Gendered understandings of the natural environment: The interaction of environmental assets with other households assets for improving wellbeing

Bradshaw, Sarah and Nascimento, Nilo and Juntti, Meri and Lundy, Lian and Britte, Rogério and Costa, Heloisa and Wade, Rebecca and Oki, Yumi and Viana Caballero, Indira (2017). Gendered understandings of the natural environment: The interaction of environmental assets with other households assets for improving wellbeing. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-852547

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity promotes using an ecosystems approach (EA) to support the delivery of ecosystem services and benefits (ESB) as a dynamic conceptualisation of environmental quality. It is promoted as enabling an easier integration of environmental goods and services into economic processes and policies. However, many researchers suggest that an EA is 'science in the making' and emerging policy initiatives overlook complexities that stem from both uncertain scientific underpinnings and socio-economic divisions. These include gender divisions and inequalities, yet these topics are largely absent from ESB discussions. While feminist writers (and others) suggest caution with adopting an EA, ADEPT seeks to explore if and how the approach could be useful for promoting wellbeing for women and men. While environmental justice scholars have long suggested that socio-economic hardship and the distribution of environmental goods and bads are correlated, recent applications of intersectional theory suggest that practical experiences of exclusion from opportunity always intermesh with other divisions such as those based on race, social class, disability status, sexuality, age and geographical location. There is then a need to address environmental and socio-economic vulnerability in an integrated manner. To do so an EA needs to first address a binary exclusion; firstly, there is a need to highlight ways in which ESB frame environmental quality, often affording stronger representation to expert interpretation of how environmental quality is experienced. Secondly, there is need to understand how intersecting vulnerabilities influence access to a range of ESB (with a focus on those linked to urban blue-green space e.g. clean water, flood mitigation and recreational opportunities).

The focus of the current research will be a major urban zoning project in Belo Horizonte (BH), which covers a range of land-use types from dense low-income urban districts to rich gated neighbourhoods, protected areas, commercial and industrial districts. This provides an ideal case study area in which to trial and extend understandings of gendered vulnerability to environmental change within local urban contexts. Research to be undertaken will involve identifying socio-economic and environmental vulnerabilities and zones of interaction, exploration of differential experiences of urban ESB and scoping the potential of these as a means to support poverty alleviation in urban transformations. Results from BH will also be discussed within a Sao Paulo (SP) context, through the involvement of field researchers from SP currently involved in a local community engagement project involving the redevelopment of urban water management policies.

The research collaboration is organised around a series of four international research workshops. An online research community will support the combination and interrogation of both new and existing data sets and development of new evidence of the processes which underpin urban vulnerability, forming the context within which any resilience solutions would need to be derived.

Data description (abstract)

The data collected during this project is:
(1)Scientific environmental assessment of the Nova Contagem area and analysis of potential ecosystem-services.

(2)Semi-structured interviews with women and men in and around Nova Contagem, including interviews with visitors to the local reservoir and surrounding countryside and walking interviews.

(3)Questionnaires undertaken with women and men living in and visiting 'down town' Nova Contagem.

Data creators:

Creator Name	Affiliation	ORCID (as URL)
Bradshaw Sarah	Middlesex University
Nascimento Nilo	Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Juntti Meri	Middlesex University
Lundy Lian	Middlesex University
Britte Rogério	Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Costa Heloisa	Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Wade Rebecca	Abertay University
Oki Yumi	Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Viana Caballero Indira	Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

Sponsors:

Economic and Social Research Council

Grant reference:

ES/M011631/1

Topic classification:

Natural environment
Society and culture

Keywords:

Eco-system services, Gender, Asset frameworks, Environmental assets

Project title:

ADEPT: developing the ecosystem approach to drive positive urban transformations in the context of intersecting vulnerabilities

Grant holders:

Sarah Bradshaw, Lian Lundy, Meri Juntti, Rebecca Wade, Kenneth Scott-Brown

Project dates:

From	To
1 January 2015	19 August 2016

Date published:

04 Apr 2017 13:59

Last modified:

09 Nov 2017 17:18

Coverage and Methodology

Collection period:

Date from:	Date to:
1 January 2015	19 August 2016

Geographical area:

Nova Contagem

Country:

Brazil

Data collection method:

This project looks at how to better understand how environmental assets interact with other assets to improve women and men’s well-being, reduce poverty and
vulnerability, and thus promote more resilient and gender just urban spaces.

A number of different interdisciplinary methods were used to establish the potential and actual ES in the area, these included:
1. A scientific environmental assessment of the potential ES in the catchment
2. Qualitative interviews around the natural environment and how it is accessed and understood by those living in and around Nova Contagem
3. Narrative walks using a phone application to record thoughts on, and images of, the natural environment in which the participants live
4. A small survey measuring asset stocks, and exploring understandings of assets, how they interact with each other for those living, working, or frequently visiting Nova Contagem

1] Using land cover maps, the three case study areas were classed as containing varying combinations of biophysical structures. Satellite images were then used to further interrogate the case study areas to identify and group biophysical structures according to their dominating structures (e.g. scale, level of management, presence of water). Site walkovers were undertaken during which the presence of biophysical structure types were verified and subjectively translated into service providing units (SPUs; see Table below). This translation activity is undertaken as a way to link biophysical structures with land use cover typologies. ES data from the literature (e.g. MEA, 2005, UK NEA 2011, Gomez-Baggethun et al., 2013, Lundy and Wade 2011), combined with field notes, were used to identify the potential ES and goods delivered by each urban SPU.

2] Some 26 qualitative semi-structured interviews were undertaken in the home of residents within the communities studied and were recorded and then transcribed. Typically lasting 40 minutes to an hour, they covered issues such as how the participant came to live in the barrio, what they most liked about it and most disliked, what they thought of the local public parks and squares, of the countryside surrounding the barrio and of the reservoir and other blue space. It sought to understand how the participants engaged with the environment and how they understood nature and what it meant to them in terms of wellbeing. The qualitative
interviews were undertaken in 3 growing urban communities, with 10 interviews in in Nova Contagem (6 women and 4 men), and 16 in two smaller urban areas which had expanded on the banks of the Vargem das Flores reservoir (7 women and 9 men).
Visitor interviews were also undertaken with people visiting the Vagen de Flores (VF) Reservoir 11 (5 women and 6 men).

3] In addition to the qualitative interviews a selection of the same respondents were also undertook a walking interview (9) through their urban environment. The walking narratives used a smart phone application, which allowed images of ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ to be recorded.

4] A questionnaire survey (395 respondents) sought to get some measure of the assets of those questioned – human, social, financial and natural and the extent to which they valued the natural environment as an asset. The quantitative interviews allowed associations to be draw between different assets, and logistic regression modelling was used to provide a robust assessment of how different assets impact on each other and what predicts, for example, greater engagement with the natural environment. It sought to analyse the data patterns and differences by gender and ‘income’.

Observation unit:

Household, Individual

Kind of data:

Geospatial, Still image, Numeric, Text

Type of data:

Qualitative and mixed methods data

Resource language:

Portuguese

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