Over the past year, I’ve been working with Mary Thompson (one of my now-former students – well done, Dr. Thompson) on a report for USAID that explores how the Agency, and indeed development more broadly, approaches the issue of gender and adaptation in agrarian settings. The report was an idea that was hatched back when I was still at USAID. Basically, I noticed that most gender assessments seemed to start with a general “there are men, and there are women, and they are different, so we should assess that” approach. This binary approach is really problematic for several reasons.

• First, not all women (or men) are the same – a wealthy woman is likely have different experiences and opportunities than a poor woman, for example. Lumping all women together obscures these important differences.
• Second, different aspects of one’s identity matter more or less, depending on the situation. To understand the decisions I make in my daily life, you would have to account for the fact that sometimes my decisions are shaped by the fact I am professor (such as when I am in the classroom), and other times where what I do is influenced by my role as a father. In both cases, I am still a man – but I occupy two different identity spaces, where my gender might not be as important as my profession or my status as a (somewhat) responsible adult in the house.
• Third, this approach assumes that there are gendered differences in the context of adaptation to climate change and variability in all situations. While there are often important gendered differences in exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity in relation to the impacts of climate change and variability, this is not always the case.

My colleagues in both the Office of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (GENDEV) and the Office of Global Climate Change agreed that these issues were problematic. They enthusiastically supported an effort to assess the current state of knowledge on gender and adaptation, and to illustrate the importance of doing gender differently through case studies.

Mary and I reviewed the existing literature on gender and adaptation in agrarian settings, exploring how the issue has been addressed in the past. We also focused on a small emerging literature in adaptation that takes a more productive approach to gender that acknowledges and wrestles with the fact that gender roles really take much of their meaning, responsibilities, and expectations from the intersection of gender and other social categories (especially age, ethnicity, and livelihood/class). You can find a first version of this review in the annex of the report. However, Mary and I substantially revised and expanded this literature review for an article now in press at Geography Compass. A preprint version is available on the preprints page of my website.

The bulk of the report – and the part probably of greatest interest to most of my readers – are three case studies that empirically illustrate how taking a binary approach to gender makes it very difficult to identify some of the most vulnerable people in a given place or community, and therefore very different to understand their particular challenges and opportunities. These cases are drawn from my research in Ghana and Mali, and Mary’s dissertation work in Malawi. They make a powerful case for doing gender assessments differently.

This report is not the end of the story – my lab and I are still working with GENDEV and the Office of Global Climate Change at USAID, now identifying missions with adaptation projects that will allow us to implement parallel gender assessments taking a more complex approach to the issue. We hope to demonstrate to these missions the amount of important information generated by this more complex approach, show that greater complexity does not have to result in huge delays in project design or implementation, and ideally influence their project design and implementation such that these projects result in better outcomes.

More to come…