizes qualitative research conducted conjointly with quantitative surveys, working with eight agricultural development projects in eight countries, to develop a project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI). The qualitative research sought to identify emic meanings of “empowerment,” validate the domains and indicators of the quantitative index, provide greater understanding of the context of each project and of strategies for facilitating empowerment, and test a methodology for integrating emic perspectives of empowerment with standardized etic measures that allow for comparability across contexts

Gender and Institutional Aspects of Climate-Smart Agricultural Practices: Evidence from Kenya

This paper analyses gender differences in awareness and adoption of climate-smart agricultural (CSA) practices. It examines what factors are associated with the likelihood of adoption of a wide range of CSA practices for 376 women and 375 men in two different areas of Kenya. This information is aimed at improving the targeting and design of interventions that are trying to achieve greater and more equitable agricultural development in East Africa and elsewhere. Our results suggest there is still much work to be done in increasing awareness of improved agricultural practices that enhance livelihoods and resilience to change, including a changing climate. Simply put, increasing awareness is necessary to increase adoption

Gender, Assets, and Agricultural Development Programs: A Conceptual Framework

Being able to access, control, and own productive assets such as land, labor, finance, and social capital enables people to create stable and productive lives. Yet relatively little is known about how agricultural development programs can most effectively deliver these outcomes of well-being, empowerment, and higher income in a way that acknowledges differential access to and control over assets by men and women. After reviewing the literature on gender and assets, this paper offers a conceptual framework for understanding the gendered pathways through which asset accumulation occurs, including attention to not only men's and women's assets but also those they share in joint control and ownership. Unlike previous frameworks, this model depicts the gendered dimensions of each component of the pathway in recognition of the evidence that men and women not only control, own, or dispose of assets in different ways, but also access, control, and own different kinds of assets. The framework generates gender-specific hypotheses that can be tested empirically: i) Different types of assets enable different livelihoods, with a greater stock and diversity of assets being associated with more diverse livelihoods and better well-being outcomes; ii) Men and women use different types of assets to cope with different types of shocks; iii) Interventions that increase men's and women's stock of a particular asset improve the bargaining power of the individual(s) who control that asset; and iv) Interventions and policies that reduce the gender gap in assets are better able to achieve development outcomes related to food security, health, and nutrition and other aspects of well-being related to agency and empowerment. The implications of these gender differences for designing agricultural development interventions to increase asset growth and returns to assets as well as for value chain development are discussed. Based on this analysis, additional gaps in knowledge and possible investigations to address them are identified

Playing games to save water: Collective action games for groundwater management in Andhra Pradesh, India

Groundwater is one of the most challenging common pool resources to govern, resulting in resource depletion in many areas. We present an innovative use of collective action games to not only measure propensity for cooperation, but to improve local understanding of groundwater interrelationships and stimulate collective governance of groundwater, based on a pilot study in Andhra Pradesh, India. The games simulate crop choice and consequences for the aquifer. These were followed by a community debriefing, which provided an entry point for discussing the interconnectedness of groundwater use, to affect mental models about groundwater. A slightly modified game was played in the same communities, one year later. Our study finds communication within the game increased the likelihood of groups reaching sustainable extraction levels in the second year of play, but not the first. Individual payments to participants based on how they played in the game had no effect on crop choice. Either repeated experience with the games or the revised structure of the game evoked more cooperation in the second year, outweighing other factors influencing behavior, such as education, gender, and trust index scores. After the games were played, a significantly higher proportion of communities adopted water registers and rules to govern groundwater, compared to other communities in the same NGO water commons program. Because groundwater levels are affected by many factors, games alone will not end groundwater depletion. However, games can contribute to social learning about the role of crop choice and collective action, to motivate behavior change toward more sustainable groundwater extraction

Food and agricultural innovation pathways for prosperity

This introduction to the special issue deploys a framework, inspired by realist synthesis and introduced in Section 1, that aims to untangle the contexts, mechanisms, and outcomes associated with investments that link poverty reduction and rural prosperity within a broad agri-food systems perspective. Section 2 considers changes in contexts: Where are agricultural research investments most likely to be an engine of poverty reduction? Over the past 25 years, there have been profound changes in the development context of most countries, necessitating an update on strategic insights for research investment priorities relevant for the economic, political, social, environmental, and structural realities of the early 21st Century. Section 2 briefly surveys changes in these structural aspects of poverty and development processes in low-income countries, with particular attention to new drivers (e.g., urbanization, climate change) that will be of increasing salience in the coming decades. In Section 3, we turn to mechanisms: What are the plausible impact pathways and what evidence exists to test their plausibility? Poor farmers in the developing world are often the stated focus of public sector agricultural research. However, farmers are not the only potential beneficiaries of agricultural research; rural landless laborers, stakeholders along food value chains, and the urban poor can also be major beneficiaries of such research. Thus, there are multiple, interacting pathways through which agricultural research can contribute to reductions in poverty and associated livelihood vulnerabilities. This paper introduces an ex ante set of 18 plausible impact pathways from agricultural research to rural prosperity outcomes, employing bibliometric methods to assess the evidence underpinning causal links. In Section 4, we revisit the concept of desired impacts: When we seek poverty reduction, what does that mean and what measures are needed to demonstrate impact? The papers in this special issue are intended to yield insights to inform improvements in agricultural research that seeks to reduce poverty. History indicates that equity of distribution of gains matters hugely, and thus the questions of “who wins?” and “who loses?” must be addressed. Moreover, our understanding(s) of “poverty” and the intended outcomes of development investments have become much richer over the past 25 years, incorporating more nuance regarding gender, community differences, and fundamental reconsideration of the meaning of poverty and prosperity that are not captured by simple head count income or even living standard measures