Gender matters - Climate Change Adaptation and Development: Transforming Paradigms and Practices - page 87

lives and livelihoods. The first is the presence of a gender regime that assigns
gender-differentiated rights and responsibilities (Mies 1986; Agarwal 1997).
The second is what Hydén (1980) termed 'an economy of affection' whereby
loyalty to one's own kin is expected through imposed social obligations. These
social dimensions have considerable bearing on how livelihoods in the LVB are
performed and enacted on the individual as well as on the collective level. The
synergistic effects of these two dimensions also help to explain the divergence
in adaptive capacities between men and women, and the subsequent climate
vulnerability felt primarily by women, who generally have less adaptive capacities
than their male counterparts.
The gender regime
Farming across SSA is centred on the family. Social norms build on and are
determined by the everyday rights and responsibilities of individuals within a
household. In the LVB the functional purpose and rationality of the gender
regime is to organize household duties and secure family wellbeing. Women and
men are assigned different rights and responsibilities within the rural farming
household (Gabrielsson 2012). Gendered rights are most evident in how property
(i.e. land) is inherited. Customary laws in the LVB prohibit women from owning
land; women can only apply their labour to the land owned by their husbands
or fathers (Lee-Smith 1997). Marriage is also a signifier of this gendered regime,
as husbands and families must exchange bride wealth for the reproductive
and productive capabilities of the bride (Rocheleau et al. 1996). Another
demonstration of gendered rights within smallholder farming households in the
LVB is the practice of 'widow inheritance' - a socially sanctioned re-marriage
whereby a male relative of the deceased husband assumes guardianship of the
deceased's family, including the wife, to ensure that the property stays in the
family (Gunga 2009).
Gendered responsibilities are primarily reflected through the differentiated
amounts, types and spheres of labour that women and men engage in. Women
are predominately bound to reproductive and productive activities within the
domestic sphere, such as childcare, cooking, cleaning, washing, fetching water
and fire wood, making charcoal, tending the home garden and food crops as
well as small livestock like chickens and goats. Men are seen as responsible
for everything else: rearing cattle, tending and selling cash crops, digging and
clearing land as well as building and maintaining the homestead (Rocheleau et
al. 1996; Francis 2000; Bryceson 2002b). Gender differences are also apparent
in how men and women keep and use cash, and their mobility and presence in
public domains (Lee-Smith 1997; Gabrielsson and Ramasar 2012).
This agrarian division of labour, whereby male farmers primarily engage in
cash crop production and females are responsible for subsistence production,
can be traced to the introduction of Christianity in Africa during the colonial
and post-colonial era, when the generic ideal of the nuclear family was pioneered