Gender and Environment from ‘Women, Environment, and Development’ to Feminist Political Ecology

Citation:

Ressureción, Bernadette P. 2017. “Gender and Environment from ‘Women, Environment, and Development’ to Feminist Political Ecology.” In Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment, 71-84. Oxon: Routledge.

Author: Bernadette P. Ressureción

Annotation:

Summary:
“This chapter provides an overview of gender, environment, and development scholarship that explains how early ideas and debates that have shaped subsequent work. My aim is to demonstrate how this field has evolved over time and how it has now come to understand two of the most pressing challenges of this century: climate change and disaster risk. While there remains a number of different approaches to studying gender-environment connections, in the discussion that follows I focus on feminist political ecology (FPE). FPE has evolved as a loose platform of ideas that seeks to theorize differentiated forms of power and resource access primarily but not exclusively in developing county contexts. FPE grew out of a desire to foreground the political aspects of earlier frameworks, as well as to analyze the growing neoliberalization of nature in capitalist development processes. It draws on feminist poststructuralist theory in order to criticize the domination of techno-scientific solutions to environmental change that sidestep more holistic and grounded approaches. I argue that at a time when there is a dire need to address the exigent features of climate change and disaster policy discourses, FPE offers valuable insights into human-nature relations that can contribute to more grounded analyses and better solutions. Understanding how women and men, as embodied and emotional beings, have complex and shifting relationships to the natural world that are embedded in place and shaped by intersections of gender, race, class, caste, culture, age (and so on) is central to the search for environmental and social justice. An FPE lens provides tools for envisioning transformative changes that are much needed in these troubling times” (Resurrección 2017, 71).

Topics: Development, Environment, Climate Change, Feminisms, Feminist Political Ecology, Gender, Gender Roles

Year: 2017