Research Frontiers at the Nexus of Gender, Environment, and Development: Linking Household, Community, and Ecosystem

The growing linkages among poverty, resource decline, and ecological degradation constitute a formidable challenge to development policy and practice. Poverty forces families to cultivate increasingly fragile, marginally productive lands, addressing short-term needs for survival while putting off concerns about tomorrow. Conceptualizing gender is essential in order to disaggregate and interpret information about the function of households and community organizations in natural resource management. The chapter identifies issues which are relevant to increasing our understanding of gender as a key variable affecting institutional responses to sustainable natural resource management. Cultural ecology and institutional analysis both provide frameworks for investigating multiple uses and multiple users of resources, which are central to understanding the role of gender in resource management. Sara Berry has explored relationships between social institutions, informal networks, and access to resources. A feminist political ecology could simply add gender to class and ethnicity as axes of power in the investigation of the political dimensions of resource use, allocation, and management