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Examining the Barriers to Gender Integration in Agriculture, Climate Change, Food Security, and Nutrition Policies: Guatemalan and Honduran Perspectives
- For policymakers
- Summary created: 2022
This research is about understanding the gender gaps and possible solutions in agriculture, climate change, food security and nutrition policies that can exist in Guatemala and Honduras, through narrative and policy document analysis.
This summary, including its recommendations and ideas, was created by Fanny Howland and is based on original research. The original research itself was conducted in collaboration with the following researchers.
Our study examined the barriers leading to poor gender mainstreaming and potential solutions in policies applying to gender, agriculture, climate change, food security and nutrition, in both Guatemala and Honduras. Indeed, to include gender in policy is key to achieve national development goals and global challenges such as climate change and food and nutrition insecurity in the agriculture sector.
Insights
One of the key findings of this research is that a gap exists between policy elaboration and policy implementation.
We identified that in Guatemala and Honduras, there are many gender policies that have been elaborated. In some cases, it was a very participatory process, where not only government personnel were participating in the elaboration of the policy, but also NGOs, international cooperation organisations and researchers. However, at the end there is no budget and no project or program to implement this policy. We understood that it is not enough to have policy documents, you must look at policy implementation to understand the gap that exists.
International corporations have a key role, because in many cases they are the ones who are pushing the government to elaborate gender policy to create gender units within the different ministries.
Sometimes they are also key to funding the elaboration of the policy. However, they only focus on the elaboration of documents, and they are not pushing beyond the creation of the policy.
International cooperation have a key role and power to influence the governments.
They should go beyond the technical issue of not having gender policy and should instead be much more ambitious in terms of bridging this gender gap in these countries.
Another finding was that there was a very pessimistic view from those working in gender towards the situation and the future in terms of bridging gender gaps.
They were very negative in terms of seeing a solution, at least in the short-term. It is important to note that they did not see an easy solution to these gender issues.
What it means
There are multiple barriers of a different nature and at different levels that explain the lack of gender integration in the policy cycle, related and linked to: (1) policy translation from the international level; (2) structural policy barriers at national level; (3) behaviours and corruption; and (4) lack of knowledge and capacity.
Suggested next steps
For organisations working to close the gender gap in policy, it is important to have several strategies within the program
We observed that it is not enough to say that your program is gender-friendly or gender-sensitive and that you are monitoring the number of women that participate in your workshop
It is important to continue to conduct research on gender and gender gap in order to carry out evidence-based advocacy
The pandemic caused by Covid-19 has been a factor that has increased the vulnerability of the already vulnerable, such as women
Acknowledgements
Thank you to iDE Global
These insights were made available thanks to the support of iDE Global, who are committed to the dissemination of knowledge for all.
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