Gendered Nature of Land and Water Use
PhD research project by Rahel Muche Kassa
contact: rahelbmk@yahoo.com
The gendered nature of land and water management have shaped the political economy of land and water use in the upstream part of the Blue Nile. This project examines the gendered nature of water management at different scales in order to understand the dynamics of ecological transformation as a result of the interaction of social and biophysical processes.
A focus on understanding the current and historic gendered access and control over land and water resources in terms of property rights and decision-making institutions allows for an interdisciplinary and contextual analysis of how environmental change has gender differentiated consequences but also how gender relations influence environmental processes. This not only contributes to a much needed Ethiopian analysis of gender, water management and ecological transformation, but informs a much larger audience concerned with the complexity of sustainable institutional approaches to integrated water resource management where up- and downstream interdependencies are both recognised and reconciled.