Gender, deliberation, and natural resource governance: Experimental evidence from Malawi
Initiatives to combat climate change often strive to include women’s voices, but there is limited evidence on how this feature influences program design or its benefits for women. We examine the causal effect of women’s representation in climate-related deliberations using the case of community-managed forests in rural Malawi. We run a lab-in-the-field experiment that randomly varies the gender composition of six-member groups asked to privately vote, deliberate, then privately vote again on their preferred policy to combat local over-harvesting.