Katherine Snyder

• Ph.D. anthropology, Yale University
• Managing Director at University of Arizona

This chapter examines the trajectory of analytical frameworks and gender tools intended to understand and address the challenges and inequities that shape women’s engagement in agriculture. We argue that while a focus on tools in many agricultural development projects can help to identify barriers faced by women, it often does little to address the...

Public sector crop improvement for development programmes aims to produce varieties tailored to the needs of smallholder farmers and their environments. Understanding how social heterogeneity, including gender, drives trait preferences is essential to ensure that crop improvement objectives meet farmers’ and stakeholder demands. This requires an in...

This chapter focuses on smallholder agriculture and livelihoods in north-central Tanzania. It traces changes in agricultural production and asset ownership in one community over a twenty-eight-year period. Over this period, national development policies and agriculture programmes have moved from socialism to neoliberal approaches. Using a combinati...

Constructing longitudinal research has, for all the authors, entailed long, and sometimes difficult, sometimes funny, always moving, personal stories. This chapter explains how the studies were conducted, both the original research and the subsequent revisits, and how the researchers coped with having to conduct them. The authors of this Epilogue c...

This paper focuses on smallholder agriculture and livelihoods in north-central Tanzania. It traces changes in agricultural production and asset ownership in one community over a 28 year period. Over this period, national development policies and agriculture programs have moved from socialism to neo-liberal approaches. Using a combination of qualita...

Recent scholarship has contributed important insights into the political dynamics inherent in the process of making and showing participatory videos. As a research method and an instrument for social change, participatory video has both potential and limitations for overturning the power dynamics embedded within research and in development processe...

Land degradation is a critical challenge to sustainable development. This paper examines factors that shape farmer decision-making around sustainable land management (SLM) practices in Tanzania and Malawi. It seeks to understand the contradictions that often exist between what research recommends, projects promote and donors invest in and what SLM...

The University of Arizona chapter of Engineers Without Borders USA has faced multiple challenges involving community participation in rural development, in the Andean community of Marquirivi, Bolivia, both in rural design and in community participation. Despite successful construction of a shower house in 2014, the EWB-USA UA team experience with c...

SUMMARY The yield gap has arisen again as a focus for agricultural research to ensure food security and economic growth for farmers around the world. To examine this renewed interest, we carried out a review of key literature in the field of yield gap analysis to identify important gaps in research and analysis. In so doing, both the complexities i...

The Evaluating Land Management Options (ELMO) tool uses participatory techniques to assist in the selection, planning and evaluation of sustainable land management (SLM) interventions. ELMO has been developed to overcome the gaps in current socioeconomic and biophysical research methods, which describe and classify the effects of land degradation a...

The role of land registration in reducing rural poverty has been debated for several decades. This article analyses the impacts of land registration on: land rentals, security of land tenure, disputes over land, use of credit facilities from formal financial institutions, and gender access and control over land. Our findings are based on data colle...

Innovation systems thinking is increasingly influencing approaches to sustainable agricultural development in developing world contexts. This represents a shift away from technology transfer towards recognition that agricultural change entails complex interactions among multiple actors and a range of technical, social and institutional factors. One...

This article discusses how decentralisation policies are enacted in the planning and implementation of natural resource management interventions in rural Ethiopia. A key element of decentralisation policy is the emphasis on greater participation by local communities. Drawing on qualitative research conducted with government staff and farmers, this...

Innovation platforms (IPs) are increasingly popular as mechanisms for enabling sustainable agricultural development in developing world contexts. This is due to growing recognition that agricultural change entails complex interactions between multiple actors and must take into account a range of technical, social and institutional factors. The Nile...

In this paper, we will explore the ways in which sustainable intensification interventions often overlook fundamental social dynamics in rural landscapes. We provide evidence of the underlying social, political and environmental contexts that affect farmers' land-use decisions. While there are numerous initiatives to promote a Green Revolution for...

Fish and other aquatic animals contribute to the food security of citizens of developing countries, both as a source of income and as a component of healthy diets, yet fishing is not currently captured in most integrated household surveys. This sourcebook provides essential technical guidance on the design of statistical modules and questionnaires...

Lake Chilwa produces between zero and 24,000 metric tons of fish per year, making it one of the most productive but variable lakes in Africa. The size of the lake varies seasonally and among years, sometimes drying completely. Its surrounding wetland and floodplain provide habitat for a diversity of birds and economically valuable grasses and reeds...

This paper examines community-based tourism among Maasai communities in Tanzania in the context of national policies that have increasingly devolved control over natural resources to local communities. It focuses on economic revenues generated from tourism growth, their distribution to village communities and the constraints and conflicts resulting...

Most research on gender difference or inequities in capture fisheries and aquaculture in Africa and the Asia-Pacific focuses on the gender division of labour. Emerging research on globalization, market changes, poverty and trends in gendered employment within this sector reveals the need to move beyond this narrow perspective. If gleaning and post-...

Key Messages: Women's involvement in fisheries is more significant than often assumed. According to current estimates from nine major fish producing countries, they comprise 47% of the labor force in small-scale capture fisheries-related activities, including pre-and post-harvesting work. Their current engagement is shaped by rapidly dwindling fish...

Trees, Land and Labour (World Bank Environment Paper No. 4). By DeweesP. A.. Washington DC: The World Bank† (1993), pp. 52, £6.25, US$6.95. ISBN 0-8213-2733-X. - Volume 31 Issue 3 - Katherine A. Snyder

Focusing on events in a rural village in Tanzania during 2001–02, this paper examines the changing nature of state/society relations in Tanzania. Drawing on experience from previous years of fieldwork in the early 1990s, it becomes apparent that villagers are beginning to change the way they engage with the state. These new approaches are framed in...

This article explores the role of women's marches among the Iraqw in rural Tanzania. It focuses on the role of mothers in gender identity and how this role gives women the moral authority to act collectively. It shows how gender roles have been redefined in the colonial and postcolonial era. In particular, it focuses on the effects of the impositio...

In this detailed historical ethnography, Dorothy Hodgson investigates why more Maasai women than Maasai men have joined the Roman Catholic Church in Tanzania. She analyzes mission journals, archives, and other historical documents and uses data from fieldwork she conducted in three Maasai communities, interviewing missionaries, catechists, women, a...

This article examines forms of personhood and identity among the Iraqw of Tanzania. It explores how ideas of personhood have changed from the precolonial era to the present as the Iraqw have been incorporated into the wider regional, national, and global political economy. Drawing on the literature from Melanesia, it investigates how ideas of the i...

Chapungu: The Bird That Never Drops a Feather. Male and Female Identities in an African Society. Anita Jacobson-Widding. Stockholm: Elanders Gotab, 2000. 525 pp., maps, photographs, glossary, appendixes, index.

This article explores local understandings of and experience with democracy in an Iraqw community in northern Tanzania. At independence, President Julius Nyerere in his development of a one-party state, argued that democracy in this new nation state would be modelled on that which is found in indigenous, pre-colonial political systems. In the Iraqw...

Anthropological theories of religion have demonstrated the role of ritual in supporting structures of power and authority. This article focuses on the relationship between ritual, ideology and authority over time in an Iraqw community. The analysis incorporates attention to changes in the wider political-economic context in which ritual is performe...

This paper explores the variety of factors which influence Iraqw fanners' land-use strategies in northern Tanzania. Based on archival research, oral history, and detailed field research, this study illustrates the ways in which access to and availability of resources through social networks and markets over time are critical to farmers' decisions a...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Yale University, 1993. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 320-334). Microfiche.

While an overwhelming majority of sub-Saharan African countries exhibit serious weaknesses in statistics pertaining to crop and livestock sectors, the deficiencies in terms of nationallyrepresentative data on the fishery sector are even more acute. The very little data available on the sector are essentially derived from case studies of selected fi...