Responses by Both Women and Men

Both women and men had reduced consumption (by buying less food, reduced or rationing food consumption, reducing forage consumption, and reducing nonfood spending); diversified food consumption (by collecting wild foods and buying different foods); migrated and worked outside their farms; diversified incomes (by selling animals and other products, or making and selling nonagricultural products); used social networks (informal loans and “receiving help,” including remittances); bought food and forage; and installed potable water systems.

Food and fodder had never been plentiful in the case study area, and the production of both crops and animals had been affected by climate change. Thus many of the women and men said they had completely excluded meat, fish, eggs, and cheese from their diets and rationed what beans and rice, and at times fruit and vegetables, they had access to. This demonstrates a lack of capacity to adapt to reduce their vulnerability. Many others said they had had to eat less in general, going hungry.

In order not to starve when drought struck and their own crops failed, the majority of the interviewees mentioned that they had no other option but to buy food. A few, primarily those who did not have any or enough land for their livestock to graze on, said that they also had to buy fodder. The increased food prices that follow droughts had forced those who did not have agriculture as their main livelihood to buy less and eat a less varied diet.

All of the interviewees had domesticated animals, mainly chicken and pigs. These were often sold in times of hardship to raise cash that would pay for food or fodder. Rocio, a woman living in a male-headed household described the strategy:

The female heads of household had access to fewer and smaller animals, such as chickens and pigs, while the women and men in the male-headed households often mentioned larger animals as well, such as cows, heifers, or oxen. Ownership of the larger animals was, however, commonly assigned to the men (see Reference Deere, Alvarado and TwymanDeere, Alvarado, and Twyman 2010, for similar findings). Those who had not sold their livestock seemed either to have enough resources to avoid ending up in a food-insecure situation or to have been able to find cash in other ways, such as those men and women who earned an income of some sort. It could also be that they did not have enough to sell without ending up in an even worse situation. This was the impression gained primarily from the female-headed households. The male-headed households in general, and the men in particular, could therefore be said to have had greater capacity to cope with the drought and to turn things around when the opportunity arose.

Both men and women cited informal loans and store credit as ways to cope with losses caused by drought. According to the interviewees, these were more accessible than formal credit, since no collateral was required and no interest had to be paid. On the other hand, they were not as substantial and could therefore only be used for minor consumption purposes, such as to buy food or fodder.

One of the more commonly mentioned consequences of the deteriorating agricultural conditions and lack of job opportunities in the case study area was migration by household members, either to other countries, primarily Costa Rica (consistent with the findings of IFAD 2010), or to urban areas within Nicaragua. This was something both men and women had done, although more often young people did so than the older generation. There are no differences for women and men in Nicaragua’s formal migration rules and regulations, but cultural aspects, primarily regarding the division of labor within households, meant that more of the men interviewed than the women had used migration as an adaptive strategy. Migration seemed to be the activity that had changed the most over time, from being internal, seasonal, and in relatively small numbers, to migration to other countries in substantial numbers. Elisa, one of the female heads of household, told me in our May interview how her husband, when he was alive, had not left the country, “like the young people do today to look for a life,” but only the county in which the case study area is located.

The remittances sent by migrant household members were an important source of income for the interviewees, and for Nicaragua as a whole. According to the 2005 Population and Housing Census, 110 of the 500 households in the case study area contained international migrants, and 80 of these received remittances (INIDE 2008, 11). However, most interviewees, men as well as women, were unsure about when or if their children were going to send money next, or how much they would send. This income source is also dependent on the prevalent norm of sending money back to the family and therefore could not be counted on entirely.

In 2007 community members had organized themselves to convince the municipality to invest in a potable water system to reduce dependence on the river and the dug wells, which had become unreliable. This potable water had also enabled cultivation in the yards, according to some, such as the only man who had a kitchen garden and used the water to grow vegetables all year around. Most of the community members had decided to participate and bear the cost in order to reduce their vulnerability to drought. The cost was around C$60Footnote ⁶ per month for each household for 10m³, an amount some said they were careful not to exceed in order to avoid paying an extra charge of around C$6/m³. A few had not installed it since they lived in a part of the case study area that still got its water from a nearby river or dug wells. Two female heads of household said that they could not afford to pay for the water. One gained access to it anyway by paying a small amount to a neighbor, who gave her and the young woman staying in her household some of theirs. The other, with the help of her daughters, had bought pipes to get access to a well in the community. This water was not enough to wash clothes with, however, forcing her to walk several kilometers to do her laundry.

Very few of the interviewees had left agriculture due to the unreliability of the weather. The former husband of Claudia, a female head of household, had established the community’s small grocery store, which she now ran with the help of her adult son. Claudia said he had done this “to help us,” despite being a farmer, indicating that farming was not sufficient to sustain them. Another man, Juan, had decided to become a cabinetmaker instead, and here it was clear that the drought was the reason behind his decision:

In sum, the actions said to have been taken by both men and women were more to cope with drought in the short term, even if a few more adaptive strategies were also mentioned. Financial capital had been central to the capacity to respond in the short term, since buying food and fodder was the main option. Thus small animals, a resource typically owned by women, and migrated family members, more common in larger, male-headed households, were key.

Responses by the Men

In addition to the changes that had been implemented by both women and men there were some activities that the interviewees talked about as specifically “male” or “female.” Those said to be responses implemented by mainly the men were land management change (such as sowing during the second farming season, the postrera, or using agricultural inputs); access to formal credit; and working off-farm, including seasonal migration.

The first was linked to a change in how the seasons were depicted and characterized, from the familiar to the whimsical, and associated with mistrust and losses of investments in labor, seed, or other inputs when the rains failed. One of the changes in agricultural practice, implemented primarily by the men since agriculture was primarily their domain, was a change in cultivation pattern. What was usually mentioned was either that the primera was delayed from April to May, or that there was no cultivation at all in the primera, since this was the less reliable season and the one with the drier climate almost every year. Over time the practice of farming in the primera had become rare, according to the interviewees. This had left the households dependent on the second farming season for their food security. This was commonly the more secure season, except in the years affected by El Niño.

To adapt to the drier climate in the case study area, men in the households, with the exception of the three female-headed households that did not have an agricultural livelihood, had begun to apply fertilizers, insecticides, and herbicides in the postrera. Interviewees perceived that the change had occurred somewhere between ten and forty years ago, because the soils would otherwise not yield any harvest or the harvest would be destroyed by pests due to a combination of factors, including drought.

To be able to afford the chemicals and to sow, buy animals, or in other ways improve or expand their livelihoods, many of the men said they had taken formal loans, primarily from the National Union of Farmers and Ranchers, and from banks. Since men were most commonly identified as the owners of the land and the houses that, unless one had access to a guarantor, were required as collateral, men had much better capacity to borrow money. Two women in male-headed households and one of the female heads of household were the only women who said they had had access to credit, the latter thanks to having a sister who acted as guarantor. This gendered pattern is also found in the third agricultural census, where 88 percent of the farmers who had received some type of credit in El Sauce Municipality are reported to be men (INIDE 2001).

To cultivate in only one farming season is a drastic measure but one that had made salaried work possible, either in agriculture in other locations or in nonagricultural activities. As a result of the gendered division of labor, it was mostly the men who worked off-farm, but age and health were also important factors. Juan José López Centeno, a representative of the Nicaraguan Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA) in El Sauce, agreed that seasonal male migration was common in the municipality and largely took place for about three months during the primera, due to the high risk associated with cultivating during this season. The men returned for the postrera in an attempt to secure a food supply for the following year.

To work for a salary at the nonfarming time of year was already a strategy in the time of the interviewees’ parents. However, it had increased as an adaptation to the more long-term consequences of drought on agricultural livelihoods. For example, one of the women talked about her eighteen-year-old son who had begun to migrate seasonally to increase his access to cash, a resource which has the potential to minimize food insecurity and negative health impacts, enable repayments of credits and informal loans, and provide opportunities for new investments, such as in seeds or other agricultural inputs.

Generally, the activities undertaken primarily by the men focused on work, agriculture, and direct access to financial capital to be able to enhance their livelihoods and their overall situation. These activities can also be described as proactive, aiming to adapt to the drier climate and not be as vulnerable when the next drought occurs.

Responses by the Women

In comparison, the women seemed to have had less capacity to implement long-term, adaptive changes. To the question of what they would do if another drought occurred, the female heads of household were more likely to express a trust in God:

Hansen (Reference Hansen and Oliver-Smith1986, 242) describes “praying and other rituals” as a coping strategy in a case study of famine in Nigeria. Rather than viewing praying as a conscious strategy in the Nicaraguan case, other than to cope mentally with the situation, the expressions used by the female heads of household are interpreted here as reflecting their perception of their own lack of capacity to do anything about their situation other than to endure (see Reference Segnestam, Simonsson, Rubiano and MoralesSegnestam et al. 2006 for a similar finding from Honduras).

Other literature (see, e.g., Reference Howden, Soussana, Tubiello, Chhetri, Dunlop and MeinkeHowden et al. 2007; Reference Olesen and VernerOlesen 2010) discusses the option of drought-resistant crops. This was only mentioned by the woman who identified herself as a farmer and who had access to credit. In 2009, with the help of a project on sustainable land management in dry areas in Nicaragua organized by INTA and El Sauce Municipality, she had changed to crops known to be drought resistant—pigeon peas, cow peas, and mung beans—in order to “be prepared” and be able to “face what is coming.”

Apart from this exception to the general gendered pattern, the overall impression given by the interviewees was that the women in general, and the female heads of household in particular, had implemented fewer strategies, and strategies requiring much less capacity than those of the men.

Spiraling Up with Adaptation

More adaptive capacity with cultural capital and land tenure

When informal norms, value systems, and traditions in a society put you in a position that gives you access to and control over other resources, you possess cultural capital. From the interviews, it is apparent that men and women had unequal access to cultural capital and therefore perceived themselves as living in a hierarchical society even if they did not use those words explicitly. Other research on gender and women’s situation in Nicaragua demonstrates the influence of patriarchal traditions (e.g., Reference DoreDore 2006), the machismo culture, and “a political climate which is attempting to recover more traditional identities for women” (Reference CupplesCupples 2005, 306), confirming that cultural capital is highly gendered. Traditional norms on the view of women and their roles in society as mothers and those responsible for the household have not changed much over time, despite other transformations the country has gone through and the “Sandinista rhetoric about the need for the emancipation of women” (Reference Fernández PoncelaFernández Poncela 1996, 62). This means that the division of other forms of capital as well as the division of labor in the case study area were also highly gendered, which leads to gender-differentiated vulnerability to drought, as I discuss below.

One resource that was affected by the unequal access to cultural capital was land, a form of natural capital central to adaptive capacity. Figure 4 shows the upward spiral of adaptation, from cultural and human (H1) capital moving upward to the other types of capital. Note that the upward spiral obviously has a limit due to such things as the aridity and accessibility of land. In Nicaragua, women’s access to land is limited. The 1981 agrarian reform law, amended in 1986, stated that the title to land went exclusively to the applicant—commonly the man—and not to the family. A law stipulating equal rights for women and men to receive land titles and prioritizing women in access to credit was introduced in 1995. In 1997 the principle of joint title for couples, whether married or not, further strengthened women’s rights, albeit only in cases where land is distributed through agrarian reform (Reference GalánGalán 1998; Reference CeciCeci 2007; USAID 2011).

Figure 4: Spiraling up with adaptation.

*The downward spirals resulting from the negative impacts of credits, agrochemicals, or migration are not included in the figure.

**To buy food and fodder was described by the interviewees in terms of coping, not adaptation.

Although women’s political capital had increased through Nicaragua’s formal attempts to make land tenure more gender neutral, this had not brought about any changes in the case study area. The women in male-headed households all said it was their husband who owned the land. A majority of the female heads of household said that they owned or borrowed land to cultivate, although in all but one case, who at times borrowed one manzana (0.7 hectare), the land was less than one manzana or only the plot of land where the house stood. In general, the men owned more land, albeit that there were big differences here too—from only the plot of land the house stood on to 120 manzanas, but most commonly between 8 and 15 manzanas. The bias in land tenure is also evident elsewhere in Nicaragua (Reference GalánGalán 1998, 42; INIDE 2005, 15–16). One explanation could be that the legal framework on joint titling is mainly about agrarian reform, since only one interviewee had received land in that way (the rest had either inherited the land from their fathers or bought it themselves). A significant explanatory factor was also customary norms and practices, which had led the women who were not born in the community to move to their husbands’ homes on marriage. Similar norms created expectations that the man would be the one to apply for land tenure, or the one to own the large animals (N1 in Figure 4). The one exception to this, where the man had moved to the case study area “to look for something better,” was a case where the wife owned the land.

All the interviewees said that owning the land made a difference. One reason was the ability to decide what to do with the land, as Francisco noted in October 2008: “Of course there is a difference because here I can’t decide directly, I can’t say some things here because [the land] is not mine.” Another reason was the positive effect of the care and management of the land, which households only invested in once the land was theirs. Milagros described this using a proverb in our October interview: “[To improve land that is not your own] is like building an altar for somebody else to give Mass.” A couple of the women also brought up the aspect of future security in relation to owning land, here in the words of one of them:

Interviewer: And when you are married and the husband is the owner, do you think there is a difference to when you are the owner?

Yamileth: Of course.

Interviewer: Why?

Yamileth: Because if we separate, we split up, he is the owner and if he doesn’t give me anything, there is nothing you can do. (October 9, 2008)

Another advantage mentioned was that ownership of land made access to credits possible, since land was required as collateral (F3 in Figure 4). Even though there are no laws discriminating against women’s access to credit in Nicaragua (CEDAW 2005), the interviewees said it was mainly men who could access loans. This bias can also be seen in official statistics (Reference Agurto, Guido, Alaníz, Acevedo, Sandino and MichellAgurto et al. 2008). Men’s financial capital had enabled the male heads of households to invest in physical and natural capital, such as water systems, chemicals, seed, and animals. Their capacity to adapt to and cope with drought was therefore increased (going from F3 and upward in Figure 4). However, several described how a debtor could be put in a position where he was forced to migrate or sell assets such as animals, which were an important part of the livelihood. The use of credit in such situations became a maladaptation. Whether the result becomes an upward or a downward spiral depends on what the money is used for and whether the investment pays off. In the case study area, the latter is often dependent on the climate as the money is commonly invested in agricultural activities. Credit was therefore considered a potentially effective but insecure strategy.

Similarly, the use of agricultural inputs in the case study area was a highly complex issue. Both men and women emphasized the need for chemicals to get something out of the land. At the same time, the increased use of agricultural inputs was recognized by one male and a couple of the female interviewees as a maladaptation leading to downward spirals due to the impacts on their natural and human capital, resulting in less capacity to withstand dry spells. A few of the farmers (all men except for one), though, mentioned that they had received support from INTA to begin to use organic fertilizers and herbicides in order to reduce the negative impacts on land and water. This increase in human capital through training thus improved the adaptive capacity.

In sum, as Ceci (Reference Ceci2007, 89) concludes, “While statutory reforms, and legal rules and regulations (where these exist), guaranteeing equal rights for men and women have in theory promoted women’s access to land, in practice cultural factors persist in obstructing rural women from gaining equal access to productive resources.”

Time may be a factor, too. Both women’s land tenure rights and access to credit are relatively recent phenomena in Nicaragua, having been introduced as late as the 1980s and more generally only in the second half of the 1990s. The same seems to be true for houses and large animals—physical and natural capital that can be used as collateral or sold. These are owned by the men in the case study area, as in other areas of rural Nicaragua (UN-HABITAT 2005, 34). That the men were the owners increased gender inequality in access to credit and therefore in adaptive capacity, and can also be said to have become a barrier to women forming social capital with those organizations that offer formal loans, thus reducing their adaptive capacity. In general, the women were left with fewer options in terms of natural-capital-based strategies and subsequently had less capacity to achieve an upward spiral (see Figure 4).

The Spirals of Coping: Short-Term Upward and Long-Term Downward

The need declared by both men and women to begin to ration their food intake demonstrates the risk of a downward spiral if this has to continue for any length of time, or if it is a recurrent response to a drought situation. Those who said they had had to take such drastic action indicated a definite lack of capacity to adapt and reduce their vulnerability.

Most of the actions implemented to cope with the food insecurity caused by drought (e.g., buying food or seeking store credit) can, nonetheless be seen as attempting to turn a downward spiral into an upward one by increasing the household’s food security (see the short-term upward spiral in Figure 5). However, over time several coping strategies, such as selling animals or hunting, are likely to become erosive due to the risk of downward spirals from a decrease in the stock of natural capital (domesticated or wild animals) to a reduction in human capital (the negative impacts on health and ability to work) (see the long-term downward spiral in Figure 5). One of the female heads of household explained that since she had sold her chickens in time of need, she no longer had any left to sell, leaving the household with no other financial capital than the remittances her children sent whenever they could. Like the maladaptations mentioned above, these strategies risk limiting the choices available in the future, as is also suggested by Legesse (Reference Legesse, Havnevik, Negash and Beyene2006, 79).

Figure 5: The spirals of coping.

The other ways for the interviewees to secure money to purchase food and fodder were to rely on store credit, loans or gifts from friends and neighbors, or on remittances from migrating household members. Adriana, one of the women in a male-headed household, described the dependence on remittances (May 17, 2008):

Unlike selling animals, an intensified use of remittances does not have to lead to a worse situation since, so far, there had been a relatively continuous inflow of such financial capital. Instead it opens up greater possibilities for an upward spiral as described above. However, this was more likely to be achieved by those with large families, leaving the female heads of household no other option than to sell their animals and with relatively little access to financial capital.

The unequal distribution of cultural capital and the resulting social hierarchy is clearly significant for the interviewees’ vulnerability. The analysis of the spirals of increasing or decreasing capacity exposes the interplay between cultural capital, the gender division of labor, and access to the other types of capital that leaves the women with less control over their own situation, and thus with less capacity to exert influence and to be able to invest in and change their own or their households’ livelihoods to make them less vulnerable to drought. Based on the above analysis of the importance, for one’s adaptive capacity, of opportunities and ability to work, one conclusion that can be drawn is that short-term coping, with its high risk of negative impacts on health and ability to work, influences adaptive capacity, and thus risks resulting in increased vulnerability in the long term (erosive coping).

Interviewees said both men and women had implemented these actions in order to cope with drought, and it might therefore be assumed that both groups had experienced the same increase in vulnerability. However, the men in particular were also said to have implemented several more long-term adaptive strategies in response to the changing climate. This was more unusual for the women in general and the female heads of households in particular, indicating that men had a greater capacity to reduce their drought vulnerability over time.

The importance of access to land is also obvious, which other vulnerability studies of the region and elsewhere also highlight (Reference Wangari, Thomas-Slayter, Rocheleau, Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter and WangariWangari, Thomas-Slayter, and Rocheleau 1996; Reference Segnestam, Simonsson, Rubiano and MoralesSegnestam et al. 2006). Those who are either landless or own very little land are, together with female-headed households, identified as the most vulnerable households by Oxfam (1998) in its assessment of the drought in Nicaragua and Honduras caused by the 1997 El Niño. As described above, the land politics in Nicaragua do not restrict access to political capital by men or women with regard to the possibility of owning land. In reality, however, land tenure is yet another issue identified in the interviews where cultural capital plays a central role, due to a culture that has for centuries perceived “the women [to be] of the house and the men of the land” (INIDE 2005, 114).

The available literature does not commonly use forms of capital to understand the details of the three dimensions of vulnerability (exposure, coping capacity, and adaptive capacity), or as an integrative framework for the analysis of gender and vulnerability to climate change. The application of this integrative framework to the case of vulnerability to drought in a rural community in Nicaragua’s zona seca demonstrates the value of using a multidimensional perspective to analyze the socioeconomic and cultural contexts that construct the opportunities people have to reduce vulnerability in the short and long term.

The framework is also more transparent, without being too simplistic, than many of those that exist in the literature, which are often criticized for being too complicated or difficult to operationalize, or for overlooking variables that are vital for a vulnerability analysis, such as gender or institutions. Finally, the findings on the roles of cultural capital and political capital contribute to an enhanced understanding of these “particularly challenging organising concept[s]” (Reference Booth, Holland, Lanjouw and HerbertBooth Lanjouw, and Herbert 1998, 100).