Social Support Networks

Displacement of people as a result of large-scale hydroelectric or infrastructure development projects also has a significant, but little researched gendered impact in terms of the loss of informal social support networks which women typically depend on, more so than men, since they have invested considerable time in building them. Such social relationships include "labour-sharing arrangements during peak agricultural seasons, loans taken in cash or kind during severe crises such as droughts, and the borrowing of small amounts of foodstuffs, fuel, fodder, and so on, even in normal times," (Agarwal 1992: 142). Networks tend to spread over a range of village clusters and take time to re-establish once dislocated.

In sum then, the gendered impacts of environmental change suggest that project design methods will have to focus on a number of interconnected sub-systems: social, cultural, economic, legal, institutional and technological, which impinge upon gender relations in rural societies. Development interventions need to address rural women's short term practical gender interests (access to clean water, fuelwood and fodder) as well as, long term strategic gender interests, for example rights, and the ability to exercise rights, over land. Priorities will vary with locally defined needs (Alsop 1993), but a crucial ingredient is decision-making by women themselves in the process of participation and self-empowerment. This will require the support of male kin and community members who need to see women as active agents of social change rather than passive recipients of development. For, in the final analysis, the "environment" is not the natural concern of rural women per se, but a social construct whose management is dependent on the social organisation of society.