Environmentalisms and gender interests in the Third World

Jackson, Cecile (1993) Environmentalisms and gender interests in the Third World. Development and Change, 24 (4). pp. 649-677. ISSN 1467-7660

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Abstract

Much environment and development discourse assumes that women are the ‘natural’ constituency for conservation interventions. This article attempts to illuminate this assumption with the lens of a gendered critique of environmentalisms (technocentric, ecocentric and non-western). How do the intellectual roots of Western environmentalisms influence the positions, or non-positions, of contemporary environmentalism with regard to gender? What does research on environmental perceptions in non-Western societies imply about gender differentiation in environmental relations? The article concludes that there are no grounds for assuming an affinity between women's gender interests and those of environments and that such a view is symptomatic of the gender blind, ethnocentric and populist character of western environmentalisms. By contrast the application of gender analysis to environmental relations involves seeing women in relation to men, the disaggregation of the category of ‘women’, and an understanding of gender roles as socially and historically constructed, materially grounded and continually reformulated. The issue of how far women's gender interests and environmental interests go hand in hand leads us to pose a broader question of the degree to which environmental conservation is premissed upon social inequality.

Item Type:	Article
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of International Development
Depositing User:	Abigail Dalgleish
Date Deposited:	15 Jul 2011 14:48
Last Modified:	15 Dec 2022 02:08
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/33848
DOI:	10.1111/j.1467-7660.1993.tb00500.x

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