Gender

Citation:

Sachs, Carolyn E. 1997. “Gender, Seeds, and Biodiversity.” In Women Working In The Environment. New York: Routledge.

Author: Carolyn E. Sachs

Abstract:

All over the world, declining biodiversity threatens people's livelihoods, cultures, and standards of living. Degradation of the environment, destruction of natural habitats, and changes in cultural strategies for survival contribute to the increasing loss of biodiversity and also to the impoverishment of women (Abramovitz, 1994; Shiva, 1995). Declines in biological resources often result in declining standards of living for many people in the world, especially women and the poor (Abramovitz, 1994 ). Women, in many cultural contexts, rely on diverse biological resources to provide food, clothing, housing, and other needs for their families. As access to these resources declines through environmental degradation or inequitable distribution of resources between men and women, women's workloads often increase and their ability to provide food for their families decreases. As a result of gender divisions of labor, women and men have different knowledge about plants and other biological resources (Sachs, 1996). Efforts to preserve biodiversity have generally neglected women's work and knowledge about crops and other natural resources. This chapter focuses on women's knowledge and efforts to maintain crop diversity. First, we discuss reasons for the decline in crop genetic diversity; then, we focus on two studies of seed saving in the United States and the Peruvian Andes.

Topics: Agriculture, Economies, Gender, Men, Women, Livelihoods Regions: Americas, North America, South America Countries: Peru, United States of America

Year: 1997

Citation:

Biesecker, Adelheid, and Sabine Hofmeister. 2010. “Focus: (Re)Productivity: Sustainable Relations Both between Society and Nature and between the Genders.” Ecological Economics 69 (8): 1703–11.

Authors: Adelheid Biesecker, Sabine Hofmeister

Abstract:

The paper is embedded in the multiplicity of discourses concerned with a viable, sustainable development of society and its economy. It makes a case for a mode of economic activity geared to systematically integrating production and reproduction processes. Its starting hypothesis is that the persistent, constantly changing and expanding crises that weigh so heavily on modern societies – above all the ecological crisis and the crisis of reproductive work – have their common origin in the separation of production from reproduction constitutive for industrial modernity. A reformulation of the category of (re)productivity – the idea of the unity of and at the same time the distinction between production and reproduction in the economic process – could set the stage for us to review today's crisis phenomena, relocalize problems, and in this way to develop new solutions for them. A sustainable society would be in a position to grasp, and shape, the economy as a (re)productive regulative system, with economic space constituted consciously as a socioecological action space.

Keywords: production, reproduction, sustainability, (re)productivity, social ecology

Topics: Development, Economies, Ecological Economics, Gender, Women

Year: 2010

Citation:

Gay-Antaki, Miriam. 2016. “‘Now We Have Equality’: A Feminist Political Ecology Analysis of Carbon Markets in Oaxaca, Mexico.” Journal of Latin American Geography 15 (3): 49–66.

Author: Miriam Gay-Antaki

Abstract:

Carbon projects follow a neoliberal logic that stresses that nature is best conserved via market mechanisms. Studies and experiences of the impacts of development projects on communities and feminist political ecologies suggest that women, the elderly, the young, the poor, and the indigenous often perceive projects differently, benefit and lose in different ways, or shape the projects on the ground to fit their needs. Carbon projects have differentiated impacts within a community especially on the poor, women, and ecology; however, these differences do not tend to be the main focus of scholarship. The research presented here focuses on the effects of a wind project and a small scale reforestation project and the convergence of environment, gender and development as these are introduced into communities in Oaxaca, Mexico. This paper expands on carbon offset literature in Mexico by looking at the differential impacts of technologies on geographies and people with specific attention to gender. I find that there are important gendered differences between the wind and the forest projects, and suggest that a Feminist Political Ecology perspective is a necessary, though infrequently employed, lens through which to understand the impacts of carbon markets.

Keywords: feminist political ecology, Oaxaca, carbon projects

Topics: Development, Environment, Ethnicity, Feminisms, Feminist Political Ecology, Gender, Women, Indigenous Regions: Americas Countries: Mexico

Year: 2016

Citation:

Kameri-Mbote, Patricia. 2007. “Access, Control and Ownership: Women and Sustainable Environmental Management in Africa.” Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity, no. 72: 36–46.

Author: Patricia Kameri-Mbote

Annotation:

"Both the Nairobi Forward Looking Strategies (NFLS) and the Beijing Platform for Action (BPFA) identify the need to upscale women's participation in environmental decision-making as a strategic action in the improvement of the overall status of women. This paper looks at the link between gender and environmental management, underscoring the disjuncture between the women's movement and the environment movement in Africa" (Kameri-Mbote, 2007, 37).

Topics: Environment, Feminisms, Gender, Women Regions: Africa

Year: 2007

Citation:

Resurrección, Bernadette P., Mary Jane Real, and Panadda Pantana. 2004. “Officialising Strategies: Participatory Processes and Gender in Thailand’s Water Resources Sector.” Development in Practice 14 (4): 521–33.

Authors: Bernadette P. Resurrección, Mary Jane Real, Panadda Pantana

Abstract:

This paper examines participatory processes in an Asian Development Bank (ADB) technical assistance package in Thailand's water resource sector. The authors analyse various levels of social interaction in the local community, in meso-level stakeholder consultations, and in opposition to ADB's environment programmes expressed by civil society organisations. While participatory approaches are employed to promote more bottom-up management regimes in water resources, the authors find that local power and gender differences have been overlooked. Evolving institutions of resource governance are constituted by gender, reproducing gender inequalities such as regarding water intended for agricultural use as a 'male' resource. Finally, it is argued that understandings and practices of participation legitimise particular agendas in a politically polarised arena.

Topics: Agriculture, Civil Society, Gender, Gendered Discourses, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, Gender Hierarchies, Infrastructure, Water & Sanitation, International Organizations Regions: Asia, Southeast Asia Countries: Thailand

Year: 2004

Citation:

Mollett, Sharlene. 2018. “The Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve: A Postcolonial Feminist Political Ecological Reading of Violence and Territorial Struggles in Honduras.” In Land Rights, Biodiversity Conservation and Justice. Routledge.

Author: Sharlene Mollett

Abstract:

This chapter aims to rethink the relationship between “parks and people” by making visible mundane and spectacular forms of violence inside the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve. In spite of landmark territorial legislation awarded to Miskito Territorial Councils beginning in 2013, the Miskito peoples continue to face impending colono land invasions inside ancestral customary territories. Drawing from ongoing research in Honduras, this chapter blends ethnographic data collection with news media, archival documents, development reports and secondary literatures to examine the violent challenges to Miskito territorial autonomy. Such violence extends beyond the Reserve and is emplaced on the bodies of land and territorial defenders mobilized against a growing extractivist Honduran state. With a focus on a coloniality of power and postcolonial intersectional thinking, this chapter maintains that biodiversity conservation and extractive development are linked, imbued with past logics of race and gender employed in the dehumanization of Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples in the present. Thus, in Honduras, I argue, contemporary Indigenous struggles over land and territory are simultaneously historical contests that work to disrupt state and elite practices of Indigenous peoples’ dehumanization, in the name of modernity and development.

Topics: Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Conflict, Resource Conflict, Development, Environment, Extractive Industries, Gender, Indigenous, Intersectionality, Land Tenure, Race, Violence Regions: Americas, Central America Countries: Honduras

Year: 2018

Citation:

Billo, Emily. 2020. “Patriarchy and Progressive Politics: Gendered Resistance to Mining through Everyday Social Relations of State Formation in Intag, Ecuador.” Human Geography 13 (1): 16–26. 

Author: Emily Billo

Abstract:

Over the last decade, the Ecuadorian government, following regional trends, called for social and environmental progress through state-controlled resource extraction. Scholars have demonstrated that this neo-extractive model warranted further investigation regarding its progressive aims. Specifically, this paper examines gendered critiques of state-led extractivism linked to expanding governmental and social programs. Even as women asserted their political recognition and rights in state politics, they still confronted patriarchal relations in their everyday lives. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic research over 6 years in campesino communities of Junín and Chalguayacu Alto, I argue that women in Intag challenged patriarchal state relations of extractive capitalism. This paper offers a novel contribution to literature on neo-extractivism and gendered forms of resistance. Women held the state accountable for its promises of social welfare and infrastructural development through which it generated public support for controversial mineral projects. These symbols of state paternalism revealed expanded patriarchal structures that underpinned their daily lives, with significance for a gendered politics of resistance.

Topics: Development, Environment, Extractive Industries, Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Hierarchies, Patriarchy Regions: Americas, South America Countries: Ecuador

Year: 2020

Citation:

Kameri-Mbote, Patricia. 2013. “Climate Change and Gender Justice: International Policy and Legal Responses.” In Climate Change: International Law and Global Governance, edited by Oliver C. Ruppel, Christian Roschmann, and Katharina Ruppel-Schlichting, 1st ed., 323–48. Volume I: Legal Responses and Global Responsibility. Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH. 

Author: Patricia Kameri-Mbote

Abstract:

Climate change raises issues of justice for different subjects of law – states and individuals. It is therefore not surprising that international policy and legal responses to climate change took equity concerns on board by considering differentiated responsibilities for climate change and taking respective capabilities of states into account in assigning the role to protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind. While the link between gender and climate change has not always been obvious, there is increasing evidence to demonstrate that women and men experience climate change differently; that climate change increases women’s vulnerability; and gender inequalities worsen women’s coping capacities. This article looks at the relationship between gender and climate change and how international policies and laws on gender and climate change address the interface. It also highlights the increasing advocacy for the inclusion of gender justice in international climate change debates. It concludes that including gender in the laws, policies and discussions on climate change brings a critical constituency to these platforms and also enhances the effectiveness of the interventions aimed at dealing with climate change because of the roles that women play in different programmes and contexts.

Topics: Environment, Climate Change, Gender, Men, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, International Law

Year: 2013

Citation:

Schild, Verónica. 2019. “Feminisms, the Environment and Capitalism: On the Necessary Ecological Dimension of a Critical Latin American Feminism.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 20 (6): 23–43.

Author: Verónica Schild

Abstract:

Latin American women are on the move today, taking their demands to the streets throughout the region in unprecedented numbers. What these demands reveal is a growing frustration and anger among women with the distance between official democratic promises and protections and the limited gains in basic rights, even the reversal of minimal achievements in places like Central America and Brazil. Feminists are weaving together different struggles into an intersectional movement explicitly linking gender demands to the end of a neoliberal capitalist model of development and its devastating social, economic and ecological effects on Latin America’s overwhelming majority. A critical Latin American feminism aimed at apprehending the present predicament of women in the region, I suggest, needs to extend its commitment to producing knowledge from below and to the left, by reaching further, and engaging critically with Marx and his feminist critics. Given the widespread impact of the present capitalist modernity, tethered to neo-extractivism, not only on the lives of peasant and indigenous Latin Americans but also of increasingly broader sectors of rural and urban society and in particular, on the lives of women, it is imperative that we understand the structural nature of the relation between women, capitalism and nature.

Topics: Development, Environment, Extractive Industries, Feminisms, Feminist Political Ecology, Gender, Women, Intersectionality, Rights

Year: 2019

Citation:

Venegas, Melissa Moreano, and Karolien van Teijlingen. 2021. “The Gendered Criminalization of Land Defenders in Ecuador: From Individualization to Collective Resistance in Feminized Territories.” In Environmental Defenders. Routledge.

Authors: Melissa Moreano Venegas, Karolien van Teijlingen

Abstract:

This chapter reflects upon two features of the violence against land and environmental defenders, anti-extraction activists, and communities that oppose extractive activities in Ecuador. The first aspect is the gendered character of this violence, which produces feminized territories; the second aspect is the perils of individualization of struggles in relation to this violence, and the benefits of its collectivization. We use a critical feminist geography perspective and base this reflection on various interviews and long-term fieldwork in the Amazon region, particularly with communities affected by extractive activities, and on the analysis of the political action of the collective Mujeres Amazónicas (Amazonian Women).

Topics: Conflict, Resource Conflict, Environment, Extractive Industries, Feminisms, Gender, Indigenous Regions: Americas, South America Countries: Ecuador

Year: 2021