Livestock Innovations, Social Norms, and Women’s Empowerment in the Global South

Reviewer 1 Comments

Authors’ responses

1. It would be valuable to include some explanation of why the authors select the Sachs and Santarius (2007) framework for this research, and to provide a critical comparison between this framework and other others, perhaps especially other gender in agriculture frameworks. See below for some examples.

Alkire, S., Meinzen-Dick, R., Peterman, A., Quisumbing, A., Seymour, G., & Vaz, A. (2013). The women’s empowerment in agriculture index. World development, 52, 71-91.

Johnson, N. L., Kovarik, C., Meinzen-Dick, R., Njuki, J., & Quisumbing, A. (2016). Gender, assets, and agricultural development: Lessons from eight projects. World Development, 83, 295-311.

Thanks for helping us sharpen our argument on the choice of framework. We added the following paragraph: ‘The Women’s Empowerment in Livestock Index (WELI) (Galiè et al 2018), for example, like the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) (Alkire et al 2013), measures women’s empowerment across three dimensions of agency (intrinsic, instrumental and collective). Given our aim to explore the ways in which livestock innovations were reported to affect women’s empowerment, we were interested in looking beyond an exclusive focus on agency and its quantitative assessment and rather, adopt a broad conceptualization of empowerment that would allow us to capture it as a whole process of change. The framework by Johnson et al (2016) on projects’ ability to ‘reach’, ‘benefit’ and ‘empower’ women, was also considered not adequate to capture how the process of change in empowerment through livestock can unfold. We therefore built our conceptual framework on key broad components that are necessary for empowerment - as self-determination - to actualize.’ (page 3)

2. Related to the above comment, what literature gap is this research responding to?

Thank you for helping us clarify the knowledge gap our article addresses. Our research problem now reads: While the body of evidence on women’s empowerment and livestock is growing, much still needs to be understood about the ways in which the two are interlinked: ‘can livestock provide empowering opportunities for women? How?’. Understanding the role gender norms play in the link between livestock and women’s empowerment is equally important because only by addressing the root causes of gender-based disadvantage (i.e. gender norms) can sustainable change towards gender equitable livestock development be achieved.’ (page 2)  

3. Line 312-13 – This sentence construction is confusing. What does it mean for “livestock” and “women’ recognition as livestock keepers” as associated? And that doesn’t actually seem to be the objective of this section. Note also that there is also a typo in this sentence (“women’”).

Thanks for noticing a mistake in the sentence which now reads: ‘In this section, we assess the ways in which empowerment and women’s recognition as livestock keepers, are associated.’

 4. Please carefully proofread the paper for minor typos and for unclear sentences. Few examples: missing commas after “Unsurprisingly” (lines 349, 719), 663-664, missing parenthesis on line 722.

We have proof-read the paper and fixed typos.

5. The paper doesn’t discussion women’s time constraints, which are often identified in the literature as key challenges to gender empowerment in agriculture. Did the author find this to be true in their data, and how do these factors fit into the framework? Would time be categorized as a resource, or is it reflected in opportunity? Or perhaps recognition leads to time availability?

We thank the reviewer for this important remark. We have added a paragraph on time implications associated to the mentioned innovations in the opportunity section of the findings, and in the abstract. However, we were unable to delve deeper on whether time is considered as a resource or opportunity by women and to explore the association with women’s empowerment as we did not collect data on that.

Reviewer 2 Comments

Authors’ responses

There is no argument presented for choosing the village/country.

Page 5 clarifies the selection criteria of GENNOVATE: ‘Sampling in GENNOVATE was purposive and guided by maximum diversity pro-cedures (Miles et al., 2014). The sampling frame for community selection focused on four variables: high or low gender gaps, and high or low economic dynamism’. 

We have clarified in the paper why Talar was chosen for in-depth analysis as it showcases in practice how interdependent factors of recognition, opportunities, resources, and decision-making interact to enable women’s empowerment through livestock as well as the synergies between different interventions.

The article can be improved by citing references (for instance, official reports) showing the results of livestock on women's empowerment. Also, alternatives to livestock should be provided and discussed in relation with women empowerment.

We have added references to literature exploring the connection between livestock and women’s empowerment in the Discussion e.g. in relation to dairy cooperatives; time; decision-making etc. Such evidence is, however, scant and non-systematic. For this reason, we are currently finalizing a scoping review of livestock interventions and women’s empowerment that we hope will provide benchmarking data on the topic.

The connection between the theme of the article and sustainability should be presented. The authors should include in the article a research question/hypothesis/objective. Afterwards, the discussion should be conducted keeping in mind the target set. In the discussion section it is required to explicitly link back to the literature review.

We have clarified the link to Sustainability throughout the paper. Thanks for pointing this out.

We have included the following research question: ‘While the body of evidence on women’s empowerment and livestock is growing, much still needs to be understood about the ways in which the two are interlinked: ‘can livestock provide empowering opportunities for women? How?’. Understanding the role gender norms play in the link between livestock and women’s empowerment is equally important because only by addressing the root causes of gender-based disadvantage (i.e. gender norms) can sustainable change towards gender equitable livestock development be achieved.’ (page 2)  

The Discussion now includes more references (11 references are added).

It is necessary to compare and contrast the findings with those that already exist in the literature. What is different? What is the same? How does the study add to better explanations of previously identified phenomena? How does it for example solve existing contradictions in findings of other studies? Or, how does it explain previously unexplainable findings? This is arguably the most important section of the paper. It needs to be strongly theorizing oriented so that it becomes clear what the study contributes to the theory. Right now, there are less than five sources cited in the discussion section.

We have revised the Discussion to compare our findings with the literature and show what new information our work provides.