Document Type: Briefs

How to Identify and Shift Harmful Gender Norms in the Context of Land and Natural Resources

Overview

USAID programs and Missions implement activities that improve land rights, support inclusive land and resource governance, build resilient livelihoods, and promote women’s empowerment. This brief explores the relationship between gender norms and women’s land rights, introducing key social norms concepts and tools to identify and shift harmful norms in the context of land and natural resources. The information will support USAID Missions, implementing partners, and other actors designing and implementing programs on land tenure and land-based investment to identify context-specific gender norms and design activities to shift harmful gender norms and strengthen women’s access to and control of land and resources.

Download the full brief here.

What Are Social and Gender Norms?

When we walk into a store or clinic and need to wait for service, we most likely wait in a line. There may not be a sign telling us to wait in line, but we might see others in line and believe that others expect us to follow this social norm. Social norms are the unwritten or informal rules about what is typical or appropriate in a setting. They are embedded in communities, systems, and structures and can promote equitable or harmful behaviors and practices.

A type of social norm, gender norms are unwritten rules based on biological sex and/or social perceptions of gender. As gender is itself a social construct, gender norms describe which behaviors are appropriate and which are not appropriate according to one’s gender identity and include expectations of how people of different the gender identities should relate and interact. Through power dynamics and sanctions, harmful gender norms normalize and reinforce gender inequality and can limit women’s access to resources and their decision-making power. [1]

Attitudes, Behaviors, Beliefs, and Norms

Attitudes and behaviors are individual beliefs and actions that a person has or does, which may or may not be informed by social factors. Norms are collective beliefs about what is typical and appropriate behavior for certain people in a setting. Attitudes, norms, and behaviors do not always align. For example, a woman may have a personal belief that domestic partners or spouses should share household responsibilities, but the norm in her community might be that men should not engage in such tasks. She therefore may feel pressured to take on most of the household work and childcare.

Download the full brief here to view a table of key definitions.

Identifying, Exploring, and Monitoring Shifts in Gender Norms

Several tools have been developed to support program implementers to identify social and gender norms, design norms-shifting activities, and monitor shifts in norms.[2] As gender norms vary across communities and cultures, exploring these norms is usually best done before an activity or project begins. This way, findings can be used to better understand the context and to inform strategies that could help shift norms and develop appropriate indicators for monitoring and evaluation. Figure 1 describes steps of the process to identify gender norms, analyze information, apply findings to inform programming, and monitor shifts in norms. Since shifting gender norms takes time and action at different levels, this is an iterative and continuous process.

Gender Norms and Women’s Land Rights

Owning land is a powerful pathway to improving economic opportunity and livelihoods, fostering dignity and improved wellbeing, and building self-reliance in developing countries. Although women play a critical role in food production, they are less likely than men to own, inherit, and control land and natural resources, which limits their socioeconomic empowerment and increases their vulnerability to gender-based violence.[3] Inequality in the ownership, access, use, and control of land and natural resources is caused by multiple factors, including discriminatory legal and policy frameworks, male-dominated governance systems, unequal access to education and information, and harmful gender norms related to men’s and women’s public and private roles. These norms are maintained through attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, practices, and structures by those who hold power at multiple levels. Figure 2 shows how two gender norms affecting women’s land rights relate to broader gender norms, beliefs, and structural factors.

USAID Land and Resource Governance division (LRG) land projects such as Integrated Land and Resource Governance (ILRG) and Communications, Evidence and Learning (CEL) are using the concepts and frameworks described above to implement activities to shift harmful gender norms across countries at different levels and with different actors. A future brief will discuss the main gender norms related to land, natural resources, and agricultural value chains, as well as the gender norms-shifting approaches used, results, challenges, and lessons learned.

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[1] Parts of this brief were adapted from USAID’s Collective Action to Reduce Gender-Based Violence (CARE-GBV), How to Identify and Advance Equitable Social Norms, May 2021.

[2] USAID-funded Passages Project and the ALIGN (Advancing Learning and Innovation on Gender Norms) Platform have developed several resources and tools to explore, shift, and monitor gender norms. A list of resources is available at the end of this brief.

[3] Gender-based violence (GBV) is any harm or potential of harm perpetrated against a person or group on the basis of gender. It encompasses many expressions of violence – whether in public or private spaces – including physical, psychological, and sexual abuse; threats; coercion; and economic deprivation of land, property, and other resources.

INTRODUCTION

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded Integrated Land and Resource Governance (ILRG) program improves land tenure security for women and youth as part of broad-based economic empowerment. In 2020, ILRG’s Mozambique team assessed gender and youth relationships and decision-making structures regarding land access and use in a matrilineal context in Zambézia Province. The lessons learned in the assessment help clarify how gender and age inequalities interact with the process of delimitation of land boundaries and confirmation of land rights, as well as women’s and men’s land use and tenure security. The findings presented in this brief can guide decision-makers to design appropriate gender and youth-responsive activities and materials.

The assessment involved qualitative field work in two communities in Ile District where delimitation of community and family land was supported by the Department for International Development-funded Land: Enhancing Governance for Economic Development (LEGEND) program in 2018 – 2019 and USAID’s ILRG program in 2019; both projects were implemented by Associação Rural para Ajuda Mútua (ORAM). The communities were also directly or indirectly affected by vast land concessions granted to Portucel, an international company investing in the production of timber for paper pulp and energy.

The projects supported the establishment and capacity building of community land associations, delimitation of communities, and subsequent delimitation of land parcels that had been previously acquired by families or individuals based on occupation. Together, LEGEND and ILRG helped form 25 community land associations and provided written declarations of land rights for over 13,000 family and individual parcels. Seventy percent of land titles were solely in the names of women and six percent were co-titled to a man and a woman.

OVERVIEW OF TENURE ISSUES WITH FORESTS AND COCOA

Côte d’Ivoire’s forests have decreased from 16 million hectares in 1900 to 7.8 million hectares in 1990 and to 3.4 million hectares in 2015 (GoCI, 2018). Today 11 percent of the country’s surface area is forested. Of the remaining forests, 39 percent are located in protected areas, 25 percent in gazetted areas (forêts classées) and 36 percent in rural areas (GoCI, 2019b). From 1990 to 2000, rural areas lost the most forest at an annual rate of 7 percent, whereas between 2000 and 2015, gazetted forests were lost the fastest at 4 percent per year (GoCI, 2019b). Today there are 387 forest logging permits covering rural and gazetted lands, though historically logging has been concentrated in rural areas (GoCI, 2019b).

Agriculture – especially cocoa – has been the primary driver of deforestation in Côte d’Ivoire in recent decades (World Bank, 2019). There are an estimated 3.5 million hectares of cocoa plantations – more than remaining forests – of which 750,000 hectares are located in gazetted areas (GoCI, 2019b). Farms are all smallholder and produce on average 40 percent of the world’s cocoa supply, with annual exports exceeding two million tons in 2018 (World Bank, 2019). A fifth of the population depends on cocoa for a living. As land availability in rural areas has diminished, farmers have moved into gazetted forests and protected areas, which today account for a quarter of national production (RFI, 2019).

Two important features differentiate Côte d’Ivoire’s tenure arrangements for cocoa compared to Ghana. First, Côte d’Ivoire’s farms have a different settlement history, with the vast majority established during migrations to forest zones by outsider ethnic groups, mainly the baoulé ethnic group as well as foreigners, mainly from Burkina Faso (OFPRA, 2017). These migrations picked up in the 1940s as part of colonial policy and administrative strategies to attract labor (USAID, 2016) but they intensified after independence to a point where migrants outnumbered locals in many areas (Ruf, 2020).

Migration in the 1970s was driven by President Houphouët Boigny’s slogan “the land is owned by whoever puts it to use” (“la terre appartient à celui qui la met en valeur”). Clearing forest helped secure access to land (Bymolt et al., 2018), and along with a government policy favoring full-sun cocoa varieties (Schulte et al., 2020), migrants had a strong incentive to clear natural forests. Customary arrangements varied and evolved, with most initially governed by the tutorat system of integrating outsiders through sharing of production and gifts with a representative of the land-owning family (Chauveau, 2007).

These arrangements became more monetized as land pressure increased (Chauveau, 2007) and in some instances transitioned to outright land sales from the 1950s (Wily, 2015) but especially the 1970s and 1980s (Chauveau, 2007). In the 1990s and 2000s, new tenure arrangements called planter-partager (plant and share) took hold whereby outsiders would clear forests and build a farm and then half of the farm would revert to the landowner upon crop maturity. The new paradigm could be explained by land-owning groups becoming more aware of the value of holding onto land while “financing” the labor needed to establish a viable plantation (Colin & Ruf, 2011). Specific tenure agreements are diverse, with as many as 15 typologies (Wily, 2015). While some of these arrangements resemble those found in Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire differs in the preponderance of migrant farmers and also the violence and politicization of cocoa belt land disputes in the 1990s and 2000s (Chauveau, 2000).

A second distinguishing feature of Côte d’Ivoire is the history of centralized state-driven approaches to land and forest management in disregard of customary practices. This has led to legal pluralism (Lamarche, 2019) and a schism between laws and what is done in practice (OFPRA, 2017). While Ghana has similar features, there is no equivalent of recognized “stool lands” in Côte d’Ivoire despite the existence of parallel customary systems. Instead the rural land law recognizes customary rights only as a temporary stepping stone towards a national titling system controlled by the central government (GoCI, 2017; OFPRA, 2017). This leads to considerable challenges in securing land tenure despite over US$100 million in donor support in recent years (Dagrou & Loroux, 2017; Wily, 2015).

Against this backdrop, the issue of tree tenure has gained increasing attention from several fronts. First, difficulties implementing tree cover and tree planting requirements under standards like the Rainforest Alliance’s Cocoa Certification Program drew attention to misaligned tenure incentives (Ruf & Varlet, 2017). Meanwhile the current government has embraced the concept of “zero-deforestation cocoa” as part of its broader commitment to increasing the country’s forest cover from 11 percent to 20 percent by 2030 (GoCI, 2018). The new forest code of 2019 explicitly addresses tree tenure for the first time and gives primacy to the underlying landowner (GoCI, 2019a). The logic underlying such reforms is as follows: just as secure land tenure is a key predictor of higher cocoa productivity (Schulte et al., 2020), secure tree tenure can incentivize agroforestry. However, as discussed in this brief, Côte d’Ivoire shows that this is not straightforward in practice.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The government of Ghana claims state ownership of all “naturally occurring” trees, including on land privately held under customary title. The lack of tree tenure and inability to capture economic benefits from trees is a major driver of tree loss and disincentivizes cocoa agroforestry. This brief analyzes tree tenure law and policy in Ghana, including the proposed tree registration policy and justifications for state ownership of naturally occurring trees based in the 1992 Constitution. The authors propose an alternative interpretation of the 1992 Constitution based on customary law and usage that allows devolution of all tree rights to customary landowners without a constitutional amendment and removes the need for a tree registry. Evidence from devolution of tree tenure in the Sahel and China shows that devolution can lead to increased tree cover. Based on this analysis a series of recommendations on tree tenure reform are posed for government, the cocoa sector, donors, and civil society.

COCOA AND FORESTS

Ghana is the world’s second largest cocoa producer, and cocoa plays a critically important role in the economy with an estimated 30 percent of Ghana’s population dependent on cocoa for part or all their livelihoods. However, the cocoa sector is in trouble and smallholder cocoa production does not provide a reliable livelihood or ensure a healthy and sustainable ecosystem.

Traditional cocoa farms retained large shade trees which preserved many economically and environmentally important trees within the landscape. In the late 1950s the government inserted itself into the timber market and claimed rights to naturally occurring trees on cocoa farms. This led to increased timber harvesting from cocoa farms that was exacerbated in the 1980s when Ghana’s cocoa marketing board changed its policy and advocated removing shade trees and switching to more sun tolerant cocoa varieties to increase productivity. The new cocoa board policy produced short-term yield gains, but also increased susceptibility to diseases and shortened cocoa trees’ productive life. The combined pressures from forestry and cocoa led to deforestation and fragmentation of forest landscape in Ghana’s high forest zone and widespread removal of shade trees from farms. An average of 138,000 hectares of forest was lost per year from 2000 to 2015 and in 2007 it was estimated that 72 percent of cocoa farms across Ghana had “no to light” levels of shade.

The government of Ghana and cocoa industry actors acknowledge the vital role of improved cocoa production systems to mitigate and adapt to climate change, maintain biodiversity, conserve and enhance ecosystem services, and improve the livelihoods of cocoa farmers and their families. They recognize that increasing the diversity of shade tree species in Ghana’s cocoa-growing landscape is critical to improve the health and sustainability of cocoa production and diversify income and resilience for cocoa households.

Wildlife conservation and natural resource management are critical areas for economic development in Zambia, yet women still have limited opportunities for participation in community-level governance. In October 2020, the United States Agency for International Development-funded Integrated Land and Resource Governance (ILRG) program led a pilot initiative to empower women during the elections for community resources board (CRB) positions in four chiefdoms (Mukungule, Nabwalya, Chikwa, and Chifunda) around North Luangwa National Park, in partnership with the Department of National Parks and Wildlife (DNPW), Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS), and the Zambia Community Resources Board Association (ZCRBA). The objective was to increase the number of women participating in CRB elections, with the ultimate goal of drawing lessons learned and best practices to promote greater gender equality in policies and programs related to community natural resource governance in Zambia. This brief summarizes the strategies used to empower women, the results, and the challenges and opportunities for scaling up gender-responsive approaches to community resource governance.

Background

Barriers and Opportunities for Women’s Participation

Research shows that women and men have distinct social roles and responsibilities both at community and household levels regarding their access to and control of natural resources. Men and women have unique knowledge about natural resources and they use resources differently. Women frequently do not equally share in the economic benefits derived from natural resources, and resource depletion often impacts them disproportionately. Women face several barriers to participation in natural resource governance. Rules that govern community resource groups often explicitly or implicitly exclude women’s meaningful participation. Social and cultural norms that associate public engagement with men also discourage women’s participation. Women have competing priorities due to their disproportionate responsibilities for unpaid care work, such as child care, household tasks, and elder care. Finally, lack of support from spouses and extended family, as well as women’s lack of information and confidence, are also deterrent factors.

Evidence from several countries shows that inclusion of women in natural resource governance has significant positive effects on conservation and development outcomes. A comparative study in East Africa and Latin America found the presence of women in community forest governance structures to enhance responsible behavior and forest sustainability (Mwangi et al., 2011). In Asia, increasing women’s representation in community forest governance institutions improved resource conservation and forest regeneration (Agarwal, 2009). The benefits of women’s participation were linked to their indigenous knowledge of the forest, preference for collaborative relationships, and greater compliance and adoption of sustainable practices. Increased participation in natural resource governance can be a pathway for wider empowerment of women in the household and in the public sphere, also leading to opportunities for growth in families’ income from economic activities related to natural resources. In addition, private companies in value chains related to natural resources are more likely to certify products and practices if women have active participation in resource governance (Beaujon Marin & Kuriakose, 2017).

Women’s Participation in Community Resource Governance in Zambia

Women’s participation in community resource governance in Zambia remains significantly low. The legal and policy framework, including the 2015 Wildlife Act No. 14 and the 2018 National Parks and Wildlife Policy, promotes devolution approaches and community involvement in the management and conservation of natural resources. It also supports gender equality and social inclusion in wildlife conservation, so that women, men, and youth have equal opportunities and benefit equally, with the goal of reducing inequities in conservation. However, progress in policies have not been reflected in community governance in the sector. Programs and strategies have failed to adopt gender-responsive approaches and consider the unique concerns, needs, and knowledge of women and men.

CRBs are an important structure for devolved power to communities in the management of wildlife with Zambia’s chiefdoms and are an important entry point for participation in wildlife and natural resource management. Gender equality remains extremely low and the 77 CRBs across the country have less than 10 percent women representation; only 3 percent of CRBs have ever had a woman in a leadership position. The few women that participate in CRBs experienced challenges in asserting themselves within these male-dominated structures. Although the legal and policy framework calls for gender equality in community governance structures, the actual lack of women’s representation and decision-making power is often ignored, undermining the ideals of community participation and the effectiveness of conservation efforts.