1

GENDER, FLOODS, MOBILITY IN AGRICULTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS: A POST-DISASTER VIEW

Low elevation zones in Quezon Province, Philippines

Bernadette P. Resurrección, Ph.D

Senior Research Fellow, Stockholm Environment Institute

Associate Professor (adjunct) Asian Institute of Technology

2

Background

This study is part of a larger three-year (2011-2014) research project on ‘Re-

thinking Gender in Development in Asia’ awarded by the Norwegian Research

Council in 2011

Context: Risk-prone low elevation coastal zones on the eastern side of Quezon

Province, Philippines (municipalities of Real, Infanta, General Nakar or REINA),

which experienced a big flood in 2004 due to swift runoffs from increasingly

denuded uplands

• Widened river system due to runoffs and heavy siltation, while agricultural lands

severely eroded by more frequent river flooding and heavier precipitation

• Over time, livelihoods have been changing from rice and coconut farming to

irregular vegetable farming, heightened charcoal production, non farm

occupations

3

4

5

Objectives and questions

Generally explores the complex factors and dynamics that define people’s attempts to secure their farm livelihoods and build resilience in the longer term especially when disaster risks become more imminent.

Specifically, addresses the following questions:• How do people make sense of floods historically and as continued

uncertainty?• What social/gender identities and meanings are created, maintained, altered

by people’s mobility or immobility?• How do people adapt to flood risks and changes in farm livelihoods, and are

there gender and other social stratifications and vulnerabilities produced and reproduced as they adapt?

• How do institutions adapt to increased flooding and people’s insecure farm and non farm livelihoods, and how is gender implicated in their programs?

6

Concepts• Political ecology, as it considers social and economic scales of influence such as the

growth of industrial estates and continued natural resource extraction that combine with

variable weather events affecting agrarian livelihoods contexts: ‘disasters are

fundamentally a human-environment problem’ (Robbins, 2004; Oliver-Smith, 2013)

• Gender and mobilities (Creswell and Uteng, 2008; Elliot and Urry, 2010) as it intersects

with theories of gender and social difference: ‘acquiring mobility is often analogous to a

struggle for acquiring new subjectivity’ (Cresswell and Uteng, 2008)

• Disaster and disaster recovery as gendered and meaning-making events and

processes (Cupples, 2007; Hyndman, 2008; Enarson, 1998)

Feminist political ecology of agricultural change and disaster:

posits a historical and scalar view of socially differentiated livelihoods and disaster

experiences;

de-centers gender and investigates how social difference constitutes power;

interprets how people make sense of their recovery from disaster and their changing

subjectivities as they are changing livelihoods and living with disasters

explores how power relations come to frame particular institutional languages of

disaster and climate resilience programs

7

Methodology

Sequential mixed methods approach was employed, following two phases of

data collection (2011-2014)

• Phase 1: Building propositions through qualitative data collection (key informants,

focus groups, in depth interviews, desk reviews, scoping exercises)

• Phase 2: Testing the pervasiveness of propositions from qualitative data through

quantitative data collection (survey of 500 individuals in 8 study sites throughout

REINA)

Currently wrapping up Phase 2 after producing a survey instrument from the

initial qualitative findings of Phase 1

8

Findings

• Increasing and rapid soil erosion leading to

landlessness

• Decline in soil fertility due to frequent floods and in

some plots, remaining layers of hardened mud from

mudslides, and damage of irrigation canals and

sources (85% of survey respondents)

• Multi-livelihood portfolios include cultivating mono-

varieties in less affected land plots (2 cropping

seasons) to multiple crop cultivation and charcoal

production

• Planting period has shifted in the last 5 years

• New tenurial arrangements: from landlords to

agricultural workers, and increasing tenancy (55%

of survey respondents)

• Most farmers also engage in non farm work (60% of

survey respondents), many of the men are

construction workers (35%), and women are

laundry workers (21%)

• Increasing engagement in non farm livelihoods and

mobility

9

Mobilities mark the boundary between a

prosperous past and a present period of

resource decline

• ‘Our wealth will never come back to us. Our

lives were better in the past.’

• ‘In the past, we could still afford to send our

children to college.’ ‘Today, our children – only

high-school graduates – leave our villages to

find work elsewhere.’

• ‘Now, even women and mothers have to travel

to work and earn something.’

• Men go off to construction sites, which is often

irregular. Whereas more women today work as

domestic workers in Manila or Laguna and

their jobs are more stable’

10

Disadvantage is assigned to types of

mobility

• ‘Migrants (‘dayo’) come to our village to

cut trees for charcoal production. They

are destroyers.’

• ‘Landless people have no choice but to

search the forests and burn and produce

charcoal. Those who still have land do not

have to seek work elsewhere’

• ‘Farming keeps mothers from leaving

their homes. They can keep households

“whole”, unlike the women who have to

leave home.’

11

Resettlement areas are sites of

resettled, but insecure mobile subjects

• ‘If we were given work here

(resettlement site), we will not go to

work elsewhere.’

• ‘From our resettlement area, we walk

to our former lands by the river to

fish.’

• ‘We stay on the lands the river has

left us to plant watermelons and

vegetables. We rush home when it

begins to rain’

• ‘We have more expenses now

because we have to travel more

frequently, from home to our fields by

the river.’

• ‘Those who lost their land have to

move and find work near and far.’

12

Mobility also marks gendered-differentiated responses to flood disasters

• ‘It is the women and children who evacuate, while the men stay behind to protect

their home and belongings.’

• ‘When there is no man in the family, we just have to abandon our home and

evacuate when a flood comes.’

• ‘When the floods came, I stayed behind to protect and watch over my husband’s

motorbike. He would be furious if I let anything happen to it.’

13

Institutional adaptive responses and

planned disaster recovery are also

mobility-defined new ‘languages’ of DRR,

resilience building and adaptation:

• Bio-intensive gardening

• Women zero-plastic campaigns

• Wood carving and sewing

• Hazards mapping for disaster

preparedness

• Reinforce the aspiration for fixity and

immobility by

• Re-traditionalizing gender roles that

emphasize in-place livelihoods and assign

tasks for disaster preparedness. No

program addresses people’s actual

mobilities in the context of current farm and

non farm livelihoods.

• Existing livelihoods placement programs

(e.g., Employment & Services Office in

local governments) have few resources

and clout

14

Changing livelihoods: Immobile but advantaged women and mobile but insecure men

Ester: The disaster brought me a home. We used to only live with my mother. Today, I stay home and find it better than working in Manila as a domestic helper. We are also safe here from the river.

Ariel: became a footloose farmworker in nearby villages or as a worker in local construction sites receiving a daily wage of 150 pesos (US$ 3). He says, “I am now ‘pa-ekstra-ekstra’ (a flexible and insecure job worker). Despite my difficulties at finding a secure livelihood, however, I now have a house of my own in the resettlement site. In the past, I used to live only with relatives.”

15

To conclude

1. Mobility in feminist political ecology of disaster and livelihoods

research: • A paradigm of mobility offers a way out of oversimplification: it complicates earlier

notions of place-based gender-specific risks and disaster response in the gender,

disaster and climate change literature

• Considers mobility as everyday occurrence not only disaster-driven: mobility for

multiple livelihoods that respond to political economy/ecology challenges and

opportunities;

• Mobility as a reflection of people’s accumulated fears and living with insecurity where

nature is perceived to acquire its own agency (and mobility)

• Mobility and immobility mark changing subjectivities, stratifications, relative degrees of

resilience and stability, insecurity and fragility, and are themselves not definitive, black-

or-white categories that define gendered subjectivities : a ‘contextualized phenomenon’

• Mobility is a blind spot in institutional resilience and adaptation programming that are

produced by knowledge/power regimes

16

2. Re-thinking gender in livelihoods, disaster, and agrarian

transformations • Compels us to go beyond easy and disembedded notions of gender-specific

impacts where women are often claimed as immediately disadvantaged and

vulnerable, sidestepping other subjects of vulnerability• The REINA case seems to point to the contrary: left-behind, immobile women – as

domestic workers, as wives of fishers and farmers on fragile lands, or stay-at-home

wives – benefit from fixity in the face of increasing fluidity and movement compelled by

living with disasters and the rise of insecure livelihoods. Men, on the other hand are more

mobile, who face multiple but insecure livelihoods.

• Challenges the positivist framing of climate change and disaster discourses

that departs from asking what floods and disasters do to women and men in

the disaster literature, but

• instead views disaster as a meaning-making event, considering how gendered

subjects feel about and reflect on complex spatial, resource and material

realignments that disasters bring, and on the ways that these may constrain or

enable positive change both in the present and future.

17