Restoration for Whom, by Whom? Exploring the Socio-political Dimensions of Restoration

As the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration launches into action, urgent attention is needed to the power and politics that shape the values, meanings, and science driving restoration, to enable the creation of equitable restoration initiatives. In this webinar, we adopt a feminist political ecology lens, with a focus on gendered power relations, historical awareness, and scale integration, to examine the socio-political and economic dynamics of restoration. We demonstrate the potential of such a perspective for thinking about the social inclusivity of restoration agendas and initiatives, and demonstrate its applicability to different restoration contexts.

We bring this perspective to life through three case studies published in a special issue of Ecological Restoration that asks: “Restoration for Whom, by Whom?”. The first case, based in Kenya, shows how attention to power relations is needed to create more equitable Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes. The second, which focuses on the restoration of an urban lake in Bengaluru, India, demonstrates the importance of taking a historical perspective to understand equity considerations in restoration. The last shows the importance of conducting multi-scalar analyses to promote inclusion in and through restoration, using wetlands restoration as an example. Together, these present more grounded and nuanced ways forward for inclusive restoration initiatives.

Marlène Elias is the Gender Lead at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT; Gender Research Coordinator for the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry; and the leader of the CGIAR GENDER Platform’s Alliances Module. Rooted in a feminist political ecology approach, her research focuses on the gendered dimensions of forest management and restoration, local ecological knowledge(s), and gender norms in agriculture and environmental management, predominantly in West Africa and South Asia. Marlène has a BSc in Biology and Environmental Sciences, and an MA and PhD in Geography.

Deepa Joshi is the Gender, Youth and Inclusion Lead for the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE) and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI). A feminist political ecologist by training, her research has analyzed shifts in environmental policies and how these restructure contextually complex intersections of gender, poverty, class, ethnicity and identity. Her interests lie in connecting gender and environmental discourse to local capacity building initiatives and advocating for policy-relevant change across developmental institutions. She has worked primarily in South Asia, and to a lesser extent in South East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. Before Joining WLE, she worked at the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience at Coventry University, and earlier at Wageningen University and DFID.

Ruth Meinzen-Dick is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). She has over 25 years’ experience in transdisciplinary research. One of her major research areas deals with how institutions and policies affect the way people manage natural resources, especially land and water. She also studies gender issues in agriculture, with a particular focus on gender differences in control over assets, and the impact of agricultural research on poverty. She is the author of over 150 peer-reviewed publications based on this research. In addition to leading numerous large research programs, she is Coordinator of the CGIAR program on Collective Action and Property Rights (CAPRi), and co-leader of IFPRI’s research theme on Strengthening Institutions and Governance. Much of her research has been in South Asia and Africa south of the Sahara.

Sanjiv da Silva is a Senior Regional Researcher at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI). His research focus includes natural resource governance, policy and institutional analysis, water user associations, wetland management, weather index insurance, and social inclusion. Before joining IWMI, Sanjiv worked at International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Sri Lanka, and managed the Environmental Law Program in Sri Lanka. He was a visiting lecturer at the University of Kelaniya and Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka. Sanjiv serves on several national Task Forces and committees related to environmental issues in Sri Lanka.

Juliet Kariuki holds a PhD in Agricultural Sciences from the University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, where she focused on gender equity in market-based conservation mechanisms in Kenya. She is currently working as a scientist at the University of Hohenheim where her research focuses on understanding the social dimensions of resource use in crop and livestock systems mostly in sub-Saharan Africa with a focus and interest on food security, gender and equity in biodiversity-rich landscapes. Specifically, she has explored the influence of agricultural practices on the relationships between the environmental and social dimensions for smallholder livestock and crop farmers.

Amrita Sen is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur and a Visiting Faculty with Azim Premji University. Her research interests include cultural and political ecology, politics of forest conservation, urban environmental conflicts and Anthropocene studies. In 2019, Amrita received the ‘Excellence in PhD Thesis award’ from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, for her doctoral research on the conservation politics in Sundarbans. She is the author of A Political Ecology of Forest Conservation in India: Communities, Wildlife and the State (Routledge 2022).