The CGIAR Collaborative Platform for Gender Research has placed a call for applications for their second workshop, this time focusing on the theme ‘Gender, water and food: perspectives and contestations’ at the Institute of Development Studies in Brighton, UK on 3-4 December 2019.
Please read the full announcement below:
Gender, water and food: perspectives and contestations
Date: 3-4 December, 2019 at the Institute of Development Studies (UK)
Inviting abstracts: 350 words by October 7, 2019
Water is crucial for human health, dignity and well-being, food security, the maintenance of livelihoods, and is the lifeline of diverse ecosystems. Despite several calls to recognize the overlaps between water, food and the environment, or more specifically between domestic and productive uses and management of water and the wider ecosystems in which these functions take place, sectoral silos continue to persist. Not paying attention to these links has huge implications for the fundamental realisation of the human rights to water and food and also for thinking about radical transformations that can enable sustainable water, land and agricultural practices. More importantly, these silos are key barriers to the persisting inequalities by gender within and across these key domains.
Water’s fluidity cuts across various binaries of domestic and productive uses, private and public spheres. These fluid movements provide a lens to explore gendered pathways that mediate and shape unequal divisions of labour; access to and realization of the right to water, food and nutrition; and natural resources decision-making in situations and contexts of changing climatic conditions, changing patterns of consumption, production and consequential patterns of mobility and migration. We take this complexity of the gender-water-food-environment intersections as the entry point of our conversation, grounding it in feminist ecological perspectives.
The central focus of this workshop is to critically examine the currently popular discourse for radical transformations to sustainable agricultural intensification (SAI), built around the increasing consensus that business as usual in agriculture is not in the best interests of the planet nor its people. It is argued that while agriculture intensification will be necessary, this will need to be pursued in ways that are ecologically/environmentally sustainable. An early analysis of the Sustainable Agricultural Intensification discourse, its framing in ‘gender-neutral’ language (Ray, 2016) reveals some key limitations in the thinking around inclusion and equity. We respond to these limitations by asking from a feminist political ecology perspective, ‘sustainability of what, for whom and how’ (Leach et. al. 2010).
These discussions take place at a precipitous time in development history. The 2030 SDG agenda and roadmap for transformational change presents an unprecedented aspirational shift towards sustainability and socially inclusive and equitable development. Corresponding to the urgency as well in ensuring sustainable development requires understanding the complexities of exclusion/inclusion and asking whether and how the dual goals are aligned.
The goal of the workshop is to lay the groundwork for an inclusive, gender just and sustainable water and food community of practice that brings together researchers, practitioners and other key stakeholders to discuss four thematic areas outlined below:
- Sustainable Intensification of Agriculture: Driven by insular goals of increasing productivity, food security and national economic growth priorities, the business as usual in agriculture has had disproportionate impacts on the lives, livelihoods and wellbeing of marginal food producers, including poor women, indigenous peoples, family farmers, pastoralists and fishers. Will future sustainable intensification of agriculture interventions be inclusive for diverse agrarian smallholders (farmers, fishers, pastoralists)? Intensification, environment sustainability and inclusion have to date been seemingly contradictory goals. We ask: (How) Will future agriculture intensification plans be
intentionally sustainable and inclusive for diverse agrarian smallholders? What might be the transactional costs, benefits and risks of proposed sustainability initiatives for those who face these intersecting inequalities (gender, class, age, race, ethnicity, disability, etc.)? - Rights to water and food: The human right to water has largely focused on questions of access, affordability, and around the domestic uses of water. It has not been deployed to look at the productive uses of water, despite earlier broader interpretations as in UN General Comment No. 15. Local water users, especially women, rarely separate out the domestic and productive uses of water or water and food issues. We thus ask for contributions to explore how these two rights can be joined up in a meaningful way in order to promote a gender-just human rights approach to water for food security and nutrition.
- Cutting across the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Planning and decision-making mechanisms on water, both at the macro and micro level, have consistently tended to bypass social and gender norms and have thus perpetuated institutional exclusions, which then cascade into other domains. Realising the SDGs in relation to ensuring access to water [SDG 6] and food [SDG 2] requires fresh approaches and analytical frameworks that can work across binaries and create synergies. We thus ask: How can the water lens enable connecting the domains of production (the fields and farms) and reproduction (home, domestic and care work and interpersonal relations)? How can we facilitate
productive interactions and collaborations to bridge these divides across scales? What kinds of networks and communities of practice need to be engaged with and supported that can foster these pathways? - Alternatives and imaginaries: Despite being siloed in policy, food and water are intricately linked at the local and household level. Social movements and grassroots initiatives such as pani panchayats (India) have reimagined water and foodscapes to address inequalities and restructure social relationships. What lessons of coherence can be learned from such bottom-up initiatives and how can they be scaled out?
The workshop will be held at the Institute of Development Studies, Brighton (UK) on 3rd and 4th of December, 2019. Participants will include academics and practitioners working on these issues. The outputs will include a special issue, a possible panel at the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI 2020) and the development of a new research agenda to be jointly pursued between CGIAR researchers and participants.
We would be delighted if you would consider participating in the workshop. If you are interested please send an abstract of up to 350 words as an outline of a potential paper describing new ideas on this topic or ongoing relevant research to Lina Forgeaux (L.Forgeaux(at)ids.ac.uk) by October 7, 2019. Funding for accommodation and travel is limited and will be provided on a needs basis, with priority to participants from the global South.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Deepa Joshi (IWMI/WLE), Lyla Mehta and Shilpi Srivastava (IDS)
Note: The workshop is co-funded by two CGIAR Research Programs, Policy, Institutions and Markets and Water, Land and Ecosystems. Ruth Meinzen-Dick (IFPRI); Anthony Whitbred (ICRISAT) and Marlene Elias (Bioversity International) partner with Deepa Joshi (IWMI) on this CGIAR initiative to establish a genderwater community of practice.
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