The need for gender justice

A woman oil palm plantation labourer spreads fertiliser.

DTE 99-100, October 2014

What is the state of gender justice in Indonesia? How does it relate to communities and their natural resources management systems? What happens to gender justice when investors move in? What about climate change and the efforts to mitigate and adapt to it?  In this introductory article we set out some of the challenges to gender justice in Indonesia today.

Women and men interact with the environment and manage natural resources differently. In some communities these differences may be more marked than in others – ongoing research is showing complex patterns of resources management and gender influences.[1] According to the World Bank, women in forest communities derive half of their income from forests, while men derive only about a third; meanwhile CIFOR’s Poverty and Environment Network (PEN) has found that men’s activities are more likely to generate an income, whereas women are more involved in subsistence activities.[2]

Women in rural Indonesia, as contributors to this newsletter show, are often positioned as food providers by their traditional gender roles, as well as being mostly responsible for caring for the children and maintaining the household. Men are often perceived or described as the main job-holder (where jobs are available)  and commonly are more likely to play a leading role in decision-making over natural resources.  Women in rural areas may cultivate food crops on their land,[3] as well as gather different food items, medicines and other daily necessities from forests (or a combination of both in agroforestry systems). They may be involved both in the subsistence as well as the wider economy, providing food for their families plus additional cash income. Their roles may also require them to safeguard cultural knowledge, ensure the sustainability of community life and make decisions about social affairs in their communities.[4]

These highly variable, often fluid and continually evolving divisions in roles and responsibilities between men and women do not necessarily imply gender injustice. As pointed out by Sawit Watch and Solidaritas Perempuan (Women’s Solidarity for Human Rights) in their book about women and oil palm plantations, such  division is not an issue “as long as it doesn’t cause injustice.”

“For example in traditional Javanese agriculture, men hoe and women harvest using ‘ani-ani’[5]; in domestic living, women use knives to cook and men use machetes to cut wood. This becomes a problem when the roles and responsibilities are restricting women’s rights to access and control. For example women are not involved in decision-making, both in the household or the village realm because the decision making is done by the men as head of the household, and village meetings are only attended by the men as the head of the household.”

(The Oil Palm Plantation System Weakens the Position of Women, Sawit Watch and Women’s Solidarity for Human Rights, November 2010.)

Indeed decision-making about control over land and resources is often not a feature of women’s traditional gender roles in rural Indonesia. This means that the importance of women’s roles and resources to the sustainability of the life of community may be downplayed or even ignored altogether when communities’ lands and resources are taken over for commercial production. As a result, women may well end up worse off than men.[6]

“In the community, grassroots women are the ones that are most often ignored, not listened to, and considered unimportant. However, grassroots women are the ones that maintain the social, cultural, economic and political life in the community.”

(Poso Women’s Congress, Press Release, 2014)

When the investors arrive...

There are also gender differences in the experiences of environmental degradation when large-scale natural resources exploitation is established in area previously controlled or accessed by local communities. This is happening in areas affected by the rapid expansion of coal-mining in Kalimantan, for example, and the advance of large-scale oil palm plantations in Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Maluku, Papua and other parts of Indonesia. These experiences centre around loss of livelihood, water and food security associated with the changing use of lands. Here, women in their domestic provider roles may feel the loss of resources more directly than men. These losses are compounded by new negative impacts: pollution of water used for cooking, washing and drinking, for example; pollution of remaining farmland; and threats to health from air pollution.  

In forest areas, where formal control and ownership rests in the hands of the state, the loss of control over land, trees and other assets are devastating for men, women and whole communities, when investment moves in. As noted by CIFOR in a gender analysis of its international forestry research, where such assets are owned by women, the position of women is strengthened in households and in communities and provides them with incentives to sustainably manage their resources. “However, a narrow focus on ownership overlooks women’s access to, and use of, these resources. While understanding customary laws and de facto rights are important, much more focus needs to be paid to ‘in-between’ spaces that women have access to; spaces that are between men’s crops, trees, or on degraded land where women can collect fuel wood or wild foods.”[9] CIFOR notes that there are “huge benefits” in engaging both men and women in forest management policies, and that involving women in forest-related decision-making at the community level has been shown to have beneficial effects on a range of forest management issues, including the capacity of community groups to manage conflict.

“In many forests and countries,...greater gender equity is one of the keys to sustainable forest management.”

(CIFOR CGIAR Factsheet, Gender analysis in forestry research)

In Indonesia, Sajogyo Institute researchers Mia Siscawati and Avi Mahaningtyas have called for gender justice principles and actions to be incorporated in the reformulation of the legal framework for forest lands and resources and systematic capacity building on gender justice and forest tenure and governance among government institutions, civil society organisations and donor agencies.[10]

Gendered jobs

There may be worse consequences for women than men when companies recruiting workers for the incoming investment further complicate and overlay the existing gender division of labour. In mining and other extractive industries projects, there are rarely any direct jobs for women at all, whereas in plantations, the women’s jobs, where these are available, tend to be lower paid, less secure and more hazardous. (Companies often boast that they are creating jobs for a community, quoting impressive numbers of posts, but they don’t make clear, if they calculate them at all, existing occupations, paid or unpaid that are obliterated by the changes they introduce.)  

At the same time, traditional gender roles persist, so that women still struggle to provide food and care for the family in a degraded environment, where all or almost all of the resources have disappeared.

‘Women, who are traditionally responsible for gathering food for the family, now have to leave their children and husbands from dawn until dusk in order to find forests where they can gather enough roots, sago, and vegetables to last a few days..”It creates problems inside of the family. The men are angry and the children are left alone all day” said one local woman.’

(Conflict in Indonesia’s Papua region, GOHONG 28/Mar/2014 (IRIN))

In the case of plantation workers, there is an expectation that they should combine both the domestic/reproductive work as well as contribute long hours on the plantations. Research has found that the limitation of opportunities from land-based livelihoods can diminish women’s status within the family and society whilst simultaneously increasing their work burdens. In some instances, the swift changes brought about by incoming investment projects are linked to an increase in sexual harassment and/or violence against women.

Climate change

“Climate change will not only endanger lives and undermine livelihoods, it will also exacerbate the gap between rich and poor and amplify the inequities between women and men”

(‘Women and the climate change’, Lynda K. Wardhani, Jakarta Post, 5/January/2010[20])

The impacts of climate change affect women and men differently as do interventions around climate change mitigation and adaptation. Globally, women are the main producers of staple crops, so when food production suffers in changing climate conditions, their work, working time, and ability to feed their families is affected. If rural women depend on forests for more of their income than do the men in their communities, it follows that any negative impact on the availability of forest resources linked to climate change, will also affect women more.

 As described by Lynda Wardhani in 2010, women are more vulnerable to climate change too, because they tend to have less income-earning opportunities than men. They manage households and care for their families, which may limit their mobility and increase their vulnerability to sudden weather-related natural disasters.

“Drought and erratic rainfall force women to work harder to secure food, water and energy for their homes. Girls drop out of school to help their mothers with these tasks. Such a cycle of deprivation, poverty and inequality undermines the social capital needed to deal effectively with climate change.”[21]

Moreover, as climate change means more extreme weather and associated disasters like floods, landslides and droughts, there is a likelihood that women will bear a disproportionate impact here too: studies show that women are more vulnerable to disasters than men in societies that are already inequitable. This is true both in terms of a disproportionate number of deaths of women compared to men in disasters, but also in terms of their living conditions and vulnerability after the disasters.[22]

Women’s active involvement in managing forests and other natural resources mean that they should be considered key actors in mitigation and adaptation efforts[23] including the management and use of mitigation and adaptation funding.

Safeguards to counter-act the further marginalisation are needed in all climate change mitigation and adaptation policies, programmes and initiatives, including finance, through funding mechanisms such as the Green Climate Fund, but their development has been sluggish through the years of climate change negotiations. They only really achieved serious consideration in the Cancun Agreements of UNFCCC COP 16 in 2010. These Agreements recognize women and gender equality as integral to effective actions to mitigate and adapt to climate change.  They include eight references to women and gender across seven sections of text.[24]

REDD+

Women are more likely to be disproportionately affected by REDD+ policies and initiatives because of their gender roles which mean they are often more dependent on forest access and resources for their livelihood and subsistence needs than are men.[25] Potential risks for women include restrictions on livelihood activities or forest access, which can lead to higher workloads or loss of income, and exclusions from benefit sharing mechanisms.[26]

REDD+ initiatives in Indonesia have thus far failed to be sufficiently (if at all) inclusive of women and women have limited access to decision-making about projects planned in their area, or about policy-making on REDD at national or regional level. In a study of gender and REDD+, the UN-REDD Programme, for example, acknowledges that its Indonesia Programme was designed without any consultation of women’s groups and gender experts, and that its National Programme Document failed to incorporate gender perspectives or include women-targeted activities – a shortcoming that was only addressed three years later. From 2012, the programme started involving ‘women champions’ in programme implementation and to inspire other women to be more actively engaged, as well as inserting gender as a topic in training for gender-responsive FPIC, and engaging women’s organizations at local level. However, as its own document states, “these initiatives alone are insufficient. Efforts for gender mainstreaming should be more comprehensive and institutionalized.”[27] The UNREDD study states that gender should be integrated into REDD+ based on two main arguments: rights (ie CEDAW, UNDRIP, Cancun Agreement) and efficiency – because engaging women in REDD+ is likely to increase the programme’s efficiency and long-term sustainability.[28]

Indonesia’s own National REDD+ Strategy, and its PRISAI (Principles, Criteria and Indicators Safeguard) contain several references to gender and women, thanks in part to input from civil society groups (see also separate  article). But according to the UN-REDD study, two important elements have not been included in the safeguards: women’s secure control over forestlands and resources; and gender sensitive FPIC implementation (see box).

Gender based violence

Violence against women (VAW) remains a persistent problem in Indonesia and absorbs much media attention. A total of 54,425 cases of violence against women were reported to the National Commission on VAW (Komnas Perempuan) in 2008. Ninety percent of these involved husbands/personal relationships.

Polygamy and early marriage are still issues in Indonesia, and in some parts of the country, violence against women is institutionalized. In some regions there is also flagrant abuse of women’s rights on inheritance, dress and public participation. Although a 2007 law was introduced to address it, trafficking is also a problem, as is violence against women migrant workers (particularly domestic workers) (see box, separate article).

Violence against women (and children) in Papua has caused heightened concern, due to the high level of reported incidents there. In 2011, the Asian Human Rights Commission said indigenous Papuan women reported high rates of domestic violence, perpetrated by husbands and partners, with little protection from police or state agencies.[34] According to Komnas Perempuan, Papua province recorded 1,360 cases of gender-based violence per 10,000 women in 2012, though reporting levels are believed to be low in Papua. Alcohol is widely recognized as a contributory factor in domestic violence here (see also Papua article).

Tanah Papua (which includes Papua and Papua Barat provinces) is a resource-rich region, but the years of political, cultural repression and resource-grabbing plus military and police-perpetrated violence against indigenous Papuans in the territory, have contributed to its human development rankings being among the lowest. The adult literacy rate is only 64% here, and, on average, pupils attend less than six years of formal schooling.[35] The state security forces have also been responsible for acts of violence, including sexual violence against women in this province.  Cases of violations have been documented by publications such as Enough is Enough, based on the testimonies of women victims themselves,[36] as well as Papuan campaigners such as Yosepha Alomang. 

The Deputy chair of the Papuan People’s Council (MRP), Angelbertha Kotorok, described the gender-based violence and economic oppression faced by women trying to provide for their families in Mimika, location of the giant Freeport-Rio Tinto copper and gold mine:

“Besides the daily work in their gardens and the panning for gold, women have to face violence from their husbands, as well as acts of violence from members of the security forces…They also face pressure from the security forces who demand from them money earned from panning gold. And moreover, they are forced to sell the results of their gold panning to members of the security forces for a very low price.”

(Bintang Papua, 3 January 2012, abridged in translation by TAPOL)

Economic and social change in Indonesian society over the past three to four decades has also led to changes to men’s traditional gender roles.  It is not a simple matter of men’s decision-making power diminishing commensurately with the increase of women’s. Sometimes everybody’s roles mutate when there are dramatic changes to economic and agrarian production. And we should not make assumptions as to their attitudes to those changes, which also vary.

How are Indonesian CSOs addressing the issue of men and gender justice? Gender considerations can often come across as an outside imposition, or, in the case of foreign-funded development initiatives, as a box-ticking exercise rather than a transformational project.  This might be observed particularly on the part of CSOs that don’t directly deal with gender issues, but who may, either voluntarily or less than voluntarily adopt gender policies/incorporate gender perspectives into their work. This is something that Solidaritas Perempuan for example, has witnessed in its work on gender and natural resources.

In preparing this newsletter, DTE came across very few references to men being engaged in gender justice programmes. One of these is the Feminist School, run by the National Network for Women’s Liberation (JNPM), since 2008. The schools are attended by women, but also by men (at the first school there were 67 men to 101 women and 1 transgender). It also counts six men among its 149 members.[40] Solidaritas Perempuan and Jurnal Perempuan also have active male members.

Ultimately, gender justice needs to be presented and understood as a powerful tool for the whole community. When women are empowered, the whole community gains. Men who acknowledge and act to address gender injustice recognise that they, their families and communities will gain from women being better able to contribute their wisdom and insights to decision-making processes. Working towards gender justice means supporting all community members - no matter whether they are male or female – to develop their full potential according to their skills and talents, within and beyond traditional gender roles. It frees up the potential of the individuals, families and communities to better face the many social, economic and environmental challenges ahead.