Women’s Ties to Lands: Charting a Course for Gendered Community Use-and-Occupancy Mapping

Through sharing a series of case studies and conversations, this reflection paper brings forth insights, themes, questions, and challenges associated with women’s participation in use-and-occupancy mapping within patriarchal contexts, as well as examples of how their participation has changed the map.

Read the reflection paper in English and Spanish

As Indigenous and local communities increasingly take mapping into their own hands new ways are being created. This reflection paper explores some of the tools and processes already practiced by the Forest Peoples Programme (FPP) and its partners to actively engage women in mapping, and ensure the documentation of their histories, knowledge, and ties to their territories.

It is worth stressing that with this analysis, we are not aiming to impose or influence changes in communities’ practices or roles based on an outsider’s point of view. Rather, the desire to transform mapping processes has been identified by the partners we work with through their own self-determined interests and the willingness of, at least some, community members to participate in enacting that transformation.

Responding to this, what we are trying to do is to reflect on a certain set of questions, and keep them at the front of our mind in order for us as facilitators and allies to be mindful of the processes in which we are engaged in or facilitating. This should help us support the full participation of all the sub-groups within a community and ensure truly collective and representative processes. Some of these questions include for instance: 

• How does gender affect map making?
• What are the challenges to including people of all genders in mapping processes?
• What alternative and creative ways can be used to overcome these challenges and include a multitude of perspectives and relationships to land?
• Who are the maps talking to?
• How are voices represented?
• How do we decolonise how we represent territories?
• What would other representations look like?
• How are these processes community-driven and owned?