238 Communities and Social Capital
2 Women and men may value collaboration differently. Women often have more
everyday experiences of informal collaboration based on reciprocal relation-
ships and higher dependence on social relations for access to household
resources (Agrawal, 2000; Cleaver, 1998b). At the same time, it is often
assumed that women reveal more relational and altruistic behaviour due to
their role and responsibility for reproduction (Folbre, 1994; Sharma, 1980;
White, 1992), and are less motivated by selfish individualism (Molyneux,
2002), while men are more individualistic and more engaged in formal col-
laboration, decision making and organized power structures.
3 Women are better able to overcome social division and conflicts (Agrawal, 2000;
Cleaver, 1998b; Moser and Mcllwaine, 1999), because of their greater inter-
dependency and their everyday experiences of collaboration. As a consequence,
women are expected to perform better in groups, and – also as a result of their
greater dependency on natural resources due to the household division of
labour – to achieve better outcomes from collective NRM (Agrawal, 2000).
Framework and Methodology
Examination of the complex causal relationships between gender and collective
NRM through different gender-related stocks and usage of social capital requires
an innovative three-dimensional framework that combines elements of gender
analysis, collective NRM, and social capital based on previous frameworks devel-
oped for environmental collective action (Agrawal, 2000; Krishna, 2000; Pretty
and Frank, 2000; Pretty and Ward, 2001): The three dimensions employed for our
analysis comprise:
1 The effects of gender on social capital based on the three propositions on gen-
dered social capital described above that refer to social relations in networks,
collaboration and conflict management.
2 The impact of gender on the effectiveness of collective action measured in
terms of the maturity of groups (Pretty and Ward, 2001).
3 The effects of gender on the results of NRM measured in terms of a group’s
learning approach to NRM (Pretty and Frank, 2000).
Combining these three dimensions of the relationship between gender, collective
action and NRM, our analysis assesses five features of collective action in NRM
groups: (1) collaboration; (2) social relations in networks; (3) conflict manage-
ment; (4) group maturity; (5) impact on NRM. Each of these five variables is now
defined in detail below.
1 Collaboration – defined here in terms of five dimensions: frequency, value,
purpose, type and structure of collaboration. To examine the frequency by