ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between gender, water resources, and fishing livelihoods through three case studies in South and Southeast Asia: the Vembanad Lake region in Kerala State, India; Trincomalee, Sri Lanka; and Banteay Meanchey province in Cambodia. In South and Southeast Asia, fishing-based livelihoods are characterized by distinct gendered divisions of labor that situate men and women in water access rights regimes in different and often disparate ways. Women often lack formalized rights of access to water resources on which their fishing and gleaning livelihoods depend. Further, they are also often excluded from fisher organizations and water resource governance institutions that could represent and ensure their rights. When economic development or ecological change unfold, women are thus impacted by such developments in particular ways. The three case studies collectively reveal how urbanization, commercial real estate development, pollution, agricultural development, and military occupation, have reconfigured water resource access rights in ways that are gendered and further shaped by class, caste, language, ethnicity, religion, and age.
