Sustainable Agriculture and Food: Four volume set (Earthscan Reference Collections)

(Elle) #1

252 Communities and Social Capital


improve NRM. Krishna’s question about how to tailor programmes to build col-
lective action based on recognition of gender differences in social capital remains
unanswered by our analysis. However, one implication of our findings is that in
cases where women are high on relational social capital as our analysis revealed, but
weak on institutional social capital, and where men have strong institutional social
capital but are short of relational social capital, their capacity to organize effective
group processes for collective action in NRM will vary. Gender differences in social
capital imply that some form of intervention is required to construct institutional
social capital in the form of enforceable rules, procedures and sanctions that can be
used by women, or alternatively that relational capital is built in the form of
enhanced trust, norms of collaboration and conflict management for men. Thus,
we conclude that capacity building and interventions to promote collective action
for NRM need to be gender differentiated.


Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the people who have res ponded to the questionnaire
survey, especially those who have dedicated time and energy to complete the
ques tionnaires. We would also like to thank James Silva and James Garcia
(CIAT) for their assistance with the stat istical analysis and Christine Kolb
(CIAT) for her assi stance. We are also grateful to Rachel Hine (University of
Essex), Sheri Arnott (IDRC), Helen Raij (IDRC-MINGA), Liliana Rojas
(CIAT-REDECO), Peggy McKee (PRGA), and Ana Maria Ponce (CONDE-
SAN – InfoAndina) for input regarding mailing lists and list servers and to
Anna Knox (PRGA), Christine Okali, Gordon Prain and Helen Hambly for
their comments on earlier versions of the paper. Finally we would like to thank
the CGIAR Systemwide Program on Partici patory Research and Gender Anal-
ysis for funding this research.


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