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Gender, Technology and Development

ISSN: 0971-8524 (Print) 0973-0656 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rgtd20

Incorporating gender into low-emissiondevelopment: a case study from Vietnam

Cathy Rozel Farnworth, Trần Thu Hà, Björn Ole Sander, Eva Wollenberg,Nicoline C. de Haan & Shawn McGuire

To cite this article: Cathy Rozel Farnworth, Trần Thu Hà, Björn Ole Sander, Eva Wollenberg,Nicoline C. de Haan & Shawn McGuire (2017) Incorporating gender into low-emissiondevelopment: a case study from Vietnam, Gender, Technology and Development, 21:1-2, 5-30

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09718524.2017.1385314

Published online: 03 Nov 2017.

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RESEARCH ARTICLE

Incorporating gender into low-emission development:a case study from Vietnam

Cathy Rozel Farnwortha, Tr�̂an Thu H�ab, Bj€orn Ole Sanderc, Eva Wollenbergd,Nicoline C. de Haane and Shawn McGuiref�aPandia Consulting, M€unster, Germany; bProgram on Climate Change, Vietnam Low Carbon RiceProject, Vietnam; cInternational Rice Research Institute, Los Banos, Philippines; dCGIAR ResearchProgram on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), Gund Institute for Environmentand Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Vermont, Burlington, VA,USA; eInternational Water Management Institute, Colombo, Sri Lanka; fSchool of InternationalDevelopment, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

ABSTRACTReducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture isneeded to meet global climate policy targets. A number of low-emission development (LED) options exist in agriculture, which glo-bally emits 10–12% of GHG emissions. In paddy rice production,alternative wetting and drying (AWD) can reduce emissions by upto 48%. Co-benefits of AWD include lower water consumption,lower use of fertilizer and seeds, and higher resistance to somepests and diseases. These are expected to result in improved bene-fits for individual farmers while lowering the sector’s overall contri-bution to GHG emissions. Women are strongly involved in riceproduction, hence improving their access to AWD technology, par-ticipation in decisions about it, and capacity to use it influencesAWD adoption and resulting emissions. Involving women in AWDand LED more broadly also can provide distributional and proced-ural justice gains for women. The authors develop a conceptualmodel to show how these issues can be integrated. They suggestthat intermediary organizations such as farmer associations andwomen’s organizations are central to enabling women to realizetheir personal goals while allowing gender to be taken to scale inLED, as is the case for other technology interventions. This requireswork to expand their social capacities. A case study developedfrom work on taking gender-responsive LED to scale in the MekongDelta, Vietnam, illustrates the model.

ARTICLE HISTORYReceived 11 April 2016Accepted 7 December 2016

KEYWORDSLow-emission development;alternate wetting anddrying; gender; rice;Vietnam

Introduction

Reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture is critical to meet climatepolicy targets, as mitigation from other sectors is unlikely to be sufficient (Baj�zelj et al.,2014; Gernaat et al., 2015). A number of low-emission development (LED) options

CONTACT Cathy Rozel Farnworth cathyfarnworth@hotmail.com Pandia Consulting, Teigelkamp 64, 48145M€unster, Germany�Plant Production and Protection Division, Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome, Italy� 2017 Asian Institute of Technology

GENDER, TECHNOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT, 2017VOL. 21, NO. 1-2, 5–30https://doi.org/10.1080/09718524.2017.1385314

exist in crop and livestock agriculture, which globally emits 10–12% of GHG emissions(IPCC, 2013). In paddy rice production, alternative wetting and drying (AWD) canreduce emissions significantly. If AWD is properly implemented, this managementoption has a high methane reduction potential. Methane-producing bacteria that buildup in anaerobic (flooded) field conditions are inhibited when the soil is aeratedthrough drainage of water. Draining the water to between 10 and 15 cm below thesoil surface ensures that the plant can still access sufficient water; this is referred to‘safe AWD’, meaning that no yield reduction is likely (Bouman, Lampayan, & Tuong,2007; Richards & Sander, 2014; Yan, Yagi, Akiyama, & Akimoto, 2005). The emissionreduction potential is influenced by many factors. Different soil types, different temper-atures, and different amounts of solar radiation lead to different magnitudes of emis-sions, different mitigation potentials, and different effective savings. On average, AWDreduces methane emissions by 48% (Yan et al., 2005) though regional variations arehigh (Sander, Wassmann, & Siopongco, 2016). In a recent study from Central Vietnam,for example, methane emission reductions of 29% were found (Tirol-Padre et al., 2017).However, a study from northern Vietnam showed reductions of around 70% (Pandeyet al., 2014).

Many LED efforts to lower GHG emissions concentrate on developing and dissemi-nating improved farm management technologies to farmers in association withpromoting more efficient use of inputs and other productive resources. Such so-calledco-benefits of mitigation are being actively promoted in many projects to make itmore attractive for farmers to invest in LED technologies and adopt the behaviouralchanges required. The commitment to promoting co-benefits is signalled by the useofþ in the case of AWD. The expected co-benefits of AWD include lower water con-sumption, lower application rates of seed and fertilizer, higher lodging resistance, andhigher resistance to some pests and diseases. These are expected to result in improvedbenefits for individual farmers.

Given women’s prominent role in the agricultural sector in many developingcountries, LED in agriculture need to understand and engage effectively with genderissues. Gender-blind LED efforts risk is being less effective at delivering both thetechnologies which are anticipated to result in reduced GHG emissions as well asdiminish the attractiveness of the co-benefits to target farmers. This is because suchefforts are unlikely account for the different knowledge, livelihood practices, andinnovation potentials of women and men farmers. When LED projects do not con-sider gender in the target agricultural system, and how actors relate to their immedi-ate resources, LED technologies run the risk of ineffectual implementation, or loweradoption. There is thus a strong instrumental justification for engaging in gender-responsive LED.

Over and beyond this, the authors take the normative position that both men andwomen farmers should have opportunities to engage in decision-making around issuesthat affect them, and that they should be able to influence the direction of project pri-orities, designs, implementation strategies, and learning frameworks. The distributionaland procedural justice reasons for bringing gender into LED in agriculture are high-lighted by Edmunds, Sasser, and Wollenberg (2013); we extend these justifications toinclude empowerment as a further potential ‘co-benefit’ alongside economic and agro-ecological co-benefits.

6 C. R. FARNWORTH ET AL.

The necessity of integrating gender into LED is gaining policy recognition. For morethan 20 years, gender was absent from the United Nations Framework Convention onClimate Change (UNFCCC) and in decision-making by its Conference of the Parties andSubsidiary Bodies. Few National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs) addressedgender considerations effectively, or even considered them (IUCN, 2013). However,since 2008, numerous references have been made to gender in UNFCCC text and cli-mate change gender action plans (ccGAPs) are under development in a number ofcountries including Nepal, Liberia, Tanzania, Mozambique, Jordan, Egypt, Panama,Costa Rica, and Haiti. Gender-responsive REDDþ (reducing emissions from deforest-ation and forest degradation) roadmaps are being developed in Ghana, Uganda, andCameroon (Edmunds et al., 2013).

Unfortunately, these efforts run the risk of being thwarted by the perceived urgencyof achieving rapid reductions in GHG emissions. LED approaches that can be broughtto scale quickly are favoured (e.g., Pretty, Toulmin, & Williams, 2011; Siedenburg,Martin, & McGuire, 2012). Mitigation initiatives are generally planned at national orregional scales and involve many actors. Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Action(NAMA) is one example (see http://unfccc.int/focus/mitigation/items/7172.php forextensive details). The sheer scale, technical, and institutional complexity of many LEDprojects can mean that gender gets lost, is seen as increasing transaction costs, or isconsidered primarily a local concern and therefore a low priority compared to ‘gettingthe technology out’ (Edmunds et al., 2013). As a consequence, the implications of LEDin agriculture for gender outcomes remain under-conceptualized (Farnworth, 2015 inrelation to Costa Rica). The situation is rendered more complex still because many’tried and tested’ approaches to working on gender in agriculture focus on involvinglocal women in participatory processes. The scale and timing, and the highly technicalagronomic requirements, of many LED projects, often do not fit well with the contextsensitivity needed to engage with gender. This is a serious gap for LED practice aswell as for scholarship.

One mechanism for taking gender to scale within LED projects is to work closelywith intermediary organizations, by which we mean the representative bodies to whichmany farmers belong, such as farmer associations, women’s groups, irrigation commit-tees, and cooperatives. Intermediary organizations link individual farmers to externalagencies and policymakers and thus have clear scaling potential. In this paper, we pur-sue the proposal that improving the capacity of women (and young people) to partici-pate in intermediary organizations is intrinsic to increasing the capacity of thoseorganizations to innovate effectively. Bringing these two factors into a dynamic inter-relationship with each other will, we contend, help facilitate an improved environmentfor climate resilience and contribute to reducing net GHG emissions from target agri-cultural systems.

We open by drawing out the challenges for gender in taking agricultural LED toscale. We then outline how the capability approach (Alkire, 2002; Nussbaum, 2003;Sen, 1985) can help in understanding the influence of underlying norms on an individ-ual’s assets, activities, and social identities, and how this in turn influences their abilityto act. We use the concept of social competencies (Stewart, 2013) to extend thisapproach to intermediary organizations, such as producer and women’s organizations.Core terminology is set out in Box 1.

GENDER, TECHNOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT 7

Box 1 Core terminology (Stewart, 2013).Individual capabilities: Capabilities are what a person can be – ’beings’ – and what they can do – ’doings’.Intermediary organizations: Organizations that operate between policymakers and implementers.Social institutions: Formal and informal laws, social norms, and practices represented in visible structures(households/ intermediary organization) and deep structures (underlying values, assumptions, and ideologies)Social competencies: Like people, intermediary organizations can ’be’, and ’do’. They articulate and enact –more or less deliberately – social competencies. The term ’competency’ is used for organizations in prefer-ence to the term ’capabilities’ which is reserved for individual human beings.

We argue that individual capability and social competencies must be worked uponsimultaneously because they are fundamentally interactive. Intermediary organizationscan either facilitate, or disable, attempts by members to realize their goals. We illus-trate our arguments through exploring an innovative approach to taking ’gender toscale’ developed by the Vietnam Low Carbon Rice Project (VLCRP). The VLCRPequipped a national organization, the Women’s Union, with technical expertise inAWD technologies and then guided it into a partnership with strongly male-dominatedFarmer Associations to allow women farmers to participate effectively in AWD trainingand implementation. In this way, underlying norms which to date have limited wom-en’s effective participation in technology development were challenged and, to adegree, overcome.

Gender challenges to taking LED to scale

We noted in the introduction that the scale at which climate change negotiations takeplace, the large number of actors involved in mitigation initiatives, and the pressurefor ‘scalable innovations’ placed huge pressures on traditional approaches to workingon gender in agriculture. We unpick four of these challenges here.

First, gender is often understood to be fundamentally experiential and dependenton particular contexts. It is about what it means to be a woman or a man in a specificplace at a specific time (Grown & Sebstad, 1989). Partly as a consequence, there hasbeen, historically, a strong focus on facilitating the agency of individual women –which can be understood as a person’s ability to set goals and act upon them.Effective agency can be understood as the motor force of empowerment: it isempowerment in action. In agriculture, many insights into individual agency havebeen obtained through research on intra-household dynamics (Quisumbing, 2003;Sheremenko & Magnan, 2015; Udry, 1996): discussions on ways to empower individualwomen through strengthening their dynamics (Quisumbing, 2003; Udry, 1996;Sheremenko & Magnan, 2015); and discussions on ways to empower individual womenthrough strengthening their access to resources and improving their capacity to nego-tiate for their gender interests within the household through improving their bargain-ing positions have been an important part of development discourse (Doss, 2013; Sen,1987). In the development sector, this has translated into work on a family of house-hold methodologies (HHM) by a number of development partners including IFAD,SIDA, and USAID, among others (Farnworth & Munachonga 2010; Farnworth, Fones-Sundell, Nzioki, & Shivutse, 2013). However, upscaling these efforts face considerablechallenges. These include methodological issues faced when inserting intra-household

8 C. R. FARNWORTH ET AL.

methodologies into intermediary organizations and higher networks, the persistencerequired to bring new language and concepts into regular use, the skills needed todevelop alliances within bureaucracies and between organizations, and the sheer effortrequired to confront gendered norms within these organizations and within wider soci-ety (Payne, 2011; Theobald, Tolhurst, Elsey, & Standing, 2005).

Second, GHG mitigation responses frequently feature top-down planning processesat national or regional scales which involve multiple large institutions. Such top-downapproaches are legitimized by portrayals of climate change as an urgent crisis(Edmunds et al., 2013), affecting vast areas and populations (IPCC, 2013), which requirerapid measures. Consequently, this makes it problematic to argue for the participationof women, and marginalized groups more broadly, to influence the development ofmitigation projects. Top-down approaches to designing and governing mitigation proj-ects, when they fail to account for gender, risk provoking procedural injustices forwomen (Ambani & Percy, 2012; Edmunds et al., 2013). Gender-blind LED projects mayproduce distributional injustices for women and marginalized groups, as seen, forexample, in some REDD projects (see Sikor, 2013; USAID, 2011 for details).

Third, mitigation projects are dominated by scientists with climate, economic, andagricultural expertise, and who face strong pressure to provide blueprint solutions forrapid scaling. The technical nature of recommendations and seeming ‘lack of fit’ withspecific localities, however, can make it difficult for intermediary organizations on theground to accept their relevance and roll them out (Edmunds et al., 2013). Forinstance, local people may well perceive complex interrelations between – and mul-tiple uses of – natural resources, for example, by linking water to rice production,aquaculture, and wetland ecologies more broadly, or by viewing forests as sources ofmultiple products. Community-level institutions frequently determine highly differenti-ated, and gendered, rights of access to such resources, including products derivedfrom what outsiders may consider to be ‘common-pool resources’ (Ahluwalia, 1997;Baker, Cullen, Debevec, & Abebe, 2015; Leach, Mearns, & Scoones, 1999; Ribot &Peluso, 2003). Such access and management rights are frequently locally contestedand subject to change (Sikor & Lund, 2009). The varied economic, social, and culturalactivities of different groups of people together with varied associated rights andresponsibilities help determine how they engage with, and shape, agricultural land-scapes. Accordingly, different social groups, and women and men within these groups,commonly perceive and use their environment in very different ways (Agarwal, 2001;Baker et al., 2015; Howorth & O’Keefe, 1999; Nazarea, Rhoades, Bontoyan, & Flora,1998). However, LED strategies may focus primarily on one resource and a particularset of usages derived from this resource, thus excluding certain categories of userfrom consideration (Edmunds et al., 2013). In so doing such strategies may not onlymarginalize these users, they may also erode local integrated management systems.

Finally, LED is attracting a wide range of new actors who may be unfamiliar withthe terrain of gender and agricultural development but who bring expertise from newfields, such as carbon markets (Siedenburg, Brown, & Hoch, 2016), energy, risk manage-ment, biodiversity, and others, as well as various ministries unused to working witheach other (IUCN, 2013). Along with these new actors, LED projects also bring newfinance streams such as the Green Climate Fund, the BioCarbon Fund, and theInternational NAMA Facility together with unfamiliar monitoring and accountability

GENDER, TECHNOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT 9

mechanisms. Given these complexities, farmers and intermediary organizations maystruggle to engage effectively LED projects let alone address gender (Edmunds et al.,2013).

Moving forward

It is not possible to address in detail the great variety of challenges involved in tak-ing gender to scale in LED projects in this paper. We therefore isolate one commonfactor to all – the underlying discriminatory social and gender norms (social institu-tions) which can make it difficult for individual women and men to participate effect-ively on their own terms in LED projects. We suggested above that one mechanismof interrogating and reshaping social institutions is to work through farmer-basedintermediary organizations as partners in LED development processes. This mechan-ism helps to counter the tendency for top-down planning processes. It also allowsintermediary organizations to challenge blueprint solutions that may overlook thecomplexities of local governance processes and the multi-functionality of resourceuse as described in challenge three. Finally, strengthening farmer-based intermediaryorganizations can help them bring a stronger voice to negotiation processes withnew actors. All these potential benefits depend, critically, on ensuring that womenare able to voice and act upon their gender-based interests in such organizations.We now develop a conceptual framework to help us develop a way of doing thiseffectively. We use, and build on, the key terms set in Box 1 in the discussion whichfollows. We then bring the three components together to build a model for movingforward.

Individual capabilities

Capabilities are what a person can be (beings) and what they can do (doings), andconsequently have a cultural as well as material dimension. The human developmentapproach, measured in the Human Development Reports, considers the object ofdevelopment to be about expanding the capabilities of individual women and men todefine and live the lives they want to have. In this shift from desire to realization, peo-ple move from having a potential of being, and doing, into actually being able to be,or to do. The human development approach is intrinsically individualistic because itfocuses on facilitating the expansion of an individual’s capabilities or freedoms(Nussbaum, 2003; Sen, 1985; Stewart, 2013).

A development focus on capabilities enables women and men within their society‘to imagine, to wonder and … to know’ (Nussbaum & Sen, 1993; p. 1–2). Expandingpeople’s capabilities is not getting them to achieve predetermined goals set by exter-nal actors, but rather about achieving empowerment on their own terms. The wordempowerment originated in the women’s movement and is used by feminist activiststo describe the process of change in women’s sense of self-confidence and ability todeal with the world, changes which can be seen on the ground (Sen, 1999).Empowerment involves a process of discovering new ways to exercise choice, or newdomains in which choice can be exercised. These may be strategic life choices, suchas choosing one’s livelihood, where to live, whom and whether to marry, how many

10 C. R. FARNWORTH ET AL.

children to have, and so on. Such first-order choices help frame other, so-calledsecond-order choices, which may be important for one’s quality of life, but do not con-stitute its defining parameters (Kabeer, 1999).

From a global perspective, LED technologies seem to constitute inherently desirable,first-order choices, defining a more environmentally sustainable, and ultimately live-able, space for development. However, communities and individual farmers withinthose communities may well perceive these choices differently. They are likely to per-ceive potentially uncomfortable trade-offs between specific choices, and between tem-poral and spatial scales (Rodriguez et al., 2006). For instance, the application ofinorganic nitrogen may be economically profitable to a farmer, in the short term atleast, yet globally the current pattern of use of nitrogen fertiliser is problematic. It is amajor source of GHG, and inappropriate use is disrupting nitrogen cycles globally(Boyer et al., 2004; Farnworth et al. 2016; Rockstr€om et al., 2009; Zhang et al., 2015,forthcoming).

Women are generally less able than men to make first-order choices and also fre-quently find it difficult to make second-order choices (Bebbington, 1999; Kabeer,1999). For instance, a farmer may be trained in a mitigation or adaptation technology,such as conservation agriculture (Farnworth et al., 2016) technology, but application ofher new-won knowledge will be problematic if social norms limit her ability to usethat technology or accrue benefits from it. Women frequently have less say in a house-hold’s technology adoption decisions, or in selecting strategies to cope with shocks(Farnworth & Jiggins, 2003; Mehar, Mittal, & Prasad, 2016; Sugden et al., 2014).

Social institutions

We use the term ‘institutions’ to refer to the ‘rules of the game’ and the term‘organization’ to refer to groupings of people which have a particular purpose. Socialinstitutions comprise the norms and rules of behaviour which shape how those organi-zations behave. Social institutions can facilitate, or constrain, the expansion of a per-son’s individual capability set within the organizations they belong to (CARE, 2009;Stewart, 2013). Social institutions include visible and deep structures.

1. Visible structures have recognizable forms. These include how households (mon-ogamous, polygamous, etc.) and organizations such as producer cooperatives areset up and operate.

2. The term ‘deep structure’ refers to the underlying values, assumptions, and ideolo-gies that perpetuate, characterize, and inform these visible entities.

Deep structures underlie and can ‘justify’ how societies are organized, how resour-ces are distributed, and how laws are written. In many agrarian societies, for instance,sons rather than daughters tend to inherit land. This reflects a norm drawn from deepstructure. The laws of the land may support this practice through acknowledging cus-tomary law. This is a visible expression of deep structure. These underlying normsaffect the choices of an individual between the different capabilities they may seek topursue. Family and societal norms help form a woman’s character, ideology,

GENDER, TECHNOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT 11

preferences, and behaviour, and indeed her conceptualization of what the process andachieved state of empowerment could actually look like.

Social norms lie outside the immediate control of individuals and can greatly influ-ence and constrain an individual’s choices. In fact, no one can experience completeautonomy: alongside political and economic constraints, their choices are heavily influ-enced by underlying social norms (Stewart, 2013).

Meaningful choices are nested within context, but arguably they have to escape theconstraints of that context in some situations in order to become meaningful. It ishere that intermediary organizations, such as those working with women, can play acritical role by challenging deep structure and facilitating the agency of individuals torealise their capabilities.

Social competencies

Intermediary organizations which represent and include farmers, such as communitygroups, farmer associations, cooperatives, women’s groups, innovation platforms (andbeyond this to farmer representatives such as lobbying groups), etc., form a commonpoint of intervention for state and nonstate development actors. They also form animportant setting within which women succeed, or fail, to realize their capabilities.

From a conceptual point of view, it is useful to treat intermediary organizationsrather like people. They also can ‘be’, and ‘do’. Organizations articulate and seek toenact – more or less consciously – sets of ‘social competencies’ which are somewhatlike capabilities.

Stewart (2013) warns it is necessary to reserve the term capabilities to refer to thebeings and doings cherished and valued by individuals. They can either facilitate, orconstrain, an individual’s ability to realize their goals. Intermediary organizations haveparticular mandates, but also operate according to sets of visible and invisible rules.Such rules serve to include, and to exclude, certain categories of people. Forinstance, visible rules may stipulate access to land as a membership criterion, thusperpetuating rather than challenging gender inequalities (Agarwal, 2001; Pandofelli,Meinzen-Dick, & Dohrn, 2007). LED interventions may unwittingly deepen this biasthrough co-developing with the intermediary organization interventions (such as aFarmers’ Association) over which men have more say or be expected to secure morebenefits.

Even when by-laws appear equitable, the daily practice of intermediary organiza-tions can be strongly influenced by underlying norms which shape the efficacy of rulesin practice, however gender equitable they may seem to be. For example, a study inMozambique showed that despite formally defined equality expressed in by-laws andgender parity in membership of the producer organization, women found it difficult tobe elected. Traditional subordination under men restricted their ability to discuss issuesof importance to them, and they were not able to develop their networks effectivelythrough the group, nor access information and assistance (Gotschi, Njuki, & Delve,2008).

Informal norms are the outcome of innumerable social interactions over time(Stewart, 2013) and are not necessarily well understood by the holders of these normseven though they may be enacted daily. At the same time, however, intermediary

12 C. R. FARNWORTH ET AL.

organizations can be positively influenced by state and nonstate actors (Stewart, 2013),for instance, through developing policies and legislation. The Kenyan Constitution inan attempt to promote gender equality, states that no sex may form more than 2/3 ofan organization’s membership. In Zambia, some male traditional elders have radicallyoverhauled decision-making structures to promote women’s voice (Farnworth et al.,2013).

Bringing it all together

Figure 1 expresses the idea that women and men can be constrained by deep struc-ture in their ability to realize their individual capabilities. Intermediary organizationsmay likewise be constrained by deep structure to expand their social competencies,and in particular, to become more gender equitable. However, Figure 1 also expressesthe idea that women and men, and their intermediary organizations, are not totallylimited and inhibited by the norms expressed in the deep structures within which theylive. Societies everywhere undergo constant change, sometimes convulsive, sometimesmore incremental. At various times and places, individuals and groups have exposedand interrogated their society’s deep structure, and so have worked to transform dis-criminatory visible structures.

Intermediary organizations are intrinsically malleable because they are human-cre-ated systems, and they are shaped by the political and economic systems within whichthey operate. The very dissonance between legislation and polices enacted at nationallevel and attempted translation at local level, for example, within producer organiza-tions, can open up spaces for dialogue and social change. Individual agents, womenand men, establish, constitute, and reconstitute structures through their interactionswith intermediary institutions and other private and public sector actors, as well asthrough their daily interactions with agroecological systems (Stewart, 2013; Tegbaru,Fitzsimons, Gurung, & Odame, 2010).

We have now arrived at the following schematic for our case study. Figure 2,though simplistic, expresses the idea that taking gender to scale in LED processes

Deep Structure

Intermediary Institutionsti

Ind. Agency

Figure 1: Associations between deep structure, intermediary institutions and individual agency.

GENDER, TECHNOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT 13

involves developing the social competencies of intermediary membership organiza-tions such that they are able to facilitate individual women to define and achieve theirgoals, thus maximizing their individual capabilities. Doing so helps address some ofthe possible risks of gender-blindness in top-down LED programmes, such as lowadoption and unequally shared costs and benefits.

In the next section, we explore the potential for change offered by transformingintermediary organizations from within by analyzing an illustrative case study fromVietnam. AWD is being promoted in Vietnam and neighbouring countries such as Laosand Cambodia as a mechanism for LED.

Case study: engendering AWD in Vietnam

We first discuss data on GHG emissions to assess the case for implementing AWD inrice production systems. We then provide a brief outline of Government of Vietnampolicies before discussing women’s roles in rice farming. (A comparative discussion ofdifferent political economies is beyond the scope of this paper. However, we doacknowledge the salience of Vietnam’s political system in interpreting the case andthe need to take account of the political context in future analysis and practical work.)

Some of the material in this section stems from research conducted by one of theauthors to this study in Bac Lieu and An Giang provinces, both in the Mekong Deltaand in Binh Dinh Province in Central Vietnam in May/June 2015. Discussions were con-ducted with provincial level Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development womenand men staff in Bac Lieu and An Giang provinces. In addition, detailed conversationswere also held with the implementing agencies of other projects working onmitigation in rice: EDF, SNV, and GIZ. These meetings included lead staff as well as par-ticipating farmers in the case of EDF and SNV. Focus group discussions were held insex-disaggregated groups with farmers involved in VLCRP projects, each comprisingan average of 12 people in all three provinces, totalling eight FGDs in all

Individuals •Capabilities

Intermediary Organisation •Gender-responsive social competencies

•Vehicle for guiding and realising individual agency: from capabilities to functionings

Gender-equitable LED outcomes at scale Realisation of individual capabilities and social competencies of intermediary organisations

Figure 2. From individual capabilities to gender-equitable outcomes at scale.

14 C. R. FARNWORTH ET AL.

(�96 respondents with equal numbers of women and men). The visit was guided byseveral staff from the International Rice Research Institute and co-conducted with thelead gender expert from the Cuu Long Delta Rice Research Institute. Remaining mater-ial stems from a literature review (Gallina & Farnworth, 2016) and from Tran Thu Ha,head of the VLCRP and an author to this study.

The introductory sections show that empirical data on gender roles, responsibilities,and decision-making are overlooked by major development actors in the country dueto the prevalence of deep structures which deny that women, particularly in theMekong Delta, have a significant role in production activities and decision-making inrice. We then explore the work of the VLCRP to change this situation.

AWDþ in Vietnam

The Mekong Delta makes up 12% of Vietnam’s land area, but produces more than50% of the country’s rice, including more than 90% of the rice for export. Rice culti-vation is the main source of income for 80% of farmers in the Mekong Delta(Wassmann, 2016). GHG emissions in Vietnam are 266.05 Tg CO2 equivalents (1 Tg ¼1 million tons). Agriculture contributes 33% of emissions [CJ(1)] – 88.35 Tg CO2

equivalents with emissions from wet rice cultivation contributing 50% to this total(MONRE, 2014).

Over recent decades, agriculture in the Mekong Delta has been adapting to chang-ing environmental conditions, for instance, through infrastructure programmes such asembankments in flood risk zones or sluice gates against salinity intrusion. Recent andforecasted agro-hydrological changes, including extreme weather events, are threaten-ing the continued viability of farmer practice including continuously flooded rice pro-duction. Important technical constraints to farmers’ ability to adapt to improvedhydrological regimes include the availability of suitable cultivars, soil nutrient manage-ment options, and insufficient knowledge of potential harm from acid sulphate soilinundation (Wassmann, 2016). Inaccurate seasonal weather forecasts, slow informationdissemination, and unpredictable water influx from the Mekong River constitute furtherbarriers to adaptation.

Agricultural policy in Vietnam has focused historically on boosting productionand reducing input costs. However, GHG emission data are now encouraging thedevelopment of mechanisms to lower GHG emissions. Following piloting from 2010,an integrated approach termed one must, five reductions (1M5Rs) was certified in2013 by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) as a nationallyapproved approach for best practices in rice production and as a contribution tolowering GHG. The ‘must do’ is the use of certified seed; the five ‘reductions’ arein the amount of seed, fertilizer, chemical pesticides, and water used, and reduc-tions in postharvest losses. One way to achieve the latter is achieved through thecompacted ground arrived at by using less water which in turn permits the use ofcombine harvesters. The VLCRP, which provides our case study, decided to build on1M5R and call its model 1M6R. The 6th reduction refers explicitly to a reduction inGHG emissions. This is not a reduction as such but a consequence of refining thesynergies between each of the reductions in order to achieve maximum GHGreduction.

GENDER, TECHNOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT 15

Gender, rice, and AWDþAWDþ technologies have important implications for the gender division of labour.They are being introduced into communities familiar with sometimes unexpectedoutcomes of technological change, and they strike at the heart of intra-householddecision-making processes around expenditure and risk. We discuss each of these inturn here.

First, AWD practices affect tasks conducted by women as well as men across theentirety of the paddy rice production and postharvest system. The empirical literatureindicates that women and men are involved in rice cultivation across Vietnam with thedegree of their involvement varying from North to South and across livelihood sys-tems, household typology (about one-fifth of rural households are headed by women),and the socioeconomic status of a household. Male and female labour is widely used.Across South Vietnam, the gender division of labour in rice is not rigid, and womenoften take on men’s tasks in their absence or as female heads of household (Chi, 2010;Paris 1998; Paris & Chi 2009). Men are associated with tasks culturally defined as‘heavy’: rice threshing, land preparation – particularly tillage, broadcasting chemical fer-tilizer, spraying pesticides, and hauling farm products. Women conduct ‘light’ farmoperations related to sanitizing farm fields, transplanting seedlings, removing off-types,weeding and gap-filling (the latter two tasks are exclusively female), and checking forpests and diseases. Both women and men apply pregermination and postgerminationherbicide and fertilizer, and women also work on field levelling and dyke building.Women are responsible for most postharvest processing including seed cleaning, selec-tion, storing seeds for the next cropping season, dehusking, cooking rice, and prepar-ing rice into products for home consumption or sale (ADB, 2012; Chi, 2010; Paris &Rola-Rubzen, 2009).

In the Mekong Delta, the seeding and harvesting stages are mechanized. Male andfemale hired labour typically conducts activities including weeding, re-distributing theyoung rice in the paddies evenly, supplying water to irrigate the rice from the mainchannel to farmer’s own paddies, fertilizing, and spraying pesticide. These are all donemanually. Hired labour is often supervised by women, whether they are women injointly headed households or heading their own households. Harvesting is usually jointwork where this is not mechanized. When it is mechanized, which is often the casetoday, farmers usually hire in machinery such as combine harvesters with drivers (ADB,2012; Paris & Rola-Rubzen, 2009). Women are also involved in irrigation including con-struction works, though they are less active in irrigation committees (ADB, 2012). Bothwomen and men sell rice, often at the farm gate.

Second, broader experiences with technologies also need to be considered. Womenand men farmers have already experienced significant change in their lifetimes. Theincreasing mechanization of rice production has resulted in large socioeconomicimpacts in rice production over the past 20 years upon hired labour and social equity.Many technologies, such as plastic row/drum seeders, have mechanized roles formerlyundertaken by women and female hired labour. It is estimated that 97% of landlesswomen lost their jobs in gap-filling and hand-weeding as a consequence of seeders,with nearly half finding it difficult to find alternative income-generating activities. Thesame study shows that smallholder women, however, have generally benefited, with

16 C. R. FARNWORTH ET AL.

some taking on new forms of income generation and spending more time on childcareand leisure (Paris & Chi, 2005).

Third, women in Vietnam generally enjoy strong participation in intra-householddecision-making around farm management and marketing, and they typically managehousehold finances (Chi, Paris, & Anh, 2013; Kabeer & Anh, 2000). This has importantimplications for the willingness of women, as well as men, to adopt new technologiessuch as AWD. The core co-benefit to be derived from reducing inputs –an increasedharvest despite lower inputs – at first glance appears counterintuitive to farmers. Oneof the barriers for households to fully adopt and practice AWDþ is that the womenare often deeply concerned about using fewer inputs – such as seeds, water, fertiliser,and pesticides, all of which are central to AWDþ, because they believe this would leadto a reduction in production and productivity, thus lessening household income. Mentoo are concerned about experiencing pressure from their wife if income from ricefalls; this can inhibit their willingness to proceed. If they nevertheless proceed, intra-household tensions often increase (Nguyen Hong, Tran Thu, Chau My, & Nguyen,2015).

In in-depth interviews with 30 women and 60 men farmers in An Giang and KienGiang provinces, the VLCRP further found that excluding women from extension activ-ities associated with AWDþ resulted in increased intra-household tensions as well aspoor application of the technologies themselves. This is because women wereexpected to apply them in the field – or manage hired labour applying them – althoughthey did not understand them (Nguyen Hong et al., 2015). AWD technologies requirereductions in seed, fertilizer, pesticides, and radically different water management. Therationale for reductions in these areas must be understood by both women and menif they are to apply them.

Associations between deep structures and women farmer participation inintermediary organizations

Vietnam is making some progress on gender equality particularly with respect to legis-lation and national policy and strategy development. The Law on Gender Equality(LGE) issued in 2006 guarantees equal rights to women and calls for the adoption ofgender strategies by each ministry. The National Strategy on Gender Equality (NSGE)was approved for 2011–2020. The National Targeted Program on Gender Equality(NTPGE, 2011–2015) supported the implementation of the NSGE. At provincial and dis-trict-level governments, Committees for the Advancement of Women (CFAWs) havebeen set up (ADB, 2012). At the highest level, the National CFAW counsels, and reportsto Vietnam’s Prime Minister on gender equality and women’s empowerment supportsresearch into women’s equality and works closely with ministerial agencies and lineministries. It works to build gender equality into legal frameworks (http://www.we-apec.com/directory/national-committee-advancement-women-viet-nam).

These measures are having some influence on gender equality, though many chal-lenges remain. The Human Development Report 2015 (UNDP, 2015) allocated Vietnama Gender Inequality Index value of 0.308, ranking it 60 out of 155 countries. Regardingleadership, 26.7% percent of parliamentary seats were won by women in June 2016.This compares with a global average of 22.8% in 2016. (http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/

GENDER, TECHNOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT 17

world.htm). In 2014, 59.4 percent of adult women had reached at least a secondarylevel of education compared to 71.2 percent of men (UNDP, 2015). Continuing chal-lenges includes improving access of women to credit (ADB, 2012), realizing their rightsto land as enshrined in law (Menon, van der meulen Rodgers, & Kennedy, 2016; WorldBank, 2011), overcoming strong gender norms that see women as suited primarily todomestic roles (ADB, 2012), and improving their representation in decision-makingbodies (ADB, 2012; World Bank, 2011). Challenges like these are underpinned by deepstructures which draw legitimacy from Confucianism. These see women primarily ashomemakers and as subservient to men (World Bank, 2011). The lack of women insenior decision-making roles is ‘partly an “issue of face” and partly the result of taken-for-granted beliefs that men have superior qualities’ (World Bank, 2011, p. 81).

Deep structures make it difficult for key decision-makers to accept the strong empir-ical evidence on gendered roles, responsibilities, and decision-making in rice. Keyinformant interviews for this study with headquarter staff from the Crop Development,Plant Protection, and Agricultural Extension departments of the Ministry of Agricultureand Rural Development (MARD) in An Giang and Bac Lieu provinces found a strongperception that men rather than women are rice farmers despite evidence to the con-trary on the ground. Men and women staff readily acknowledged that gender is notmainstreamed in their work and that they have not collected and analyzed sex-disag-gregated data pertaining to women and men’s roles in rice production. They arguedthat focusing on women is irrelevant because women do not, in their view, take deci-sions on rice. These findings are supported by the ADB (2012) and World Bank (2011)which show that gender mainstreaming at provincial, district, and commune level isnot subject to regular monitoring and assessment, statistical data are not disaggre-gated by sex, thereby making measurement of progress difficult, few officers possessgender analysis skills, and budgets for gender analysis and gender mainstreaming areinsufficient. Within institutions, the perception persists that women are only suited forcertain roles and ‘are busy with housework’ (World Bank, 2011).

The deep social structures which inform the behaviours of government agriculturalstaff at provincial, district, and commune level are, unsurprising, reflected in the behav-iours of farmer intermediary organizations. These include Integrated Pest ManagementClubs, Animal Husbandry Clubs, and Fishery Clubs, Co-operatives, Farmers’Associations, Irrigation Management Committees, and Extension groups. All of theseare male-dominated and have very few, if any, women members and they have a poorunderstanding of gender issues (ADB, 2012; Jones & Anh, 2010). All Farmers’Associations are mandated to achieve gender equality. However, they usually lack suffi-cient enthusiasm, resources, skills, and interest. Chi (2010) found women rice farmersfeel excluded because they had never been invited by agricultural support staff toattend training conducted in Farmers’ Associations. This picture is now changing dueto concerted efforts by the Government of Vietnam and internationally funded projectsto involve women. The challenge is more often that women themselves, due to yearsof noninclusion, feel their husbands are better at learning and should participate intraining courses. It will take time before women feel confident in their own abilities.

The Women’s Union is the only formalized grouping of women, including farmwomen, in Vietnam. It was founded in 1930 and thus has developed within a plannedeconomy. Though not a government body, it has formal, state-sanctioned status and

18 C. R. FARNWORTH ET AL.

has strong ties to official Party policies and practices (World Bank, 2011). Today, it hasalmost 14 million members (half the female population) who participate in Women’sUnions branches at national, provincial, district, and commune level (USAID, 2012;Waibel & Gl€uck, 2013). It acts as an important interface between the government,women, financial institutions, and other organizations in agriculture (ADB, 2012; USAID,2012). Its economic development wing offers a variety of poverty alleviation strategiesincluding vocational training and micro-loans and it also disseminates a wide range ofinformation on laws, family planning, etc. (USAID, 2012; World Bank, 2011).

Historically, the Women’s Union has focused on women in development (WID) typeinterventions rather than on gender per se. Although it still provides training towomen on how to fulfil their ‘traditional’ roles better, it is moving into new domains,for example, by promoting women’s use of solar energy technology (http://self.org/archive-vietnam/). The Government of Vietnam is currently promoting new messageson the importance of greening lifestyles, among others, and sees the Women’s Unionas an effective intermediary for such messaging. The readiness of the Women’s Unionto further such mandates, and its access to appropriate technical know-how in orderto develop appropriate training curricula for women, depends critically on governmentsupport.

Historically, however, the Women’s Union has not been involved in rice productionactivities. It therefore lacks institutional technical expertise and credibility as an actorin LED and has not been involved in AWD initiatives.

Developing the technical competencies of the Women’s Union and socialcompetencies of the Farmers’ Associations

In response to Vietnam’s Green Growth Strategy and with the support of the AustralianGovernment, VLCRP was launched in 2012 in Kien Giang and An Giang provinces. InVietnam, it is a prerequisite that all projects work in close collaboration with govern-ment structures – in this case the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development(DARD), since the project was executed at provincial level. The Women’s Union and theFarmers’ Association were engaged officially in their functions as development partnersas members of the local authority board in order to bring farmer and women’s (gender)interests to the table. Established in 1930, the Farmer Association is a social politicalmass organisation. It is led by the Communist Party of Vietnam and is a member ofVietnam’s Fatherland Front. Figure 3 shows the VLCRP operational structure.

The VLCRP recognized the necessity of challenging the deep structures informingthe behaviour of all actors, governmental and nongovernmental, involved in takingAWDþ to scale in Vietnam. The project focused on improving the capacity of the agri-cultural authorities, the Women’s Unions, and the Farmers’ Associations at provincial,district, and commune level to share knowledge of AWDþwith women within andbeyond VLCRP project sites. The VLCRP developed a two-step strategy to achieve this:

Step 1. Train all participating institutions in gender empowerment and 1M6R

The VLCRP developed curricula on 1M6R, including gender, for DARD staff, extensionpersonnel, representatives of local authorities, the Women’s Union, Farmer Association,and lower level Farmer Group leaders.

GENDER, TECHNOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT 19

It equipped Women’s Union staff with technical competencies related to rice farm-ing. It is anticipated that acquisition of this expertise would allow the Women’s Unionto become legitimate discussants in AWDþdialogue processes – as well as – throughthe women rice farmers in their membership, direct participants in the adoption ofAWDþ. The expectation was that the effective participation of the Women’s Unioncould assist gender-responsive rapid scaling of AWDþ from local to provincial levels inthe first instance. The VLCRP decided to work from the bottom-up in order to build abody of evidence that higher level Women’s Union staff could trust. It started at thehamlet level before taking capacity development to the commune level and then tothe district and finally the provincial level Women’s Union branches.

Commune-level branches agreed to integrate 1M6R into their regular meetingsstarting from the first crop cycles using AWDþ (10 crop cycles were performed intotal). In An Giang Province, during crop 1 and 2 in 2013, five training sessions reached502 women farmers. Two sessions were delivered to 61 Women’s Unions and disabilitygroup representatives. In Kien Giang Province, 10 training sessions on AWDþ reached�1000 farmers, with three training sessions for 73 representatives. The Women’sUnions in An Giang and Kien Giang provinces reached an additional 800 women viathe periodic commune women’s meetings. In September 2014, VLCRP organizedConsolidated Training Workshops for Provincial Women Union staff in An Giang andKien Giang provinces for integration of the low carbon rice farming technique intotheir curriculum. To do this, the VLCRP fostered collaboration between the Women’sUnion and Agricultural Extension Centres (Huynh, Nguyen, Tran, Doan, & Tran, 2014;Nguyen Hong et al., 2015). One output was a simple to use handbook onAWDþ technologies for use with Women’s Union membership.

Step 2. Mobilize Women’s Unions and Farmer Associations to reach women farmers

The second step was to work with the Women’s Unions and Farmer Associations athamlet and commune level to reach women farmers. In so doing VCLRP developed

Figure 3. VLCRP operational structure.

20 C. R. FARNWORTH ET AL.

the social competencies of Farmers’ Associations (and their lower tiers –FarmerGroups) by helping them to acknowledge and work with women farmers as equalpartners and seeing them as a legitimate target group for technical training onAWDþ. This process set up feedback loops which challenged the deep structures justi-fying the exclusion of women farmers in AWDþ.

Rice farmers in Kien Giang and An Giang provinces were organized into a total of10 Farmer Groups (five in each province). Farmer Groups (also called ProductionGroups) are made up of farmer households that normally consist of a husband andwife. According to the law, such households are termed jointly headed rather thanmale-headed, although many people, particularly in rural areas, persist in consideringsuch households to be male-headed. Each Farmer Group in the VLCRP interventionincluded 30–35 households, meaning 30–35 potential adult women trainees perFarmer Group (300–350 across both provinces). Farmer Group leaders provided tech-nical training and assistance to farmers in implementing 1M6R techniques and keepingaccurate farm records, with a special focus on poor and women farmers. Each FarmerGroup leader organized seven on-farm training and community meetings to assistfarmer households within their Farmer Group to learn about and manage AWD andmaintain a household diary on inputs and productivity.

To strengthen the appeal to Farmer Associations and their male membership ofworking with women in Farmer Groups, co-benefits selected by the VLCRP includeddemonstrating how adoption would contribute towards higher household incomes,and, over the longer term, strengthen the sustainability of rice-based livelihoods. Thisspoke directly to women’s roles as managers of the household budget. Furthermore,since the inclusion of women in technical training must ultimately be justified in intra-household decision-making processes, the VLCRP, the local authorities, the provincialWomen’s Union and Farmers’ Association agreed to promote 1M6Rs as ‘1 Must 6Reductions for Improving the Household Economy and Protecting the Environment’.

About 2000 women were reached to receive training on 1M6R and they receivedboth on-farm and off-farm supports for recording crop expenditures and calculatingtheir income and net profit per hectares. Of the 2000 women, over 50% were reachedvia the existing Women Union’s periodical meetings.

Outcomes of the VLCRP intervention

In the theoretical part of this paper, we set out a model whereby we suggested thattaking gender to scale in LED projects can be achieved if actors work successfully withintermediary organizations to help them identify and challenge the deep structureswhich prevent the effective engagement of women. The VLCRP experience suggeststhe following intermediate development outcomes on individual capacity and on socialcompetencies.

Individual capability

Over the lifetime of the project, more and more female farmers became interested andattended the relevant technical meetings within their own Farmer Groups. This set upa feedback loop whereby as women learnt more about the technical aspects of 1M6R

GENDER, TECHNOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT 21

and witnessed the co-benefits – particularly higher income, achieved by other farmers,they became increasingly determined to find the time to join their Farmer Groupmeetings. They began debating actively with their husbands in favour of using fewerseeds, and less fertilizer, pesticides, and water. Case studies (Nguyen Hong et al., 2015)show that women engaged in a steep learning curve as, often for the first time, theygrappled directly with a technological intervention rather than simply applying itunder instruction from their husbands. Of particular importance to women is the factthat they were able to interact directly with extension workers to discuss their con-cerns and to explore the technology further. One unexpected side effect was thatwomen disseminated information on 1M6R to large numbers of women farmersthrough their informal networks, for example, at church, and at weddings and funerals.

Another interesting side effect is that men, due to their wives’ participation, foundimplementation easier. This is because, hitherto, even when men themselves had beenconvinced of the need to apply AWD, they frequently found it very difficult to per-suade their wives. In some cases, men themselves were deeply concerned about thepotential impact of AWD on yield and income, and found it easier to contemplateadoption with their wives’ support (Nguyen Hong et al., 2015).

Social competencies

The new openness of the Women Union towards the Farmers’ Union came aboutbecause the Women’s Union realized that promoting IM6R helped them fulfil theirmandate to economically empower women. This resulted in great enthusiasm amongstaff at all levels of the Women’s Union. For their part, the Farmers’ Associationexpressed strong interest because their mandate is to support farmers to adopt andpractice advanced farming technologies and practices. They therefore collaborated will-ingly with the Women’s Union and VLCRP.

These efforts resulted in a steep increase in women joining meetings of local-levelFarmers’ Associations (i.e., Farmer Groups). In An Giang Province, the first FarmerGroup meeting was attended by 121 men and no women, and no women attendedthe second one either. By the end of the sixth crop cycle (each cycle is 100 days andthe total time period discussed is 2.5 years), however, 17% of all farmers attendingmeetings were women (almost all with their husbands). When women were providedthe required knowledge and trained skills on 1M6R rice farming technology, they hada chance to interact with others in a new environment as well as to communicatewith extension workers to express their problems and difficulties on rice cultivation.This helped them to enhance their technical capacity and strengthen their visibility asrice farmers alongside men. Figures 4 and 5 show a direct relationship between train-ing at the Women’s Union and participation in Farmer Group meetings in both provin-ces (Nguyen Hong et al., 2015).

Through the integration of community development activities and with close collab-oration from the Women Union, VLCRP built up the knowledge and capacity of almost2000 women, including women heads of household (about 20 in each province) inrelation to AWDþ. It encouraged women to push for gender equality in agriculturalproduction and it helped them improve their household budgeting skills (as areminder, this is a woman’s responsibility in Vietnam). Due to the training on AWDþ,

22 C. R. FARNWORTH ET AL.

women were able to better track records of crop inputs and farm labour used.Married women reported more consultation from their husbands regarding farmplanning.

Local leadership of the Women’s Union were delighted with their enhanced tech-nical capacity. Tran Thi Dao, Head of Women’s Union of K7A hamlet said: ‘After learningabout 1M6Rs, I now understand that rice does not always require water and that AWDhelps the rice to grow better while reducing the greenhouse gas emissions. I will convincemy husband to use less seed and fertilizer and apply AWD and I will also advocate andconvince other women to apply 1M6R’.

In theory, women could have participated in technical training on 1M6R withoutthe encouragement provided by the Women’s Union. Given the gender equalitymandate of the Farmers’ Association, there is no active bar and ‘everyone’ is invited.However, women hardly ever join technical training sessions due to social normswhich frown upon this. Husbands rarely support their wives to attend. Workingthrough the Women’s Union on the technical benefits and co-benefits of 1M6R wasa critical first step in garnering women’s attention and their resolve. Bolstered inconfidence, women were then able to participate actively in regular FarmerAssociation/Farmer Group meetings to learn more. The Women’s Union was a step-ping stone to increasing women’s individual capabilities and agency. This empow-ered them to carve out a space in the Farmers’ Association and develop its socialcompetencies from the bottom-up.

3.3 3.3 10

85.7 87.6100

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

Be trained on riceproduction

Participation in riceproduction

Association members

Before project After project intervention

Figure 5. Women participation ratio in project activities in An Giang Province.

11.7 12.121.2

87.579.8

100

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

Be trained on riceproduction

Participation in riceproduction

Association members

Before project After project intervention

Figure 4. Women's participation ratio in project activities in Kien Giang Province.

GENDER, TECHNOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT 23

Adoption of 1M6R and associated benefits

The rate of adoption increased as a consequence of women’s enhanced technologicalcapacity in AWDþ and their improved budgetary skills (in relation to developing cost–benefit analyses of AWDþ). This process took time. At the beginning of the interven-tions, around 120 women in the target households complained bitterly when theirhusbands decided to adopt 1M6R. They did not believe that reducing seed, fertilizer,pesticide, and water could improve yields and profits. However, during the 4th and5th crop cycles, women switched from being passive to actively discussing their plansand ‘recipes’ with respect to seed quantity per ha, types and quantity of fertilizer, andthe necessity for very close management of water scheme under AWD to ensure thatweeds were controlled. Many women became highly competitive among themselvesin terms of saving inputs, saving money, and producing higher rice yields and betterrice quality. This actually resulted in some stress to participating households. A numberof households were perceived as ‘failing’ to apply the whole package, or applyingthem incorrectly. As a consequence, they experienced different yields. Although suchdifferences were not statistically significantly, in the real world women were very keenand competed against each other to demonstrably obtain a better income from theapplication of the same practice. Table 1 shows that average net profits per hectareincreased for all participating households and that the cost of inputs declined.

Conclusion

LED is likely to create a wave of technical interventions and best management guide-lines that will define the next generation of agricultural development. As part of this,explicit attention must be paid to developing organizational competencies and gen-der-responsive research and interventions that will challenge deep structures to allowtruly progressive social change.

Our illustrative case study, though small-scale and experimental in its execution,suggests that actively engaging women in LED innovation processes can stimulatefeedback loops into the systems which otherwise may fuel gender and social inequal-ities. Women farmers were encouraged to work actively through the Women’s Union

Table 1. Cost–benefit analysis of participating households in An Giang and Kien Giang provinces.VLCRP project site,An Giang Province

VLCRP project site,Kien Giang Province

Female-headedHH

Male/female jointlyheaded HH

Female-headedHH

Male/female jointlyheaded HH

No. of HH involved in project 8 (þ 1 singlemale HH)

165 11 192

Average total production cost includinginputs per ha before intervention

21.28mil VND(1048 USD)

22.1mil VND(1089 USD)

18.2mil VND(896.5 USD)

20.3mil VND(1000 USD)

Average total production cost includinginputs per ha after intervention

18.42mil VND(907.3 USD)

18.4mil VND(907.3 USD)

16.65mil VND(820 USD)

15.4mil VND(759 USD)

Average net profit per ha before intervention 14.40mil VND(709 USD)

17.6mil VND(867 USD)

17.99mil VND(886 USD)

15.8mil VND(778 USD)

Average net profit per ha after intervention 19.76mil VND(973.3 USD)

22.5mil VND(1108 USD)

19.58mil VND(964.5 USD)

17.4mil VND(857 USD)

Source: Nguyen Hong et al. (2015).

24 C. R. FARNWORTH ET AL.

and the Farmer Associations to renegotiate gender relations within their households.They proved to be eager to adopt AWDþwhen organizational competencies improvedsufficiently to allow them to do so. By helping to bring more women into AWDþ, theWomen’s Union pushed the process of social and technical change.

The VLCRP considers that working with the Women’s Union is a powerful mechan-ism for helping to improve the dissemination of AWDþ and taking it to scale. Givenits strongly established existing structures at provincial/district and at commune level,the Women’s Union is well poised to reach huge numbers of women farmers throughtheir regular women’s meetings at commune, district, and provincial level. By providinginitial technical training in AWDþ, it equips women farmers to enter FarmerAssociations with confidence and acquire further technical training, thus strengtheningtheir capacity. This is turn deepens understanding of AWDþ at household level andencourages adoption.

However, given that Vietnam has sharply defined organizational mandates, it isbeyond VLCRP’s capacity to ensure that the DARD continues working with theWomen’s Union, though it has made this recommendation to the government. Thebelief that the Women’s Union should not be involved in the provision of agriculturalextension services remains widespread since this is seen as the specialized role of theDARD. It is thus unclear whether the innovative strategy developed by the VLCRP willbe taken to scale by other actors in Vietnam. Nevertheless, our case study provides atantalizing and provocative model for upscaling gender in LED and is perhaps of mostrelevance to countries in Southeast Asia like Cambodia and Laos with strong hierarch-ical decision-making and dissemination structures. It should also be possible to supportthis process by encouraging the DARD to provide gender training to its staff and pro-vide appropriate targets and incentives for reaching women farmers. Such efforts canbe aligned with national commitments to promote gender equality.

As the need to address climate change through technical changes in agriculturalpractices grows, and a new generation of agricultural good practices is developed,opportunities for including gender-based approaches will be important for both instru-mental and procedural and distributive social justice purposes. This is expressed inFigure 6.

Ensure Procedural & Distributive Justice for

Women

Challenge Reproduction of

Gender Inequalities in Deep Structures

Develop Instrumental Benefits for

LED

Figure 6. Engaging women in LED processes in agriculture: key components.

GENDER, TECHNOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT 25

Our paper has shown that it is possible to move beyond understanding gender asan individualized, experiential experience in order to take gender to scale in large-scalenational and potentially interregional initiatives. The deep structures of society, thehidden social norms, are not fixed and immutable.

Acknowledgements

This work was implemented as part of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change,Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) with support from CGIAR Fund Donors and through bilat-eral funding agreements.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Cathy Rozel Farnworth holds a PhD from the University of Agricultural Sciences in Sweden. Shehas a strong theoretical and practical background on gender issues in agriculture, value chainsand climate change. She has twenty years of experience worldwide working for multi-lateral andbilateral agencies, research institutions and NGOs.

Tr~an Thu H�a was a Project Director for the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). She played aleading role in the pioneering project – GHG Emissions Reduction in Rice Production in theMekong Delta. Thu H�a is now (since July 2016) Team Leader for the AgResults VietnamEmissions Reduction Pilot.

Bj€orn Ole Sander is a scientist in IRRI’s climate change research group with a focus on green-house gas (GHG) mitigation technologies. As climate change specialist, Ole analyzes the GHGbalance of different cropping systems in Vietnam and the Philippines, and evaluates mitigationoptions through water, fertilizer, and crop residue management.

Eva Wollenberg works with CGIAR centers and partners to inform developing countries and theglobal policy community about options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase car-bon sequestration from agriculture while achieving food security and to support implementationof low emissions agricultural practices and policies at large scales.

Nicoline C. de Haan is a senior social science researcher and leader of the gender team atInternational Livestock Research Institute. She has over 15 years of expertise in gender, rural live-lihoods, and natural resource management. Presently, she is responsible for developing innova-tive research on gender and livestock for equitable development.

Shawn McGuire is an Agricultural Officer in FAO, responsible for promoting seed security, bridg-ing emergency responses with development activities to help farmers access the seed and plant-ing materials they desire. Previously he was Senior Lecturer in Natural Resources, in the Schoolof International Development, University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK).

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