Shady Practices: Agroforestry and Gender Politics in The Gambia / Edition 1

by Richard A. Schroeder

Overview

Shady Practices is a revealing analysis of the gendered political ecology brought about by conflicting local interests and changing developmental initiatives in a West African village. Between 1975 and 1985, while much of Africa suffered devastating drought conditions, Gambian women farmers succeeded in establishing hundreds of lucrative communal market gardens. In less than a decade, the women's incomes began outstripping their husbands' in many areas, until a shift in development policy away from gender equity and toward environmental concerns threatened to do away with the social and economic gains of the garden boom. Male landholders joined forestry personnel in attempts to displace the gardens and capture women's labor for the irrigation of male-controlled tree crops.

This carefully documented microhistory draws on field experience spanning more than two decades and the insights of disciplines ranging from critical human geography to development studies. Schroeder combines the "success story" of the market gardens with a cautionary tale about the aggressive pursuit of natural resource management objectives, however well intentioned. He shows that questions of power and social justice at the community level need to enter the debates of policymakers and specialists in environment and development planning.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520222335
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	10/01/1999
Series:	California Studies in Critical Human Geography , #5
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	206
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Richard A. Schroeder is Director of African Studies and Assistant Professor of Geography at Rutgers University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations and Tables
Abbreviations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Maps
1. Introduction
2. The Rise of a Female Cash Crop:
A Market Garden Boom for Mandinka Women
3· Gone to Their Second Husbands: Domestic Politics and the Garden Boom 
4· Better Homes and Gardens: The Social Relations of Vegetable Production 
5. Branching into Old Territory: The Gender Politics of Mandinka Garden/Orchards 
6. Contesting Agroforestry Interventions 
7· Shady Practices 
Notes 
Works Cited 
Index