Weathering the storm or storming the norms? Moving gender equality forward in climate-resilient agriculture - Introduction to the Special Issue on Gender Equality in Climate-Smart Agriculture: Approaches and Opportunities

Abstract

The articles in this issue grapple with how climate-resilient approaches including climate-smart agriculture (CSA) can more effectively promote gender equality and women’s empowerment1. How can CSA be implemented in ways that improve the situation and empowerment of women as well as men. CSA has the potential to provide a range of benefits for women in adapting to climate change, if they are able to take advantage of them (Jost et al. 2016), and in fact, research presented in this issue and elsewhere indicate that CSA can be a supporting condition for empowerment (see Farnworth et al. 2017; Hariharan et al. in this issue; Mittal 2016). This issue attempts to begin to answer the questions of what are the key issues, gaps, and constraints relating to gender equality in CSA? How can women be empowered to use CSA to improve the food security and resilience of their households and communities? At the same time, it is understood that gender equality may be a process rather than an immediate result (Gutierrez et al. in this issue).