Gender And Green Governance

Economists studying environmental collective action and green governance have paid little attention to gender. Research on gender and green governance in other disciplines has focused mainly on women's near absence from forestry institutions. This interdisciplinary book turns that focus on its head to ask: what if women were present in these institutions? What difference would that make? Would women's inclusion in forest governance - undeniably important for equity - also affect decisions on forest use and outcomes for conservation and subsistence? Are women's interests in forests different from men's? Would women's presence lead to better forests and more equitable access? Does it matter which class of women governs? And how large a presence of women would make an impact? Answers to these questions can prove foundational for effective environmental governance. Yet they have hardly been empirically investigated. In an analysis that is conceptually sophisticated and statistically rigorous, using primary data on community forestry institutions in India and Nepal, this book is the first major study to comprehensively address these wide-ranging issues. It traces women's history of exclusion from public institutions, the factors which constrain their effective participation, and how those constraints can be overcome. It outlines how strategic partnerships between forestry and other civil society institutions could strengthen rural women's bargaining power with community and government. And it examines the complexities of eliciting government accountability in addressing poor rural women's needs, such as for clean domestic fuel and access to the commons. Located in the interface of environmental studies, political economy and gender analysis, the volume makes significant original contributions to current debates on gender and governance, forest conservation, clean energy policy, critical mass and social inclusion. Traversing uncharted territory with rare analytical rigor, this lucidly written book will be of interest to scholars and students as well as policy makers and practitioners.

This book questions the conventional belief that development brings about greater gender equality and better environmental management. 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. Engaging seriously with academic debates on gender, environment and development, this volume contributes to a much-needed dialogue among these fields.

Despite its tiny size and seeming marginality to world affairs, the Central American republic of Costa Rica has long been considered an important site for experimentation in cutting-edge environmental policy. From protected area management to ecotourism to payment for environmental services (PES) and beyond, for the past half-century the country has successfully positioned itself at the forefront of novel trends in environmental governance and sustainable development. Yet the increasingly urgent dilemma of how to achieve equitable economic development in a world of ecosystem decline and climate change presents new challenges, testing Costa Rica’s ability to remain a leader in innovative environmental governance. This book explores these challenges, how Costa Rica is responding to them, and the lessons this holds for current and future trends regarding environmental governance and sustainable development. It provides the first comprehensive assessment of successes and challenges as they play out in a variety of sectors, including agricultural development, biodiversity conservation, water management, resource extraction, and climate change policy. By framing Costa Rica as an “ecolaboratory,” the contributors in this volume examine the lessons learned and offer a path for the future of sustainable development research and policy in Central America and beyond.

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.

On one day in 2009, in thirty-eight countries around the world, 4,000 ordinary citizens gathered to discuss the future of climate policy. This project, 'WWViews', was the first-ever global democratic deliberation – an attempt to enable ordinary people to reach informed decisions on and impact the global policy process. This book – which analyzes the experiences and lessons from this ground-breaking event – marks the beginning of a new kind of democratic politics, providing practical lessons on how to increase the impact of global deliberation projects within the media and on official policy processes. The authors explore important themes for participatory approaches from the local to the global: the role of deliberation within global governance methodology and practice participant selection; policy impacts engaging the media how policy culture affects deliberation uptake capacity building and knowledge transfer process evaluation content and argumentation analysis gender, race and class aspects. The global aims of the 'WWViews project', along with the opportunity to evaluate the same process in different national and cultural contexts, makes this a hugely valuable and informative study for all those interested in democratic deliberation and environmental governance from the small to the international scale.

An internationally acclaimed economist, Bina Agarwal is known for her path-breaking writings on agriculture, property rights, and the environment. Her three-volume compendium brings together a selection of her essays, written over three decades. Combining diverse disciplines, methodologies, and cross-country comparisons, the essays challenge standard economic analyses and assumptions from a gender perspective. They provide original insights on a wide range of theoretical, empirical, and policy issues of continuing importance in contemporary debates. The first volume spans varied dimensions of the author’s writings on agrarian change, from 1981 to the present. It identifies gender inequalities in the impact of agricultural modernisation and technical change across Asia and Africa; the links between women, poverty, and economic growth processes; and data biases in measuring women’s work. It traces the gendered costs of droughts and famine, and challenges top-down methods of innovation diffusion. Focusing on the key role of women farmers in food security, it also offers innovative solutions, including public land banks and group farming. The second volume focuses on the author’s paradigm-shifting work on women’s property status in South Asia. Challenging conventional approaches to women’s empowerment, it demonstrates how promoting access to property, especially land, is key to enhancing women’s economic and social well-being and deterring domestic violence. It details gender inequalities in inheritance laws, public policies, and land struggles, and presents the bargaining framework for understanding and finding ways of overcoming these inequalities, both within families and in markets, communities, and vis-à-vis the state. This third volume traces the relationship between gender and environmental change. Critiquing ecofeminist assumptions, it presents an alternative theoretical framework. It also examines the causes of women’s absence as well as the impact of their presence in environmental collective action. Based on innovative fieldwork on community institutions for forest governance, the author demonstrates how a critical mass of women can significantly improve conservation outcomes. In conclusion, she reflects on which features of feminist scholarship make for an effective challenge to mainstream economics.

Many people investigating the operation of large-scale environmentalist organizations see signs of power, knowledge and governance in their policies and projects. This collection indicates that such an analysis appears to be justified from one perspective, but not from another. The chapters in this collection show that the critics, concerned with the power of these organizations to impose their policies in different parts of the world, appear justified when we look at environmentalist visions and at organizational policies and programs. However, they are much less justified when we look at the practical operation of such organizations and their ability to generate and carry out projects intended to reshape the world.