Key messages Decision-making initiatives led solely by external forest stakeholders (organizing local community stakeholders) can make the meaningful involvement of women and marginalized groups difficult, if not impossible.Self-initiated community groups, however, are able to leverage authentic collaborative engagements, empowering women to speak up when decisions are being made.To ensure effective participation, women need to be empowered to become agents of change through taking on, both formally and informally, strategic roles in community groups making forest-related decisions.Forest certification requires new approaches to ensure the effective participation of all stakeholders; this includes promoting the use of gender quotas as a transitional mechanism, not as an end-goal; the development of local gender-sensitive leadership pathways; and taking a human rights approach to participation.

Since 2015, the Dedicated Grant Mechanism for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (DGM) has provided a unique model for inclusive and bottom-up approaches to delivering climate finance for sustainable forest management. Through 12 country-level programs designed and implemented by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs), the DGM is guiding investment of around $80 million and impacting the livelihoods of over 200,000 people. DGM supported activities are intended to be designed and implemented in a gender-responsive and socially inclusive manner and aim to improve key gender equality outcomes based on the particular and varied contexts of DGM countries.

How do we integrate gender analysis into forestry research? Where do we start? What challenges are we going to face? What skills are required to conduct gender analysis? What methods are appropriate? What do we do with the data we collect? The answers to these questions often feel elusive. However many of them are within our reach. If you are a CIFOR scientist, partner or other researchers curious about what it means to conduct gender-responsive forestry research this guide is for you. This guide for was developed to help CIFOR scientists, partners, and program administrators more easily develop their own skills in gender analysis or find the needed resources elsewhere to advance efforts to integrate gender issue into forestry research. The guide provides researchers, ranging from those with no knowledge of gender concepts to those with some familiarity with the topic, with an introduction to the concept of gender and the gender dimensions of key forestry issues. Short thematic briefs outline the key dimensions of various topics including climate change, REDD+, and value chains. Gender related research questions and methods for conducting gender analysis are also described. The guide also provides tips and advice for building the right research team and gender-sensitive field strategies.

Both women and men depend on forests, agroforestry and trees for their livelihoods, and play a critical role in managing them. However, inequalities persist in roles, rights and responsibilities of women and men, and shape the ways they participate in decision making, benefit from forest and tree resources, and experience changes in forest and tree-based landscapes. Gender biases in the wider policy environment and exclusionary social norms result in a gender gap in access to and control of assets and key resources, including land, labor, credit, information and extension services, with women facing disadvantages in several domains. These inequalities, embedded in formal and informal institutions and structures, hinder the change needed to support the sustainable and equitable development solutions that FTA seeks to deliver.As FTA's research agenda has evolved since the program's inception, so too has the program's portfolio of gender and social inclusion research. This revised research agenda and action plan draws on a tradition of quality gender work within FTA centers and complements FTA's original Gender Strategy (2013). It reflects the evolution of the program, including thematic and methodological developments in gender research and praxis, and increases the focus on the nexus of gender and generation (including youth issues), and efforts to make FTA’s research increasingly transformative.

This enlightening book brings together the work of gender and forestry specialists from various backgrounds and fields of research and action to analyse global gender conditions as related to forests. Using a variety of methods and approaches, they build on a spectrum of theoretical perspectives to bring depth and breadth to the relevant issues and address timely and under-studied themes. Focusing particularly on tropical forests, the book presents both local case studies and global comparative studies from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as the US and Europe. The studies range from personal histories of elderly American women’s attitudes toward conservation, to a combined qualitative / quantitative international comparative study on REDD+, to a longitudinal examination of oil palm and gender roles over time in Kalimantan. Issues are examined across scales, from the household to the nation state and the global arena; and reach back to the past to inform present and future considerations. The collection will be of relevance to academics, researchers, policy makers and advocates with different levels of familiarity with gender issues in the field of forestry.

Decentralization was introduced in 1990s in India through the Joint Forest Management (JFM) program in which rights of women to participate in decision-making in local forest management was reserved through various legislations. However, these were ineffective due to lack of clarity about participation of women. A revision in 2000 brought specific rights for women. This book looks at the distributional implications of local level forest management when women are given the right to head a local level forest institution. Four JFM Committees are compared in this book - two headed by men and two by women to compare if women-headed local-governance institutions lead to overall effective participation of women in governance of forests as compared to those headed by men. It also looks into the impact of participation of women on the health of forest institution, and if there is more equity in benefits and costs between men and women in such a set-up. The analysis provides policy inputs for making participation of women effective with larger intervention from external agencies like gender-sensitive NGOs in order to make forest management at the local level more effective.