In this IUFRO 2014 presentation, CIFOR scientists challenge perceptions about men, women, and forest product use.
This presentation was a part of a session which focused on challenges, opportunities, and outcomes of securing women’s participation in forest governance, linking them with issues and experiences in climate change adaptation and mitigation.
Myths and realities about men, women and forest use: a global comparative study
1. 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
THINKING beyond the canopy
IUFRO World Forestry Congress
Salt Lake City
6th October 2014
2. THINKING beyond the canopy
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
3. THINKING beyond the canopy
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
4. 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
THINKING beyond the canopy
5. 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!
THINKING beyond the canopy
7. crops
forest
wages
livestock
business
environment
Income sources in the PEN dataset
0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3
income shares
other
Source: CIFOR-PEN dataset
~22%
~6.4%
T = 27.5%
=> Clearly supports “high env. income” hypothesis
– …much more than some of us had thought!
8. Is the harvesting of forest products mainly
undertaken by women?
Share of income from unprocessed forest products by region and gender
THINKING beyond the canopy
9. 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
THINKING beyond the canopy
10. 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
THINKING beyond the canopy
11. Do women collect primarily for
subsistence and men for sale?
THINKING beyond the canopy
12. 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
THINKING beyond the canopy
13. Do women collect a greater share of forest
products from lands under common property
tenure regimes than men?
THINKING beyond the canopy
14. Do women collect a greater share of forest
products from lands under common
property tenure regimes than men?
THINKING beyond the canopy
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
15. 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
THINKING beyond the canopy
16. 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
THINKING beyond the canopy
17. Read more…
Special Issue of
World Development
including all of the
PEN-related
research findings
PEN website:http
://www.cifor.org/pen/
THINKING beyond the canopy
This is the global average results.
Forest (natural) income = 21.1%
Forest (plantation) income = 1%
Non-forest environmental income = 6.4
Environmental income (natural forest & non-forest environmental) = 27.5, about the same as crop income 28.7%