The tradition of planting and maintaining home gardens is an expression of culture and represents an intense interaction between humans and plants. Forty-nine home gardens in northeastern Thailand were surveyed and found to be quite rich and diverse. The gardens contained domesticated plants, species that are not native to the area, and local non-domesticates. We focused on women's gardening practices as behaviors that create an intensive interaction with the physical and social environment and found that women are increasing their management (...) and manipulation of non-domesticated resources. Home gardens, maintained primarily by women, are part of a continuum of resource areas that are constructed and utilized. The maintenance of specific plants in the gardens provide a source of stability in the rapidly changing cultural, social, and economic environment. (shrink)

Since its origins as an academic newsletter, _Agriculture and Human Values_ has evolved to be one of the leading journals publishing critical scholarship of the food and agricultural system. This essay illustrates and comments on the evolution of the scale and scope of research published in the journal over the years.

This paper argues that there is ethical and practical necessity for including women's needs, perspectives, and expertise in international climate change negotiations. I show that climate change contributes to women's hardships because of the conjunction of the feminization of poverty and environmental degradation caused by climate change. I then provide data I collected in Ghana to demonstrate effects of extreme weather events on women subsistence farmers and argue that women have knowledge to contribute to adaptation efforts. The final section surveys (...) the international climate debate, assesses explanations for its gender blindness, and summarizes the progress on gender that was made at Copenhagen and Cancun in order to document and provoke movement toward climate justice for women. (shrink)

Attention to differences within communities is important in working toward sustainability of an agro-ecosystem. In the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Collaborative Research Support Program, gender made a difference in terms of access and control over key resources – financial, human, natural, and social capital – critical for project success. Efforts to build social capital among women proved critical in developing both collective and households strategies for sustainability. The sites differed greatly in both landscape and lifescape. Women's position within (...) each landscape provided an important perspective with which to assess and act toward achieving ecosystem, economic, and social sustainability. (shrink)

This article reflects on how Agriculture and Human Values has approached women, gender, and agriculture over the years based on a content analysis of the journal. Overall, the journal has a long history of dealing with these issues with increasing interest over time. The predominant research themes in this area are women on farms; gender, agriculture, and environment; and gender, agriculture, and intersectionalities. Feminist political ecology constituted the major theoretical orientation of this scholarship. Two themes in gender scholarship that received (...) scant attention were masculinities and sexualities. Although many articles focused on women and gender over the years, little evidence exists that the findings from this research penetrated the main issues in the journal. Studies in which gender is not the central focus, such as those related to sustainability, work, and supply chains, would benefit from attention to feminist work in these areas. (shrink)

Participation has been widely touted as “the answer” to a number of problems facing sustainable development programs. It is not enough, however, to involve rural people as workers and informants in research and planning endeavors defined by outsiders. A truly collaborative approach will depend upon our ability to broaden our definitions of research and participation, to accommodate a wide spectrum of land users and local knowledge, and to expand our repertoire of research methods. This paper presents a critique of facile (...) approaches to participation, outlines a more inclusive framework for who participates on what terms, and reviews a variety of methods that address the complex realities of rural livelihoods and landscapes. The final section of the paper suggests a multi-institutional model that combines the complementary strengths of several types of organizations in participatory field research and planning. (shrink)