More Women, More Voice—But No Policy Shift in Malawi's Forest Deliberations

Examines whether increasing women's representation changes how communities talk about and decide climate-related forest policies in Malawi.

🔎 Where and How The Experiment Ran

A lab-in-the-field experiment was conducted with community-managed forest users in Malawi. Six-member deliberative groups were formed and the gender composition was randomly varied. Each group was asked to deliberate and recommend policies to address local overharvesting.

📊 What Was Measured and Observed

• Random variation of group gender composition in six-person groups
• Measures of individual influence during deliberation and participants' assessments of others' influence
• Content of deliberations (topics and proposed solutions) and final group decisions

🔑 Key Findings

• Any given woman had relatively more influence in group deliberations when women comprised a larger share of the group.
• That increase in women's influence was driven largely by men's assessments of how influential women were.
• Women's presence shifted the substance of discussions toward solutions for which women have socially recognized expertise, notably cooking-related practices and tree replanting.
• Despite these shifts in who spoke and what was discussed, women and men showed similar policy preferences on deforestation, and the gender composition did not meaningfully change final group decisions.

⚖️ Why It Matters

The results show that greater female representation alters the dynamics and content of climate deliberations—raising women’s relative influence and bringing different solutions into view—but do not guarantee different policy outcomes. This nuance is important for expectations about how descriptive representation translates into substantive change in local climate governance.