Securing Women's Tenure and Leadership for Forest Management: A Summary of the Asian Experience

This technical report includes research and four case studies from Indonesia, Nepal, the Philippines, and a multi-country case study from South and Southeast Asia that review the dynamics between tenure and access to forests. The report includes information on the role of gender in natural resource management and how gender has increasingly part of the international development agenda through groups such as Women in Development (WID) and Gender, Environment and Development (GED).

The case studies include:

1. Gender in Forest Tenure: Pre-requisite for Sustainable Forest Management in Nepal—history of forestry and Community Forestry, with a focus on how the roles and needs of local rural communities have been considered during different periods
2. Fostering Women-led Natural Resource Management Reform Amidst Conflict—nexus of armed conflict, gender roles, ecosystem degradation, inconsistent policies and uncontrolled capitalism in Philippines
3. Gender Justice: Forest Tenure and Forest Governance in Indonesia—tenure and access to forests dynamic with intersect of state and customary law
4. Re-Envisioning REDD+: Gender, Forest Governance and REDD+ in Asia—multi-country study drawing lessons from supposedly gender sensitive initiatives

Excerpt from the report:

Bottlenecks for empowering women include: inability to implement programs they have designed, undue influence of men in making key decisions, household chores, limited access to finance or financial management skills, undervaluing of women’s work, no land and property ownership, limited organizational experience, and limited documentation of their own children’s citizenship.

These require constant and collective work on three levels

1. Policy level: by developing policies, regulation, law and guidelines and by revising them periodically in favor of women and disadvantaged groups
2. Implementation level: by changing attitude of people, which is also not an easy task as it takes lots of time and efforts to change the perception of people about gender roles
3. Establishing rights: This is very challenging but possible and may generate conflict. If we can manage land, water and forest properly we can have sustainable development. For this, we need to establish ownership of women over those resources. It is important to give leadership to those who raised the agenda. Support from every stakeholder is necessary to establish resource rights and empower women. In this process, the government is an obstacle—many high-level policy people are not convinced about handing over rights and ownership to local communities. Therefore there is a need of continued advocacy.