Bringing gender analysis and resilience analysis together in small scale fisheries research: Challenges and opportunities
This working paper (PDF) from the University of East Anglia scrutinizes the challenges and opportunities for bringing a gender analysis together with an analysis of social-ecological resilience in the context of policy-orientated small-scale fisheries research. The authors argue that whilst the analysis of social-ecological resilience has made valuable contributions to integrating social dimensions into research and policy-making on natural resource management, it has so far demonstrated limited success in effectively integrating considerations of gender equity. They argue that gender analysis and the analysis of social-ecological resilience have divergent epistemological and methodological underpinnings and show how these have shaped the progress in social-ecological resilience analysis in addressing gender, as well as the progress of gender analysis in addressing social-ecological resilience. The authors conclude that rather than searching for a single unifying framework for gender and resilience analysis, it will be more effective to pursue a plural solution in which closer engagement is fostered between gender analysis and resilience analysis whilst preserving the strengths of each approach. The authors believe that fostering constructive debate between analyses of gender and social-ecological resilience has the potential to generate a richer understanding of the ways in which gendered power relations mediate social-ecological resilience.