Co-Management Approach And Its Impact On Women’s Livelihood Strategies: Lawachara Protected Forest Area Perspective

Women’s position has not changed greatly in the patriarchal society of Bangladesh. The cultural interpretation of social practices creates a lot of obstacles for women to survive properly. Most of the time conventional development projects and policies prefer men’s issue to ensure their rights and opportunities rather than women’s as human being. Today’s socio-economic political situation has also affected poor people’s livelihood improvement especially for the poorest of the poor group. Among them, forest areas women are living in the most vulnerable situation to meet their livelihood. They have to face unthinkable problem to maintain their livelihood strategies as they do not have enough food, education, voice, power to exercise their capacity to bring some changes in both public and private places. To improve forest areas people’s livelihood strategy USAID/Bangladesh is playing a very significant role in association with states initiatives. They identified some areas as protected areas to take innovative development projects named co-management approach to development local people’s sustainable development. Lawachara is one of the oldest protected forest areas, under co-management approach in Bangladesh and USAID/Bangladesh has already launched different types of strategy to improve local people’s livelihood and as well as natural resource development. Through comanagement approach women in Lawachara are now really having some positive changes regarding their livelihood improvement but still there are some problems regarding policies, implementation strategies, monitoring and evaluation strategies. Greater recognition of this problem will be helpful for women in Lawachara to improve their livelihood strategies by incorporating gender issues into different mechanisms. In this regard this study examines the co-management approach from gender perspective to analyze the improvement of women’s livelihood strategy.