Maritime Studies

In recent decades, there have been considerable efforts to enhance, diversify, or implement alternative livelihood activities in marginalized coastal communities, to ease reliance on deteriorating coastal resources, reduce poverty and improve well-being outcomes. To date, gender has been notably absent from the literature on small-scale fisheries and associated livelihood improvement programs, despite increasing evidence of the importance of gender equality and women’s empowerment in achieving such outcomes in other contexts. In this paper, drawing from an evaluation of the effectiveness of 20 livelihood development projects implemented in coastal communities in Indonesia since 1998, we report on how gender was considered in these projects. We assessed whether and how gender was included in project rationales, and how men and women were included in project activities. We found that, despite the women being reached by many project activities, particularly efforts to increase women’s productive capacity through training and group-based livelihoods enterprises, 40% of the projects had no discernible gender approach and only two of the 20 projects (10%) applied a gender transformative approach that sought to challenge local gender norms and gender relations and empower women beneficiaries. Our assessment suggests the need for greater understanding of the role of gender in reducing poverty and increasing well-being outcomes in coastal communities. Lessons from comparable agricultural settings suggest that this may be facilitated by locally situated gender social relations analysis, integration of gender throughout livelihood improvement project cycles, gendered capacity building activities and shared learning from the evaluation of the gendered outcomes of project activities.

Improving livelihoods and livelihood opportunities is a popular thrust of development investments. Gender and other forms of social differentiation influence individual agency to access, participate in, and benefit from existing, new, or improved livelihood opportunities. Recent research illustrates that many initiatives intended to improve livelihoods still proceed as “gender blind,” failing to account for the norms and relations that will influence how women and men experience opportunities and outcomes. To examine gender in livelihoods, we employed empirical case studies in three coastal communities in Solomon Islands; a small island developing state where livelihoods are predominantly based on fisheries and agriculture. Using the GENNOVATE methodology (a series of focus groups) we investigated how gender norms and relations influence agency (i.e., the availability of choice and capacity to exercise choice). We find that men are able to pursue a broader range of livelihood activities than women who tend to be constrained by individual perceptions of risk and socially prescribed physical mobility restraints. We find the livelihood portfolios of women and men are more diverse than in the past. However, livelihood diversity may limit women’s more immediate freedoms to exercise agency because they are simultaneously experiencing intensified time and labor demands. Our findings challenge the broad proposition that livelihood diversification will lead to improvements for agency and overall wellbeing. In community-level decision-making, men’s capacity to exercise choice was perceived to be greater in relation to livelihoods, as well as strategic life decisions more broadly. By contrast, capacity to exercise choice within households involved spousal negotiation, and consensus was considered more important than male or female dominance in decision-making. The prevailing global insight is that livelihood initiatives are more likely to bring about sustained and equitable outcomes if they are designed based on understandings of the distinct ways women and men participate in and experience livelihoods. Our study provides insights to make these improvements in a Solomon Islands setting. We suggest that better accounting for these gendered differences not only improves livelihood outcomes but also presents opportunity to catalyze the re-negotiation of gender norms and relations; thereby promoting greater individual agency.