Gender, Development and Environmental Governance

Theorizing Connections

Seema Arora-Jonsson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136259579
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A major challenge in studies of environmental governance is dealing with the diversity of the people involved at multiple levels – villagers, development agents, policy-makers, private resource users and others – and taking seriously their aspirations, conflicts and collaborations. This book examines this challenge in two very disparate parts of our world, exploring what gender-equality, resource management and development mean in real terms for its inhabitants as well as for our environmental futures.

Based on participatory research and in-depth fieldwork, Arora-Jonsson studies struggles for local forest management, the making of women's groups within them and how the women's groups became a threat to mainstream institutions. Insights from India, consistently ranked as one of the most gender-biased countries, are compared with similar situations in the ostensibly gender-equal Sweden. Arora-Jonsson also analyzes how dominant ideas about the environment, development and gender equality shape the spaces in which women and men take action through global discourses and grassroots activism.

Questioning the conventional belief that development brings about greater gender equality and more efficient environmental management, this volume scrutinizes how environmental imaginations are key to crafting gender relations. It shows gender to be at the heart of environmental negotiations while at the same time making a case for environmental sensibilities as integral to gender relations. At the confluence of development, environmental and gender studies, the book contributes to a much-needed dialogue between these fields, proposing new futures in environmental management.

1 Introduction

Three Places and a Jigsaw World

FIRST PLACE: A SHADY CORNER OF A VILLAGE IN NAYAGARH DISTRICT IN ODISHA, INDIA. FEBRUARY 1999

It was towards the end of February, but Odisha was already getting warm.¹

Summer was approaching. At least 30 women from a women’s group had gathered to talk to me. However, answering their questions about why I wanted to write about them was not all that simple. Manju² asked me if I was married and how many children I had. I was reprimanded for not wearing bangles or sindoor³ that showed that I was married (I was getting used to that now). Some women sang a song about how women and men together looked after the forests and the welfare of the village. I was then told that it was my turn to sing. They were not taking no for an answer. (The message was: If you want our information, you had better entertain us first). I managed to croak out a song, after which they began to tell me about themselves (probably to pre-empt any more singing on my part). I got to hear about their group, about all the work they did in the village, their negotiations with violent husbands and nasty mothers-in-law, struggles with rich landowners and their work for everyday village life. They spoke positively about the forest organizations in their villages, but also about their non-involvement in formal decision-making and about the problems of not being able to speak about and relate their work to the forests at forestry forums.

SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, ANOTHER PLACE: A FEW THOUSAND MILES NORTH—A COTTAGE BY THE LAKE IN DREVDAGEN, AN OUT OF THE WAY VILLAGE IN SWEDEN, JUNE 1999

It was an evening after midsummer but it was still cold outside. Thirteen women sat around an old fashioned fireplace in the middle of the one room cottage. The hordes of mosquitoes outside were kept out firmly by the closed door. The discussion centered on why we had decided to meet. Kerstin stoked the fire vigorously,

After the gubb⁴ conference on local forest management last weekend
when they ‘forgot’ to invite us... it is about time we form our own network. We could take up things that women are interested in so that we all know that we have support from each other...

Cecilia:	I am interested in the social issues. For a living countryside, we must look to the village as a whole... if we are ever going to be able to get anywhere with the forests.
Kerstin:	I called around before this and spoke to some people about forming a women’s network. I spoke to Sune Johansson at the Hushållningsällskap.^5 He gave me some tips. And then he said... aha, have you come so far... you have someone from SLU in your group.

I squirmed in my place, glad to be of help, but not quite sure how I would live up to it

How do you think I could be of help? I could document all that you do and talk about and maybe we could use that to think about what we are doing. And I could find out what other women’s networks have been doing and what has been written on them and...”

THE THIRD PLACE: FORESTS TREES AND PEOPLE PROGRAM OFFICE, SWEDISH UNIVERSITY OF AGRICULTURAL SCIENCES (SLU) IN UPPSALA, NOVEMBER 1997

We were in a room constructed out of temporary partitions and overfull bookshelves that tilted precariously with FAO manuals on how to go about development. Piles of papers and books covered every inch of the room as I tried in vain to find a place to sit. Diane and I listened to Axel’s account of meetings that he had been to. He had met men from a village and its municipality in mid-western Sweden who were trying to find ways to revive their forest community by working locally with the forests.

Axel:	There are things happening here, people struggling for rights to the forests... issues that we have been working with in the countries in the global South for years... that nobody is looking at. We could learn so much from each other...
Diane:	We can’t just keep talking and devising solutions for the South and not see that we have similar problems here.
Axel:	We need to look at ourselves and start from where we are.

My presence in these three places and the interactions with the people involved encapsulate how the research, on which this book is based, began. The visits to Nayagarh and Drevdagen showed me that women in these villages preferred to work in alternative ways when it came to local development and environmental governance. In both places, I heard the women saying important things about needing to link environmental governance to other aspects of village life to be able to succeed in their struggles. Why was that proving to be so difficult? After my visit to India, another constant thought in my mind was ‘what did the women get out of my research?’ Was this going to be a book that would address another stack of books and a world of people far from their lives? Or could I do it in a way that might be relevant for the women that I spoke to?’ I came to the conviction that future research had to be useful for the people immediately concerned. And that these issues needed to be seen in a ‘global’ perspective. There are processes taking shape in the ‘developed’ North, not dissimilar to those in the South. Studying them in relation to each other and unraveling the connections between them provide insights about environmental governance, gender and development that are hard to discern otherwise.

This book is about the entanglements of gender, environmental governance and development activities on the ground. It seeks to disentangle these strands to understand them and having done so, to be able to see them in their connections to one another. It is about working in and with, what J. K. Gibson-Graham (drawing on the eco-philosopher Freya Matthews) call a jigsaw world, where practice is shaped by and shapes everything else. This is an up-close, piecing it together, participatory approach to understanding (or performing) the world rather than a big-picture, spectator approach that captures and reduces everything via universal laws (Gibson-Graham 2011, 4). At the heart of the book are ‘up-close’ stories from two peripheral places (in relation to state and other decision-making structures in their countries): Nayagarh, in the countryside of the state of Odisha in India and the other the village of Drevdagen, in the sparsely populated area of western Sweden. I examine the minutiae of daily life, the negotiations of gender and power relations and how these shape environmental governance and development action. I then step back to view them as part of a larger puzzle that makes up our world and trace the tenuous connections between them.

The political meaning of their geographical location as marginal played an important part in gender relations and in the villagers’ work with local development and environmental governance. This politics of marginalization was contested even as it was elaborated. It was, as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing writes of her work in Indonesia, a marginalization developed in language, in dialogue with state policies and regional politics rather than in their isolation in relation to what is perceived as mainstream society. Gender was not parallel to this marginalization. Marginalization itself was gendered (c.f. Tsing 1993) and played an important part in environment and development politics.

The villagers in Nayagarh and Drevdagen regarded themselves as forest communities. Forests are both material resources but also symbolic, imbued with culturally constructed meanings and values. The forests were and remain intrinsic to the way of life in these communities and have played a major role in the sustenance and cultures in these places. Contestations over natural resources in Nayagarh and Drevdagen were central to questions of local governance and development. Natural resources are important for rural lives but they are also a source of significant wealth for governments and for the meaning that they hold for different people. The communities sought to ‘redefine’ their relationships with the environment and to authorities while claiming greater rights over the forests. Women in the villages in both these places chose to organize themselves in their own groups to work for themselves and their communities. This decision became contentious.

By working with the women in these two places and following the trajectories of their organizing, I foreground everyday practices of gender and power while questions of local forest governance form an important background. The women’s organizing turned the focus to struggles over meanings and the contestations over what constituted rural development and local environmental governance. These struggles made clear that what environmental governance and development meant could no longer be taken for granted. The processes brought to attention how dominant meanings are sought to be established. Environmental imaginations were key to crafting gender relations and gender was integral to environmental governance and rural development. In thus arguing, I put environmental sensibilities at the heart of gender negotiations, while at the same time making a case for gender as integral to our analyses in order to be able to meet environmental and developmental challenges.

GENDER, ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE AND DEVELOPMENT

In speaking of gender, development and environmental governance as three pieces of a jigsaw, I do not mean that these are discrete and separate pieces. They are charged by each other—that is, while practices of development and environmental governance are gendered, environmental governance in local communities can be synonymous with development. These categories are superimposed on each other in particular ways in different, material contexts.

There are three important ways in which I conceptualize gender in these two rural contexts—(1) as a description of society based on sexual attributes, (2) as a category of analysis and also (3) how it becomes an issue or problem that needs to be dealt with in development and environmental governance. The first use of gender, as a description of society, is what we find all around us. When we allocate to the sexes different attributes, characteristics and roles, we are doing gender. It becomes apparent in the text as people in both Nayagarh and Drevdagen (especially in Chapters 4, 5 and 6) describe men and women on the basis of their sex with certain taken for granted attributes, for example, men as pragmatic or women as impulsive. These characteristics have valence because, regardless of actual practice, they were often used as the justification for and basis of action. Gender is thus part of the world we live in but it also a way of understanding the world. It is in this second meaning, of studying and understanding the world that I use gender as a category of analysis. This implies studying the organization of power in initiatives for local environmental governance and development (see chapter two for a futher discussion on how I use gender as an analytical category). Appeals to sexual difference were used to consolidate power relationships, but these were also crosscut by other categories of social difference such as age, class, caste or occupation. Gender was, and always is, entangled with and never separate from other forms of social difference. Gender relations were also central within the women’s collectives as the women related to each other, organized themselves and built up an intersubjective space between them, creating a ‘mood’ for change. Third and lastly, I study how gender becomes an ‘issue’ in environmental governance and development, as a problem that needs to be solved. This is typified by the absence of women from organizations for local governance and by the professed need by mainstream organizations and development practitioners to ensure their presence. It also recurs in reiterations about needing to train and develop women and in exhortations to women in rural areas to involve themselves in income generation and community activities. I turn first to the issue of environmental governance and then to development to examine how gender is intrinsic to these processes.

Environmental governance is increasingly concerned with formal and informal decision-making, rule making mechanisms and actors and networks at various scales in relation to environmental resources. Environmental threats and the failure of previous centralized regimes to deliver effective development has led national governments and international organizations to regard political decentralization and a devolution of responsibilities over the environment as the path to sustainable development (Shakleton, Campbell, Wollenberg and Edmunds 2002). At the center of theoretical and policy discussions about political decentralization is a shift from ideas on ‘government’ by the state to ‘governance’ by a variety of different actors in the pursuit of collective interests (c.f. Peters and Pierre 1998).⁶

There are different emphases in the ways that scholars have theorized environmental governance, especially in relation to the actors involved in the processes of devolution. The literature from Sweden, for example centers predominantly on initiatives characterized by partnerships between publicprivate interests or in some cases with established civil society groups. Many such initiatives especially in the last decade reveal neoliberal influences, where environmental problems are sought to be solved by market approaches (see Bäckstrand, Khan, Kronsell and Lövbrand 2010). Another emphasis associated with the term governance, more noticeable in the literature in India, focuses on rural communities’ struggles for viable alternatives to existing arrangements and their relations to the state (e.g. Agrawal, Chhatre and Hardin 2008; Edmunds and Wollenberg 2003). These concern the politics of decision-making and community action while a few have also studied the gendered nature of local environmental governance (e.g. Agarwal 2010).

To varying extents, approaches are dictated by context. Neoliberal currents and community action are present in both India and Sweden although community action is largely inconspicuous in the literature on forest governance in Sweden, and discussions of gender and power are singularly absent. In the present book, I analyze the micropolitics of everyday relations on the ground in cases both from India and Sweden to understand these wider trends associated with the idea of governance in particular spaces. In doing so I pay special attention to the subjectivities produced at the intersection of efforts towards environmental governance and development of marginal places.

At the time of the fieldwork in Naygarh and Drevdagen (in periods between 1992–2005), much of the discourse—in theory and practice—was framed around the term community-based natural resource management (CBRNM) or simply local management. Since then, recognizing community claims as beyond that of ‘managing’ the environment, the discourse has been in terms of ‘governance.’⁷ This is a term I use in the book to refer to processes of decision-making, accountability and for rights and relations to the environment that exceed that of ‘management.’

My attention is on how environmental governance and development are realized through gender and power relations in everyday practice and decision-making processes that give rise to new relationships and subjectivities at collective and individual levels. Issues of management and governance, if anything, have gained more salience in the last few years with climate concerns dominating international agendas and with environmental debates once again focusing on forestry. In quotes from people in Nayagarh and Drevdagen I sometimes continue to use the term ‘local management,’ to suggest a more limited meaning but also when it was a term that participants used themselves, a language that was in use then. Their meanings though, become clear from the dialogues and stories.

Since the term governance has overtones of private interests, I often resort to the use of the term ‘local’ governance to emphasize the focus on community claims. Local governance or management implied a new kind of politics in the two settings, a politics where everyone could be involved. This made it imperative to study what is ‘local’ and who is ‘local’ in environmental governance and development activities. As women were sought to be included in the public space of ‘local’ governance by mainstream organizations, I examine if attempts at inclusion may not in fact undermine efforts towards equitable participation and sustainable environmental governance (Chapter 6)? If we are looking for potentially more democratic and effective environmental governance and development, we need to take account of the alternative spaces in which social groups such as those of women choose to work and what they might want out of their political participation and hopes for the development of their environments.

Development is primarily associated with economic progress and with a ‘will to improve’ (Li 2007) the lives of people, especially in rural areas. Ideas about development are linked in specific ways to conceptualizations of rural space (Chapter 2). Rural areas are seen as being left behind in the inexorable thrust of development and economic growth. Cities are centers of capital accumulation, entrepreneurship and cultural development. Rural women are often regarded as doubly backward, as rural inhabitants restricted to their homes and villages as in India; or in Sweden, as aberrations if they choose to stay on in the countryside instead of seizing opportunities in cities that promise greater equality in gender relations. While rural areas are and have been materially central to global flows in the natural resources and eco-system services they provide, they have been pushed further into the periphery from the centers of capital. These can be understood as the disintegrative effects of development as described by Cindi Katz—the uneven motion of capital finding producing and reproducing places and people in... relation to peculiar strategies of accumulation (Katz 2004, ix). But, as I go on to argue in this book, development is also what people do, as they consciously mobilize resources and networks, form new associations or revive old ones, seek new markets for entrepreneurship and construct a rural community. Dominant definitions of development associated with material improvement contended with varied understandings of what development meant to different people in Nayagarh and Drevdagen.

The ‘conversation’ about development, as Fredrick Cooper and Randall Packard (drawing on McClosky’s metaphor of the ‘conversation’ in the social sciences) point out, “is an extraordinarily extensive one, taking place all over the world” (1997, 6). It also has distinct connotations for countries in the global South or North. In places located in such different parts of the world such as Nayagarh and Drevdagen, where differences in wealth and gender indices are so glaring, global space is often transformed into a time sequence. The West becomes the inhabitant of modernity that is in several respects interchangeable with development and westernization (Pieterse 1991). These conversations produce p...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Routledge Research in Gender and Society
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowlegments
• 1 Introduction: Three Places and a Jigsaw World
• 2 Crafting New Relations and Theorizing Connections: Gender, Development and Environmental Governance
• 3 Policy Discourses and Material Places: Forests, Gender and the (Re)making of the Peripheries
• 4 Environmental Politics on the Ground
• 5 A Politics of the Possible: Gendered Subjectivities in Collective Organizing
• 6 Micropolitics of Rural Development and Environmental Governance: Resistance, Maintenance and Outside Intervention
• 7 Discordant Connections: Discourses on Gender and Grassroots Activism
• 8 Development Practice and Environmental Governance: Flexible Spaces for Political Action
• 9 Conclusion: Up Close in a Jigsaw World: Guideposts from the Present
• Glossary
• Notes
• References
• Index