Enriching perspectives: experienced ecosystem services in rural Mozambique and the importance of a gendered livelihood approach to resist reductionist analyses of local culture

Abstract

Based on a case study from rural Mozambique, we stress that ecosystem services research may be enriched through gendered livelihood approaches, particularly in terms of experienced ecosystem services. Ecosystem services studies have been accused of being gender blind. We argue for the value of open narratives that are attentive to the gender dynamics underpinning the production and reproduction of livelihoods. By focusing on the experienced gender dimension of ecosystem services, livelihood perspectives fulfill the normative role of providing a people-centered means to assess the values of the environment "from below" and can therefore constitute an entry point to a holistic understanding of by whom, how, when, and why the environment is experienced as valuable. Our findings stress the dynamism and plurality of experienced ecosystem services (i.e., they vary across groups and time and cross-cut material and immaterial dimensions), as well as the asymmetrical gendered and fundamentally cultural relations that they enable. Accounting for the experienced gender dimension of ecosystem services is critical to contextualize the environment in people's lifeworlds and to make understandings of ecosystem services representative of, and instrumental to, people's voices and agendas. We show how such enriched, diverse, bottom-up ecosystem services perspectives form an essential foundation (together with ecological research) for resisting applications of reductionist top-down categories assumed to represent general local values.

Livelihood alterations and Indigenous Innovators in the Ecuadorian Amazon

“…Although previous studies are divided into the implications of Indigenous cultural commoditization in tourism settings (Coronado, 2014), we argue, based also on evidence from cases elsewhere (Porsani et al, 2023b), that such commoditization processes (clearly illustrated in the tourism case but, as noted, also present at least in the origins of the Shuar mining project) are key components in the innovative paths along which ethnic identity assists in developing new positions and an altered local power balance. Accordingly, the emphasis on culture in these new livelihoods is not only instrumental for liberating Indigenous peoples from exploitative forms of commoditized labor relations, as indicated above, but also perceived by the Kichwa and Shuar, as enhancing pride and positive (re)valuations of their indigeneity, including ancestral knowledge, culture, and values.…”

Contesting Extractivism through Amazonian Indigenous Artivism: Decolonial reflections on possibilities for crafting a pluriverse from within

“…The process is denounced as multi-fold, working through the oppression of minds (and cultures) and the oppression and exploitation of bodies (human and non-human) (cf. Porsani et al, 2023). The denounced oppression is asserted to have taken several forms starting from the erasure of the Indigenous experience of being colonized from the official eurocentric history internalized by Brazilians themselves.…”