The challenge of HIV/AIDS: Where does agroforestry fit in? - World ...

Chapter 22: Women, land and trees177the changes. Legal literacy campaigns aretherefore needed for both audiences, andwomen need to have access to administrativeand judicial channels. Access can berestricted physically, by women’s morerestricted mobility due to childcare orsafety concerns. The greater the distancepoor rural women have to travel to registera claim or fight for it in court, the lesslikely they will be to use formal channelsto claim their rights. Social distance alsomatters, for when women have less educationor social standing than those to whomthey must go to claim their rights, they areless likely to seek redress. For this reason,in Tanzania and Uganda, land managementand adjudication bodies at all levelsare required to have female representation.However, these bodies require resourcesto be effective, and governments may nothave the personnel, funds or political willto provide for them at the local level. Evenwith reforms in legislation and implementingbodies, women’s rights may not changedramatically if there is major differencebetween statutory and customary law, butstate law does provide a basis upon whichthey can appeal. Eventually, with enoughappeals to such laws, even social normsand power relations can change.Community programmesCommunity programmes offer the potentialto change gendered power relations directly.Many programmes run by governmentor non-governmental organizations (NGOs)use group-based approaches for a rangeof social development or natural resourcemanagement (NRM) goals. In many cases,the programmes introduce new discourseabout gender relations and resource rightsthat affect local customs. If women areincluded in such groups, either through allwomen’sgroups (as in many microfinanceor education programmes), or throughactive participation of women in mixedgendergroups (as in some, though not all,forestry groups), it can have an empoweringeffect on them. The interaction betweenmen and women in such groups can alsohelp to change gender-related norms andeven power relations. However, in othercases, it can cause a backlash by men towardmore ‘traditional’ practices.Collective action programmesCollective action programmes can havea direct influence on women’s propertyrights, as when women group together toacquire land and then cultivate it individuallyor collectively (Agarwal 1994; Rocheleauand Edmunds 1997; Schroeder 1993).Women’s participation in NRM groups hasa direct bearing on their property rights.Under many devolution programmes, usergroups are charged with managing resourceslike forests, irrigation, or watersheds thathad been under (nominal) state control.Although many government programmesare reluctant to give away explicit rightsover resources (preferring to focus on theresponsibilities that user groups should undertake),when user groups take over, theyBox 1. Collective action in Nepaleffectively acquire management and oftenexclusion rights over the resource. Thus,effective participation in the user groups isimportant to ensure that the resources areused in a way that meets women’s needs.Without women’s participation, for example,watershed management groups in Indiaoften close off areas for grazing or fuelwoodcollection in such a way that poorwomen lose access and bear the greatestcosts, while the benefits go to the richerlandholders (often men) downstream. Kerr(2002) found that where NGOs had givenspecial attention to social organization(especially among women and marginalizedgroups) before starting to addresswatershed management, those groups werebetter able to articulate their interests, andthe programmes were more equitable andmore sustainable. However, collective actionprogrammes can be highly complex(see Box 1).Agroforestry interventionsAgroforestry interventions have considerablepotential to influence property rightsbecause planting or clearing trees is aThe complexities involved in collective action programmes are illustrated by programmesin Nepal, which provide 40-year leases of degraded forest to groups of poor people. Thepilot project included 25 percent women members, but even when women were not themembers, both husbands and wives were involved. Gender training for all project staffand hiring women as group promoters were seen as instrumental to project success. Inaddition to significant regeneration of vegetation, the focus on developing fodder andfuelwood sources that were of particular importance to women reduced household timespent on gathering them by an average of 2.5 hours per day (Brett et al. 2004). Womenreported that they became more empowered, in part because they learned to have a sayin group decision making. However, granting more secure tenure to a subset of the poorestpeople challenged local power structures and excluded others who had customaryuse rights over that land (Baral and Thapa 2003). Without strong local organizations toenforce rules, there were conflicts that decreased tenure security.