Enabling transformations of power relations in order to achieve greater equity is challenging; years of experience and scholarly analysis show that “gender mainstreaming” has usually been depoliticized in development and has missed its aim, including in mountain contexts. Important innovations and strategies with potential for achieving gender shifts in power relations do exist, but they require sustained effort, rigorous monitoring, and continual reflection. Indeed, tenacious resistance to change and barriers that hamper gender work consistently reappear in development projects and organizations, as illustrated in the papers in this issue of MRD. A novel approach is required to effect truly gender equitable change: an approach that entails challenging “business as usual.” This introductory essay synthesizes insights from gender and feminist scholarship and from debates that took place at the recent Bhutan 10 conference entitled “Gender and Sustainable Mountain Development in a Changing World.” The essay presents the concept of gender transformative change, placing it within a discussion of the failures of “gender mainstreaming” and the potential of strategic innovations for transforming power relations into more gender equal ones in development and mountain contexts. New theories, organizational change, and a gender transformative change approach are some of the innovations with potential for advancing gender equality. Failures in advancing the gender agenda include the persistence of outdated “gender mainstreaming” approaches, confusion between 4 gender approaches (gender awareness, gender championing, gender analysis, and feminist activism), gaps in knowledge, policy, and practice, and tenacious forms of resistance (“3Bs”: backlash, backsliding, and burnout); it is crucial to learn from these failures. The paper concludes by reflecting on the way forward, arguing for more strategic alliance building, gender championing, negotiations as well as out of the box thinking and action.

Despite widespread gender issues in natural resource management and rural livelihoods strategies, there has been little study of how new development strategies, such as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD ), consider gender issues. Gender consideration in REDD is especially important in mountainous countries like Nepal, where the majority of the rural population, especially women and socioeconomically disadvantaged households, depend on forests for many of their subsistence needs. Any changes in forest access or use rights or rules as a result of REDD would impact marginalized people whose inclusion, voice, and access to and control over forest resources are influenced by deeply gendered power relations and socio-institutional practices in Nepali society. This article analyzes ways the REDD initiatives in Nepal have considered gender issues identified in earlier studies. The main finding is that the REDD policy process is inadequate to account for underlying power dynamics, and thus is unable to achieve equity goals. In the absence of accounting for power, the consideration of gender issues in forest management by explicit inclusion of women in the payment criteria and policy discussions within REDD programs, including the REDD payment pilot project, is insufficient to redress gender imbalances. Forest actors such as the government and other project implementers—including community institutions—lack strategies and responsibilities for applying REDD initiatives that are gender equitable and ensure REDD benefits and decision-making opportunities for women and other marginalized people. To tap the potential of REDD to contribute to both climate change mitigation and mountain development, efforts are needed to make REDD national strategy- and policy-making gender sensitive. The critical areas to be addressed in Nepal include framing the REDD strategy within the forest ministry's Gender and Social Inclusion Strategy 2008, and then by judicious implementation ensuring access of poor and disadvantaged women and men to forest resources, carbon funds, and decision-making roles in order to undermine entrenched unequal relations.

The present article argues for better assessing how drinking water supply interventions affect gender relations. This requires going beyond conventional “water burden” indicators such as time spent collecting water or distances walked to a water source. Based on research in the Shivalik hills of northwest India, the article shows how men's expectations of water uses changed when interventions brought piped water supplies to the area. Though the interventions reduced the distance women walked to reach water sources and the drudgery of negotiating steep mountain slopes, there was an increase in the volume of water women were expected to carry. Following the interventions, men began performing many water-use functions in the privacy of their homes rather than at public water sources, and women were forced to carry more water home for these purposes. The decline of common property resource institutions also resulted in greater dependence on piped water supplies, further increasing the volume of water women must carry. Employing a qualitative research design relying on semistructured interviews, direct observation, and participatory rural appraisal tools, the study described here makes a case for more qualitative assessments of water supply interventions' impacts on mountain women's quality of life. This would yield a better understanding of women's water burdens.

Measures of gender-based labor distribution can contribute to understanding the feasibility of agricultural development in mountainous subsistence farming communities. Conservation agriculture (CA) can provide sustained crop yield and improved soil and water conservation in mountain areas prone to degradation and where few inputs are available. This study sought to measure the gendered labor impacts of CA practices and to assess their feasibility in remote farming communities. We surveyed farmers in 3 tribal villages in the Middle Hills of Nepal, where communities consist of smallholder (<2 ha) farmers cultivating highly sloping, marginal lands. Face-to-face interviews and time allocation surveys were used to quantify distribution of labor and to identify engagement in agricultural decision-making in 87% of the households. On-farm plots were used to measure differences between the gender-based labor demands of conventional and CA practices. Results show that women bear a disproportionate burden (53–55%) of on-farm labor. Field trials showed that women would predominantly manage increases in labor demands from CA, particularly where more labor for plowing, sowing, and harvesting is required, yet 51.3% indicated that they have limited control over adoption of new practices. In situations where women are already overburdened, technologies that require additional labor may prove unsustainable. It is crucial to adapt technologies to provide gender-sensitive solutions and meet the needs of the local community. Identifying the gendered constraints of CA is vital to improving understanding of agricultural livelihoods.

The devastating eruptions of Mount Tungurahua in the Ecuadorian highlands in 1999 and 2006 left many communities struggling to rebuild their homes and others permanently displaced to settlements built by state and nongovernmental organizations. For several years afterward, households diversified their economic strategies to compensate for losses, communities organized to promote local development, and the state and nongovernmental organizations sponsored many economic recovery programs in the affected communities. Our study examined the ways in which gender and gender roles were associated with different levels and paths of access to scarce resources in these communities. Specifically, this article contrasts the experiences of men and women in accessing household necessities and project assistance through formal institutions and informal networks. We found that women and men used different types of informal social support networks, with men receiving significantly more material, emotional, and informational support than women. We also found that men and women experienced different challenges and advantages when pursuing support through local and extralocal institutions and that these institutions often coordinated in ways that reified their biases. We present a methodology that is replicable in a wide variety of disaster, resettlement, and development settings, and we advocate an inductive, evidence-based approach to policy, built upon an understanding of local gender, class, and ethnic dynamics affecting access to formal and informal resources. This evidence should be used to build more robust local institutions that can resist wider social and cultural pressures for male dominance and gendered exclusion.

Mountain women's resistance to inequitable development practice manifests itself in several ways; one of the most visible ways is their campaigning with social movements. The efforts to save the Ganges (Ganga) River from hydroelectric dams in the Garhwal Himalaya of Uttarakhand, India, are a case in point. Within these movements, men often take leadership roles, while women from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds form the base of participation at meetings, assemblies, and rallies. Based on ethnographic research from 2007–2010, this article explores the particularities of women's engagements with dam opposition efforts, their motivations for activism, and the degree to which their concerns for environment and development receive attention. Although women make extensive contributions, movement leaders often do not adequately represent the specifics of their development concerns, and this impacts the ability of policy-makers to respond to women's demands. This article shows mountain women's locations on multiple social and geographic peripheries and argues for more gender sensitivity and critical reflection in social movement campaigns and decision-making processes as a prerequisite for expanding the possibilities of gender-inclusive sustainable development.

This article explores the motivations of a diverse group of women in the Himalayan region of Darjeeling district in India to engage (or not) in politics, and discusses how women, like men, are vulnerable to power and politics. In Darjeeling, class, ethnicity, and other divides are accentuated by unresolved, decades-long identity-based political conflicts that also obscure practical everyday needs and challenges. This defines which women engage in the political domain and, in the dominantly patriarchal political space, how these women relate to the region's enduring water challenges. In such a setting, it would be ideal to wish for solidarity among women that would overcome class and ethnic divisions and individual political aspirations, making space for gendering political causes and practical challenges. Such solidarity would be especially pertinent in the Eastern Himalaya, given the region's projected climate vulnerability and fragile democracy. However, reality is far removed from development discourse and policy which suggests an assumed camaraderie among mountain women: an imagined empathy and solidarity in relation both to environmental causes and concerns and the practice of equitable power and politics. In looking at how a diverse group of women in varying positions of power and powerlessness in Darjeeling District are unable, reluctant, or simply uninterested in addressing critical water injustices experienced by some, this paper calls for retrospection on both gender–environment myths and gender–politics fictions.

Natural resource-dependent isolated mountain communities are highly vulnerable to climatic and environmental stresses, and migration is often the most important livelihood diversification strategy for insuring a household against shocks. In this paper, we present some key results from a study conducted in the West Karakoram region of Pakistan to assess the influence of environmental shocks on migration and the effect of remittances on the adaptive capacity of recipient households and on gender relations. Primary data were collected at community and household level through in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and quantitative questionnaires covering 210 households in 6 villages of the West Karakoram. Our findings suggest that migration is adopted as a core response to environmental pressure, both as an ex ante form of household risk mitigation against decreased and uncertain agricultural production, and as an ex post coping mechanism in the wake of environmental shocks. Gender structures migration; only men participate in circular labor migration to urban areas, while women are left behind to take care of the agricultural work and the household. Despite women's increased role in farming activities, no significant changes were noted in the decision-making power of women as a result of male outmigration. Gender positive transformative processes are more likely to be intergenerational and driven by increased access to education for girls.

Families living in Gorno-Badakhshan—situated in the Pamir Mountains in Tajikistan—depend on irrigated agriculture to meet their subsistence needs. Because men predominate, and are most visible in, the operation and management of irrigation systems in this region, water-related activities are often labeled as masculine. Yet women historically played an important role in on-farm irrigation activities and even formed the majority of the agricultural workforce during the Soviet period. Today women are still responsible for the bulk of farming activities, including irrigation. This is partly a consequence of the difficulty of depending on farming alone for making a living, which leads many men to migrate elsewhere in search of employment. Drawing on 6 months of fieldwork in 2 villages in different irrigation systems, this article argues that although formal water rights and power are vested in men, this does not mean that women lack agency, nor is it necessarily a reflection of wider gender inequities. Understanding the power and equity implications of formal distributions of rights and powers among men and women requires an analysis that links formal rights to actual irrigation and farming practices and places them in broader historical and livelihood contexts.

Accessibility in rural Austrian areas is more restricted than in urban regions. Limited accessibility leads to social exclusion. Therefore, mobility should be inclusive, allowing everyone to satisfy mobility needs and reach destinations. Mobility should also be environmentally friendly. Use of a private car offers opportunities for comprehensive mobility but is related with high individual, social, and environmental costs. We studied the interplay between employment, care, and mobility variables among people in the foothills of the European Alps in Lower Austria who are employed and have care responsibilities, assuming them to be a group with complex mobility needs and high vulnerability. The aim was to derive policy recommendations to decrease their car dependency and ensure accessibility. Adopting a mixed methods approach, we conducted a tailored quantitative and qualitative survey, using cluster analysis to derive relevant patterns. Within the group under analysis, 5 subgroups were identified: persons in 2 clusters worked more and cared less, with significant differences in commuting distances. Persons of 2 further clusters cared more and worked less, with one group caring for very young children, and the other working and caring a lot. Persons in the fifth cluster cared for elderly people, had low caring duties, and almost no pickup/drop-off trips; almost all had full-time jobs. Significant gender differences existed in the identified activity patterns. Results showed that responsibility for care is still mainly with women, even if they are increasingly seeking employment. Recommendations in 3 major fields of action were derived, comprising: measures to support the mobility of persons responsible for care, measures to support the autonomy of cared persons' mobility, and measures to reduce the mobility needs of both groups. Even if respondents are satisfied with how they manage their care tasks and employment by car, higher shares of walking, cycling, and public transport seem to be necessary and feasible.

When the first protected areas in the European Alps were established as national parks, biocentric ideas of nature protection and research-oriented ecological approaches were at the heart of these efforts, and gender issues were not considered. With the paradigm shift toward integrative biodiversity politics, gender issues gained significance. In addition, the European Commission Women's Charta 2010, on building a gender perspective into all policies in accordance with the European theme “united in diversity,” required the integration of gender considerations into regional development, including protected areas. Based on a document analysis, an online survey, qualitative interviews, and focus group discussions, this article shows how widely gender mainstreaming is accepted and in which aspects of protected mountain areas gender perspectives are already considered important. Inspired by concepts from gender research and available options for regional (mountain) development, new items are recommended for a mountain agenda.

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) believes in a future where the mountain people of the Hindu Kush–Himalayas can experience enhanced livelihoods, equity, and social and environmental security; where they can adapt to environmental, socioeconomic, and climate change; and where future generations of mountain and downstream populations can enjoy the benefits and opportunities afforded by the region's natural endowment. ICIMOD is an intergovernmental center that develops and shares information and knowledge, facilitates learning, and uses innovation and effective communication to empower its eight regional member countries—Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan—and the women, men, and children living there. ICIMOD believes that interventions are most successful when they take into account the points of view of everyone in society, regardless of gender, caste, or ethnicity. Inclusiveness is the hallmark of ICIMOD's work.