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Towards a gender-responsive implementation of The Convention on Biological Diversity

27 February, 2019
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This research paper is prepared by UN-Women, with section contributions from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Bioversity International, the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). It first sets the context by presenting the gender dimensions of biodiversity conservation and the global norms on gender equality and natural resource management. It then outlines the key mandates for the integration of a gender perspective in biodiversity conservation and identifies the main entry points for strengthening gender considerations in decisions of the Parties to the CBD and in the implementation of the Convention, as well as in the future work of Parties and other stake-holders. Gender-responsive practices contributing to biodiversity conservation at the local and country level are then presented to highlight promising examples and lessons. The paper concludes with recommendations for action directed at specific stakeholders. The research paper was prepared by UN Women staff (Christine Brautigam, Verona Collantes, Sylvia Hordosch, Nicole van Huyssteen and Sharon Taylor), and consultant (Hanna Paulose). Section contributions and inputs were provided by Carolyn Hannan (University of Lund), Tanya McGregor (CBD Secretariat), Marle`ne Elias (Bioversity International), and Markus Ihalainen (Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR)).

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  • What’s in it for gender researchers when it comes to UN Women’s gender and SDGs report?

What’s in it for gender researchers when it comes to UN Women’s gender and SDGs report?
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A woman and her father-in-law pick up a permit to collect fuelwood in the Chisapani Community Forest, Nepal. Photo by Chandra Shekhar Karki/CIFOR

UN Women’s 2018 flagship report on gender and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offers a framework to monitor each of the 17 SDGs from a gender perspective, and takes stock of their performance to date. 

In a two-part series, Bimbika Sijapati Basnett, gender coordinator for the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA) gender scientist, analyzes the report and its implications for the CGIAR gender research community. Sijapati Basnett recently published a brief evaluating this role.

With this article, she reviews the strengths and limitations of the UN Women report – Turning promises into action: Gender equality in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development – for gender researchers wishing to contribute to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The highest echelons of the United Nations have hailed the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as “a victory for gender equality” [1]. Concerns are mounting, however, over how the SDGs will be interpreted and implemented, and whether they will make a difference to the lives of women and girls the world over.

The UN Women 2018 flagship report offers a framework to monitor each of the 17 SDGs from a gender and social inclusion perspective, and it takes stock of that performance to date.

The report calls for greater collaboration among governments, researchers and women’s rights organizations to realize the 2030 Agenda. How? By tracking progress against the goals, identifying achievements and gaps, and highlighting implementation challenges and opportunities.

Read more: UN Women’s evaluation of gender in the SDGs – What’s the role for the CGIAR?

KEY MESSAGES 

Turning promises into action: Gender equality in the 2030 agenda for sustainable development

The report makes a strong case for leveraging data, evidence and analysis, to inform the duties and performance standards of those in positions of power, and to help assess compliance and enforcement of sanctions and remedies where required.

“The ultimate test for the 2030 Agenda will be whether the SDGs are achieved by 2030” (43).

The report’s excellent assessment of the current ‘Global Indicator Framework for the Sustainable Development Goals’ offers strategic entry points for CGIAR (and/or gender researchers outside of CGIAR) to address current limitations in data, methods and analyses. The Global Indicator Framework comprises 232 indicators to track and monitor progress against the SDGs. The Inter-Agency and Expert Group on Sustainable Development is the inter-governmental body responsible for developing and providing technical support for implementation of the framework. The UN Women report also offers conceptual, methodological and policy directions for future CGIAR research.

Some key messages and highlights from the report are listed below.

Strategic entry points

Although gender equality matters to all 17 goals, the current Global Indicator Framework is inadequate for gender responsive monitoring of the SDGs because:

  • Only six of the 17 SDG goals are gender sensitive (SDGs 1, 3, 4, 5, 8 and 16); five goals are gender sparse (SDG 2, 19, 11, 13 and 17) and the remaining six are gender blind (SDGs 6, 7, 9, 12, 14 and 15).
  • The available gender data presents gaps.
  • There is inadequate investment and funding for additional or quality data collection.
  • Data collection methodologies present deep biases (e.g. censuses, labor surveys).

Upon assessing all 54 gender-specific indicators and analyzing one indicator per goal in detail to illustrate progress, gaps and challenges to date, the report calls for: “serious analytical work that sharpens our understanding of how to capture, measure and monitor meaningful change for women and girls” (73).

The report suggests this gap is particularly clear in new and emerging areas, such as understanding the gender implications of climate change.

Commitment to intersectionality

The report highlights that focusing on women as a group is insufficient to measure progress. Gender inequalities only acquire meaning and significance when they interact and intersect with other social relations. Many women and girls face multiple forms of discrimination – e.g. accessing resources, services and opportunities – based on aspects of their identity that differentiate them from more advantaged groups. It is critical to move beyond averages and to identify and compare how the most marginalized fare on key well-being markers in relation to other groups.

Through four country study summaries (see Chapter 3), the report shows how average aggregate figures on women’s wellbeing often mask significant variations across regions, ethnic, racial and income groups. This is a considerable departure from previous reports that had given lip service to ‘differences among women’ and treated women as a group (UN Women 2014; Asher and Sijapati Basnett 2016).

This is also the first time that a high-profile global report has engaged seriously with feminist concerns with ‘intersectionality’ in a substantial way. While intersectionality has long been considered a ‘gold standard’ for analyzing experiences of identity and oppression in feminist and gender theories, scholars have been concerned that ‘gender’ and ‘gender inequalities’ are simplified, both in policy and practice (Nash 2008; Arora-Jonsson 2014; Ihalainen et al. 2016; Colfer et al. 2018).

Read also: Making sense of ‘intersectionality’: A manual for lovers of people and forests

Spotlight on structural barriers to gender equality 

The report devotes two chapters to structural barriers to gender equality: eliminating all forms of violence against women (Chapter 5); and addressing unpaid care and domestic work (Chapter 6). The Millennium Development Goals, predecessors to the SDGs, were heavily criticized for omitting these dimensions of inequality (see Razavi 2016, Chant and Sweetman 2012, Kabeer 2003).

Chapter 6 of the report highlights that women perform the vast majority of unpaid and care work across the world. The distribution of such work remains the same, despite women increasingly joining the labor force through formal employment.

Policies and interventions aimed at empowering women economically (e.g. through greater involvement in value chains, financial literacy and new livelihood opportunities) must go hand in hand with initiatives to reduce women’s paid and unpaid work burdens, recognize their work and redistribute it within the family, as well as among families and wider institutions.

Policies and accountability

The report clearly highlights what actions are needed, as well as who should be responsible for implementation and accountable for action/inaction. It suggests that governments should prioritize universal systems that are financed and used by everyone, and simultaneously target efforts towards ensuring access for historically excluded groups. This approach offers a stance on a long-standing debate within social policy on ‘universal’ or ‘targeted policies’ for addressing poverty reduction and social inequalities (see Mkandawire 2005).

The report also highlights that governments are primarily responsible for implementation, because other actors cannot be held accountable in the way that governments can (see Chandhoke 2003). The report seeks to temper current enthusiasm around the private sector’s role in realizing the SDGs, drawing attention to the fact that private businesses are not yet bound by any global set of rules on business and human rights, and their actions do not always align with objectives of sustainable development and gender equality (Kabeer 2017).

PITFALLS AND LIMITATIONS 

A couple in a peatland area in Indonesia. Photo by Mokhamad Edliadi/CIFOR

The report also presents pitfalls and limitations from a methodological, conceptual and policy application perspective.

Methodologically, the report mainly privileges quantitative methods over qualitative and mixed methods. The risk here is to imply that any research seeking to monitor the 2030 Global Agenda must comply with pre-existing national datasets (such as national census data and demographic health, labor and living standard measurement surveys) rather than additionally taking advantage of the wide variety of other research available.

Conceptually, Chapter 3 on ‘Moving beyond the averages’ provides only lip service to the risks of using pre-existing categories to identify who the marginalized are and what sustains their marginalization. The chapter does not adequately consider the reality that ‘targeting the poor and the marginalized’ is an inherently political and contested process. Likewise, it presents just one methodological approach (the ‘inter-categorical approach’, see McCall 2015 or Colfer et al. 2018) for examining the intersection between gender and other axes of social difference.

Chapter 6 on ‘Unpaid and care work’ demonstrates this report was written by a committee of writers who do not always write with one voice; this makes the report lack coherence in many places. As such, while most of the chapters point to knowledge and data gaps, Chapter 6 reads more like a definitive guide on how to address women’s unpaid work and care burdens. Likewise, the report’s overall stance against the private sector or corporations is rather dogmatic, and does not offer a realistic way of engaging with them and/or holding their actions to account.

On the question of the potential impact of such reports, the report was published by UN Women rather than by the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on Sustainable Development or the UN Statistical Commission for the Global Monitoring of 169 SDG Targets. It is therefore unclear whether (and if so, how) the analyses and recommendations offered by the report will inform broader SDG monitoring efforts. Given the global scope of the report, the findings only provide broad brushstrokes of key challenges and opportunities. They must be validated through national and locally relevant monitoring, too.

Despite these limitations and the subsequent need to interpret it with caution, the report is an impressive first attempt at taking stock of performance against each SDG from a gender and social inclusion perspective. It also calls for more concerted SDG monitoring efforts by different actors, including research organizations.

In an upcoming article, I will outline how CGIAR can play a meaningful role in contributing to future efforts to monitor SDGs from a gender and social inclusion perspective.

By Bimbika Sijapati Basnett, originally published by the CGIAR Collaborative Platform for Gender Research. 

Notes: [1] Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of the Entity for Gender Equality and Empowerment of Women (UN Women) in UN Women 2018, 18

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UN Women’s evaluation of gender in the SDGs: What’’s the role for the CGIAR?

21 September, 2018
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FTA COMMUNICATIONS TEAM
  • The UN Women’s 2018 report on gender equality within the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development underscores the importance of monitoring the SDGs in order to: translate global commitment to results, foster public debate and democratic decision-making, and strengthen accountability for actions or omissions.
  • The report serves to demonstrate the inadequacies of the current Global Indicator Framework for gender responsive monitoring of the SDGs. It highlights that women and girls face multiple forms of disadvantage and calls for recognizing, redistributing and reducing the paid and unpaid burdens women face, so as to overcome structural barriers to gender equality.
  • The CGIAR gender research community is uniquely positioned to contribute by tracking progress against the goals, identifying achievements and gaps, and highlighting implementation challenges. However, the report does not significantly showcase CGIAR gender research and research publications.
  • Looking forwards, the CGIAR can play a bigger role in the 2030 Agenda by leveraging its globally comparative, high-impact and innovative research to contribute to global and national efforts to monitor the SDGs. This will necessitate seizing opportunities to inform future reports as well as consolidating and harmonizing our research and findings to have a bigger voice and effect.

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  • Yes, we could and we did. Gender specialists share success stories

Yes, we could and we did. Gender specialists share success stories

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By Markus Ihalainen

The event “Gender Matters in Forestry – Challenges and Opportunities”, during the World Forestry Congress in Durban, South Africa, brought together policy makers, practitioners and researchers to look at what is already being done to address gender in forest policy and practice. The panel featured: Esther Mwangi, Principal Scientist (CIFOR), Heidrun Ströbert-Beloud, Gender Officer (GIZ), Patricia Rosete Xotlanihua, Deputy Director of Intersectoral Cooperation, Mexican National Forestry Commission, Eva Müller, Director at the FAO Forest Economics, Policy and Products Division, Bhaswati Thakurta, PhD candidate, University of Calcutta and Åsa Torkelsson, Economic Empowerment Advisor, UN Women.

Photo: FAO
Gender matters in forestry. Photo: FAO

We know gender matters in forestry. An ever-increasing body of research has time and again demonstrated that. We know that cultural norms and power relations often assign men and women different roles in forest use and management; gender inequalities persist in access and control over forest resources, benefit distribution as well as participation in decision-making. These inequalities are further likely to be exacerbated by climate change.

We also know that empowering women in forest management and use is crucial for realizing their rights. It is also often likely to bring about more egalitarian policy outcomes and environmental benefits.

So instead of discussing whether gender matters or not, why not look at what is already being done in terms of addressing gender in forest policy and practice? Our event tried to do just that.

Examining various initiatives and approaches, and understanding what works, what doesn’t, and why, is of crucial importance, also to allow for compiling and up-scaling best practices and identifying the enabling conditions, under which certain approaches to integrating gender translate into the desired outcomes.

Empowering women benefits the forestry sector. Photo: Simon Maina/FAO
Empowering women in forestry also benefits the environment. Photo: Simon Maina/FAO

In Uganda and Nicaragua, CIFOR researchers worked alongside communities to jointly identify and address barriers to equal participation in decision-making. They used a participatory research approach titled Adaptive Collaborative Management (ACM). After five years, women’s representation in forest executive committees is now on par with men’s, compared to the baseline figure of 16% at the inception stage. Involving both women and men in the process also made it easier for men to accept women’s leadership, said presenter Esther Mwangi

Promoting equal participation in forest decision-making also benefits the environment. In her research in India, Bhaswati Thakurta found that laws for equal participation in forest administration groups were often not enforced. Before women were included, it was the responsibility of men to guard the forest area, but they were idle and drank alcohol. This depraved their families of income so that the women saw themselves forced to cut trees illegally to sell them for livelihood.

The West Bengal state forest department changed the scenario radically. They included women in the forest management program and created Forest Protection Committees that were exclusively managed by women. So the illegal felling stopped.

Working with the male-dominated Moroccan Forest Administration on gender mainstreaming, Heidrun Ströbert-Beloud and the GIZ project team asked how the Moroccan forest sector could support gender-equal participation on the local forest user level, if the institution itself is not gender-inclusive? To change this, GIZ trained forest officials on gender issues and helped to bring more women into the forest administration. Since female representation is slowly but constantly increasing and staff are more aware of gender issues, both factors are expected to contribute to a more gender inclusive forest policy.

In Mexico, women’s land ownership and participation in forest decision-making is very limited. To address these issues, CONAFOR has adopted a twofold approach. First, the commission promotes women’s participation through gender-specific programs. These programs focus both on building women’s capacity as well as raising awareness of gender issues among men. Second, the commission – much like GIZ in Morocco – actively works to increase awareness of gender within CONAFOR. This involves studies, stakeholder consultations and building the capacity of staff. For the past two years, CONAFOR has devoted 10% of their budget to gender-specific activities, and their advances in integrating gender considerations into policy were hailed as a “shining example” by Lorena Aguilar from IUCN in the Huffington Post.

Eva Müller stated that women’s participation is increasing in many countries, but their access to decision-making and leadership positions continues to be limited. A study by FAO and RECOFTC suggests that while gender-responsive policies are crucial, they might not be enough to reduce pervasive gender inequalities in forestry. Instead, policies should be supported by a number of additional measures, such as: 1) gender sensitization seminars and workshops for decision-makers; 2) supporting institutions to facilitate incremental learning and knowledge exchange; 3) facilitating coordination between technical line ministries and women’s groups and their alliances; and 4) strengthening the capacity of women’s organizations, user networks to engage in forestry-related consultations.

There is need for further alignment of the sustainability and gender agendas, said Åsa Torkelsson from UN Women. There is no sustainable development without everyone on board. Women are relatively most impacted by climatic changes. UN Women’s forthcoming work with UNEP–UNDP-PEI Africa and World Bank estimates the substantive Cost of the Gender Gap in Agricultural Productivity, and explores the impact on agricultural production and national income. This gap exists because women frequently have unequal access to key agricultural inputs, such as land, labor, knowledge, fertilizer and improved seeds. Sticky areas for gender inequalities remain and new areas emerge: land, access to technologies. UN Women’s Alliance for Women in Technologies proposes to increase women’s productivity and time-saving and reduce post-harvest losses.

All presentations showed that working jointly with forestry departments and local communities to raise awareness and build their capacity in gender issues, encouraging equal representation and offering continued support, are measures that have the potential of resulting in more gender-responsive policies and outcomes.

Throughout the presentations, the importance of involving boys and men in the process of changing gender relations was stressed as a key factor for ensuring both immediate and long-term success. Unequal power-relations are often deeply rooted in norms and institutions, and thus rarely questioned. By identifying and discussing privileges and power that groups have over one another, and pointing at both the injustice of inequality and the collective benefits of equality, perceptions of what is “normal” can slowly begin to change.

 

 

 

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