Tuesday, June 17, 2025 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM South College SCOW245
Gender Quotas & Broadening Participation in Forest User Groups
in-person
Nathan Cook1, Tara Grillos2, and Krister Andersson3
1Indiana University Indianapolis, USA, 2Purdue University, USA, 3University of Notre Dame, USA
The inclusion of women in environmental decision-making is widely believed to improve conservation outcomes and can be considered normatively desirable independent of outcomes. Gender quotas have been proposed as a policy intervention to ensure descriptive representation of women. In Nepal, Community Forest User Groups (CFUGs) manage more than a third of forested land under the country’s community forestry program, which is regarded as a model forestry decentralization policy. Current governmental guidelines set a target of 50% women on the executive committee of these groups, though this target has not been fully achieved to date. One possible effect of a gender quota for executive committee membership is that the representation of women in leadership may motivate more people (perhaps especially other women) to participate in the CFUG more broadly. This study uses an original survey experiment framed around community-based forest management that was administered to survey respondents in 100 villages in rural Nepal (N = 1,243). The survey experiment exposed respondents to a vignette describing a hypothetical CFUG in the respondent’s village, which was randomly varied with respect to the number of women required to be included on the ten-member executive committee. This was followed by survey questions that asked respondents whether they would engage in a number of participation activities if the group existed in their village. We find that having more seats reserved for women on the executive council leads to a statistically significant increase in the probability that female respondents report being likely to join the group, and it also increases their likelihood of attending meetings. Furthermore, our results suggest that more women on the executive committee predicts a higher probability of ‘active’ participation’—joining the institution, attending a meeting, and speaking up at the meeting—among women respondents. Our findings suggest that gender quotas requiring the presence of a women in leadership roles can induce other women to engage more actively in community-based forest management, without discouraging participation among men.
