Gender and Intra-Household Impacts of Community Based Conservation and Development Initiatives in Peru and Brazil

Marianne Schmink, University of Florida, and Avecita Chicchón, Conservation International, Peru

The last two decades have seen a growing consensus on the need to experiment with new ways to work with local communities to improve the management of natural resources. Development workers have realized that environmental sustainability, rather than a purely livelihood improvement focus, is important in their activities and conservationists have recognized that successful conservation demands attention to maintaining or improving the livelihoods of local people. The importance of gender in development work has long been recognized, but within conservation work gender analysis is a relative newcomer. Community based conservation projects capture elements previously ignored by both conservationists and development practitioners. The design and implementation of these projects is geared to achieve social equity through community participation in natural resource management. As such, gender is likely to be a key factor in their operationalization; and women should reap benefits from participation.

Building on the methodology development and baseline data collection of a year-long comparative study of 10-15 sites currently underway in Peru, Brazil and Ecuador, this USAID/IFPRI funded study will extend the research in two neighbouring Amazonian regions in Peru (Tamboptata-Candamo) and Brazil (the eastern portion of the state of Acre). Project interventions currently underway in these two sites include non timber forest product extraction, agroforestry systems, and eco-tourism, the most commonly proposed types of project for community based conservation and development.

The project will collect qualitative (interviews, participatory mapping, oral histories, and focus groups) and quantitative data (random household surveys, time allocation studies). In keeping with a gendered political ecology approach, one level of analysis will focus on how participation in project benefits is differentiated among different stakeholder and user groups. Gender is assumed to be one of the key factors underpinning this differentiation. The second level of analysis will focus on project induced changes in decisions about intra-household allocation of labor and income, comparing households of different size, life cycle characteristics, and migratory status.