Fostering Gender-Transformative Change in Sustainable Forest Management : A Case Study of DGM Saweto Peru (English)

The DGM Saweto Peru country project focuses on supporting Indigenous peoples in selected communities in the Peruvian Amazon to improve their sustainable forest management practices. The project started its implementation in November 2015 and closed in June 2021, it has had 133 subprojects which were all completed. This case study focuses on one of those subprojects to offer insight into whether and in what way it influenced women's participation and leadership on the ground. It could also indicate the extent to which the subproject may be influencing broader social and gender norms in Peru. It also informs the wider line of inquiry of the DGM Gender Study, which seeks to analyze the contribution of the DGM project to women's economic achievement, access to and control over productive assets, voice, and agency that supported positive changes in women's leadership and meaningful participation. Our conceptual framework for this study, both the broader DGM Gender Study and this more focused case study, follows a stepwise, yet flexible and dynamic, progression toward gender transformative change. The framework begins by assessing the inputs that the DGM project provided to beneficiaries, such as assets, information, skills, and capacity building. This assessment looks at what type of inputs were are provided, to whom, and how. We assess how those inputs influenced women's income and assets, and building on that, how women are gaining voice and agency. We assess whether and how those changes in voice and agency are influencing gender norms, attitudes, and perceptions of women and men at multiple levels, from individual to household to community. Finally, we look at whether those shifts have the potential to be sustained beyond the lifetime of the project and could influence more formal practices, rules, policies, and laws that are unequal to women. In this case study, which focuses on improving fish farming in the native Awajún community of Nazareth in Amazonas, female and male community members report some benefits and positive shifts for women at the individual level, but only limited benefits at the household and community level. The results suggest that the DGM Saweto Peru fish farming subproject brought some tangible positive changes for women but leave in doubt the extent to which those changes have extended beyond the direct subproject participants.