Introduction
Women in Kenya struggle to produce crops to feed their families amidst drying climates and insecure land tenure, on holdings diminished by private sector âland grabsâ.
In many villages and cities, vital work to care for the people who sustain economies and societies is compromised and rendered more difficult, because the basic water, sanitation, health and energy services needed arenât within reach.
Environmental and economic problems are blamed on population growth and the âexcessive fertilityâ of women â especially in Africa â encouraging a resurgence of coercive policies that undermine their bodily integrity and control.
Forest user groups in India with strong womenâs involvement render landscapes greener and richer in biodiversity and climate mitigation potential, while also satisfying vital needs for livelihoods, food and fuel.
Waste picker networks with women at their heart combine livelihoods with âgreenâ circular economies both in their communities and through upscaling into global networks.
Vignettes like these highlight vital interconnections between gender, environment and development. Environmental degradation has different impacts on women and men. Development patterns that neglect everyday environmental and economic needs can worsen womenâs positions, but so can environment and development discourses that target women inappropriately. Yet in an era when development is becoming sustainable development, women are also leading the way in new practices that combine environmental, economic and social goals. This book highlights the vital synergies between sustainable development and gender equality, but also the need for transformational change if negative interactions are to be averted and positive pathways built.
Accelerating sustainable development, and enhancing gender equality are both current imperatives in research, policy and public debate. Too often, however, they are addressed separately. This bookâs central argument is that they need to be integrated in both understandings and practices, in ways that appreciate the diversity of womenâs and menâs experiences and contexts. Pursuing either sustainability or gender equality without attention to the other is doomed to failure on practical, moral and political grounds; the challenge, therefore, is to find pathways that build synergies between these concerns, towards sustainable and just futures for all. But how is this to be done, and by whom? How are gender equality, sustainability and their interlinkages to be understood, and how might the challenge of integrating them be addressed? The chapters that follow take up these questions in relation to a variety of issues and settings across the world. In this chapter, we introduce the overall arguments, definitions and conceptual approaches that inform and unite these contributions.
Our starting point is glaring evidence that dominant patterns of production, consumption and distribution are heading in deeply unsustainable directions. In a world in which humanity has become a key driver of Earth system processes, we are seeing over-exploitation of natural resources, the loss of key habitats and biodiversity, and pollution of land, seas and the atmosphere. Scientific understandings are clarifying the huge social, environmental and economic challenges posed by threats such as climate change and loss of essential ecosystem services, as humanity approaches or exceeds so-called âplanetary boundariesâ (Rockström et al, 2009a; IPCC, 2013; Steffen et al, 2015). Already, human interactions with the environment are producing unprecedented shocks and stresses, felt in floods, droughts, and devastated urban and rural landscapes and livelihoods, while many people and places have suffered from a ânexusâ of food, energy, environmental and financial crises. These unsustainable patterns add to poverty and inequality today â especially for the third of the worldâs population directly dependent on natural resources for their wellbeing (UnmĂŒĂig et al, 2012) â and create deep threats for future generations. And their effects often intensify gender inequality.
The causes and underlying drivers of unsustainability and of gender inequality are deeply interlocked. Both, we argue, are produced by politicalâeconomic relations in late capitalism that support particular types of neoliberal, market-led growth. These involve extreme privatization, financialization and concentration of capital; production geared to short-term profits; unfettered material consumption; and unprecedented levels of militarism â very often at the expense of state regulation and redistribution, reproduction and care. These politicalâeconomic relations rely on and reproduce gender inequalities, exploiting womenâs labour and provision of unpaid care, and often their bodies too. They are leading, in many settings, to crises of social reproduction, while undermining peopleâs rights and dignity. The same politicalâeconomic relations also produce environmental problems, as market actors seek and secure profit in ways that rely on the over-exploitation of natural resources and the pollution of climates, land and oceans. Such market-led pathways are leading in directions that are unsustainable in social and ecological terms, and ultimately in economic terms too, undermining the conditions for future progress.
Growing international attention and debate now highlight the need to move economies and societies onto more sustainable paths, whether to avert crisis and catastrophe, or enable prosperity through âgreen economiesâ. Yet often missing in these debates is a sense of the politics involved. The challenge is often seen in technical and managerial terms, as a matter of getting the technologies, prices and regulations right. This overlooks the more profound restructuring of social, economic and political systems that we may require to transform unsustainable patterns. Equally, âsustainabilityâ is often presented as if it were a clear, uncontested term. Yet many tensions and trade-offs arise: for instance between finance for different kinds of low-carbon energy; between prioritizing food or biofuels in land use, or forests for carbon to mitigate global climate change or to meet local livelihood needs, to name a few. How such tensions are addressed has profound implications for who gains and loses â amongst social groups, and between local, national and global interests. Thus sustainability is a normative and contested term: we must constantly ask âsustainability of what for whomâ (Leach et al, 2010). As this book shows, many instances of policy and intervention today promote sustainability or green economy goals in ways that create tension with, or undermine, womenâs rights and gender equality.
Yet this is also a time of opportunity. Examples are accumulating around the world of alternative pathways that move towards sustainability and gender equality, uniting these in powerful synergies. Some are rooted in the everyday practices through which women and men access, control, use and manage forests, soils and urban landscapes in ways that sustain livelihoods and wellbeing. Others are evident in movements and collectives, many led by women, to build alternative food and resource sovereignty, agro-ecology, urban transitions or solidarity economies. While some of these offer alternatives or modifications within current capitalist relations, others suggest routes to more profound âgreen transformationsâ (Scoones et al, 2015).
Integrating gender equality and sustainable development is therefore vital for several reasons. First, this is a moral and ethical imperative: building more equitable gender relations that support the human rights, dignity and capabilities of all women and men, intersected by differences of class, race, sexuality, age, ability and circumstances, is a central requirement of an ethical world order. Second, an integrated approach is vital to avoid women becoming victims, redressing the all-too-common pattern whereby women suffer most from environmental, climatic and economic shocks and stresses, undermining their vital roles in sustaining their families and communities. But third, and most significantly, an integrated approach offers opportunities to build on peopleâs agency. Attention to gender offers routes to improve resource productivity and efficiency; to enhance ecosystem conservation and sustainable use, and to build more sustainable, low-carbon food, energy, water and health systems. Not just victims, the chapters in this book show how women have been, and can be, central actors in pathways to sustainability and green transformation. Yet, crucially, this must not mean adding âenvironmentâ to womenâs caring roles, or instrumentalizing women as the new âsustainability savioursâ. It means recognition and respect for their knowledge, rights, capabilities and bodily integrity, and ensuring that roles are matched with rights and control over resources and decision-making power.
Gender equality and sustainable development can thus reinforce each other in powerful ways (see Agarwal, 2002; Buckingham-Hatfield, 2002; Johnsson-Latham, 2007; UNDP, 2012). Charting what pathways that reinforce gender equality and sustainable development together might look like, and how they might be built, are the central aims of this book. Five key sets of issues provide focal lenses through which the bookâs chapters consider these challenges. Thus Elissa Braunstein and Mimi Houston explore work and industrial production (Chapter 2); Betsy Hartmann, Anne Hendrixson and Jade Sasser consider population and reproduction (Chapter 3); Sakiko Fukuda-Parr addresses food security and agriculture (Chapter 4); Michael Levien takes up the related question of land rights and âgrabsâ (Chapter 5), and Isha Ray examines everyday innovations around water, sanitation and energy (Chapter 6). These issues have been chosen â amongst many possibilities â because each illustrates âtroubling intersectionsâ between dominant development pathways, (un)sustainability and gender (in) equality; each highlights the importance of a range of rights that are key to gender equality, from those involved with bare life and survival to those linked with voice, power and dignity; and each reveals contestation and debate between problematic narratives and pathways, and alternatives that offer pathways to sustainable development and gender equality.
The chapter authors are all eminent scholars and experts in the particular fields and issues they address. They come from diverse disciplinary backgrounds â including anthropology, economics, politics and technology studies â and a variety of positions in gender, development and feminist debates. These differences are reflected in the focus and analytical style of their particular chapters. Yet all share a broad political commitment to greater gender equality and a more sustainable and just world. This sense of the politics involved and their importance, as well as a desire to collaborate to produce a coherent set of analyses of gendered pathways to sustainability, was reinforced during a series of workshops and exchanges during 2013â14. These were hosted by UN Women, the United Nations entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, to inform the preparation of the 2014 World Survey on the Role of Women in Economic Development (UN Women, 2014). While several of the bookâs chapters originated as background papers from which the report drew material, the analysis and arguments developed during these dialogues went far beyond what a UN report could hope to include. Shahrashoub Razavi and Seemin Qayum (Chapter 7) reflect on these issues of inclusion and translation, as an exemplar of the wider challenges of bringing a feminist political perspective to bear on sustainable development debates. Meanwhile, this book emerged as a collective effort to present a deeper set of contributions that, together, could demonstrate the importance of building pathways to sustainability and gender equality.
The dialogues that led to this book shared and developed a common set of definitions and approaches to gender equality, sustainability and their interlinkages. Central to these is a âgendered pathways approachâ. Building on the pathways approach developed by the STEPS Centre as a guide to thinking and action around sustainability challenges in a complex, dynamic world (Leach et al, 2010), this offers a conceptual framework for addressing the intersections, tensions and tradeoffs between different dimensions of gender and of sustainability. The gendered pathways approach offers guidelines for analysing current pathways of change, and imagining and appraising alternatives.
The next two sections of this chapter introduce these core concepts in general terms, indicating their broad relevance for understanding the interlocking of gender (in)equality and (un)sustainability in pathways related to work, population, food, land, water and energy â thus introducing core themes dealt with in detail in subsequent chapters. The chapters themselves all apply this conceptual approach and illustrate it in action, although to different extents and in different ways, as befits their authorsâ focal issues and perspectives.
Tracing interlinkages between gender and sustainability is nothing new, however. The subsequent section reviews how diverse concepts â or narratives â about women, gender and sustainability have emerged and come to co-exist. Tracing shifting sustainability debates from colonial times to the present, we consider how and to what extent gender has been conceptualized, and the gendered outcomes of sustainability-focused policies and programmes. This includes a review of gender thinking â and silences â in current approaches to climate change, green economies and planetary boundaries. As it shows, powerful narratives have sometimes worked to hide or misrepresent genderâsustainability linkages. In the name of environmental protection, women have sometimes been dispossessed from their lands, forests and water resources. Womenâs roles as so-called âcarersâ of nature have sometimes been essentialized, making women responsible for environmental chores that draw on their voluntary labour â in narratives that cast them as âsustainability savioursâ. Revisiting a longer history of sustainability thinking and feminist scholarship highlights problems to avoid and potentials to build on in developing a fully gendered pathways approach.
Building on this review, we go on to elaborate the gendered pathways approach more fully, drawing particularly on insights from feminist political economy, feminist political ecology, and studies of gendered subjectivities and embodiment. We also emphasize the significance of tensions and trade-offs in different pathways. Some will promote sustainability at the cost of gender equality; some may promote gender equality and neglect key dimensions of sustainability. Since pathways are dynamic, they can also have unintended social, technological and environmental consequences which effect gendered outcomes. Negotiating such dynamics requires inclusive learning and deliberation processes and ways to monitor exclusions, trade-offs and emerging opportunities, as well as ongoing awareness of the complex politics of both gender and sustainability.
The final section addresses the policy and political challenges of transforming pathways towards greater gender equality and sustainability. Strengthening and refining public policies and investments is key; but beyond and complementing these lies scope to build gender-progressive alliances between public and private actors, state and civil society institutions, and formal and informal practices. Ultimately, feminist movements and collective organizing, emerging in diverse ways and places across the world, may offer the greatest hope both for challenging unsustainable pathways and charting new ones that lead us in more sustainable, gender-equal directions.
Conceptualizing sustainable development, gender equality and pathways
Sustainability, and sustainable development, are historically changing and much debated concepts. Since the 1990s, mainstream views have generally defined sustainability in normative terms, to refer to a broadly identifiable set of social, environmental and economic values. Our definition is broadly in line with the view, since Brundtland (1987, p43), that sustainable development should âmeet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needsâ. This involves integrating three âpillarsâ of sustainability: environmental, economic and social. Yet we go beyond these broad emphases in several important ways. First, we emphasize the need to be more specific about the values and goals at stake around different issues and contexts, across temporal and spatial scales, and according to the perspectives and priorities of different groups. Thus there may be multiple possible sustainabilities at stake, and negotiating these is a political, not just a technical and managerial, challenge. Second, in such negotiations, the social dimensions of sustainability â too often played down or ignored â must be fully integrated. And third, we must attend to equity not just across generations, but within them. Here gender equity and equality are central.
In this book, then, sustainable development is development that ensures human wellbeing, ecological integrity, gender equality and social justice, now and in the future.
Pursuing sustainable development for all requires upholding human rights principles, widening freedoms and promoting peace â in combination with respect for the environment. It requires redressing discrimination and disadvantage at household, local, national, regional and global levels.
This in turn requires redirecting interconnected environmental, economic, social and political processes, challenging current unsustainable pathways of production, consumption and distribution and finding new ones. It requires action and accountability by the state, civil society, the private sector, communities and individuals, building alliances to transform institutions and power relations, and to democratize knowledge.
In this conceptualization, gender equality is therefore integral to how sustainable development is defined and pursued. We consider gender equality in relation not just to women and men, but also to the ways that gender intersects with class, race and ethnicity, sexuality, place and other significant axes of difference. The concept of substantive gender equality emphasizes the importance of human rights, capabilities and the ways these intertwine and overlap (Goldblatt and McLean, 2011; Vizard et al, 2011). Building on this, we recognize multiple dimensions to pursuing gender equality. They include first, redressing socio-economic disadvantage in the domains of work, wellbeing and access to resources. This encompasses ensuring equal access to decent work and secure livelihoods; the recognition, reduction and redistribution of unpaid care work; equal access to quality education, health and other social services and public goods; and equal access to and control over resources and their benefits â including ecosystem-based resources. A second dimension is enhancing recognition and dignity. This includes challenging stereotypes around masculinity and femininity; assuring freedom from violence and violations of dignity and security; assuring bodily integrity and sexual and reproductive health and rights; and recognition and respect for diverse forms of knowledge production and application. Third, greater gender equality means enhancing equal participation in decision-making at multiple levels. This includes supporting agency, power and voice in institutions and decision-making; building deliberative forms of democracy that can debate sustainability goals and values in inclusive ways; and assuring space for feminist collective action.
Gender equality ultimately requires the realization of all human rights. In relation to work, we see the importance of womenâs rights to decent employment and livelihoods, and the significance of multiple rights while at work (see Chapter 2). In relation to population, we see the importance of assuring sexual and reproductive rights, as well as rights to freedom from violence and coercion (Chapter 3). Chapters 4 and 5 on food and agriculture highlight the right to food, as well as the importance of rights to land and natural resources in order to produce it. In relation to water, sanitation and energy, we see the importance of the right to water and sanitation as well as rights to basic infrastructure and services, and their vital links to rights to bodily integrity, dignity and security (Chapter 6). Yet in each of these areas, different kinds of rights and capabilities overlap and reinforce each other. Rights on their own are often not enough; making them real also requires recognition and respect (Fraser, 2013), power and voice, and challenges to dominant institutions ...
