“Credit plus” microcredit schemes: a key to women's adaptive capacity

Here´s an article by me published this week on "Climate and Development" 

Abstract
This paper presents the provision of “credit plus” training activities, conditionally and jointly with microloans by Equity Bank and by Swedish non-governmental organization Vi-Skogen in the area of Kisumu, Kenya to women's groups as a key to improving women's capacity to adapt to climate change. Groups received training in small business administration and agroforestry, which produced positive outcomes or a virtuous spiral in their families' economy, well-being and in their intra-household bargaining power. In agroforestry and new farming practices, group training enhanced the women's set of planned adaptation strategies. In a context where formal financial institutions are still reluctant to provide credit to subsistence farmers, this case study shows the beneficial effects that credit would generate for women's adaptive capacity.

Find the full text here http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17565529.2014.886990#.Uw-LD_l5Mb0 

Local gender contract and adaptive capacity in smallholder irrigation farming: a case study from the Kenyan drylands

Here´s an article by Lowe Börjeson and I recently published in Gender, Place and Culture. 


Abstract 
This article presents the local gender contract of a smallholder irrigation farming community in Sibou, Kenya. Women's role in subsistence farming in Africa has mostly been analyzed through the lens of gender division of labor. In addition to this, we used the concept of ‘local gender contract’ to analyze cultural and material preconditions shaping gender-specific tasks in agricultural production, and consequently, men's and women's different strategies for adapting to climate variability. We show that the introduction of cash crops, as a trigger for negotiating women's and men's roles in the agricultural production, results in a process of gender contract renegotiation, and that families engaged in cash cropping are in the process of shifting from a ‘local resource contract’ to a ‘household income contract.’ Based on our analysis, we argue that a transformation of the local gender contract will have a direct impact on the community's adaptive capacity climate variability. It is, therefore, important to take the negotiation of local gender contracts into account in assessments of farming communities' adaptive capacity. 

Download text online at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0966369X.2014.885888#.Uwofq_l5Mb0  

The socioenvironmental state:

Invitation to Guest Lecture

The socioenvironmental state: Towards a political ecology of state formation and environmental change

Thursday 27 February 2014, 13.15-15.00.
Venue: De Geersalen, Geovetenskapens hus, Stockholm University.

Dr Andrea Nightingale, School of Global Studies, Univ. Gothenburg

In her presentation, Andrea Nightingale develops the idea of the ‘socio-environmental state’ to understand how ‘nature’ or ‘environment’ is an active agent in state formation. She begins with the question what is ‘the state’? How does it operate, and most importantly, how do resources and their ‘nature’ shape the possibilities of state transformation not only ecologically but also politically? The presentation takes the case of forests in Nepal to probe how environmental governance is bound up in state ambitions of conflicting groups. The kinds of relationships believed to be required for good environmental management are absolutely fundamental to how states and state-like actors seek to promote particular ideas of citizenship and to unite and control their populations. The argument builds from four core literatures: work on state formation in geography and anthropology; new work in development studies on property, authority and citizenship; political ecology; and feminist theory. This theoretical synthesis helps capture the emergence of political subjectivities, imaginaries and biophysical-ecological transformations from projects intended to improve the material base of the state. As such, these projects serve to quite literally build the state, offering important insights into processes of state transformation.

Convenor: Kulturgeografiska institutionen, Stockholms universitet. www.humangeo.su.se

Dr. Andrea Nightingale is an Associate Professor in the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She was previously the Director of the MSc in Environment and Development and a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Geography at the University of Edinburgh (2002-2012). Her PhD from the University of Minnesota in Geography was based on work done in Nepal since 1987 on questions of development, natural resource management, community forestry, gender, social inequalities and governance.

Reflections on Human Geography Fieldwork

At a recent lunch seminar in our department, we, (Martina Caretta, Natasha Webster, and Brian Kuns) prepared a presentation about how we do fieldwork abroad in our department, with the intent of having a self-critical dialogue with colleagues. Ethnographically flavored fieldwork is an important tool in the Human Geography method tool kit, though it certainly is not as prevalent in Human Geography as in Anthropology, and it is even less reflected upon in Human Geography than it is in Anthropology. Fully a third of current and former PhD students in our department (going back 16 years) have done fieldwork outside Sweden. If you count those who have done extended fieldwork inside Sweden, one can only come to the conclusion that we are an empirical department, and indeed this is one of our strengths. But we have not been so good in recent years in reflecting on this experience. The three of us, then, sent out a questionnaire to current and former PhD students in our department who have done field work abroad asking them to reflect on our fieldwork experiences.  

The responses were interesting, to say the least, and we identified the following themes to focus on: (1) how much time we spend in the field and why; (2) what are the obstacles and challenges we meet while in the field and; (3) what issues or challenges end up coming home with us from the field. A brief summary of these points is given in the following bullets:

·         On average we spend half a year doing field work abroad with some spending a year and others spending about a month. The standard in Anthropology is of course one year in the field, which anthropologists say is needed to achieve the kind of ‘thick description’ of social relations they aspire to. Our research is not necessarily as inductive as Anthropology tends to be so we do not need to spend as much time in the field – at least that is what Human Geographers would cite as one reason why we do not (need to) spend a year in the field. At the same time, we tend to defer to Anthropology –as the fieldwork experts – in terms of our training in fieldwork methods and in terms of reflecting on fieldwork in general. 

·         It was all in the course of a “normal” fieldwork that PhD students in our department experienced various logistical difficulties, problems with housing, and, perhaps most important, difficulties adapting fieldwork plans to unexpected events. In other words, it is a regular experience that fieldwork plans do not survive first contact with reality. This could be weather related delays, problems getting access to interview subjects, etc… Problems with housing and logistics can be overcome, but it is more problematic to have concerns about the data one has gathered.  

·         Another very serious issue concerned how common it was that PhD students in our department either were witness to unpleasant events and/or were concerned about their own safety at one point or another. Fieldwork still tends to be seen as the Male solo adventure, and the culture in our department (and most likely not just here) is to remain silent about these issues.

The discussion was very interesting and we got a lot of interesting comments from colleagues. Among other things we do not in fact want to reify notions of the “brave, adventurous geographer” venturing far abroad. Important fieldwork happens here in Sweden and can entail some of the same problems and risks.

In any case we will be working further on these questions so we hope to report more about this in the near future.