myths and realities about men, women and forest use: a global comparative study

THINKING beyond the canopy

Myths and realities about men, women and forest use:

A global comparative study

Terry Sunderland, Ramadhani Achdiawan, Arild Angelsen, Ronnie Babigumira,Amy Ickowitz, Fiona Paumgarten, Victoria Reyes-García, Gerald Shively

IUFRO World Forestry Congress

Salt Lake City

6th October 2014


Introduction Many of the claims often

made in the literature on gender and forest products are based on case studies

However, it is unclear how generalizable they actually are

We investigated whether several commonly held views on gender and forest use are supported by the global PEN dataset


PEN is…

Large, tropics-wide collection of detailed & high-quality &comparable data by PhD students on the poverty-forest(environment) nexus, coordinated by CIFOR, with

numerous partners

It is the most comprehensive analysis of poverty-forest linkages undertaken to date


Features of PEN Approach: a network

• PhD students: Long fieldwork & student engagement

• Supported by senior resource persons

• Mutual benefits Capacity building

• Majority of partners from developing countries

State-of-the-art methods

• Quality data – short recall

• Comparable methods


PEN: the numbers..

24 countries 38 PEN studies 239 households in the average study 364 villages or communities surveyed >8,000 households surveyed 40,950 household visits by PEN enumerators 2,313 data fields (variables) in the average study 294,150 questionnaire pages filled out and entered 456,546 data cells (numbers) in the average study 17,348,734 data cells in the PEN global data base!


The PEN data set

0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3income shares

other

environment

business

livestock

wages

forest

crops

Source: CIFOR-PEN dataset

Income sources in the PEN dataset

~22%

~6.4%

T = 27.5%

=> Clearly supports “high env. income” hypothesis – …much more than some of us had thought!


Is the harvesting of forest products mainly undertaken by women?

Share of income from unprocessed forest products by region and gender


Pen and gender analysis

We disaggregated forest activities and income by gender using descriptive and regression analysis

Dependent variable: share of hh forest product income collected by women


Is the harvesting of forest products mainly undertaken by women?

Our data do not support this claim

For unprocessed products, this claim only holds in Sub-Saharan Africa

For processed products, it does not hold in any geographical location


Do women collect primarily for subsistence and men for sale?


Do women collect for primarily for subsistence and men for sale?

• Both women and men collect predominantly for subsistence use, but …

• Men´s sale share is higher than women´s

• However, in Sub-Saharan Africa, the share is almost equal


Do women collect a greater share of forest products from lands under common property

tenure regimes than men?


Do women collect a greater share of forest products from lands under common property tenure regimes than men?

The vast majority of products for both genders is collected under state property tenure regimes

In the global sample, the proportion collected by men and women from common property is about the same

The conventional claim holds for Latin America and Asia, but not for Africa


Summary of PEN gender findings

There is large regional variation in both the shares of forest products collected by women

Even after controlling for most of the factors discussed in the literature as well as differences in level of market integration, women in Africa collect a much larger share of forest products than women in Asia and Latin America

Many of the claims that originate from the gender and forest literature do not hold using the PEN global data sample

Men play a much more important and diverse role in the contribution of forest products to rural livelihoods than is often reported


Conclusions/Reflections

Deeper understanding of gendered patterns of income generation are important for designing policies aimed at improving HH welfare in general, but especially those aimed at improving the livelihoods of women

Culture, ethnicity, wealth and other variables are important! Interesting methodological issue: what we can learn from

case studies vs. global data This kind of study helps us to see overall patterns, but.. To understand the stories behind the patterns, case studies

can be useful, but not as stand-alone reference points


Read more…

Special Issue of World Development including all of the PEN-related research findings

PEN website:http://www.cifor.org/pen/


http://www.cifor.org

myths and realities about men, women and forest use: a global comparative study

Environment

pen data setthinking

pen studies

pen global data base

forest use

pen enumerators

pen dataset0

share of income

data cells numbers