Gendered Knowledge and Perception in Managing Grassland Areas in East Sumba, Indonesia

Abstract

Dynamics of land use changes in this earth induce the land quality is often reduced, and the ability to support our livelihood be on the skids. Efforts to recover or restore the land to its original state needs to be done. Gender studies conducted to understand how the roles of women and men in the management of land and other natural resources as part of the restoration process in Haharu Subdistrict, Sumba Timur. Social classes are still prevails in some group of Sumba communities and vertically arranged into three classes, the nobleman, the ordinary people, and the slaverian. Our finding shows that women and men have almost the same contribution in farming, animal husbandry, and tapping watter as one of productive work in each household. Women seems have more burden in compare to the men, as they have more responsibility in household activities. On the knowledge about land use and land preferences, men’s perception usually focus on long term, something related with longterm economic forecast, while women are usually focus on shorter periods and more on economic calculation, reducing the capital through low labour need and low cost on fertilizer. Related to gender relation intra household, we found that there are some weak relation which is showed that not many women has high confidence to evince their opinions. Weak gender relation is getting stronger while we look at the lowest social status. In sum, involvement of men and women in restoration process is essential, but need to take into account the burden and the social strata in the community