Dr. Alaka Wali

Centering women is a core tenant of Legado’s 360° Community-Led Change approach—and a critical part of advancing climate justice in places important for biodiversity, many of which are stewarded by Indigenous and local communities. In this Q&A, Legado Board Member, anthropologist, and Curator Emerita at Chicago’s Field Museum Dr. Alaka Wali shares why centering women is absolutely crucial to Legado's approach.

Legado: How does the research support centering women’s leadership in the pursuit of Thriving Futures?

Dr. Wali: Since the 1970s, there has been an array of anthropological and economic research that shows how central women are in small-scale communities like the ones where Legado works. A groundbreaking study by Danish economist Esther Boserup in 1970 demonstrated that women play the most critical role because they are the ones who sustain a community’s way of life and contribute to their communities’ livelihoods by doing the bulk of the agricultural or horticultural work. Her research influenced the creation of many “Women in Development” programs and further research that reinforced her findings. That's been my own research experience as well. Working with Indigenous communities in the Amazon and Central America, I saw how women played a critical role in the livelihood strategies of their communities. Because of this, in order to encourage the people making decisions to more sustainably protect their environments, you have to empower women to make decisions around those kinds of concerns.

Mparkenoi Lenkurikuri in the community garden outside the Lolkunyiani Maternity Shelter in Ngilai, Kenya | Legado

Why are women more likely to be interested in championing conservation and community well-being?

Men are also very invested in their communities and their children’s welfare. But part of the reason we center women is because in the places we work, like Africa or Peru, when enterprises came in that were about extraction of resources, like logging, large-scale farming, or mining, men were recruited to do that kind of work. So their connection to the land became more tenuous, whereas women typically maintained that connection. Because of this, it’s my experience that it can be easier for women to understand why conservation is in their communities’ interest.

What does female leadership look like?

Leadership can look very different in different cultures. In Peru, in Indigenous societies like the Machiguenga, women can take a very strong role. They don't hesitate to speak out at community meetings. They may not always be the most visible people in leadership or hold political offices, but they exert influence through other means—through their household conversations with their families and so on, in addition to the public arena. If they speak out in favor of, for example, getting rid of the illegal logging, they tend to get the community to agree.

Maria Gonzalez of Koribeni, Peru | Legado

How is Legado’s approach to centering women unique?

Nowadays, more NGOs and governmental organizations understand that they have to include women for conservation to work. But we’ve been doing this from the beginning because we understand that women have a way of tying all their community’s concerns together. They don't tend to separate between, for example, their livelihoods, their health or their children’s well-being. Because men have been drawn so much into the market economy, it's sometimes easier for the women to grasp the integrated nature of these concerns.

Legado’s approach isn’t just to include women in a cursory manner. Instead, we try to privilege the existing cultural resources that people have and strengthen the distinct cultural perspectives of these communities. Often the ways women’s roles are respected and how the land and environment are valued are grounded in those cultural values and beliefs. If you don’t think about the cultural values people have, you're likely to fail. Because the long-term maintenance of those kinds of endeavors won’t happen if people don't see how it fits with their cultural values and beliefs.

A community member smiles with her child near their home in Curuca, Mozambique | Legado

If you ignore the specific cultural roles women play, you are missing a huge piece of the puzzle for making conservation happen. Ignoring women is not compatible with our goal of working with communities for the protection and maintenance of these landscapes that we care about—landscapes we want to be healthy and thriving.

Dr. Wali has written numerous articles about the importance of community-led approaches to conservation and sustainability, producing some of the scholarship that underpins Legado’s radical approach. Here are a few we recommend to learn more:

Centering Communities in Conservation through Asset-Based Quality of Life Planning - 2023. This study is co-authored by Dr. Tita Alvira, Legado’s Chief Partnerships and Programs Officer and Ana Lemos, Legado's Deputy Director of Programs.
Biocultural approaches to well-being and sustainability indicators across scales - 2017. Co-authored by Dr. Tita Alvira, this study explores how building on local cultural perspectives can support both well-being and sustainability.
A new approach to conservation: using community empowerment for sustainable wellbeing - 2017. Co-authored by Dr. Tita Alvira, this study uses an asset-based approach to integrating conservation and community well-being.
Working towards and beyond collaborative resource management: Parks, people, and participation in the Peruvian Amazon - 2007. A close look at Dr. Wali and her team’s work doing participatory research in conservation in the Peruvian Amazon.