Gender monitoring schema for aquaculture projects: Capturing the process of change

Abstract

Women are heavily involved in aquaculture, but their gendered knowledge and expertise continues to be ignored in the process of innovation and technological development. Since women's participation is crucial in promoting more extensive and sustainable aquaculture, this paper presents a gender monitoring schema for aquaculture to allow for women's meaningful participation. A review of current MEL systems, particularly in aquaculture, found that the plethora of gender indicators and MEL frameworks do not adequately capture the dynamics of changes in gender roles and relations. Given that shifts in gender relations can be subtle, the change process is crucial to capture so that the MEL process can further accelerate these shifts within the lifetime of the project itself. Noting that women's important role in extensive and sustainable aquaculture, for e.g., nature-based solutions (NbS), the MEL process focusing on NbS aquaculture has been developed. Three agentic processes (awareness, images of change, and agency) and two environmental processes (attitudes towards NbS practices and climate change) have been identified as the key domains for the proposed gender monitoring schema to capture the process of change towards gender equality in the context of climate change.