Drawing on survey and ethnographic data, this article presents empirical evidence regarding the impact of work participation on poor women's lives in urban Bangladesh. Working for pay is common among poor, married women in Dhaka and working women commonly make an important contribution to household income. There is evidence that working women are more likely to manage money, shop for household provisions and move about outside the home than non-working women. Working women also appear better able to accumulate personal assets and take steps to secure their own well-being. Despite such signs of challenge to ‘traditional’ gender identity, social and economic structures continue to be heavily weighted against women, limiting the impact of employment on other dimensions of their lives. In the acutely insecure urban setting, women (and men) are found to pursue multiple strategies aimed at both securing ‘centrality’ within their families, as well as protecting personal interests should familial entitlements prove unreliable.

Women's Employment in Urban Bangladesh: A Challenge to Gender Identity?

Effective planning for climate change adaptation programming in developing countries requires a fine-grained assessment of local vulnerabilities, practices and adaptation options and preferences. While global models can project climate impacts and estimate costs of expected investments, developing country decision-makers also require national assessments that take a bottom-up, pro-poor perspective, integrate across sectors, and reflect local stakeholders' experiences and values, in order to determine appropriate climate responses. This paper outlines the methodological approach of the social component of the World Bank's economics of adaptation to climate change study. The social component features both village-level investigations of vulnerability and adaptive capacity, and innovative participatory scenario development approaches that lead diverse groups at local and national levels through structured discussions using Geographic Information System (GIS)-based 'visualization' tools to examine tradeoffs and preferences among adaptation activities and implementation mechanisms. This dynamic, multi-sectoral approach allows for real-time analysis, institutional learning and capacity development. The paper presents the research and learning approach of the study and offers emerging findings on policy and institutional questions surrounding adaptation arenas in Bangladesh, Bolivia, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Mozambique.

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Assessing vulnerability and adaptive capacity to climate risks : methods for investigation at local and national levels

Ce document montre que les correlations entre genre et pauvrete sont beaucoup plus complexes et diversifiees qu'il apparait au travers des etudes realisees avec des indicateurs sociaux et/ou economiques negligeant les processus conduisant a la pauvrete. A travers cette critique methodologique, cette conception defend le fait que l'analyse de la pauvrete par sexe est moins de savoir si les femmes souffrent plus de la pauvrete que les hommes, que de savoir comment les trajectoires sociales aboutissant a la pauvrete et permettant d'y echapper se differencient selon que l'on est homme ou femme

http://www.unrisd.org/80256B3C005BCCF9/(httpAuxPages)/0E53CA577A663DA780256B67005B6FB5/$file/dp94.pdf

Gendered Poverty and Social Change: An Issues Paper

Community forestry in the middle hills of Nepal has been undergoing unprecedented changes in recent years. Community forestry was first introduced in 1978 to address forest degradation through partnership between local people and the government to manage community forests. Development practitioners and policy makers are recently and increasingly concerned with gender and social equity issues in community forestry. Furthermore, a myriad of external actors are invovled directly in community forestry at the local level. Academic research on community forestry in Nepal, however, has not adequately studied the interrelationships between gender relations, local institutions of community forestry governance, and external intervention. In light of the above, my research examines and explicates gender relations in two field sites in the middle hills; the interrelationship between gender relations and the formation, functioning and change in institutions; and analyzes the interface between forest officials and local users. My research findings posit that institutions are 'embedded' in existing gender relations. Intra and extra-household relations define the terms under which men and women enter, interact and influence institutions. Parallel social institutions are drawn upon to mediate the governance of resources, which in turn are influenced by existing 'distribution of power' amongst the genders, and field level extension agent's dual relationship with the organizations they represent and the local users. My research draws from and engages with the debates and understandings in the scholarships on gender and environment; gender analysis of intra/extra household; and local institutions of natural resource governance. I use a combination of qualitative research methods and engage with questions of reflexivity and positionality in the research process. The findings of my research serve to inform theoretical debates on gender and natural resource governance as well as national level policy changes in Nepal.

Gender, institutions & development in natural resource governance : a study of community forestry in Nepal

This article contributes towards unpacking the relationships between gender, poverty and inequality at several interrelated levels. It explores the concept of poverty as a useful starting point not only for understanding how gender fits into it, but also for understanding why gender is not reducible to poverty. It provides a brief history of how poverty came to be analysed from a gender perspective, and how such a perspective advances our understanding of poverty and inequality. The article follows this with a critical analysis of important gendered and non-gendered approaches developed to measure poverty, and outlines their contributions to advancing the art of monitoring and evaluating gendered poverty. Using research conducted predominantly in South Asia, it demonstrates how the richness of academic scholarship and discourses on gender and poverty contrast sharply not only with the narrow range of strategies employed for poverty alleviation, but also the limited array of methods and tools designed to m...

Monitoring progress towards gender-equitable poverty alleviation the tools of the trade

This article takes up the theme of 'gender and poverty', but looks at it from the vantage point of women living in an increasingly opulent setting. The case study comes from a small rural community in south-eastern Iran. The selected region has some distinct features which make it interesting for exploring this particular conjunction of social forces: relative opulence generated through agricultural export earnings, on the one hand, and powerful gender discriminatory relations sanctioned by local custom and reinforced through state policy, on the other. The article will explore the contradictory implications that the rising levels of household income have had for women. lt does so by using two different, but related, ways of capturing how women have fared in the context of these socioeconomic changes.

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From Rags to Riches Looking at Poverty from a Gender Perspective

Summaries This article examines the contradictory implications of rising rural incomes – generated through export crop production – for women in a rural community of south‐eastern Iran. It uses two different, but related, ways of capturing how women have fared in the context of these socioeconomic changes. First, defining well‐being in terms of lsquo;functionings’, it looks at the gender‐differentiated patterns of deprivation expressed in terms of infant and child mortality. It then explores issues of ‘vulnerability’ which are highlighted in women's own accounts of well‐being; vulnerability refers to the bundles of risk from the deterioration in women's independent entitlements and from the changes in conjugal relations that are hemming women in and making them more dependent on male incomes. By juxtaposing these two accounts the article concludes that while conventional well‐being indicators (measured directly on the individual) are more conducive to obtaining a gender‐differentiated picture of deprivation than are household‐based measures (as in the poverty line approach), they are nevertheless limited in the extent to which they can capture different aspects of gender discrimination. These neglected dimensions of gender discrimination may be precisely the ones that get exacerbated when rising cash flows are directed into male hands.

Shahra Razavi

Papers

From Rags to Riches Looking at Poverty from a Gender Perspective

From Rags to Riches