Gender Analysis and Environmentalisms

The coupling of women and environment in development discourses, popular, academic and practical, has created an illusion of gender awareness. Yet women and gender are, of course, distinct, and this chapter aims to examine this illusion more closely. I focus on assumptions about women and environments but also raise the wider question of coercion in environmental management and regulation. A secondary theme of this chapter is to query the adequacy of the view that poverty is the cause of environmentally unfriendly behaviour. This leads to assumptions that poverty alleviation will result in more positive environmental management, and that therefore development and conservation are inherently compatible. A gender perspective, however, suggests that environmental behaviour is also formed by other social relations which can disrupt such an equation. It also suggests that environmental conservation is frequently predicated upon social inequality.