Part 5 - Towards an integrated, cross-sectoral approach: placing women at the centre
If women could their own choices about childbearing, the world would be well on the road to the lowest of the United Nations' projections. That would make a difference of 2.5 billion in population in 2050.
Dr. Nafis Sadik, Secretary-General,
United Nations International
Conference on
Population and Development and Executive Director,
United Nations Fund for
Population Activities (UNFPA)
The analyses in the previous sections point to the need for an integrated, cross-sectoral approach, able to address effectively the complex issues raised. Any policy that fails to deal comprehensively with the total reality of rural women's lives is merely a piecemeal and ad hoc treatment of an arbitrarily isolated fragment of the real world. It is not mere passing intellectual fashion to call for replacing single-sectoral approaches with cross-sectoral ones integrating women, population and environment in development policies and programmes. There is an urgent need for a coherent and effective policy framework that will be gender-sensitive, socially equitable, environmentally sustainable and developmentally innovative.
The need for such integration was recognised in the Bali Declaration on Population and Sustainable Development (Fourth Asian and Pacific Population Conference 1992: UN Document ST/ESCAP/1195), where the members and associate members of ESCAP stated that:
· "An integrated approach incorporating population, resources, the environment and development elements must be pursued, although understanding of the complex interrelationships between these elements is still at an early stage. To do otherwise would endanger the attainment of sustainable development and narrow the options available to future generations."
· "Measures to improve the status, role and participation of women must be given high priority, both because women have a fundamental right to enjoy equality with men in all aspects of life and because women play a critical role in, and must fully participate in, the sustainable development process."
· "The alleviation of poverty is fundamental to the achievement of sustainable development.''
The destination has now been agreed. How to get there is the issue. How do we fully integrate these complex issues into all aspects of planning and policy-making by so many different planners and policy-makers, across so many different sectors? A top-down approach
37 is woefully inadequate. From a top-down perspective, a sector is a specialised purview, a defined jurisdiction, a realm of decision-making, a policy niche. In such a context, to seek integration across different policy sectors is to go against the grain.
But the aim is not to force together disparate fragments. What is sought, rather, is a recognition, an acknowledgement of the intrinsic relatedness of the processes that have an impact on the lives of people. Those who experience these multiple processes are themselves the people most aware of their relatedness. Usually such people are women, because of their multiple roles in all aspects of social life.
Women are involved in all social and cultural activities. It is well documented that development programmes that ignore women either fail or have negative social impact, as they are based on an inadequate and only partial understanding of society. Because of women's vital role in production and reproduction, the many programmes and policies targetted at the rural community have their greatest impact on women. Yet this gender-specific impact is too often ignored by planners, overlooked by field workers, and bypassed in project implementation.
The mistake of ignoring gender is clear when the household serves as the unit of analysis. To regard the man as the head of the household and to relegate the woman to nothing more than his wifely appendage with no independent role, rights, responsibilities, or perspectives of her own, is always a mistake. The reduction of a woman to a stereotypical 'wife' focusses only on her biological reproductive capacity and classifies her as an 'economic dependent' who makes no significant contributions to society outside the domestic domain. This form of gender-blindness assumes the homogeneity of the household unit, ignores interpersonal dynamics across gender and age, and fails to consider women's multiple contributions to society.
An integrated, cross-sectoral approach must thus seek not just to include women as one sector among others. It must place women at the very core of its programme, not as the passive recipients of top-down integrative efforts. It must see women as important social actors who play a key role in sustaining societal integrity in the midst of rapid change. Such a perspective, grounded in women's multiple experiences and roles, would be integrative and cross-sectoral, and would contribute to a new development paradigm based on the recognition of women as the core of the biological and social reproduction of all human societies.
Diagram 3 (Dehlot, 1992:5) illustrates the centrality of women in the nexus of environment, population and development. This centrality is, however, a double-edged sword: on the one hand, women have suffered, at great cost, the impact of multiple forces; on the other hand, they have also developed coping strategies and survival skills that have enabled them to transcend these multiple forces. This is of particular relevance in the rural context and in relation to the four problems discussed previously--poverty, environmental degradation, infant and child mortality, and maternal mortality.
Diagram 3 Women and Ecological Engineering
Adapted from Dehlot, 1992: 5
Women are often the poorest of the poor, shackled to social, cultural, legal and economic inequities. While many women have indeed suffered the wrongs of social injustice, the transcendence of their deprivation enables them to develop innovative ways of maximising meagre resources. Case Study 2 in Part 3, for example, illustrates how women in the Philippines turned a waste by-product into a food resource. While making something out of nothing is, in many cases, borne of necessity, it nonetheless demands labour-intensive drudgery. Because of their marginal position in society, women have drawn on indigenous knowledge for the identification and utilisation of alternative resources usually ignored by the mainstream economy.
This explains why, in rural communities, women's knowledge of big-diversity is often more comprehensive than men's. Women's botanical knowledge, for example, tends to embrace a maximal number of edible plants, including otherwise poisonous plants that can only be made edible through food processing. Knowledge of medicinal herbs and rare plants useful in periods of scarcity is also largely the purview of women, who often hold the keys to sophisticated indigenous plant classifications. In contrast, men's botanical knowledge tends to focus on plants that are used as staples and those marketed as cash crops.
The loss of indigenous knowledge is a permanent loss of a precious resource. An entire bank of data, collected over thousands of years in indigenous knowledge systems, can not be superceded entirely with 'scientific' information. Social data is especially important, but so is indigenous information which holds answers to today's unsustainable development strategies. Environment, population and gender issues have much to gain from a new recognition and search within old knowledge systems. As Vandana Shiva wrote in her essay "Systems of Knowledge as Systems of Power" (1993):
The disappearance of local knowledge through its interaction with the dominant western knowledge takes place at many levels, through many steps. First, local knowledge is made to disappear by simply not seeing it, by negating its very existence. This is very easy in the distant gaze of the globalising dominant system . The western systems of knowledge have generally been viewed as universal. However, the dominant system is also a local system, with its social basis in a particular culture, class and gender. It is not universal in an epistemological sense It i* merely the globalised version of a very local and parochial tradition. Emerging from a dominating and colonising culture, modern knowledge systems are themselves colonising.
And another quote from Vandana Shiva:
A woman anthropologist at IRRI in the Philippines had the sensitivity to observe how male categories of 'efficiency' created the mechanisation imperative. Barog, a process of shaving off the already beaten stalks of rice to glean the grain that remain*, used to be undertaken by women who did this between child care and cooking. They kept all the grain they got (none going to the owner of the field), which, at times, was as high as 10 percent of the total yield Mechanising the barog process was inspired because the male IRRI scientists saw women's gain as 'loss. ' The woman anthropologist asks: "How can IRRI defend counting barog grain as a 'loss'? It is true that the field owner does not get his hands on it. But that the grain passes out of his hands does not reflect the technical inefficiency of the traditional method. The barog grad'' is by no means 'lost' either to the national economy or to the production system itself Village families eat it - and what makes our report more embarrassing, it is usually the poorest villagers that eat it. At best, our failure to credit the traditional system with this gaing reflects a'' evaluation of rice in terms of money rather than consumable food.
"From a woman anthropologist's note-pad: IRRI memos," Balai No. 7, 1993, quoted from Shiva, 1989:111
Women's indigenous knowledge is founded precisely on their multiple roles and responsibilities in the care of their children, cooking of food, management of scarce resources, and their own survival as the disadvantaged members of an inequitable society. The shadow ecology and shadow economy based on women's indigenous knowledge now need to come out into the sunshine, particularly as our current environmental crisis has been brought about by the over-consumption and wastage of resources. In the search for sustainable development alternatives for all sectors of society, women have a crucial role to play. At micro and community levels, they are usually the managers of local resources upon which everyday life depends. This significant managerial role should be duly acknowledged and integrated into rural development policies and programmes, especially those aimed at smallholder agricultural production.
But though women are half the world and though they play a vital role in society, they are usually considered a social and political minority whose needs and views are seldom included at a macro level. 4 On the one hand, there is a need to ensure that women fully participate in and benefit from the socio-economic development processes while, on the other, developmental, demographic and environmental issues cannot be adequately addressed without taking into consideration half the human population. Indeed, as shown above, in the current search for new solutions to global problems, women's views and indigenous knowledge should themselves be recognised as vital resources.
Unfortunately, in many Asian countries, women are still not regarded as equal partners in socio-economic development. Even when their vital contributions are acknowledged, they are relegated to a subordinate role.5 Bearing in mind the existing centrality of women in the nexus of economic, environmental, social, cultural and demographic forces, a comprehensive analysis should be made of:
· the impact of these multiple forces on women's lives
· how women integrate the multiplicity of their experiences, roles and responsibilities
· how they transcend these external forces and make life-choices that simultaneously enhance their own survival, nurture the young, care for the old, manage the household, find and use natural resources, and sustain the environment
There can be no long-term sustainability without social and gender equity. Inequities generate inherent instabilities in the ecosystem as people compete to secure monopolistic resource niches. Nor can there be sustainability if the basic livelihood needs of people are not met.6 It is thus recommended that governments allocate budget priorities and take pro-active measures to safeguard and revitalise the natural environment and to build capacities for sustainable livelihoods through equitable resource use and distribution.
It is also recommended that governments should learn from the costly mistakes of past development failures. They should not follow the NIC (newly-industrialised country) model blindly. There should be an awareness of the ecological and social costs of the so-called "economic miracles" of Asia and the Pacific, which benefit some at the expense of the rest. Development should not be motivated by conspicuous consumption as an expression of affluence. Instead, governments should undertake the following measures:
· reduce the over-consumption and wastage of resources
· re-distribute resources more equitably between urban and rural sectors
· emphasise self-sufficient food security and the provision of adequate nutrition for rural communities, especially for women and children
· rely less on the export of cash crops and primary resources in exchange for food imports
· value the sustainability of a subsistence economy, based on the agricultural production of smallholders practicing mixed cropping, especially the work of women farmers
Governments need to acknowledge women's vital role in maintaining intergenerational sustainability in a self-renewing environment. This is particularly important during the sweeping environmental and societal changes that come in the wake of new economic policies and structural adjustment programmes. It is recommended that in the transformation of the landscape through development activities, efforts be made to design and maintain sustainable living habitats and that women's indigenous knowledge be incorporated into the planning of such habitats. Women's indigenous knowledge should be acknowledged as valid in its own right and therefore included in educational curricula and teaching methods.
In this regard, it is important to protect women's rights of access and control over the land and resources. Their indigenous knowledge, the source of their livelihood, comes from their understanding of these. Protecting the quality of the natural resource base is also needed, as are the retention of topsoil, maintaining unpolluted waters, forest conservation, and preserving big-diversity. Where the environment has undergone degradation, efforts should be made to revitalise all remaining resources, so that a viable, self-renewing resource base can be reconstituted for the sustainable livelihood of rural communities. The role and indigenous knowledge of women as resource managers is of particular significance here.
It is recommended that rural women's productive role be enhanced by addressing the social, cultural and economic forces which undermine women's contribution. First and foremost among these forces is the tradition of patriarchy. Through patriarchy males are able to enjoy, among other privileges:
· rights over productive resources (e.g., land ownership)
· rights over children (e.g., petri-biased kinship)
· rights over female sexuality (e.g., the double sexual standard)
· rights over female labour (e.g., women's double burden)
· rights over their own male person, allowing them to decide for themselves whether to stay in their community or to migrate, to work on the farm or to accept wage work, to marry or not to marry
To provide a counter force to this tradition of gender inequity, it is recommended that governments should recognise:
· women's rights over productive resources (e.g., the right to own land and other economic assets)
· women's rights over their children (e.g., as the head of the family)
· women's rights over their own sexuality (e.g., the right to have or not to have sexual intercourse, to have or not to have children)
· women's rights over their own labour (e.g., owning and enjoying the fruits of their labour, such as money from the sale of food products and handicrafts)
· women's rights over their own person (e.g., rights to mobility, job opportunities and marriage choice)
Another force that women have to contend with is the external market which diverts male family members' labour into off-farm activities in towns and cities, leading to seasonal and permanent migration and leaving the women who remain behind to shoulder all the agricultural tasks. To counterbalance this tendency, governments should not seek to encourage the rural exodus by exporting labour for foreign exchange. Governments should seek to lighten women's load by providing them with extension training, rural credit, processing and marketing skills, and up-to-date technology in agricultural production. Ways should also be found to ease drudgery in domestic work.
It is also recommended that governments and international organisations seek an understanding of the social, cultural, political and economic conditions that lead women to make particular reproductive choices. It is these structures and conditions that need to be addressed to empower women to make alternative reproductive choices. Poverty, gender inequality, early marriage, male control of female sexuality, cultural denotations of parenthood, the social and economic value of children, the preference for sons, the lack of alternative life choices for women: all these and more are the forces and constraints that shape women's reproductive choices. Population care policies should thus look at the roots of the demographic problem and not just its surface manifestation.
The burden of reproductive control should not be placed only on women, and family planning should not be targetted solely at women's bodies. It should be recognised that it is the larger society that has generated the reproductive patterns which usually determine women's fertility. Ultimately, therefore, population care has to take place through social development directed towards society as a whole, so that reproductive patterns that are gender-biased and ecologically unsustainable can be fundamentally reshaped.
As a countervailing force to gender-biased reproductive patterns, governments should recognise women's right to maintain control over their own bodies and their sexuality. Women should also have the right to demand and to shape the kind of information they need and want on sexuality, reproduction, medical technology, marital rights and parental rights. Women, therefore, need access to a range of contraceptive choices, and to be fully informed of their various risks and effects. Family planning then becomes an instrument to promote gender equity. Training and counselling on gender equity should be given to all persons involved in the reproductive and contraceptive process, including family elders, husbands, family planning personnel, and of course the women themselves. There should be a conscious promotion of male respect for women's rights over their own bodies.
