This book casts a light on the daily struggles and achievements of ‘gender experts’ working in environment and development organisations, where they are charged with advancing gender equality and social equity and aligning this with visions of sustainable development. Developed through a series of conversations convened by the book’s editors with leading practitioners from research, advocacy and donor organisations, this text explores the ways gender professionals – specialists and experts, researchers, organizational focal points – deal with personal, power-laden realities associated with navigating gender in everyday practice. In turn, wider questions of epistemology and hierarchies of situated knowledges are examined, where gender analysis is brought into fields defined as largely techno-scientific, positivist and managerialist. Drawing on insights from feminist political ecology and feminist science, technology and society studies, the authors and their collaborators reveal and reflect upon strategies that serve to mute epistemological boundaries and enable small changes to be carved out that on occasions open up promising and alternative pathways for an equitable future. This book will be of great relevance to scholars and practitioners with an interest in environment and development, science and technology, and gender and women’s studies more broadly. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351175180, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Climate change, natural disasters, and loss of biodiversity are all considered major environmental concerns for the international community both now and into the future. Each are damaging to the earth, but they also negatively impact human lives, especially those of women. Despite these important links, to date very little consideration has been given to the role of gender in global environmental politics and policy-making. This timely and insightful book explains why gender matters to the environment. In it, Nicole Detraz examines contemporary debates around population, consumption, and security to show how gender can help us to better understand environmental issues and to develop policies to tackle them effectively and justly. Our society often has different expectations of men and women, and these expectations influence the realm of environmental politics. Drawing on examples of various environmental concerns from countries around the world, Gender and the Environment makes the case that it is only by adopting a more inclusive focus that embraces the complex ways men and women interact with ecosystems that we can move towards enhanced sustainability and greater environmental justice on a global scale. This much-needed book is an invaluable guide for those interested in environmental politics and gender studies, and sets the agenda for future scholarship and advocacy.

This title was first published in 2002: Tracing global shifts in development thinking through to national-level policy making in India and its local-scale implications, Sarah Jewitt investigates the practical value of radical populist and eco-feminist alternatives to more mainstream forms of development. Using detailed empirical data on forests and agriculture from two adivasi (tribal) villages in India, she takes a micro-political ecology approach to examine inter- and intra-community (especially gender) variations in environmental knowledge, resource management strategies and development aspirations. Critiquing the adoption of romanticized eco-feminist discourse in policymaking, Jewitt studies the Jharkhand region of Bihar, India, to determine women’s contribution to environmental degradation and how the implementation of environmentally-oriented development initiatives affects their daily lives. She also examines the populist concern about the displacement of traditional agro-ecological practices by modern techniques, and illustrates the need to understand local people’s socio-cultural beliefs and aspirations as well as their technical knowledge when seeking to promote more appropriate development.

Gender and Sustainability deals with women's struggles to contend with global forces—environmental change, economic development, discrimination and stereotyping about the roles of women, and diminishing access to natural resources—not in the abstract but in everyday life. It addresses the lived complexities of the relationship between gender and sustainability.

Gender equality and environmental goals are mutually reinforcing, with slow progress on environmental actions affecting the achievement of gender equality, and vice versa. Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires targeted and coherent actions. However, complementarities and trade-offs between gender equality and environmental sustainability are scarcely documented within the SDG framework. Based on the SDG framework, this report provides an overview of the gender-environment nexus, looking into data and evidence gaps, economic and well-being benefits, and governance and justice aspects. It examines nine environment-related SDGs (2, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12 and 15) through a gender-environment lens, using available data, case studies, surveys and other evidence. It shows that women around the world are disproportionately affected by climate change, deforestation, land degradation, desertification, growing water scarcity and inadequate sanitation, with gender inequalities further exacerbated by COVID-19. The report concludes that gender-responsiveness in areas such as land, water, energy and transport management, amongst others, would allow for more sustainable and inclusive economic development, and increased well-being for all. Recognising the multiple dimensions of and interactions between gender equality and the environment, it proposes an integrated policy framework, taking into account both inclusive growth and environmental considerations at local, national and international levels.

Over the past 20 years scholars, policymakers, and the media have increasingly recognized the links between both traditional and non-traditional security issues and the changing condition of the global environment. Concepts such as 'environmental security' and 'resource conflict' have been used to hint at these significant linkages. While there has been a good deal of scholarly work conducted that seeks to identify the ways that actors link these concepts, there has been little examination of the intersection between approaches to environmental security and gender. This book explores this intersection to provide an insight into the gendered nature of both global environmental politics and security studies. It examines how the issues of security and the environment are linked to theory and practice, and the extent to which gender informs these discussions. By adopting a feminist environmental security discourse, this book provides crucial redefinitions of key concepts and offers new insights into the ways we understand security-environment connections. Case studies evaluate if, and how, environment and security discourses are being used to understand a range of environmental issues, and how a feminist environmental security discourse contributes to our understanding of security-environment connections. This multidisciplinary volume draws on literature from the environmental sciences, security studies and sociology to highlight the complex human insecurities that often accompany environmental change. As conceptualizations of security continue to shift and broaden to include environmental issues and concerns, it is imperative that gender informs the debate.

The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment gathers together state-of-the-art theoretical reflections and empirical research from leading researchers and practitioners working in this transdisciplinary and transnational academic field. Over the course of the book, these contributors provide critical analyses of the gender dimensions of a wide range of timely and challenging topics, from sustainable development and climate change politics, to queer ecology and interspecies ethics in the so-called Anthropocene. Presenting a comprehensive overview of the development of the field from early political critiques of the male domination of women and nature in the 1980s to the sophisticated intersectional and inclusive analyses of the present, the volume is divided into four parts: Part I: Foundations Part II: Approaches Part III: Politics, policy and practice Part IV: Futures. Comprising chapters written by forty contributors with different perspectives and working in a wide range of research contexts around the world, this Handbook will serve as a vital resource for scholars, students, and practitioners in environmental studies, gender studies, human geography, and the environmental humanities and social sciences more broadly.