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Gender as unequal power relations intersects with global environmental change threatening agriculture-based livelihoods, including land degradation, increasing climate variability, and invasive alien plants. Commonly overlooked, invasive alien plants may have gendered impacts on everyday life that disproportionately affect the less powerful. Drawing on experiences of smallholder farmers in Ethiopia's Oromia region with an invasive, transboundary weed, Parthenium hysterophorus L., this paper illustrates how environmental change interacts with pre-existing vulnerabilities to shape individual and household-level impacts and responses. We applied a feminist perspective in livelihoods and environmental change research and praxis to explore the intersection of gendered livelihoods and parthenium management in spaces of everyday life. While invasive plants, including parthenium, may be easily perceptible in the field, understanding impacts on livelihoods requires consideration of women's and men's roles and responsibilities within the broader household compound as well as intra-household decision-making. Parthenium can be harmful to environmental, animal, and human health, but unduly impacts women's labor, spaces, and assets, including cows whose milk may be tainted by grazing in parthenium-infested fields. We demonstrate the importance of considering women's social networks and so-called reproductive space and labor to understand gendered and place-based inequities of climate change. This study reveals intimate connections between environmental stressors and gendered livelihoods. Our findings demonstrate how inequalities can be reinforced by new forms of vulnerability, with response options socially differentiated. We argue that a feminist livelihood lens helps bridge the global scale of environmental change with local scales of gendered livelihood adaptation embedded within broader socio-environmental change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Africa women are underrepresented in higher education (HE) agricultural programs, despite the fact that they make up half of the agricultural labor force. This article discusses the reasons for women's low enrollment in HE agricultural programs, focusing on socio-cultural norms and gendered perceptions of agriculture. Moving beyond access, it also explores the institutional culture and learning environment in HE agricultural programs. We argue that women often feel unsafe, uncomfortable, and isolated in these programs and that conservative socio-cultural norms, which discriminate against women in society and family life, also permeate institutions of HE. The data comes from a literature review, a Southern and Eastern Africa regional workshop, and focus groups and interviews conducted with faculty and students in South Sudan and Mozambique. We conclude with recommendations for increasing the number of women in agricultural programs and improving their experience.

Mobile phones have been heralded by many as promising new tools to empower women throughout the Global South. However, some have asserted that new information and communication technologies (ICTs) may serve to amplify disparities between more powerful and less powerful people. Few studies have examined which women stand to benefit and under what conditions. This study seeks to better understand the relationships between mobile phones and women's empowerment by examining diverse women's experiences within Maasai agro-pastoralist communities in northern Tanzania. Specifically, we ask three guiding questions: (1) How do Maasai women access and use phones? (2) What processes of empowerment do phones support or undermine? and (3) How are these processes embedded in diverse social relations? To address these questions, we use a framework that integrates a Social Relations Approach with a modified version of the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach. Our team conducted semi-structured and individual-stakeholder interviews with Maasai women in June-July, 2018 to learn their perspectives on phones, social-relations and multiple aspects of empowerment. We analyzed the content of these interviews using deductive and inductive qualitative strategies. These efforts yield multiple findings: (1) women's access to phones is fluid; (2) multiple pathways to empowerment and disempowerment exist; (3) phones reinforce inequalities; (4) women's identities are intersectional; and (5) women's networks remain homogenous. Taken together, this approach and these insights provide a more conservative account of the benefits of mobile phones than many studies and also an important technology-empowerment narrative for development scholars and practitioners. • Mobile phones are presented as important new resources, embedded in social relations, linked to women's empowerment. • We examine how agro-pastoralist Maasai women access and use mobile phones. • Content analysis of group and stakeholder interviews shows characteristics of women's assets, decision-making and autonomy. • Access is fluid, men are gatekeepers, and women have heterogeneous identities and homogenous networks; and. • Findings undermine simple, positive, technology-empowerment hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Caribbean subspecies of the Red-tailed Hawk ( Buteo jamaicensis solitudinus or B.j. jamaicensis) is the largest native carnivore on the island of La Gonave, Haiti, and the island's apex predator. On other Caribbean islands, raptors have been persecuted by local people typically because of their depredation of livestock. In addition to possible persecution from humans, Red-tailed Hawks on La Gonave face challenges from island-wide timber overharvest and rapid land-cover changes. To better understand the human-apex predator relationship on La Gonave, we surveyed islanders about their perceptions of, and interactions with, the Red-tailed Hawk. According to 121 respondents from 10 villages, La Gonavans do not hunt, kill, or consume Red-tailed Hawks. Our study revealed a notable absence of negative perceptions of the hawk by respondents despite intense hawk depredation of domestic chickens. While the chicken depredation may lead outside observers to consider the human-hawk relationship on La Gonave as representative of a human-wildlife conflict, our interview data do not support that conception. Our findings reflect an important conversation in related contemporary scientific literature about what constitutes human-wildlife conflicts across various cultures. Despite tolerance by residents, Red-tailed Hawks on La Gonave remain threatened by habitat degradation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientists often turn to farmers to understand soil management. This process reveals differences and overlaps between local and scientific soil knowledge but rarely considers women and gender issues. This paper examines men's and women's local knowledge of soils in upland, smallholder farms in two villages in Mindanao, the Philippines, using focus group discussions, semi-structured household interviews, field visits, GIS and soil testing. Farmers' field areas were calculated and delineated based on their perceptions of the different types of soils on their land. Men and women chose the same plots for what they considered their best soil but differed on what they felt were their worst. The fertility of the soils that women considered to be the best and worst was not significantly different from that of the men's respective choices. There was a difference in fertility, however, between the best and worst soils regardless of gender. Although soil fertility analyses showed that the women's chosen soils were similar to men's, analyses of qualitative data showed that their knowledge of soils was different and was based in part on a gendered division of labour. A multidisciplinary approach helped bridge the gap between sociocultural and physical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the pursuit of technical goals such as improved yields or reduced pest damage, agricultural development programs—and the technologies they introduce—can alter or reinforce gender roles and relations with clear implications for gender equality. This case study explores the experiences of tomato production and pest management of men and women farmers in Tuobodom, Ghana. A primary goal of the research is to better understand the farmers’ current dependence on pesticides and identify gender-based constraints to, and opportunities for, the introduction of an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) program. The findings reveal how contact with pesticides becomes part of tomato farmers’ embodied experiences and how different roles played by men and women in agriculture, coupled with the differences in their knowledge, perceptions, and access to resources, result in differential exposure to and experiences of pesticides. Analysis using an embodied livelihoods framework reveals that men and women face a paradox in which their dependence on pesticides for tomato production reduces their body capitals, which they need to sustain their corporeal existence through their livelihoods as tomato farmers. The IPM programs could introduce alternative technologies of pest management that reduce dependence on toxic chemical pesticides, but these alternatives will be successful only if they are developed in collaboration with farmers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on extensive ethnographic field research with multiple women and kitchens in two central Mexico communities, this article argues for kitchenspace - indoor and outdoor spaces where food preparation takes place - as gendered territory. Using a feminist political ecology approach, it explores private and semi-public space in the everyday, household kitchen and the fiesta or 'smoke' kitchen at the center of community celebrations. Marked as gendered territory by distinct social boundaries and gendered, discursive strategies, kitchenspace is vital to the maintenance of traditional forms of organization and generational transmission of cultural and embodied knowledge. This article questions assumptions about 'the kitchen' as a site of social isolation and women's oppression that often characterize feminist approaches. It considers embeddedness in local social and spatial contexts and the importance of everyday life in private and public spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]