Using the Social Relations Approach to capture complexity in women's empowerment: using gender analysis in the Fish on Farms project in Cambodia

Gender-analysis frameworks and tools provide a pre-designed methodology which can be used for the purposes of monitoring, evaluation, and learning, as well as for research undertaken for other reasons by planners, practitioners, and academic researchers. This article focuses on the use of Naila Kabeer's concept, the Social Relations Approach, to frame a baseline gender analysis of a food security project undertaken in Cambodia. The Fish on Farms project was designed to establish evidence of the impact of homestead food production, which included fishponds, on nutritional status, food security, food intake, and livelihoods. Integral to the objectives was the need to understand how the project activities affect gender equality and the empowerment of women. The Social Relations Approach was chosen to explore gender relations in context, and to understand better the subjective meanings of empowerment and the pathways to it.