Gender and Sustainable Livelihoods in Urban Honiara

This chapter explores livelihood and food security challenges experienced by women in the city of Honiara, Solomon Islands. It focuses on the potential for women to maintain subsistence gardening practices in peri-urban and urban environments in order to increase their own food sovereignty. Women in Honiara, and Solomon Islands more broadly, are engaged in practices ensuring they are determining their food and nutritional needs, how to meet these needs, and doing so in ways that are sustainable and locally oriented. They are practices of food growing, consumption, and exchange that defy the ever-increasing and convergent export-oriented neo-liberal market-based development and development solutions. The chapter draws from research in Honiara of this increasing convergence among development aid actors in Solomon Islands. I make the argument that the contemporary development gaze does not accommodate urban lives, or does so in homogenizing ways. Moreover, the development challenges experienced specifically by women in these small, often forgotten, urban spaces are seldom specified in any part of a dominant development imagination, rendering them only as bare life or stick-figure subjects of so-called development ‘solutions’ (Sylvester, 1994, 2006). In exploring some of the challenges facing women in Honiara and examining the ways women have responded to these challenges, particularly through the work of a local NGO, Kastom Gaden, I propose that new development imaginings and practices need to be fostered, ones that take into account hybridity and participatory spaces for women in urban and peri-urban spaces.