By Soma Kishore Parthasarathy National Facilitation Team Member. Mahila Kisan Adhikar Manch (MAKAAM) The commons represent socio-ecological landscapes (Lele2014) of diverse needs and possibilities - ecological terrain and living subsistence, survival and sustenance everyday needs of food, fodder, water etc thereof. The footprint of development in the neo liberal development era, policies programmatic interventions Manifests spatially on the socio- economic landscape in varied ways Manifests on gender relations. This paper, analyses the emergent Genderscapes (Krishna 2012) in the wake of neoliberal policies of development, Examines the implications of such processes on the lives and livelihoods of commons dependent communities and on women.

1. GENDERSCAPES IN
MANAGEMENT AND
GOVERNANCE OF THE COMMONS
Soma Kishore Parthasarathy
National Facilitation Team Member. Mahila Kisan Adhikar Manch (MAKAAM)

2. INTRODUCTION
The commons represent socio-ecological landscapes (Lele2014) of
diverse needs and possibilities -
ecological terrain and living
subsistence, survival and sustenance
everyday needs of food, fodder, water etc thereof.
The footprint of development in the neo liberal development era,
-policies programmatic interventions
-Manifests spatially on the socio- economic landscape in varied ways
-Manifests on gender relations.
This paper, analyses the emergent Genderscapes (Krishna 2012) in the
wake of neoliberal policies of development,
Examines the implications of such processes on the lives and
livelihoods of commons dependent communities and on women.

3. Feminist Political Ecology:
Rocheleau’s framework
“the multiple scale analysis of environment and power in political
ecology to gendered relations both within and beyond the
household, from individual to national scales….. to complicate what
has been called ‘‘community’’ and ‘‘local’’ as well as the often
presumed unit of homogeneous conditions and shared interests, the
household . (Rocheleau 2008).
The FPE framework allows a triangulation- environmental, economic
and social processes and relations - scapes for a gendered analysis of
the ensuing outcomes of NR polices and relationships.
It allows for the historical narratives of ecologies to be
contextualized in the current political and policy scenario of
development and growth over-drive compelled by the overarching
mandate of neo-liberal policy ….

4. FPE enables the processes within multi
layered societies and communities to be
examined simultaneously, while keeping
the focus on the rooted networks as the
means for communities and people to
engage and deal with consequences of
ecological changes on social relations
and vice versa
Tools : Structured Questionnaires;
Semi structured questionnaires for FGDs,
Interviews, oral histories,
transect walk and resource and social mapping

5. Levels of Analysis
Analysis of policy : Feminist Discourse Analysis and Grounded
theory approach
Field Inquiry at Community and Inter-community Level in Sirohi – webs
of being and social relations ,
rooted networks, affinity networks
REBARIS- TRIBAL BHIL AND GIRASIYA – RAJPUT- MEGHWAL
Analysis at intra household, intra - community and inter-
community levels as well as in the interface with state as
representatives of various departments and governance bodies nd
institutions ;
market, through traders, credit structures, banking and local
outlets and market actors at local levels
RECENT POLICY PRONOUNCEMENTS IN RAJASTHAN RE NR
• State Forest Policy *Commons policy(draft) *Climate change
*Roads *Water *PESA notification *Womens policy

6. Priorities and purpose – neoliberal footprint of commodity
Participation in performative subjectivity- resource feminized, labour
feminised for appropriation for masculinist manufacturing ends or
dismembered as commons – reconstituted as commodity and consumer
-modernized client for consumption
Ownership and control appropriation for state and market control
through private intervention (egJICA Forestry and Biodiversity Project
Phase 2 “RFBP-2”) linked to market interests
People as ‘anti-national’ non-citizen , Community as ‘encroacher,
inefficient, destroyer’ – subject for punitive action, ignore susbsistince
and livelihoods
• Environmental Knowledge – community as ignorant and destructive,
survival and rudimentary

7. The 2010 Forest Policy of the State ….. overriding narrative one
of ‘territoriality’ rather than of environmentalism.
Approach to community -‘organize’ for efficient management, alluding
to the unaware and disarrayed status of communities that are forest
dependant.
The purpose of the state as responsible vanguard, to ensure an
adherence to a prescription for forest health,
Technical knowledge and professional competence only state
domain, a narrative of technocratic authoritarianism
Performative position of community men and women in forest
management through JFM.
This view obliterates the centuries and generations of forest
interdependent embodied co-existence; it prevents the possibility of
dialogue and constructs a macho narrative that prescribes roles in a
dominance and patriarchal control.

8. Entitlement and negotiation –
GDOL, roles, contestations,
space, agency (participation),
rights assertion
Customary and constitutional,
institutional spaces of
interface, opportunities for
empowerment
GENDERSCAPES
inscribedrelationshipswithvaried
domains…aholisticanalysisof
“women’slifeworlds”
actionscapes
Labor and production, child care
and ‘domestic work’ ; invisible
work - collection of fuel and
firewood, water, food and fodder,
processes of access, control,
agency over the natural resources,
decisions and institutions - rules,
norms, practices of use and access.
their ideas, meaning and
relationship with spaces
and the materiality of
environmental needs
and current realities
workscapes
wordscapes
Caste
Class
Gender
(Krishna 2009 p 19).
Rooted
networks,
webs of
relations,
affinity
(Rocheleau)

9. ADIVASI Wordscapes
‘write this down, in my words – we are living a miserable life, our children
are travelling far away, which person will want their family to live like this,
everything is no longer accessible, how do we exist? Write down every
detail, this fence, the nursery, the forest, and the guards everything, let
them know they are destroying our lives, and our forests also”. Adivasi
woman returning from grazing her goats and collecting fuel wood.
Despite the fact that the husband is working outside the village, this young
adivasi girl says “I like it better here; we get what we need from our
land and our forest, why live in the noise and crowd? It is
overwhelming”. “We would work like slaves and even then there may
not be food at the end of the day. Here there is air and we can
breathe, there is some food, and the people who are known to me”
exclaims another young woman, newly married to a boy from a
neighbouring hamlet who works in the stone carving works near the
town , and visits home about twice in a week.

10. REBARI WORDSCAPES AND WORKSCAPES
• We used to sell wood earlier, to sustain ourselves in the
period while the crop ripens as there was no other
food but we have not been able to go to sell wood for
the past 4 years ever since the fight happened. One has
to go to D…….i to sell the wood, and the person my
husband had a fight with; his house is on the way. So
even I feel scared to go because I want to avoid conflict
• the break in rhythm of ensuring the sustainability of
the resource, and fetching those fuel woods that are
more fuel efficient that is a reason for greater angst.
Women’s lives are tightly intertwined into managing
the multiple chores to keep the family going,

11. Boys are expected to go and
work outside the village after
high school among the
Adivasis and must therefore
attain that level of education
Workscapes: Enclaved Spatialities, Dominated Existence
Girls provide labour - fetch fodder, fuel
wood, feed and graze goats, attend to
siblings. “This is the world they must learn,
we cannot have for them to have other
ideas, what is the use?” says the father
closet bigamy (Menon 2013)
to deal with high female
mortality and labour
subsidization
Capture of common lands as a
deliberate act of land grab –
enclosure, assertion in collusion
with forest department revenue
dept bureaucracies
Curbs on access to forest resoruces
- aggravate toil and low access to
health care, breakdown of
traditional health care
practices,higher female mortality in
reproductive age groups
Performativity defines the boundaries
of Rebari girl’s existence, with limits
to the aspirations they can harbor
determined by these
performative roles ascribed for them
in the households

12. INSTITUTIONAL SITES
Gendered division of work and roles continue to confine women’s
work and social spaces in arenas of subservience, with decreasing
value for girls manifest in the diminishing sex ratios and denial of
education
Family : site for social stricture and sanction
We don’t need daughters and wives who will work and go to
public places, who will attend to the chores in the house and
serve everyone when we return from the fields and a hard a
day’s work? “ Boys on the other hand are encouraged to study,
find their calling, in services that reflect on the valour and status of
the community, to become landlords, soldiers or traders of high
value assets..

13. ACTIONSCAPES
SUBVERSIONS
No more the ambling and selective collection of wood, the tending to
foliage and plants, they now have to await the departure of the guards
from the precincts of the village to mark their attendance in the
panchayat, “we know they will take a bit of time, this is the moment we
can grab fuel wood, so someone will inform of their departure and we
rush to get our needs, there is no other way.”
COERSION, ASSERTION, “What do we tell you , you can see around you
the barren land is a landscape of hunger for us , what will it give for the
future generations? Our grasslands too have been reduced to mere
shrubs; our trees which marked the landscape are no longer there”. In K
phala of Bairan the forests on the hillsides are restricted for entry, and
the nursery development works of the Forest department have
extended into what were previously grasslands. Forest guards vigilantly
guard the territories, but women have formed their means of being
informed of the movement of the forest guards.

14. TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE GENDER STRATEGIES
FOR COMMONS AND COMMONEERS
CONCLUSIONS
the need gender and equity centred analysis to inform policy for
sustainable livelihoods and development
Calls for a democratic, representational and gender inclusive politics
to enhance the access and agency of commons dependent
communities.
The direction of growth and de-growth must be determined by the
measure of wellbeing assured across intersectinoalities of gender
class caste ethicity.
The state must be charged with assuring the wellbeing and access
and control over natural resources for the marginalized and for NR
dependent communities in strategies and policies for the future.