Internship: Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) Program

Internship to conduct a literature review on gender, agriculture and innovation

The Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) program’s Theme 3 on Climate Change Mitigation seeks an intern to prepare a comprehensive literature review on gender and women's innovations in agriculture in the global south, with special attention to innovations with clear climate impacts.  Innovation is defined here as encompassing five broad areas: 1.  technical  (such as developing a new planting technique or crop variety), 2. managerial (developing a new way of organizing labor, inputs or marketing), 3. institutional (rules for accessing resources, creating cooperatives, credit associations),   4. political (media programs, lobbying efforts, protests), and 5. social (knowledge sharing, forming agricultural collectives, social network development, etc.). In addition to a focus on women’s innovation, we are also interested in literature critically analyzing the role of gender differences and gendered inequality in producing or constraining the conditions of innovation.

We would like the project to focus on the literature on:

• Gender and development
• Science and technology studies
• Political ecology
• Human dimensions of climate change
• Social learning
• Common pool resources and collective action
• Indigenous resource management
• Agrarian and other social movements
• Agro-ecology and sustainable agriculture
• Appropriate technology or technology and social change
• Ecofeminsim
• Environmental Justice

We are interested in both academic articles and gray literature produced and circulated by development institutions.  We are especially interested in innovations that either explicitly reduce the carbon or other GHG emissions associated with agriculture, or improve livelihoods in a manner that would fit within a low carbon development pathway.  We also would like to collect articles that address the factors that enable or discourage such innovations. Regional area is open, though we intend to focus on examples from South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

We are most interested in collecting the greatest number of references possible at this point.  We expect that a reading of the article or book abstracts will provide sufficient evidence of relevance.  However, after we have adequate numbers of references, we would like the intern to help us read, summarize and organize the literature.

We would like to have bibliographies with abstracts sent every week through November 15^th, 2012, formatted in EndNotes.  A final review paper – 10 to 15 pages in length – categorizing and analyzing case material and theoretical perspectives on gender and women’s innovation in the agricultural sector should be produced by December 10^th, 2012.  This summary and review paper will form the basis of the intern’s contribution to a joint publication on the topic of women, innovation and climate change mitigation in agriculture, and will also be included as a background document for an innovation workshop scheduled for early 2013 (to which the intern may be invited, depending on funding availability).

We expect the intern to log 140 hours for this work (approximately 10 hours per week on average, over 14 weeks). Project stipend is $3,850.

If interested, please send a cover letter and CV to David Edmunds at david.s.edmunds@gmail.com