In celebration of International Women’s Day (March 8), IUCN, through its Mangroves for the Future programme, in collaboration with the Southeast Asian Fisheries De-velopment Center (SEAFDEC) and Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), have launched a Gender Analy-sis Toolkit (GAT) to improve gender integration and mainstreaming in coastal resource management pro-grammes in South and Southeast Asia.

Photo: IUCN

The toolkit aims to help coastal and fisheries management practitioners, such as programme officers and technical advisors from development and environmental agencies, develop baseline knowledge around gender dimensions related to coastal and natural resources use, livelihoods development and ecosystems management. 

This knowledge can help identify gender gaps and advance gender-integrated and gender responsive planning for improved resilience of coastal ecosystems and the communities that depend on them. 

The toolkit also provides direction around key instruments, concepts and themes for qualitative gender analysis in coastal ecosystem-dependent communities.  

The toolkit is an iterative development process meant to be revisited and revised to reflect new circums-tances and emergent learning at different stages, and from sites where the analysis is conducted. 

“As gender norms, roles and dynamics are not static and do not exist in discrete terms, the tools we use should be able to capture and reflect social changes as they happen,” said Maeve Nightingale, Senior Programme Officer, Coastal and Marine Programme, IUCN Asia.

The GAT is one of the main outputs of a MFF-SEAFDEC-SEI regional gender study, funded by the Swe-dish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA). 

The study explored gender patterns in coastal and marine resources management, with the aim of improving overall understanding about the state of women and men in environmental decision-making. 

The study also identified the main challenges prevent-ing equitable opportunities for men and women in the coastal fisheries and coastal resource management sectors. 

In her statement for International Women’s Day, IUCN Director General Inger Andersen says, “At IUCN, we insist that women represent 3.5 billion solutions to our most pressing global challenges. Data tells us that women matter – and gender equality matters – when it comes to conserving and protecting our environ-ment. For instance, studies of the forestry and fisheries sectors demonstrate that the empowerment of women in local resource decision-making can lead to better governance and conservation.”

The study, along with a resulting synthesis report contributes to strengthening our collective understanding and commitment towards achieving gender equality as a core part of coastal and marine resource man-agement and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in particular SDG 5 and SDG 14. 

The GAT was tested and improved throughout the study. 

Gender analysis is a way of understanding how perceptions of gender in terms of norms and values, gender roles, and identities and gendered power relations among and within social groups are produced and reproduced within the processes of social change. 

The continuity perspective is paramount to gender anal-ysis as it explains the dynamic character of gender identities and relations embedded in both structural and contingent processes.

This year’s theme for International Women’s Day is “Better the balance, better the world”. 

‘’Sustainable development in South and Southeast Asia cannot be achieved without the talent, knowledge and experience of half the population caring for marine and coastal resources at all levels of decision-making: at regional, national and community scales. However, biases and social-gender norms have con-strained humanity from being more inclusive,’’ said Bernadette P. Resurrección, Head of the Gender Team, SEI Asia. 

The Gender Analysis Toolkit can be downloaded here: 

http://www.mangrovesforthefuture.org/knowledge-hub/e-library/?documentId=19157

The Regional Gender Synthesis can be downloaded here: 

http://www.mangrovesforthefuture.org/knowledge-hub/e-library/?documentId=19156

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