Demonstrating How to Integrate Gender into Conservation

In East Timor’s Nino Konis Santana National Park, men work as fishermen while women prepare the catch for sale—first removing the fish from fishing gear, then sorting, processing and packaging for the market. In Madagascar’s Fandriana Vondrozo forest corridor, women who engage in small industries like basketry must often rely on men for raw materials, as they hold the permit required to collect wood and honey. In communities along the lower Caquetá and Apaporis Rivers of Colombia, the traditional roles of women and men are changing with younger generations. Women now gather coca leaves and weave palm leaves for thatching, two activities that were once the sole responsibility of men.

Photo by Kate Proud

These examples, drawn from a series of gender integration pilot projects implemented by Conservation International (CI) earlier this year, illustrate the different rights, roles and responsibilities of men and women concerning access, use, management and conservation of natural resources.

As an organization that works closely with communities, CI has considerable experience integrating the human dimension in conservation practice and ecosystem management. Yet, when it comes to incorporating gender dynamics into a conservation project or program, conservation project managers still face challenges. Among them are a lack of technical knowledge and available funds for gender integration, limited staff-time and socio-cultural resistance.

In 2012, CI adopted a Gender Policy under its Rights-Based Approach (RBA) to conservation, committing to “actively work to incorporate gender issues and anticipate gender-related outcomes in our design and implementation phases.” In response to this directive, and recognizing that conservation project managers need a simple resource that can easily be adapted to specific contexts, CI developed Guidelines for Integrating Gender into Conservation. These guidelines outline a pragmatic four-step approach for conservation project managers to better understand and integrate gender dimensions into their conservation projects.

Step 1: Understand and examine gender-based dimensions of the project

The essential first step to integrating gender dimensions into conservation projects entails collecting and identifying information on the differences in gender roles, activities, constraints and opportunities in a given context. Applied to conservation interventions, a gender analysis helps inform how gender issues may impact the project as well as how the project may impact men and women.

In Timor-Leste, a gender analysis comprising of focus groups and key informant interviews identified clear barriers for women to participate in conservation and livelihood activities. These obstacles ranged from a language barrier that is impeding women’s ability to contribute to community forums, to the unequal division of labor around household and child-rearing duties. A similar analysis conducted among fishing communities in Ecuador’s Galera San Francisco Marine Reserve uncovered the invisible role of women in fishing and related conservation activities, despite opportunities for them to engage at various points of the value chain.

Step 2: Adapt and develop project elements and activities

Photo by Vitus Antone

Information gathered through a gender analysis can help inform projects and programs that produce better outcomes for both men and women. The second step entails working with the community to brainstorm specific adjustments or additions to a project building off of the gender-based opportunities and constraints that were identified in Step 1.

In Colombia, CI is working to incorporate men’s and women’s voices into conservation decision-making in five local communities. Strategies are being identified to strengthen women’s participation in conservation activities, which include generating training spaces exclusively for women on different aspects of the program and developing capacity-building workshops for activities like biological monitoring, where women have expressed an interest but haven’t yet had the opportunity to get involved. In the Alto Mayo Basin of Peru, where it is common practice to refer to a group of people using only masculine vocabulary, CI is designing a protocol to incorporate inclusive language and thereby make women visible in written and oral communication.

Step 3: Adapt and develop project indicators for monitoring gender integration

To ensure that the gender-integration strategies developed in Step 2 are working, the third step to integration involves making monitoring and evaluation (M&E) processes more gender-sensitive to help paint a more detailed, gendered story of the project. This could mean, for example, designing a monitoring plan comprised of gender-based results, gender-sensitive indicators and sex-disaggregated qualitative and quantitative data.

In the striking landscapes of Guyana’s Rupununi region, CI is working with community-based enterprises to create environmentally-sustainable business models focused on nature-based tourism and organic and climate smart agriculture. Based on the findings of the gender analysis conducted in Step 1, the project team has proposed a set of gender-sensitive indicators to measure the income gap between men and women, control over resources, freedom of movement and risk of violence, voice and influence in decision-making, involvement in entrepreneurial projects and endorsement of gender considerations by various stakeholders engaged throughout the project.

Step 4: Move beyond project adaptation—broader institutional steps towards gender integration

While applying these gender integration techniques in projects and programs is important for building capacity, helping staff feel comfortable with the concepts of gender and improving methods of stakeholder engagement, true programmatic integration is needed for long-term sustainability. With this in mind, CI is continuing to work with many of these pilot sites over the next year to do just that. Taking lessons learned from these case studies, CI country offices will develop strategies for ensuring that gender considerations become part and parcel of how conservation projects are developed and implemented.

For more information about how CI is working to incorporate gender dimensions into projects and programs, please contact CI’s Gender and Conservation Advisor, Kame Westerman at kwesterman@conservation.org.