Diverting the flow: questions of gender in water
Among the summer courses that IHE Delft will offer this year from July 31st to August 4th, one will address the question how is the use, management, governance and knowledge of water services, resources and the watery environment gendered?
International and national water policy statements frequently make explicit reference to the crucial importance of women as users, guardians and managers of water. Development policies tend to single out women as ‘local water experts’ on water, depict them as having specific watery responsibilities or characterize them as particularly vulnerable to droughts and floods. On paper, women thus appear central to the achievement of water policy objectives. Yet, most rights to land and water continue to be vested in men. Formal water decision making bodies are typically dominated by men, while most water managers and experts are also men.
During the summer course, students will learn to recognize how the use, management and knowledge of water is gendered. The course proposes and discusses different tools and concepts to identify and explain this ‘genderedness’, and to understand its implications for equity, sustainability and efficiency. It presents different theoretical frameworks (gender and environment, feminist political ecology, eco-feminism) for analysing gender and water linkages, discussing these based on cases from different countries. The course also critically examines gendered assumptions of current water policies and provides an introduction to gender sensitive planning methods in watershed, water supply and irrigation management projects.
Lectures will be given by a diverse group of gender experts from Spain, Perú, the Netherlands and Colombia. Men and women coming from both cities and towns, engineers, geographers, and anthropologists.
Here you can learn more about the course and register. Only limited places are available, hurry up!