Beyond 'Participation': Institutionalizing Indigenous Agricultural Knowledge in MENA Climate Policy

Abstract:

This article critiques the technocratic orientation of climate policy in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), which sidelines Indigenous Agricultural Knowledge (IAK) held by rural women. While donor-driven responses emphasize mechanization and innovation, they ignore feminist, embodied, and ecologically embedded practices that women have sustained for generations, such as seed conservation and water-harvesting techniques. The exclusion of IAK reflects more profound epistemic injustices, where women's knowledge is dismissed as folklore and tokenistic participation fails to influence decision-making. Through case studies from Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco, the article highlights how rural women resist dominant models and adapt through locally rooted, low-cost methods. It proposes pathways for institutionalizing IAK in national policies, such as participatory mapping, inclusive extension systems, and community-managed seed banks. Rather than symbolic inclusion, the article advocates for practical and systemic changes that validate rural women's expertise as a right and a strategy for achieving sustainable and equitable climate resilience in the MENA region.

Introduction

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region faces a precarious due to intersecting climate, food, and inequality crises. Policy prescriptions and international donors increasingly promote technological innovation as the route to resilience, leaving behind a more fundamental form of knowledge: the indigenous agricultural experience of rural women. This neglect is not only a policy failure, but it is also a form of structural violence. This article argues that the indigenous agricultural knowledge (IAK) held by rural women in the MENA region is a vital yet systematically excluded corpus of ecological science. Redeploying this knowledge is crucial for adaptation to climate change and challenging the epistemic hierarchies that sustain gendered dispossession.

Climate Stress and the Vulnerability of Technocratic Governance

The MENA region is at the forefront of global climate disruption, where temperatures rise at twice the global average. Due to droughts, erratic rainfall, and land degradation, agricultural productivity will dramatically decrease. Governments have responded by doubling down on techno-centric agricultural models centered on mechanization, monoculture, and external inputs. These responses are often guided by donor requirements and private sector imperatives that do not consider the variety of ecological conditions within the region, further entrenching dependence on global input markets.

This technocratic approach does not perceive agriculture as a socio-political space where questions of knowledge, land, and power come into play. The subjugation of Indigenous women's knowledge is a product of a political economy organized to devalue non-western, non-male, non-elite knowledge.

Indigenous Agricultural Knowledge (IAK): Feminist, Embodied and Politically Silenced

The IAK in MENA, although generally gendered, is also passed down through generations of women's experiential practices with soil, seed, and water work. Women play a crucial role in conserving agrobiodiversity and responding to climate volatility. In Tunisia, for example, rural women manage jessour systems (stone terraces) to conserve water and facilitate agricultural activities in arid lands. Amazigh women preserve heirloom conservation seed systems in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco to provide genetic diversity for improved food security under varying environmental conditions.

Although valuable to the environment, such understanding faces a multitude of threats: patriarchal land-tenure regimes, rural youth migration, and donor-driven modernization. The absence of women's IAK in formal planning documents is symptomatic of a deeper epistemic hierarchy that prioritizes technocratic knowledge at the expense of vernacular ways of knowing.

The Epistemic Injustice of the Development Paradigm

Epistemic injustice involves silencing marginalized perspectives from informing and authorizing understanding systems. This is particularly relevant for rural women in the MENA, whose knowledge is often considered “folklore” or anecdotal in development discourse. Even within participation processes, women are frequently included as tokens in consultative roles, with limited power to influence decisions made regarding the allocation of resources and the design of policies.

The implications are critical: adaptation approaches that ignore local knowledge are often poorly suited, ecologically unsound, or socially contentious. Without epistemic recognition, climate resilience planning becomes a source rather than a solution to injustices.

Case Studies: Resistance and Adaptation as Counter-Narratives

In Egypt's Nubian communities, women have revitalized Nile-related agricultural calendars to adjust their activities according to the varying seasons induced by dam-related infrastructures. They are working through composting and rotation planting to forestall homogeneous cultivation dominated by chemical monoculture methods, as national agribusiness policies recommend.

These practices are not just adaptive; they are acts of epistemological resistance. They provide integrated, low-cost, eco-embedded modalities that complement state- and market-centric models.

Beyond Inclusion: Toward Transformative Policies

Therefore, MENA countries will need to approach the integration of IAK into climate and agricultural policy through a pragmatic, incremental process that aligns with available institutional capacities and local political dynamics. Such overarching empowerment statements should be replaced and, in some cases, superseded by practical measures to help enable rural women to have a meaningful stake in knowledge preservation and agricultural planning.

First, they can model ministries of agriculture and initiate participatory mapping exercises to incorporate women's traditional knowledge of practices and their agroecological knowledge at the local level. These projects could be funded through small grants and technical collaboration with universities or NGOs that have experience in community-based research.

Second, national agricultural extension systems should trial inclusive programs that formalize the recognition of experienced rural women as resource persons or trainers. This can be institutionalized by working in collaboration with women's associations or cooperatives rather than making piecemeal interventions.

Third, rather than attempting to achieve comprehensive legal change from the outset, develop national protective laws that permit community-managed seed banks and agreements at the local level regarding land access and stewardship. These bottom-up approaches can serve as pilot projects for more ambitious policy plans in the future.

Lastly, donors and development agencies should revisit their funding criteria to reward projects that demonstrate local consultation, intergenerational knowledge transfer, and biodiversity conservation. Minor changes to project design, rather than complete overhauls, can result in more widespread institutional change over time.

Conclusion

The urgency of climate change in the MENA region requires more than just technical fixes; it necessitates reimagining who the knowledge holders and decision-makers are in agriculture. Rural women, typically excluded from institutionalized governance yet endowed with a wealth of ecological knowledge, have created effective place-based solutions in the face of environmental stress. It is not coincidental but rather a result of established policy architectures and gendered hierarchies that have increasingly devalued experiential and community-embedded knowledge.

As this article has demonstrated, including IAK in national and regional plans is not only ecologically sustainable but also socially equitable. There are practical inroads, including documentation and piloting extension programs, supporting community seed banks, and adjusting donor metrics. It is now our job to translate that insight into policy with modesty and sustained effort.
Such is not the future for resilient agriculture in the MENA region unless we start by listening to those who have kept these lands alive for generations. Rural women's knowledge can no longer be just a heritage; it needs to be considered a strategy and a right.

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