 I'd like to introduce myself just to say that I've been working with IID for about five years in a team working on conservation and biodiversity from a people perspective. Prior to that I worked with Care, International and Reaching with Birdlight International and within Care for a long time worked on environmental issues in a team where we had gender experts, but more broadly during the time I worked at Care Moon from being I might say gender centricists who have an agenda transformative ambition and I'll sort of refer back to that in relation to some of the things I've said. So I'm going to talk about three case studies and in particular focus on two big issues. One is the issue of gender equity and equality and what we mean by those and how we sort of made a transition from one to the other. The question of why gender equality from a conservation perspective and then I'm going to talk about those issues in the context of three case studies. Two very specific initiatives, the first two that happened to be in Kenya and then the last one is a broader look at a whole sector of community forestry in Nepal. So to start with the first one, this is a forest on the coast of Kenya. I was working there and we had a study that was organized by AWF on the Butterfly Farming Initiative which was one of those sort of classic alternative livelihoods initiatives. And it was looking with a viability initiative in general and the impact of it had quite a lot of interesting things to say about women and the impact on women and how to increase that. So this is an important source of income, not for a lot of people, but about 100 in the area. And it's particularly suitable for women as you raise these butterflies, the pupae of the butterfly at home in cages in the compound and so you don't have to, if you've got young children, do it while you're looking after the children. And so it was reviewed by... So some of the observations on this initiative, particularly from a gender perspective, were that this enterprise, they're raising these pupae of butterflies and sending them to a project which spends those amount of international markets for people to put in butterfly houses. So this was an initiative controlled by men. The basically unit through which the project interacted with people was the household and naturally they spoke to the household head. So most times, although women were actively involved in it, they weren't the contact point and it was seen therefore by the project to be a sort of male enterprise. They commented very interestingly and referring to other research that if you assume that it could be men or women doing this particular enterprise, that when income accrued into women was generally spent more wisely on things like school fees and income accruing to men, which in that area is a lot of it spent on palm wine. Now that's a rather extreme example but that has been observed in a number of other cases. I think there's a paper by Amartya Sen that talks about altruism personally. That was an observation from the specifics of this particular case study. On the conservation impact, the idea with these alternative livelihoods activities is that people are generating income from an enterprise that is to some extent dependent on the forest and therefore it would make people more supportive of conservation. And that indeed was observed in terms of the political threats to the forests of deaconsetment of removing parts of the forest, but there was no evidence of any reduction in legal activities per se by individuals. But very clear evidence of the big comparing people who were involved in the enterprise with others, big difference in their attitude to the forest. And lastly, the observation that you had a choice basically, you could run the enterprise with relatively few people growing a lot of these pupae or the other extreme, hundreds of small producers who might be particularly poor people or particularly maybe women, and that would cost you quite a lot more to run because you needed a lot more extension agents. So there was a cost to this more gender-responsible protocol approach. So in the conclusions, he could say that prior to the review, this was a best-gender sensitive and in terms of our equity framework, it wasn't really looking at any aspect of equity. It simply observed that there were men and women who produced pupae, but they worked mainly with the men. So this changed to a responsive approach to deliberately trying to encourage more women to get involved in interacting with them directly rather than through the men and so what that changed. That was expected as an impact to generate more benefits for women and probably a larger contribution to human well-being as a result given the spending sort of pattern of women and men there. It was expected this would have no conservation impact, increasing the number of women involved or maybe even negative impacts on conservation for the reason that women have no voice, political voice in that area. So if the pathway to conservation impact was through men being incentivised to raise their voices in local forums after MPs to support forest conservation, that did not happen with women because they're not in those forums. They don't have a voice. There was possibly a trade-off there between more benefits for women and the conservation objectives although that was never sort of specifically discussed if it seemed to be a significant question. And last year I said it would probably cost more to certainly set up the project and even probably to sustain it over time if you want to have a more gender responsive approach because you'll tend to be dealing with more smaller scale producers and that will require more investment, at least in the start-up. So that's the Butterfly Project. The next case study also from Glenian is something very recent. So the Butterfly Project was 1998, that assessment was done. This is 2017, done by myself and Francesca. Well, supported by myself and Francesca. This is in a Conservancy in Kenyon, Mara North, which is recently established and it borders the Mara National Reserve. It has comprises of land owned by 700 individuals and they individually titled where they manage it as a group. It has a very high income from lots of tourist hotels and camps, at least $100 per household per year. And there's a sort of joint venture in terms of governance between the indigenous community of our site and the private sector tourism operators. And what we were doing there was supporting them to do an assessment of the governance of the Conservancy, particularly looking at issues of participation and decision making, transparency and benefit sharing. So later the assessments, we helped to train them how to do it and the facilitators were also local, from locally around. So just to show you this, so this is looking at, said very much, a decision making, access to information and benefit sharing. There were a number of interesting observations related to gender equity, stroke equality. The first and most obvious one was they had an overall decision making committee of 19 people. There were no women on that committee. Even on the subcommittees that allocated benefits like school bursaries, there were again about 20 people, not a single woman in that committee either. So that became very obviously a problem and they agreed that they would make those decision making bodies, at least the third women. And that has been done in terms of the quantity, the numbers, but not yet in terms of the quality because they haven't done a proper election process. So they kind of co-opted women in who were probably friends of the men that stepped down to make space for the women. So there's still quite a big issue there. It's a move in the right direction. With information gathering, women knew nothing about the Conservancy. In fact, the fact that a large part of their family land had been committed to this Conservancy and therefore excluding grazing certainly of their animals, they knew nothing about it, nothing about release arrangements, nothing about their rights, and in fact many of them had never been invited to any meeting about the Conservancy. So when we went there, they observed that it was the first meeting that they had on that topic. So it was agreed that definitely they need to be more involved and get more access to information and specifically to attend the general meeting once a year. It remains to be seen whether that will happen. This is on the benefit side, limited employment opportunities for women in the Conservancy and all these hotels and lodges. There was an agreement that the Board of the Conservancy would take this up and put in place. That's where the community and the partners worked together and joined governance. They would come up with an affirmative action strategy to increase women's employment. And lastly, the women observed that it didn't seem to be fair that men can graze their cows in the Conservancy, that they can't graze their sheep. The men said that there should be no action on this because grazing sheep is incompatible with conservation, whereas grazing cows is compatible with conservation. And that simply illustrates, and that closed down the conversation basically and illustrates although there is a space for this discussion and the men definitely were open to a number of quite progressive ideas, this wasn't one of them. And they've acted up with what they said was science that made that case. So the progress is basically at the highest, the number one most progress down to the fourth issue, no progress. But fundamentally, and I think Helen referred to this, some of the proposed actions fundamentally challenged traditional norms of Maasai culture. One reason why that is even possible is because the Kenyan Constitution has changed recently and says that a third or women should be, one committee should be a third women minimum, land can be owned by women in their own right and various other very progressive provisions in the new constitution. So prior to this assessment, definitely there was no even talk of men and women, it was just the members. And that's how the tour operators and everybody referred to the people, the members of the community. Gender blind now that's definitely moving in some respects to be responsive. So at least responsive would be looking at how the benefits are distributed and trying to do something to make that fairer. And in this case, the affirmative action in favor of women in employment. Potentially transformative is only possibly the first one. If the women who are properly elected to this committee and people listen to them and actually enable them to have influence, then it would be becoming transformative in the change. So I'll move on to the third one, which is a much larger kind of case study. And I've been involved in not living in Nepal, but working through when I was with CARE. Over many, many years, they had a big program supporting community forestry and particularly governance of community forest user groups in Nepal from the mid-90s onwards. So when you look at the program in Nepal, it now has more than 20,000 community forests, mostly almost entirely natural forests. More than a quarter of all the forest in Nepal is in these community forests under this arrangement. So you can see when people use these terms, the first generation, second generation, and third generation. So the first generation, the government started to hand over forests, as they call it, hand over to communities. Because the forest was so degraded, they hardly were anything to government anymore, and they thought they really had nothing to lose. And they were really quite successful in conservation terms. And the only aspect in which there was some kind of discussion agenda was in the membership of the actual group that manages the forest, where women were encouraged to join in their own right as well as men. So it was not on a household basis and the decision-making, but not in decision-making committees. So, and there was a lot of early capture of benefits. A lot of exclusion of vulnerable people who had been very forest dependent, who were often from a bit further away, they were shut out, including some women who experienced those negative impacts as well. So in some respects, the first generation was actually bad news for women in a number of places. That began to be recognized towards the end of that period. And there was a new policy, which had been come undue, and they decided they needed to address these issues of social exclusion and the gender issues. And so there were some policy changes, such as the first saying that 30% of committees have to be women. They tried to deal with some of the elite capture. They partially successfully in some areas, but still major problems existing. There was this evidence that forests, they encouraged women groups on their own to take up forest conservation, and those forests actually did better than the other ones that were managed by mixed groups, and there's some strong evidence for that. And their overarching cross-cutting theme around gender was called gender and social equity, and that kind of it. And then the third generation, again, is trying to address the issues around to be still problematic in the first generation of the... of women, largely not having any influence other than the women having forests and still order the elite capture benefits. So the third generation, again, there are policy changes, which are progressive and sort of affirmative. And very recently, the government and all the donors and major NGOs have adopted what they call gender equality and social inclusion as opposed to gender and social equity. And this has become fully formally integrated in the forest policy in 2015. So what does all this mean? Well, so... And there's a lot of interesting work being done on gender and forestry in Nepal, perhaps as much or perhaps more than most other countries. And one of the things I looked at, because I was agreeing around this as well, was the PhD, which basically looked how this first, second, third generation maps on to the change in the way the gender has been addressed in an environmental context over time. So in the 80s and 90s, you had this, certainly when I was in care, we talked of women in development or women in environmental development paradigm. So this is based on the idea there's some kind of special relationship between women and nature and that women have a natural interest in protecting forests and harnessing these interests and skills and et cetera could be make forestry more efficient. That sort of instrumental argument. Although these studies that show that these forests often had negative impacts on women, but this was the sort of strong paradigm of that period. The second generation tried to address some of the problems by emphasising by working on governance and women's empowerment. And there were some successes in areas where which has strong internal support like through care that I was working for at the time, several thousand of the groups had that kind of support, but 18,000 of them didn't and there's still a lot of problems as recent studies have shown. One of the sort of analysis of why it has been so difficult beyond these islands of sort of NGO support is a very fundamental point that this relationship between women and forest management conservation is conditioned by pre-existing gender relations whereas the assumption of many NGOs was at the entry point was working through these forest governance groups and empowering women within that context. Whereas it's just saying that actually these external gender, the dynamic within society is the thing that shapes all of this and if you just focus on forest governance but anyway, there was some benefit from the second generation with increased benefits to women. The conservation impacts haven't already referred to this paper by Alicia Etal at 2017 and one of these sources is this paper which showed that not only the women only groups but also the mixed groups with high proportion of women are conditioned and they attributed that to better rule compliance or accountability in these mixed groups women's knowledge and also the fact that there tends to be stronger cooperation amongst women so collective initiative maybe works better if there are a good number of women within that group. So as you see this evolving from the first to the second to the third let's map that on to this sort of continuum of sensitive to responsive to transformative where the responsive in the language of Nepal equates with equity and the transformative equates with equality. So finally just to wrap that up now I'm not going to read through all this but the definition for just to say that formally these definitions are taken from UN women website glossary of terms and the equality being a human rights issues and it refers to equal rights and responsibilities and opportunities very clearly equal to be equal the gender equity being a notion of fair treatment of women and men and they note that this involves an interpretation of the concept of justice or equality and it's usually based on local context which is often most often to the detriment of women so that's why the Beijing conference of the mid-90s came down strongly against using this term discourage organizations from using it the term that Helen mentioned about intersectionality is becoming really important in the whole and their new strategy of gender equality and social inclusion meaning that an individual's identity is conditioned by many things one of which is gender but father's being access to resources and power relations that are based on religion, ethnicity, caste and class and in fact it is more effective to recognize this complexity rather than try and take a reductionist approach and so that's lastly so looking and taking a step back and looking at this issue of gender equality and equity in the context of conservation now when I look in literature from care it says that gender equity is a step towards the ultimate goal of equality however in the equity framework that we've been referring to which we've been developing with a number of people in which it relates to the context of conservation and it relates to relationships between many different acts of state and non-state which will not always be equal so in a broader framing of equity in conservation some of the factors that determine how you allocate benefits or even how you what access people have to information or decision making platforms is based on rights it could be based on costs and curves so say there's a big problem with elephant damage people who are experiencing that problem may have preference in being involved in a certain process contribution to conservation goals or in the last one is needs basically their particular needs that are related to poverty rather than what I say so in the context of conservation you can see that in the domains of recognition and procedure which is all about recognizing rights and the governance issues of participation accountability etc the norm tends to be gender equality and we don't see many cases where men and women are treated separately but in the domain of distribution there are much more differences as bullets above and in the context therefore in the context of conservation we tend to see equality as one variant of equity that applies very much in the recognition and receipt almost easily universally in those dimensions but not necessarily in the dimension of distribution so you have a kind of conundrum between the way that people in conservation might see the relationship of these two and the way that others in more in the gender world in other sectors might see them lastly and that's a question how do we I guess I kind of explain that here the last question is related to that my point about moral and instrumental arguments for why we need to address gender equality and so you can also say is gender equality considered a goal of conservation or simply a means or instrumental pathway to achieving better conservation