Exploring Participatory Film-Making as a Development Method to address Gender Inequality in the Pacific

Gender inequality in the Pacific is a serious challenge and a sensitive issue - and requires a culturally appropriate and joined-up development approach to support and drive the necessary social changes. The prevalence of violence against women in the Pacific region is among the highest in the world, whilst women's parliamentary participation is amongst the lowest in the world. Countries across the Pacific region have put in place policy strategies, legal frameworks and a raft of initiatives, but against their own and internationally accepted indicators there has been poor progress towards gender equality, despite the development cooperation efforts of many donors over several decades. Why is the current paradigm underpinning gender policy apparently ineffective in grasping the social actions that produce gender inequality in the Pacific? What are the cultural contexts shaping the contemporary situation?

An emerging body of Pacific-made participatory documentary films has recently thrown new light on these problems by enabling communities to tell their own stories, in their own ways and through their own cultural terms. But we cannot assume that Pacific peoples' view visual representations as we might expect, nor that film technologies alone are able to access and to draw out ideas in the vernacular. Rather, research suggests that the design of participatory processes can enable people to analyse and to leverage social change in their own terms. How do these home-grown Pacific film projects fit with the history of community film-making and human rights activism? What are the key factors to development methods able to align with indigenous knowledge and Pacific protocols for communal relations?

At the same time, legal and anthropological research suggests that current gender policies have recognisable origins in Euro-American folk models that reduce 'gender' to the taken-for-granted differences between men and women. But gender in the Pacific is not merely a matter of the biological differentiation of women and men: in their own analyses of events and actions, Pacific peoples point to the importance of differentiating whether a woman is acting as a mother, daughter, sister, cousin, wife, in-law and look to these particular social, collective and kinship relations. Alongside examining the conceptual and cultural assumptions that underpin the current gender policy paradigms, we will examine the dominant theories of change for levering 'individual' and 'societal' behaviour changes misunderstand the tenets of Pacific socialites. Is there a culturally appropriate way to promote rights-based issues such as gender inequality within a communal society?

Film studies and ethnographic research each have distinctive ways of understanding how people engage and portray the world in their own cultural terms, and this project aims to bring these insights into dialogue. With PNG and Samoan film-makers' recent development of culturally effective participatory methods and ethnographic evidence that Pacific gender differentiates relational roles not biological difference, this international research network opens a new space for dialogue in which academics and non-academics can collaborate in re-thinking the current paradigms in development policy and practice.

The proposed inter-disciplinary international research network will work by promoting sustained collaboration between researchers in the UK, Papua New Guinea and Samoa, by the use of video-conference research seminars, by analyzing the emerging genre of Pacific-made community films, by reviewing the literature on indigenous approaches and participatory methods, by involving Pacific film-makers and communities with experience of participatory film-making, and by series of workshop and impact engagement events across both regions - all with the objective of contributing to creative development methods to support the challenge of promoting gender equality in the Pacific.

Gender inequality is widespread in the Pacific and a key challenge in the ODA LMIC countries of Papua New Guinea, Samoa and ODA UMIC country of Fiji where the bulk of project activities and impact engagement will occur. In formulating this project, our research outputs to date and the proposed areas of research focusing on gender inequality and participatory film-making have been discussed and shared with the UK FCO in London, Port Moresby and Suva; with the Commonwealth Secretariat; with the EU's EuropeAid; with Pacific embassies in Brussels and, through our international project partners the Papua New Guinea National Research Institute and National University of Samoa, with governments in PNG and Samoa. Our international partners are particularly well placed at research institutions with direct pathways to impact into the PNG and Samoa governments in view of the growing priority given to national strategies, and into regional governance bodies and international development agencies.

Film studies and ethnographic research each have distinctive ways of understanding how people engage and portray the world in their own cultural terms, and this project aims to bring these insights into dialogue with a range of academic and non-academic actors. The proposed project design recognizes that the likelihood and scale of beneficial impacts are promoted by our focus on the clearly defined challenge of gender inequality, by our existing experience of impactful research engagement in this field, and by our working method of close liaison and alignment with stakeholders throughout the whole project life cycle (ODA GCRF Guidance).

Project participants from the UK, Papua New Guinea and Samoa are already well-versed in research-policy knowledge exchanges and in the methods and contexts through which research findings, collaborations and advice can realize the potential for impacts. Research impacts through knowledge exchange takes time: expertise needs to be demonstrated and recognized, and two-way research-policy relationships are key to creating the spaces in which knowledges can be drawn together and utilized. In having already established knowledge exchange relations with the key impact stakeholders for this project, our participants provide the project with a head-start. We recognize from personal experience that 'impacts from research are always uncertain, often unexpected and cannot be guaranteed' (ODA GCRF Guidance), and have experience of the relations of trust, effective engagement events, diverse forms of dissemination and outputs and continuing dialogue by which impacts from research can be promoted and can arise through indirect and non-instrumental influence on the evolution and directional change in policy thinking and practice. A series of seven workshops will build capacity and develop and share expert knowledge, and all will involve some element of impact engagement, and be followed by circulated briefings to our wider networks. We also recognize the need to specifically engage certain key stakeholders - with whom our group has existing working contacts - in a sustained way and in their own locations. To this end we have planned impact engagement meetings in London, Port Moresby, Apia, Suva and Brussels.

By addressing Pacific conceptualizations of gender, relationality and inequality actions in the vernacular; by exploring the contribution of film, legal and anthropological studies to understanding the key components to effective processes for community responsive participatory documentary film-making; and by researching theories of change in terms of both means and ends through close consideration of cultural mechanisms and interfaces between customary and codified law - we have designed research interactions and outputs that promote impacts from our research which hold considerable potential in supporting efforts towards the challenge of transforming gender inequality in the Pacific.