While applauding the steps taken by indigenous peoples for the recognition of their rights over their territories, Dianne Rocheleau, Barbara Thomas Slayter and David Edmonds, researchers at Clark University, USA, have drawn attention to the need for a gender-based analysis of how spaces are used, valued and struggled over in different cultures.

In a recent paper on gendered resource mapping (Cultural Survival Quarterly, Winter 1995), the researchers say that the lack of recognition of women's spaces and their rights has often led to land reforms that have disenfranchised them. In Kenya, for example, land tenure reforms deprived women of access to areas where firewood, water, fodder and medicinal plants were available. This increases the burden of labour on women, while important sources of income and subsistence are eliminated.

As men and women often have different daily routines and experiences, their resource management skills and environmental knowledge vary. Not taking the knowledge and experiences of women into consideration while mapping means ignoring an important source of cultural and ecological information. In a mapping exercise in Kenya's Machakos district, it was found that while a single tree may have a single male owner, it may be cared for by a woman 'borrowing' the land on which the tree is grown. The tree provides fruits to her and to another woman who lived on that plot when the tree was planted, and also provides firewood to all the other women in the community. These multipurpose uses would only emerge in a representation that recognises multiple, overlapping rights and obligations.