Integrating Gender into Environmental Research and Policy

Many interventions in the environment sector have given women a role in environmental projects in the hope that this would facilitate resource conservation efforts as well as benefiting women themselves. But across a whole range of subsectors (forestry, soil conservation, water, rangeland management, integrated pest management etc.), outcomes have often been disappointing and sometimes even damaging to women: • women have often been treated as, in effect, a source of cheap labour, with little consideration as to whether the project really served their interests. Frequently the demands of a project merely added to women's already overextended workload, or required them to forsake some other activity. • in cases where women were able to resist the attempt to commandeer their labour, projects often failed as a result. • women have usually been sidelined in the management o f projects, once they come on stream, and rarely given any decision making powers (even where the project relates directly to women's social responsibilities), or responsibilities for high-level tasks in routine operations. The approach underlying past efforts to incorporate women into projects relied on a flawed conceptualisation of gender relations, hingeing on the idea that men and women assumed gender roles that were unproblematically complementary to each other. This led policymakers to focus exclusively on women's subsistence roles, ignoring their market-related activities and the dynamic interactions of men's and women's resource management roles and responsibilities; and to view women as an untapped pool of labour whose energies could be costlessly mobilised for project activities, while in reality women's workload usually entailed diversion of effort to the project and carried an opportunity cost to them. It also tended to be assumed that participation in an environmental project would benefit women, without appreciating either that women might have no rights in the incremental resource so created, or that women's involvement with resource management might be a residual consequence of lack of access to more rewarding activities. Recent research in many different settings has arrived at a new understanding of the links between gender relations and environmental management which carries very different policy implications. The prime requirement is the understanding that men's and women's interests in and incentives for environmental conservation may be very different, largely because women have lesser property rights than men in environmental resources. Those rights are usually insecure, being embedded within and contingent on the rights of male kin; and, slight as they may be, they risk being undermined by interventions of any kind. women's property rights in natural resources need to be identified at the outset and actively monitored throughout the life of a project. policymakers need to examine, support and build on the often little visible institutional arrangements and networks which provide channels for women to press their concerns and guard their entitlements in situations of ecological stress or environmental change. women must not be expected to participate in or contribute to the furtherance of resource use practices from which they themselves will not benefit. They must, at the least, be paid for any current labour contribution to a project on the same terms as men. local project management procedures must be designed to give real representation to women's interests. the need to widen people's, particularly women's, range of livelihood choices may sometimes imply a need for interventions not focused on the environment per se. where any charges are involved, policies need to take account of the fact that 1) women have lesser command over cash than men and that 2) where men control household expenditures, they may not give proper weight to women's interests or priorities

Gender and Livelihoods in Northern Pakistan

This article reports on research done in 1993-94 in the Hunza and Nagar districts in the Karakorum mountains in the Northern Areas of Pakistan. It was designed to explore whether increasing demands on women's labour inputs in an ecologically stressed area undergoing population growth might be prejudicing sustainable use of natural resources and, further, whether project interventions that succeeded in delivering resources to women might, by relieving their time constraints, contribute to environmental sustainability as a result. A study in Nepal had convincingly demonstrated that in a comparable (though not exactly similar) environment, resource degradation was leading women to take short cuts in cultivation methods that were undermining the maintenence of soil fertility under traditional cultivation methods (Kumar and Hotchkiss 1988). If a similar situation obtained in Northern Pakistan, more attention to gender analysis of production systems in ecologically fragile areas, and the direction of more resources specifically to women, might be generally warranted on environmental grounds.European Research Council (ERC

Women In The World Wconomy

xii,161 hlm.; 23 c

Competition and development : the power of competitive markets

Library has French version: Concurrence et le développement : la puissance des marchés concurrentielsLibrary has Spanish version: Competencia y desarrollo : el poder de los mercados competitivosThe growth of privatization and international trade and investment, and the spread of bilateral and multilateral trade agreements have increased economic integration, affecting almost all nations of the world. This new reliance on private enterprise has brought about many changes in the economic structure and production capacity of developing countries. However, it has also made developing countries more vulnerable to new and harmful types of anticompetitive business practices. Putting effective policies in place to ensure that businesses compete is a complex and difficult task. This book and its accompanying website demonstrate the importance of true and fair competition to sustainable development and an effective marketplace, touching on issues of globalization, consumer welfare, cartels and monopolies, and trade liberalization

Concurrence et le développement : la puissance des marchés concurrentiels

Version anglaise dans la bibliothèque: Competition and development : the power of competitive marketsVersion espagnole dans la bibliothèque: Competencia y desarrollo : el poder de los mercados competitivosLa montée de la privatisation, la croissance du commerce et de l’investissement internationaux, et la multiplication des accords commerciaux bilatéraux et multilatéraux ont favorisé l’intégration économique, qui touche presque tous les pays de la planète. Ce nouveau recours à l’entreprise privée a entraîné de nombreux changements dans la structure économique et la capacité de production des pays en développement. Toutefois, il a également accentué la vulnérabilité des pays en développement face à de nouveaux types préjudiciables de pratiques commerciales anticoncurrentielles. Il est à la fois complexe et difficile de mettre en place des politiques efficaces pour assurer la compétitivité des entreprises. Ce livre et les pages Web connexes illustrent l’importance d’une concurrence juste et équitable pour le développement durable et le fonctionnement efficace des marchés; on y aborde la mondialisation, le bien-être des consommateurs, les cartels et les monopoles, et la libéralisation du commerce

Competencia y desarrollo : el poder de los mercados competitivos

Versión inglés en la biblioteca: Competition and development : the power of competitive marketsVersión francés en la biblioteca: Concurrence et le développement : la puissance des marchés concurrentielsEl incremento de las privatizaciones, el comercio internacional y la inversión, así como la expansión de los acuerdos comerciales bilaterales y multilaterales, han llevado a una mayor integración económica cuyos efectos son visibles en casi todas las naciones del mundo. Esta nueva dependencia de la empresa privada ha provocado muchos cambios en la estructura económica y en la capacidad de producción de los países en desarrollo. No obstante, también ha contribuido a que los países en desarrollo se vuelvan más vulnerables ante la adversidad de nuevas modalidades que derivan de prácticas comerciales anticompetitivas. El diseño y ejecución de políticas efectivas que aseguren la competencia entre las empresas constituye una tarea compleja y difícil. Este libro, y el sitio web que lo acompaña, demuestran la importancia que representa una competencia verdadera y justa para lograr un desarrollo sostenible y un mercado eficaz, presentando temas relativos a la globalización, bienestar del consumidor, carteles y monopolios, así como liberalización del comercio

Competition Principles Under Threat : IDRC Pre-ICN Forum on Competition and Development, Zurich, 2 June 2009; record of the proceedings

Both developing and industrialized country governments have been forcing mergers, bailing out failing firms, rolling back procurement rules, requiring banks to allocate credit preferentially to domestic firms, and authorizing new state aid. The implementation of these measures can reverse decades of slowly-won support for competition norms. The report covers the workshop and presentations organized by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC, Canada) and co-sponsored by the Swiss Competition Commission (Comco) as hosts of the 2009 Annual Conference of the International Competition Network (ICN)