| dc.description.abstract | Despite many years of development work on gender inequality in global agricultural supply chains,
there are still significant gaps that prevent gender equality from being achieved. Recent feminist
literature has critiqued symptomatic approaches to gender and called for the use of Gender
Transformative Approaches (GTAs) in this field, to tackle the underlying, root causes of gender
equality, namely, social norms, and hegemonic power structures. However, there is a lack of
research on what elements of GTAs promote what changes, for whom, and how GTAs intersect with
the changing environmental and socio-economic contexts of smallholder’s broader livelihoods. This
study looks specifically at the Gender Action Learning System (GALS) approach, being used in the
Circular Coffee Project in San Martín, and takes an intersectional, power focused- approach (power
over, power to, power within and power with), to investigate in what ways such an approach
contributes to gender transformative change, within coffee smallholder’s livelihoods.
Qualitative field research was conducted in 5 smallholder coffee producing communities in San
Martín, Peru through 5 evaluation workshops, 21 interviews with producers and 5 key informants,
visual elicitation, and participant observation. These methods were undertaken to understand the
impact of the GTA approach on gender transformative change within coffee producer livelihoods.
Policy analysis of project documents was undertaken to understand the framings, purpose and
assumption behind the specific approach chosen, to understand its influence on outcomes.
The results highlight that at the household level, GALS promotes recognition of women’s work, more
equal divisions of labour, decision-making, sharing of resources, co-planning for the future and selfconfidence of women. However institutional barriers both at the cooperative and project level
prevent women’s “power to”, which in turn put limitations on other power dimensions, and prevent
progress towards gender transformative change, highlighting the importance of institutional barriers
as key levers of change. Further, the structural environmental and economic insecurity of coffee
producers’ broader livelihoods, and their intersections with gendered power structures, presents a
real risk to a reversal in gender transformative progress, revealing the need for more systemic
approaches to GTC in the future.
The research concludes that to ensure effective gender transformative change that works for
producers’ broader livelihoods, GTA’s should pay closer attention to intersectionality, institutional
context, organisational bias, and the intersections of gender transformative change with broader
livelihood resilience. Therefore, transformative approaches, particularly when implemented in a
global supply chain context, should take a critical, intersectional and systems approach to their
design, implementation and evaluation | |
