Gender Transformative Approaches – a silver bullet for gender equality? Investigating the effects of the GALS methodology on gender transformative change for coffee smallholders, as implemented in the Circular Coffee Project in San Martín, Peru

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