Making room for manoeuvre: addressing gender norms to strengthen the enabling environment for agricultural innovation

Local gender norms constitute a critical component of the enabling (ordisabling) environment for improved agricultural livelihoods–alongsidepolicies, markets, and other institutional dimensions. Yet, they havebeen largely ignored in agricultural research for development. Thisviewpoint is based on many years of experience, including a recentmajor comparative research initiative, GENNOVATE, on how gendernorms and agency interact to shape agricultural change at local levels.The evidence suggests that approaches which engage with normativedimensions of agricultural development and challenge underlyingstructures of inequality, are required to generate lasting gender-equitable development in agriculture and natural resource management