Gender and Natural Resource Management

Livelihoods, Mobility and Interventions

Bernadette P. Resurreccion, Rebecca Elmhirst, Bernadette P. Resurreción, Rebecca Elmhirst, Bernadette P. Resurreccion

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781844075805
• eBook ISBN: 9781136565045
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Environmental Law
• Index: Law

This book is about the gender dimensions of natural resource exploitation and management, with a focus on Asia. It explores the uneasy negotiations between theory, policy and practice that are often evident within the realm of gender, environment and natural resource management, especially where gender is understood as a political, negotiated and contested element of social relationships. It offers a critical feminist perspective on gender relations and natural resource management in the context of contemporary policy concerns: decentralized governance, the elimination of poverty and themainstreaming of gender.

Through a combination of strong conceptual argument and empirical material from a variety of political economic and ecological contexts (including Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal, Thailand and Vietnam), the book examines gender-environment linkages within shifting configurations of resource access and control. The book will serve as a core resource for students of gender studies and natural resource management, and as supplementary reading for a wide range of disciplines including geography, environmental studies, sociology and development. It also provides a stimulating collection of ideas for professionals looking to incorporate gender issues within their practice in sustainable development.

Published with IDRC.

Chapter One

Gender, Environment and Natural
Resource Management:
New Dimensions, New Debates

Rebecca Elmhirst and Bernadette P. Resurreccion

This book is about the gender dimensions of natural resource exploitation and management in Asia. It provides an exploration of the uneasy negotiations between theory, policy and practice that are often evident within the realm of gender, environment and natural resource management, especially where gender is understood as a political, negotiated and contested element of social relationships. In recent years, there has been some disquiet that, amidst efforts to mainstream gender into natural resource management interventions and into development policy more broadly, gender has lost its critical and politicized edge, having been institutionalized into a series of tools and techniques that are far removed from the transformatory potential of gender as a feminist concept (Kabeer, 2005; Molyneux and Razavi, 2005; Leach, 2007).

The tension between gender as a technical fix and a more politicized view of gender is examined in this book. The chapters touch on theory, policy and practice, all with a shared focus on gender as a critical analytical concept for understanding the social and political dimensions of natural resource management and governance across a range of empirical settings. In different ways, and with varying commitments to particular conceptualizations of gender, the authors explore how gender subjectivities, ideologies and identities are produced, employed and contested within natural resource governance, and how gender discourses shape exclusions and possibilities within environment/development processes.

The book focuses on environments in Asia as a realm in which new realities are producing significant challenges for natural resource management, livelihoods and the mitigation of social inequalities. Across the Asian region, natural resource exploitation is accelerating dramatically as countries, cities and small communities are ever more incorporated into the global economy. Economic reform programmes that favour domestic and global market expansion rather than a social welfare agenda, policy responses to climate change, pressures associated with population growth and intensified geographical mobility, and urbanization and commoditization, are reconfiguring patterns of natural resource use and governance at both a national and local level and are having complex effects on peoples’ lives. These processes are themselves not innocent of gendered power relations: they are inflected with gender discourses that set in motion differentiated and unjust life opportunities and exclusions. At the same time, sustainable development policy initiatives that seek to ameliorate environmental degradation and its negative livelihood effects not only bring gendered impacts and responses, they also work through and produce particular framings of gender and gendered power relations. The impact of this is apparent in the unintended consequences associated with sustainable development initiatives that target women as a homogeneous and undifferentiated social category, at times exacerbating social and gender injustices.

In part, this book offers a response to recent calls to re-establish more politicized gender at the heart of environment–development debates (Leach, 2007) and we are encouraged by a recent wave of politically committed and theoretically sophisticated contributions to the ‘gender agenda’ in the development literature (Harris, 2006; Jackson, 2006; Nightingale, 2006; Cornwall, 2007; Cornwall et al, 2007). In contributing to this new wave of interest, we aim to provide a necessary corrective to the naturalized assumptions about men, women and power that underpin the widely held notion within sustainable development policy circles (and reiterated in the recent UN review of ten years of gender mainstreaming initiatives in Asia) that women play a central role as effective managers of resources, and therefore should be key actors in natural resource management programmes (UN-ESCAP, 2004). At the same time, and in line with a broadly conceived feminist political ecology, we conceptualize our endeavours within emerging political economies, globalizing conditions and changing cultural landscapes in the Asian region in contemporary times.

In this introduction, we develop three themes that link the discussions of gender, environment and natural resource management provided by our contributors, and around which the book is organized. First, we consider the changing global context with which approaches to gender and environment must engage, paying particular attention to macroeconomic policies and changes in governance associated with neo-liberalism. Second, we explore the ways ‘gender’ has been incorporated in environment and development practices, especially within interventions designed to accomplish sustainable development goals. Finally, we examine the realm of gender, knowledge and authority, offering a critical consideration of gendered subjectivities that problematize simplistic mappings of gendered agency and environmental actions. Within each of these themes, our contributors respond in various ways to longstanding debates around gender, environment and natural resource management, many of which resonate with developments in feminist social theory more generally. We begin, therefore, with an overview of debates around gender, environment and natural resource management as these have unfolded in response to a widening engagement with environmental concerns within development policy frameworks since the landmark World Commission on Environment and Development.

Theorizing gender and environment: Conceptual
antecedents and new theoretical pathways

The genealogy of gender and environment debates is well documented in the literature. Broadly, two key strands may be identified that generally map onto (1) liberal correctives to gender-blind scholarship within development policy and practice, and (2) relational perspectives that emphasize binary power relations between men and women. Common to both is a sense in which experiences of the environment are differentiated by gender through the materially distinct daily work activities and responsibilities of men and women. Consequently, men and women hold gender-differentiated interests in natural resource management through their distinctive roles, responsibilities and knowledge. Gender is thus understood as a critical variable in shaping processes of ecological change, viable livelihoods and the prospects for sustainable development. However, relational perspectives on gender purport to give greater emphasis to the dynamics of gender, emphasizing power relations between men and women over resource access and control, and their concrete expressions in conflict, cooperation and coexistence over environments and livelihoods.

In recent years, new work in this area has been influenced by feminist and post-colonial theories that effectively destabilize ‘gender’ as a central analytical category and explore multidimensional subjectivities, emphasizing how gender is constituted through other kinds of social differences and axes of power such as race, sexuality, class and place, and practices of ‘development’ themselves. This type of thinking not only critiques ‘development’, but effectively challenges the representational strategy adopted initially by those concerned with overcoming differences among women by articulating a centred developing world woman subject in order to press for women’s rights to inclusion in international agreements around sustainable development (Mohanty, 1988; Saunders, 2002). Such a strategy served a specific rhetorical purpose that was intensified through the United Nations’ World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland) report in 1987, and the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Brazil in 1992, where alliances amongst feminist activists from across the world were forged to produce the Women’s Action Agenda 21 (Leach, 2007). This effectively linked concerns with women and gender with environmentally sustainable development: both having been traditionally marginal issues on the development agenda (Dankelman and Davidson, 1988).

Exploration of the links between gender and the environment in the South began in Asia, stimulated largely by compelling narratives of rural and indigenous women saving trees and thwarting the destroyers of forests and forest livelihoods.¹ Two popular strands – a particular variant of ecofeminism from a Southern perspective and WED (or ‘women, environment and development’) – posited natural connections between women and environmental resources, positing rural women of the South as the unrecognized caretakers of the environment, and in whose care the Earth and its resources had better chances of surviving for future generations (Dankelman and Davidson, 1988; Shiva, 1989; Rodda, 1991; Sontheimer, 1991). All pre-colonial societies ‘were based on an ontology of the feminine as the living principle’, Vandana Shiva (1989) argued, ‘where rural, indigenous women are the original givers of life and are therefore the rightful caretakers of nature’ (p42; see Tomalin, Chapter 12 in this volume for a fuller discussion). WED’s logic, unlike Shiva’s more spiritualist–cultural premise, was that women were adversely affected by environmental degradation due to an a priori gender division of labour. In this division, women are usually assigned reproductive roles, explaining why they were chiefly responsible for the collection of forest products and food for daily household subsistence. Planners interpreted this to mean that women should then be targeted in conservation projects since their daily roles connected them more closely to natural resources. Early examples in this policy genre have been work on women, forests and energy resources (FAO, 1989; DGIS, 1990), especially in the light of the global energy crisis in the 1970s in the course of searches for rural energy alternatives.

Both in the exploration of the ‘feminine principle’ in human–nature relationships, or in the analysis of gender divisions of labour in natural resource management, the emphasis has been clearly on women and women’s roles. Whilst this might well provide a corrective to gender-blind and androcentric environment–development policy, within the context of mainstream development policy it has been translated from the politicized category ‘woman’ into what Cornwall (2007) describes as a combination of ‘gross essentialism’ with ‘patronising paternalism’ (p71). A number of scholars have identified problems associated with WED approaches that inadvertently give rise to such a description. First, research has challenged the notion that women have fixed caretaker roles and that they may just end up being key assets to be ‘harnessed’ in resource conservation initiatives (Rocheleau, 1991; Leach, 1992, 1994). Planning on the basis of fixed and reified ‘roles’ may, in the end, turn out to be counterproductive for women. Policy translations of WED are implicitly founded on the rational choice stream in policy studies that rely on simplifications around women’s care of natural resources as atomized individuals with fixed attributes, and with roles that are disassociated from wider relationships and webs of power.

Secondly, Rao (1991) has argued for the need to contextualize women as they dynamically respond to complex environmental realities, and to consider how they enter into and engage in social relationships with men within the institutions of their natural resource-dependent societies instead of a priori perceptions on women’s roles. Thirdly, both ecofeminism and WED also connote a victim status of rural women from the South, conveying images of women walking longer distances in the daily collection of food, fuel and fodder for their households as resources are increasingly depleted. As the ‘main victims’ of environmental degradation, ecofeminism and WED position women as the ‘most appropriate participants’ in environmental conservation, and thus a natural constituency for donor-initiated resource protection, conservation and regeneration (Dankelman and Davidson, 1988; Shiva, 1989; Rodda, 1991).

Disquiet with the translation of WED thinking into policy has run in parallel with critiques levelled at ‘women in development’ or WID perspectives that saw women as a stand-alone homogeneous group with a set of static and predefined roles that translated into their disadvantaged social lives (Rathgeber, 1990). Arguments have been made for more context-specific and historically nuanced understandings of the relationship of specific groups of women with specific environmental resources, especially as these are mediated by their complex relations with men, kin and other social actors. In other words, greater emphasis is given to gender and its structuring, relational and power dimensions. An early proponent of gender analysis as a useful framework for unpacking environmental relations was Jackson (1993a, 1993b), who proposed that analysis should focus on power relations between women and men, and that women be treated as a disaggregated group of subjects as gender roles are socially and historically constructed and being continually reformulated. Like others before her, Jackson challenged the idea of ‘women’ as a natural constituency for environmental projects, underscoring the contingent nature and fluidity of gender interests, an approach that has been discussed more fully in debates regarding practical and strategic interests elsewhere in the wider field of gender and development (Molyneux, 1985; Moser, 1993;Wieringa, 1994).

A number of perspectives have subsequently emerged that share a concern to emphasize dynamic social and political relations and contextual analysis, rather than universal assumptions and essentialist views of men’s and women’s engagement with the environment. Alongside the gender analysis approach associated with gender, environment and development or GED (Leach, 1992, 1994; Jackson, 1993a; Joekes et al, 1996; Green et al, 1998), feminist environmentalism (Agarwal, 1992, 1994) emphasizes the material aspects of the gender–environment nexus, in particular gender divisions of resource-based labour and culturally specific gender roles. Finally, feminist political ecology draws on the field of political ecology to focus on resource access and control, gendered constructions of knowledge, and the embeddedness of local gendered environmental struggles in regional and global political economic contexts (Rocheleau et al, 1996; Schroeder, 1999). These debates and their policy counterparts are evident in an explosion of ethnographies and edited volumes that have sought to capture the gender–environment nexus in various geographical and resource use contexts, for example forests, land and agriculture, and water (Fortmann and Rocheleau, 1984; Leach, 1994; Carney, 1996; Sachs, 1996; van Koppen and Mahmud, 1996; Ireson, 1997; de Bruijn et al, 1997; Jarosz, 1997;Tinker, 1997; Zwarteveen, 1998; Schroeder, 1999; Cranney, 2001).

In locating gender within changing contexts of ecological change, economic dislocations and windfalls, as well as legal normative frameworks, gender, environment and natural resource management scholarship has engaged with a range of empirical concerns. Work has centred on gendered property rights (water and land) (Brunt, 1992; Agarwal, 1994; Meinzen-Dick et al, 1997; von Benda-Beckmann et al, 1997; Meinzen-Dick and Zwarteveen 1998); gender dynamics in local participation in development programmes and community-based institutions (Villareal, 1992; Mosse, 1994; Agarwal, 1997; Guijt and Shah, 1998; Cleaver, 2003; Colfer, 2005); the micro- and macro-politics of collective action (Rocheleau et al, 1996); geographical mobility (Elmhirst, 2001, 2002); gendered environmental knowledge (Fortmann, 1996; Jewitt, 2002; Howard, 2003; Momsen, 2007); livelihoods and resource use (Feldstein and Poats, 1989; Leach, 1994; Deere, 1995); history (Leach and Green, 1997; Resurreccion, 1999); and dynamics of gender in policy discourses and within environmental departments of development agencies (Crewe and Harrison, 1998; Kurian, 2000). In different ways, these studies hold a view of gender as relational: involving the interaction of men and women, structured through norms and institutions, reconfigured through individual agency. This is a view that is extended in different ways by contributors to this volume. Together, they also challenge the position that gender is primarily relevant only within households (a view that is often stated in mainstream environmental and political ecology research) and instead see gender as salient within policy and practice across a var...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables and Boxes
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Gender, Environment and Natural Resource Management: New Dimensions, New Debates
• Part 1 Contextualizing Gender and Natural Resource Governance in Neo-liberal Times
• Part 2 Gender Interventions:Targeting Women in Sustainable Development Projects
• Part 3 Responding to Intervention: Gender, Knowledge and Authority
• Index