Exploring the effects of gender on commercial (peri-)urban agriculture systems in Gaborone, Botswana

Urban agriculture has long been viewed as changing the way people feed themselves in cities, and reflecting an alternative vision of urban form and development. Understanding the role and potential of commercial (peri-)urban agriculture in addressing national goals of food security and economic diversification requires an assessment of the agricultural systems themselves, along with the net outcomes they generate. Limitations in past research on urban agriculture make these assessments difficult. Specifically, studies tend to aggregate such that it masks differential experiences of men and women farmers, and fail to explain adequately the influence of location and human-environment relations on production systems. People's ability to create productive and sustainable urban agriculture systems is premised on who they are, where they are located, and how they interact with the environment in that location. The objective of the research is to broaden understanding of human-environment relations in the city. It draws on a conceptual framework that brings the largely rural-based theories of political ecology into an urban context, and broadens the scope of urban geography to include environmental issues and perspectives in understanding the form and (re)negotiation of space(s) in cities. The framework highlights feminist perspectives in urban geography and political ecology as a means of exploring power dynamics between men and women with respect to human-environment relations in urban space. The central research question asks, how and why does gender affect the net outcomes of commercial (peri-)urban agriculture systems in Greater Gaborone? The empirical investigation reveals that gender relations of power at the macro-scale, as mediated through the urban land market and agriculture sector in Botswana, are expressed both in terms of a socio-spatial and human-environment relationship that (re)produce gender inequality in the commercial (peri-)urban agriculture sector in and around Gaborone. This has implications for the quantity and type of local foodstuffs available to urban dwellers, as well as for the ability of this urban economic sector to address issues of food security and economic diversification in Botswana. To this end, the research builds understanding of the gendered socio-economic, spatial and environmental processes within which urban development is embedded.