Women's participation in conservation projects in the southern Yucatan peninsula: Effects on land control, farming practices, and women's empowerment (Mexico)

This dissertation is on gender, conservation, and development in the southern Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. It explores the relationship between women and the environment, rejecting the notion of an inherent or universal gender role-based intersection of women's interests and conservation interests. Data gathered in forty-one communities in the municipality of Calakmul, Campeche and interviews and ethnographic research with one hundred women in three case study ejidos are used to examine efforts to construct an alliance, or interest convergence, between community-based women's agricultural groups and conservation organizations operating in the communities surrounding the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve. Conservation activities in the region emphasize sustainable development projects, including with local women's agricultural groups, in an attempt to reconfigure human-environment relations in Calakmul and alter farming practices. This paper assesses (1) the nature of the interest convergence; (2) with which women it is occurring and why; and (3) the effects to-date on land control and access, income control and generation, and women's gender empowerment, on the one hand, and on farming practices of the women and their households, on the other. The author finds that women's engagement with conservation projects is based primarily on current household-oriented livelihood strategies; and the alliance is thus contingent on success of these strategies and success of the current project-oriented conservation approach in serving what are potentially conflicting interests. The result is a constructed convergence that is relatively fragile. Findings from the ethnographic research and statistical analyses of interview data indicate that despite emergence of selected "green" women's groups, there has been little diffusion of "green" farming practices outside the projects. Nonetheless, some women are successfully furthering their gender-based livelihood interests, through consolidated or new land access and control, a capturing of conservation funds, and the adoption of new gender roles. These outcomes vary widely among the women's groups, because of differences in group institutional framework, individual group histories, and group leadership. Unintentionally, conservation practice is facilitating the emergence, through the activities of particular women's groups, of an environmental identity for some women as "farmers," representing a burgeoning challenge to current gender relations in Calakmul.