Analysing gender roles in community natural resource management: negotiation, lifecoures and social inclusion

摘要

There is a need to facilitate thinking about gentler relations without necessarily making men secondary or peripheral to the analysis. Some recent work on gender and development explores relations between men and women in depth and offers a useful reconsideration of some of the underlying concepts and the tools of gender analysis (see for example Jackson and Pearson 1998). However, such sophisticated Gender and Development (GAD) analyses are rarely translated into policy. A review of policy on community-based water resource management highlights the need for more complex approaches to gender. In this article I will suggest that an improved understanding of local decision making in rural livelihoods involves recognising negotiated relations betweenmen and women, changing gender positions over lifecourses and the complexity of individuals' identities. I illustrate here why a more explicit focus on men, as well as women, may be justified.