Report
Teaser, summary, work performed and final results
Periodic Reporting for period 1 - WACE (Women at the Cutting Edge. Assessing the gendered impact of industrial logging on well-being in Solomon Islands.)
Teaser
Through this project I am generating and utilizing new insights on a neglected, yet crucial subject: the gendered impacts of industrial logging on well-being. My project assesses how and why industrial logging affects men and women differently. Using insights from an...
Summary
Through this project I am generating and utilizing new insights on a neglected, yet crucial subject: the gendered impacts of industrial logging on well-being. My project assesses how and why industrial logging affects men and women differently. Using insights from an ethnographic case-study of the logging industry in Solomon Islands, combined with comparable cases from colleagues from across the globe, I also aim to develop an assessment tool that can help forestry professionals to work towards gender equitable logging practices.
Worldwide, China is the main importer and exporter of tropical hardwood. The majority of this wood presently comes from the Pacific, in particular from Papua New Guinea and neighbouring Solomon Islands. In these two countries, the logging industry is notorious for its unsustainable character and its high rates of illegality in timber felling.
However, there has been less systematic attention for the social impacts of industrial logging, and especially for its impacts on gender-relations. While it is well-known that women generally benefit the least from the logging industry and that they are often adversely affected by its environmental and social impacts, the literature on this issue is fragmented. There is also little understanding of how and why individual women’s experiences may vary depending on their positions within society. Moreover, the importance of gender-equitable logging practices hardly receives attention from policy and industry.
Using an ethnographic approach, I am documenting how women and men living in logging concessions in Solomon Islands experience the impacts of logging during and after logging operations. I am seeking to understand how logging affects both objective aspects of well-being, such as the impact of logging on income, shelter, and food-security; as well as subjective aspects of well-being, notably relationships with others and safety. The project generates data that will result in both peer-reviewed scientific papers, as well as outputs directed at a policy audience.
Further reading:
The Great Timber Heist (Oakland Institute): https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/files/PNG_Great_Timber_Heist_final_web.pdf
Paradise Lost: How China can help Solomon Islands protect its forests: (Global Witness) https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/forests/paradise-lost/
Work performed
The core of my work so far has consisted of generating new empirical data by conducting ethnographic field work on the island of Malaita in Solomon Islands, an archipelago of just over 600,000 inhabitants, situated at the Western Pacific’s logging frontier.
Based on a selection of the generated empirical data, I led the publication of a professional report called From Happy Hour to Hungry Hour. Logging, fisheries, and food-security on Malaita, Solomon Islands. This open-access, illustrated report was written for local and national audiences in the field of forest governance and gender, but can also be used for scholarly purposes. It presents ethnographic evidence of how logging affects Solomon Islander men and women and how it transforms gender relations, while it also proposes specific measures to protect women’s well-being in forest concessions.
In the report, I call for attention to a number of issues surrounding logging that specifically affect women. Part of these issues relate to women’s livelihoods. For instance, the bulk of women’s fishing activities takes place in mangrove forests, but my research shows that sedimentation caused by upstream logging activity is negatively affecting these forests, which in turn is detrimental to women’s ability to collect shells from them. Moreover, in many logging concessions mangrove forests are clear-cut to facilitate the construction of logging infrastructure. In such situations, women’s fishing grounds disappear altogether. Another issue affecting women’s livelihoods concerns the effects that logging has on freshwater supplies. As fetching water is mainly done by women, pollution and even destruction of water sources as a result of unsustainable logging activities is burdening women in particular.
Aside from the impacts that logging has on livelihoods, my study calls attention to a number of severe social impacts. These include conflicts over the inequitable distribution of benefits from logging, increased alcoholism, increased domestic violence and sexual exploitation of women and girls. While women are profoundly affected by these issues, as they are not part of decision-making processes surrounding logging – which is exclusively a male domain – they seek other ways to influence the situation. For instance, some women have attempted to resist logging, while others find ways to set-up their own timber-milling businesses in the margins of large-scale logging operations. However, what is ultimately needed is commitment from logging companies and governments to safeguarding women’s well-being in forest concessions.
Over the past months I have given multiple lectures for different audiences about the issues described above. These included academic, policy and lay audiences in Solomon Islands, the Netherlands, Indonesia and Taiwan. I am also currently in the process of writing various scientific papers based on my ethnographic field work in Solomon Islands. I am further leading a Special Issue on the social impacts of logging to be published with International Forestry Review, which will combine my specific knowledge of the situation in Solomon Islands with other scholars’ knowledge and data on other prominent forestry regions, notably Latin America, Central Africa, and Southeast Asia. Based on insights gained in the Special Issue, and in conversation with practitioners in the forestry sector, I will over the next reporting period develop a tool that supports forestry practitioners in safeguarding the well-being of women in logging concessions around the world.
Final results
My project is generating and contributing to a societal debate on the gendered impacts of logging in Solomon Islands, which has hardly happened thus far. Moreover, it adds to the existing scientific literature on gender and sustainable logging by making a connection between the two, and by adding new empirical data. Finally, within an international policy context, it puts the importance of making gender an integral part of sustainable forestry on the agenda and offers practical tools for doing so.