In the fields of environmental governance and biodiversity conservation, there is a growing awareness that gender has an influence on resource use and management. Several studies argue that empowering women in resource governance can lead to beneficial outcomes for resource sustainability and biodiversity conservation. Yet how robust is the evidence to support this claim?

The study provides a comparative analysis of the devolution and empowerment process in 14 case studies drawn from eight countries in southern Africa. Each case study examined the extent to which policy and legislation devolves significant control over decision making and benefit flows to communities; the legitimacy and power of different community institutions and their relationship with other stakeholders such as local authority structures, NGOs, donor agencies, and the private sector; and lastly the relationship and divisions between different actors and groupings in the community.

Local people in South-east Asia are often cited as skilled forest managers. It is barely acknowledged that an essential part of this forest management does not concern natural forests, but forests that have been planted, often after the removal of pre-existing natural forests; forests that are cultivated not by professional foresters, but by sedentary or swidden farmers, on their farmlands; forests that are based not on exotic, fast-growing trees, but on local tree species, and harbour an incredible variety of plant and animal species.

A farmer explains his system of using drip irrigation with harvested rainwater to grow vegetable crops

Extending livestock grazing to the steep slopes has led to unstable grazing systems in the East African Highlands, and new solutions and approaches are needed to ameliorate the current situation. This work was aimed at studying the effect of livestock grazing on plant attributes and hydrological properties. The study was conducted from 1996 to 2000 at the International Livestock Research Institute at Debre Ziet Research Station. Two sites were selected: one at 0-4% slope, and the other at 4-8% slope.

Data on water sources, mode of offer, watering frequency, amount of water offered, body weights and milk yield were collected from 21 randomly selected smallholder farms in Kiambu by means of farm visits and questionnaires fortnightly. Most farms (67%) had water on-farm but 76% of them needed labour to deliver the water to the animals. Fifty two percent of the farms practised continuous watering. Water troughs (67%) were mostly used to water dairy cattle.

South Africa is often regarded to be at the forefront of water reform, based on Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) ideas. This paper explores how the idea of IWRM emerged in South Africa, its key debates and interpretations and how it has been translated. It maps out the history, main events, key people, and implementation efforts through a combination of reviews of available documents and in-depth semi-structured interviews with key actors.