Women engaged and seeking to become involved in innovative agriculture and innovations in rural areas
General public/civic society
Academia and researchers

Exploring issues of gender, rural development and farming: Concepts and ideas

Looking for new ideas to explore issues of gender, rural development and farming from a fresh angle? Then take a look at the FLIARA Conceptual Framework that provides a comprehensive resource.

Improving understanding and opening opportunities

Better understanding of how women engage in innovative sustainable practices on farms and in rural areas is crucial to opening new opportunities for rural women throughout the EU. The FLIARA Conceptual Framework acts as a set of guidelines for the FLIARA project, setting boundaries, directing analysis, and identifying key aspects missing from current gender and innovation thinking.

Using new ideas to fill knowledge gaps

To shape how FLIARA fills these knowledge gaps a comprehensive co-created conceptual framework was developed that includes six perspectives at its basis to ground the framework. Among the ideas and concepts included in the Conceptual Framework you will find:

Details of the six perspectives (gender, rural, resilience, sustainability, innovation, policy and governance). Across the six perspectives there are 30 concept notes that take a deep dive into a range of specific concepts from gender equality and anti-feminism to rural development and positive discrimination.

A flexible framework is outlined for examining and understanding how female-led innovations can initiate progress towards gender equality and sustainability in rural areas. This includes the need to reflect on the realities of different rural areas, as well as not just see resilience as a positive thing, but can take good and bad forms.

The idea of ‘female-led innovation journeys’ as a way to understand and unpack the different steps that women take to realise and develop their innovations is detailed. The journey can be understood as starting with aspirations, moving into a decision to act and then building the innovation. Further on in the journey innovations may also scale in different ways, such as scaling-up,

A series of hypotheses are outlined that are potential leverage points for improving gender equality and rural sustainability. These include ‘tweaking policy and governance’ and ‘reimagining sustainability and equality’. Leverage points are potentially powerful areas of change that aim to get at the root causes of problems