Presented at the Agri4D 2013 conference at the session on Transforming Gender Roles in Agriculture: - Ways Forward

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GENDER, FLOODS, MOBILITY IN
AGRICULTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS:
A POST-DISASTER VIEW
Low elevation zones in Quezon Province, Philippines
Bernadette P. Resurrección, Ph.D
Senior Research Fellow, Stockholm Environment Institute
Associate Professor (adjunct) Asian Institute of Technology

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Background
This study is part of a larger three-year (2011-2014) research project on ‘Rethinking Gender in Development in Asia’ awarded by the Norwegian Research
Council in 2011
Context: Risk-prone low elevation coastal zones on the eastern side of Quezon
Province, Philippines (municipalities of Real, Infanta, General Nakar or
REINA), which experienced a big flood in 2004 due to swift runoffs from
increasingly denuded uplands
• Widened river system due to runoffs and heavy siltation, while agricultural lands
severely eroded by more frequent river flooding and heavier precipitation
• Over time, livelihoods have been changing from rice and coconut farming to
irregular vegetable farming, heightened charcoal production, non farm
occupations

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Objectives and questions
Generally explores the complex factors and dynamics that define
people’s attempts to secure their farm livelihoods and build resilience
in the longer term especially when disaster risks become more imminent.
Specifically, addresses the following questions:
• How do people make sense of floods historically and as continued
uncertainty?
• What social/gender identities and meanings are created, maintained, altered
by people’s mobility or immobility?
• How do people adapt to flood risks and changes in farm livelihoods, and are
there gender and other social stratifications and vulnerabilities produced and
reproduced as they adapt?
• How do institutions adapt to increased flooding and people’s insecure farm
and non farm livelihoods, and how is gender implicated in their programs?

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Concepts
• Political ecology, as it considers social and economic scales of influence such as the
growth of industrial estates and continued natural resource extraction that combine with
variable weather events affecting agrarian livelihoods contexts: ‘disasters are
fundamentally a human-environment problem’ (Robbins, 2004; Oliver-Smith, 2013)
• Gender and mobilities (Creswell and Uteng, 2008; Elliot and Urry, 2010) as it intersects
with theories of gender and social difference: ‘acquiring mobility is often analogous to a
struggle for acquiring new subjectivity’ (Cresswell and Uteng, 2008)
• Disaster and disaster recovery as gendered and meaning-making events and
processes (Cupples, 2007; Hyndman, 2008; Enarson, 1998)
  Feminist political ecology of agricultural change and disaster:
 posits a historical and scalar view of socially differentiated livelihoods and disaster
experiences;
 de-centers gender and investigates how social difference constitutes power;
 interprets how people make sense of their recovery from disaster and their changing
subjectivities as they are changing livelihoods and living with disasters
 explores how power relations come to frame particular institutional languages of
disaster and climate resilience programs

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Methodology
Sequential mixed methods approach was employed, following two phases of
data collection (2011-2014)
• Phase 1: Building propositions through qualitative data collection (key informants,
focus groups, in depth interviews, desk reviews, scoping exercises)
• Phase 2: Testing the pervasiveness of propositions from qualitative data through
quantitative data collection (survey of 500 individuals in 8 study sites throughout
REINA)
  Currently wrapping up Phase 2 after producing a survey instrument from the
initial qualitative findings of Phase 1

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Findings
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Increasing and rapid soil erosion leading to
landlessness
Decline in soil fertility due to frequent floods and in
some plots, remaining layers of hardened mud from
mudslides, and damage of irrigation canals and
sources (85% of survey respondents)
Multi-livelihood portfolios include cultivating monovarieties in less affected land plots (2 cropping
seasons) to multiple crop cultivation and charcoal
production
Planting period has shifted in the last 5 years
New tenurial arrangements: from landlords to
agricultural workers, and increasing tenancy (55% of
survey respondents)
Most farmers also engage in non farm work (60% of
survey respondents), many of the men are
construction workers (35%), and women are laundry
workers (21%)
Increasing engagement in non farm livelihoods and
mobility

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Mobilities mark the boundary between
a prosperous past and a present
period of resource decline
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„Our wealth will never come back to us. Our
lives were better in the past.‟
„In the past, we could still afford to send our
children to college.‟ „Today, our children –
only high-school graduates – leave our
villages to find work elsewhere.‟
„Now, even women and mothers have to
travel to work and earn something.‟
Men go off to construction sites, which is
often irregular. Whereas more women today
work as domestic workers in Manila or
Laguna and their jobs are more stable‟

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Disadvantage is assigned to types of
mobility
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„Migrants (‘dayo‟) come to our village to
cut trees for charcoal production. They
are destroyers.‟
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„Landless people have no choice but to
search the forests and burn and produce
charcoal. Those who still have land do not
have to seek work elsewhere‟
•
„Farming keeps mothers from leaving
their homes. They can keep households
“whole”, unlike the women who have to
leave home.‟

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Resettlement areas are sites of
resettled, but insecure mobile
subjects
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„If we were given work here
(resettlement site), we will not go to
work elsewhere.‟
„From our resettlement area, we
walk to our former lands by the river
to fish.‟
„We stay on the lands the river has
left us to plant watermelons and
vegetables. We rush home when it
begins to rain‟
„We have more expenses now
because we have to travel more
frequently, from home to our fields
by the river.‟
„Those who lost their land have to
move and find work near and far.‟

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Mobility also marks gendered-differentiated responses to flood disasters
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„It is the women and children who evacuate, while the men stay behind to protect
their home and belongings.‟
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„When there is no man in the family, we just have to abandon our home and
evacuate when a flood comes.‟
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„When the floods came, I stayed behind to protect and watch over my husband‟s
motorbike. He would be furious if I let anything happen to it.‟

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Institutional adaptive responses and
planned disaster recovery are also
mobility-defined  new ‘languages’ of
DRR, resilience building and
adaptation:
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Bio-intensive gardening
Women zero-plastic campaigns
Wood carving and sewing
Hazards mapping for disaster
preparedness
Reinforce the aspiration for fixity and
immobility by
Re-traditionalizing gender roles that
emphasize in-place livelihoods and
assign tasks for disaster preparedness.
No program addresses people’s actual
mobilities in the context of current farm
and non farm livelihoods.
Existing livelihoods placement
programs (e.g., Employment &
Services Office in local governments)
have few resources and clout

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Changing livelihoods:
Immobile but advantaged
women and mobile but
insecure men
Ester: The disaster brought me
a home. We used to only live
with my mother. Today, I stay
home and find it better than
working in Manila as a
domestic helper. We are also
safe here from the river.
Ariel: became a footloose
farmworker in nearby villages
or as a worker in local
construction sites receiving a
daily wage of 150 pesos (US$
3). He says, “I am now „paekstra-ekstra‟ (a flexible and
insecure job worker). Despite
my difficulties at finding a
secure livelihood, however, I
now have a house of my own in
the resettlement site. In the
past, I used to live only with
relatives.”

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To conclude
Mobility in feminist political ecology of disaster and livelihoods
research:
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• A paradigm of mobility offers a way out of oversimplification: it complicates earlier
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notions of place-based gender-specific risks and disaster response in the
gender, disaster and climate change literature
Considers mobility as everyday occurrence not only disaster-driven: mobility for
multiple livelihoods that respond to political economy/ecology challenges and
opportunities;
Mobility as a reflection of people’s accumulated fears and living with insecurity where
nature is perceived to acquire its own agency (and mobility)
Mobility and immobility mark changing subjectivities, stratifications, relative degrees of
resilience and stability, insecurity and fragility, and are themselves not definitive, blackor-white categories that define gendered subjectivities : a ‘contextualized
phenomenon’
Mobility is a blind spot in institutional resilience and adaptation programming that are
produced by knowledge/power regimes

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2.
Re-thinking gender in livelihoods, disaster, and agrarian
transformations
• Compels us to go beyond easy and disembedded notions of gender-
specific impacts where women are often claimed as immediately
disadvantaged and vulnerable, sidestepping other subjects of vulnerability
• The REINA case seems to point to the contrary: left-behind, immobile women – as
domestic workers, as wives of fishers and farmers on fragile lands, or stay-at-home
wives – benefit from fixity in the face of increasing fluidity and movement compelled
by living with disasters and the rise of insecure livelihoods. Men, on the other hand
are more mobile, who face multiple but insecure livelihoods.
• Challenges the positivist framing of climate change and disaster discourses
that departs from asking what floods and disasters do to women and men
in the disaster literature, but
• instead views disaster as a meaning-making event, considering how gendered
subjects feel about and reflect on complex spatial, resource and material
realignments that disasters bring, and on the ways that these may constrain or
enable positive change both in the present and future.

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