Chapter 2 GLOBAL GENDER AND ENVIRONMENT OUTLOOK Introduction


Socially constructed gender roles create differences in the ways women and men behave in relation to the environment, and in the ways they are enabled to act (or prevented from acting) as agents of environmental change. Even relatively simple gender-based divisions of labour can affect how they experience the environment. If only men fish in the open sea and only women fish in coastal mangroves, they will inevitably have different sets of environmental knowledge and experiences. Or if most men drive to work in a car while most women use public transportation, they will see the environment and changes in it from different vantage points.


Their different environmental positioning may mean women and men have exposures to very different environmental problems and risks, and have very different ideas about the seriousness of environmental problems and appropriate interventions, adaptations and solutions. Further, because of the social construction of gender roles, they may have different – usually unequal – capacities and approaches with respect to environmental interpretation and change.


The GGEO methodology framework


At the heart of gender and environment analyses is curiosity about whether women and men (and girls and boys) experience “the environment” differently; how their needs, encounters, vulnerability, and resilience differ. This necessitates a basic curiosity about gender equality and inequality – how inequalities are created, perpetuated, and sometimes effectively challenged and changed.


The GGEO methodological model (Figure 2.1) shows the analytical flow among Drivers-Pressures-State- Effects/Impacts-Response/Policies, which are mediated through Knowledge/Perceptions including traditional and indigenous knowledge. These inform the Outlook on the transformative changes needed to achieve a sustainable and just future.


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To emphasize its people-oriented character and address the key challenge of lack of gender-disaggregated information in many of the assessed areas, the GGEO methodology employs several analytical approaches:


Figure 2.1: GGEO methodological model DRIVERS


e.g., population dynamics, social norms; types of economic growth; unequal


distribution of resources


STATE AND TRENDS


of gender and environment linkages


KNOWLEDGE AND


PERCEPTION


OUTLOOK


RESPONSE AND POLICY


Innovation; social action; gender empowerment


IMPACTS AND EFFECTS Health;


ecosystem; economic loss; gender inequality


Source: Seager (2014)


• A human-centred analytical approach: It is essential for gendered environmental analysis to put people first, redefining environmental relationships through the lens of social relationships and in the context of human economic activities rather than defining the environment primarily in physical terms.


• Incorporating the social construction of knowledge: Shifting the boundaries of environmental assessment to include qualitative and quantitative information broadens the range of expertise on which we can draw. The need to include different “ways of knowing” has been acknowledged in previous Global Environment Outlooks (GEO), primarily through recognizing indigenous perspectives and traditional knowledge (UNEP 2012). Responses to environmental problems do not follow a straight line from facts about the environment. Among other social forces, perceptions intervene, and these are almost always gender-differentiated.


• “Lifting the roof off the household”: “Household”-based,


environmentally relevant


decisions and behaviours are negotiated, often unequally, between women and men inside households – on matters such as water use, the division of labour, energy-source choices, and financial allocations for agricultural adaptation. Intra-household dynamics are critically important in terms of the use, conservation and consumption of resources, as well as the ways women and men (may) act as agents of change. All environmentally consequential decisions made within households are filtered through gender norms and roles.


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