Person: Feldman, S.
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Feldman
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Feldman, S.
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- A community typology of social change devised from the bottom-up(GENNOVATE, 2019) Petesch, P.; Feldman, S.; Elias, M.; Badstue, L.B.; Najjar, D.; Rietveld, A.M.; Bullock, R.; Kawarazuka, N.; Luis, J.
Publication - Feminist science and epistemologies: key issues central to GENNOVATE’s research program. GENNOVATE resources for scientists and research teams(CIMMYT, 2018) Feldman, S.; Badstue, L.B.This methodological brief offers a window onto GENNOVATE’s innovative collaborative research initiative to promote gender equality in agricultural and natural resource management. GENNOVATE (‘Enabling gender equality in agricultural and environmental innovation’) has focused on the study of gendered norms, agency, and innovation as means to understand and address women’s and men’s access to, and use and development of, new technologies and agricultural practices. By innovation we include changes in agricultural production, resource management, institutional practices such as those in extension services, entrepreneurial activities, informal learning and exchange, and collective action. GENNOVATE’s challenge in moving toward greater gender equality has been to develop a research strategy that reimagines research about women in agriculture from the bottom-up. Doing so offers new ways to understand and respond to the ongoing gender inequalities that characterize relations in agricultural production, resource access, services, and distribution, and to signal their importance for understanding consumption, nutrition, wellbeing, food security, and other aspects of social change. Central to the discussion that follows is how feminist debates about key methodological and epistemic issues — i.e., issues pertaining to the production of knowledge — have contributed to the GENNOVATE research program. This brief note addresses four central questions: Why is it important to distinguish among epistemology, methodology, and methods? What is feminist epistemology? What can researchers of gender, agriculture, and innovation learn from engaging the contributions of feminist epistemology? What is feminist methodology? What contribution can (and does) feminist methodology make to understanding gender relations in agriculture? How has GENNOVATE integrated lessons from feminist methods and feminist epistemics about gender relations, agricultural change, and innovation?
Publication - Fostering collaboration in cross-CGIAR research projects and platforms: lessons from the GENNOVATE initiative. GENNOVATE resources for scientists and research teams(CIMMYT, 2018) Elias, M.; Badstue, L.B.; Farnworth, C.; Prain, G.; van der Burg, M.; Petesch, P.; Elmhirst, R.; Bullock, R.; Feldman, S.; Jafry, T.; Netsayi Mudege; Umantseva, A.; Amare Tegbaru; Dina Najjar; Jummai Yila; Behailu, L.A.; Kawarazuka, N.; Kandiwa, V.; Kantor, P.; Luis, J.; Lopez, D.E.; Njuguna-Mungai, E.; Rietveld, A.M.“GENNOVATE: Enabling gender equality in agricultural and environmental innovation” is a collaborative study that represents an unprecedented initiative in the CGIAR in its scale and comprehensiveness for examining gender norms, agency, and capacities for innovations. A qualitative study, it brings to life the voices, challenges, and aspirations of local people differentiated by gender, socioeconomic class, and generation under diverse cultures, religions, ecological circumstances, and agricultural systems. The research design was developed collaboratively, and Principal Investigators (PIs) from nearly all CGIAR Research Programs (CRPs) contributed substantively to the study. GENNOVATE was initiated from the bottom up in 2013 among CGIAR and associated gender researchers, and was made possible through funding support from CGIAR Trust Fund Donors, the CRPs, the CGIAR Gender and Agricultural Research Network, the World Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the governments of Germany and Mexico. One unique aspect of GENNOVATE is its ability to catalyze collaboration: It brought together a multidisciplinary team of researchers across the CRPs and enabled them to carry out a study that covers the many regions where the CGIAR is active. GENNOVATE researchers worked with 137 agricultural communities from 26 countries across the Global South. In this way, the initiative moved beyond the small, isolated studies which have characterized much gender case research towards real time comparisons across many qualitative cases. This has allowed for new patterns to emerge while maintaining emphasis on contextual specificity. The success of the study has rested considerably in its driving principles of systematic collaboration and learning.
Publication - Community typology framed by normative climate for agricultural innovation, empowerment, and poverty reduction(Journal of Gender, Agriculture and Food Security, 2018) Petesch, P.; Feldman, S.; Elias, M.; Badstue, L.B.; Najjar, D.; Rietveld, A.M.; Bullock, R.; Kawarazuka, N.; Luis, J.This paper employs the concepts of gender norms and agency to advance understanding of inclusive agricultural innovation processes and their contributions to empowerment and poverty reduction at the village level. We present a community typology informed by normative influences on how people assess conditions and trends for village women and men to make important decisions (or to exercise agency) and for local households to escape poverty. The typology is comprised of three village typestransforming, climbing and churning with each type depicting a different normative climate and trajectory of change in agency and poverty levels. Across “transforming” villages with significant increases in people’s agency and poverty reduction, we found a highly inclusive normative climate that is fueling gender equality and agricultural innovation, as well as infrastructural improvements, expanded markets, and male labor migration. The research, part of the GENNOVATE initiative, includes a qualitative comparative methodology and dataset of 79 village cases from 17 countries.
Publication - Local normative climate shaping agency and agricultural livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa(Journal of Gender, Agriculture and Food Security, 2018) Petesch, P.; Bullock, R.; Feldman, S.; Badstue, L.B.; Rietveld, A.M.; Bauchspies, W.; Kamanzi, A.; Amare Tegbaru; Jummai YilaWe introduce the concept of local normative climate to improve understanding of community- level social processes that shape women’s and men’s sense of agency and capacities for taking important decisions, including in their agricultural livelihoods. The idea of normative climate is informed by feminist literature that addresses concerns for the contextual, fluid, and relational properties of gender norms. We apply normative climate to a qualitative examination of men’s and women’s assessments of decade-long changes in their decision-making capacity in two village case studies as well as comparatively with 24 village cases from seven sub-Saharan African countries. The case studies reveal how a normative climate is shaped by contextual influences that give rise to social processes where, for instance, changes in decision-making and agricultural opportunities may be perceived as empowering by only men in one village, and only by women in the other village. Comparative findings highlight how perceptions of agency are rooted in fluid normative expectations that evolve differently for women and men as they move through their life cycle and as local institutions and opportunities change.
Publication - Qualitative, comparative, and collaborative research at large scale: the GENNOVATE field methodology(Journal of Gender, Agriculture and Food Security, 2018) Petesch, P.; Badstue, L.B.; Camfield, L.; Feldman, S.; Prain, G.; Kantor, P.We present a field-tested “medium-n” qualitative comparative methodology, which enhances understanding of the strong and fluid influence of gender norms on processes of local agricultural innovation in the Global South. The GENNOVATE approach (“Enabling Gender Equality in Agricultural and Environmental Innovation”) weaves together three broad methodological challenges—context, comparison, and collaboration—and highlights how addressing the social context of innovation contributes to applied research. We discuss GENNOVATE’s analytic approach, sampling framework, data collection, and analysis procedures, and reflect critically on the research strategies adopted to document and learn from the perspectives and experiences of over 7,000 women and men in 137 villages across 26 low- and middle-income countries.
Publication - Qualitative, comparative, and collaborative research at large scale: an introduction to GENNOVATE(Journal of Gender, Agriculture and Food Security, 2018) Badstue, L.B.; Petesch, P.; Feldman, S.; Prain, G.; Elias, M.; Kantor, P.What is the relationship between gender norms, agency, and agricultural innovation? How might we undertake and what can we learn from a comparative approach to this question? GENNOVATE—a comparative and collaborative research project—addresses these questions using contextually embedded qualitative analyses that also allow for comparison and extrapolation of patterns across multiple locations. This paper provides an overview of the conceptual approach and the methodological strategy that informed GENNOVATE's twin objectives and research design. The conceptual framework underlying this original research initiative is introduced and the challenges and opportunities faced when combining inductive and deductive analytic approaches are discussed. The empirical and methodological issues are explored and the broad relevance of GENNOVATE’s research approach beyond the field of agricultural development is reflected upon.
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