Chapter 1 GLOBAL GENDER AND ENVIRONMENT OUTLOOK Chapter 4:


Chapter 2


In the 1980s and 1990s research and writing pushed forward more grounded and materialist gendered environmental analyses (UN Women 2014). Women, Environment and Development (WED) approaches that emerged in the 1980s were based on research and policy development by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), development agencies and others. Initially, such approaches typically positioned women as victims of environmental degradation; later there was more emphasis on women’s importance to community- based environmental conservation and management and to environmentally related livelihood opportunities (Douma et al. 1994; Green et al. 1998; Schultz et al. 2001; Tiondi 2000). In this sense, WED was aligned with ecofeminism’s belief in women’s closeness to nature and the symmetry between violence against nature and violence against women. Women’s roles, viewed through a WED lens, lens, thus tended to be conceived of as natural, universal, and rooted in reproductive and subsistence activities such as small-scale agriculture and food processing and water and fuel collection, rather than shaped by historical, social and economic forces and gender relations. WED approaches have been found particularly attractive for development policies and that depend on women’s labour, skills and knowledge as essential for development (Agarwal 1992). One of the drawbacks of this approach is that the unpaid work and time burdens of women and girls often increase without these women and girls necessarily receiving the benefits of development (ADB 2015).


4


Feminist analysis of sustainable development since the 1990s yielded critiques of WED and ecofeminism, and offered new analytical frames grounded in feminist political economy and dynamic understandings of gender relations and social, economic and environmental (un)sustainability. These newer approaches, loosely described as “feminist environmentalism” or “feminist political ecology”, emphasize that environmental rights and responsibilities are often contingent on class, kin, and household and governance arrangements and negotiations, which are critical to the realization of women’s rights and agency (Elmhirst 2011; Rocheleau et al. 1996). Such approaches share a number of core ideas, including: women’s and men’s relationships with the environment are embedded in the social, political and economic context of dynamic gender relations, rather than in an essential unchanging relationship with nature; different groups of women and men have different interactions with natural resources, and


with ecosystems and habitats, because of their class, age, race/ethnicity, geographic location and other characteristics; it cannot be taken for granted that women’s participation in environmental projects means they will benefit, or that greater gender equality will be achieved without specific attention, monitoring and follow-up to ensure positive outcomes; and gender- specific land tenure and property relations and control over labour, resources, products and decisions should be at the forefront in environmental analysis.


The overall conclusion of several decades of feminist theory, perspectives and initiatives is that the holistic nature of the gender-and-environment nexus requires:


• analysing the different dimensions of relationships between humans and the environment across ge- ographic scales;


• establishing how environmental conditions shape the lives of women and men in different ways as a result of gender and other differentiators;


• developing frameworks and perspectives that al- low an understanding that women and men are not only affected by, but also have important roles to play in, enabling environmental sustainability;


• demonstrating that ignoring these issues in envi- ronmental and climate policies and programmes (based on the erroneous assumption that the en- vironment is gender-neutral) is a recipe for failure (Aguilar et al. 2015; Nightingale 2006).


International commitments to gender equality and to sustainable development


During several decades of women’s environmental movements and activism there has been an evolution from silence on gender differences in international environmental


agreements and commitments, to


gender equality being at the core of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (UN 2015b).


In 1979 the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) was adopt- ed by the UN General Assembly to provide for the ad- vancement of non-discrimination and rights through


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