Rubaya, a village in Rwanda, is a trail-blazing example of gender-sensitive environmental reform.  Gender-aware approaches to building community resilience—recognizing that women and men suffer differently from the impact of environmental degradation—are crucial for sustainable development. 

Since its establishment in 2010, Rubaya, Rwanda’s first  “green village,” has been a trailblazer for the country’s “quiet sustainable development revolution”.¹ Guided by a women-led cooperative, the village has improved its agricultural productivity by combating soil erosion and deforestation through terracing and tree planting; built several biogas plants to decrease its dependency on firewood, and increased water supply through maintaining rainwater reservoirs. Together,  these measures have not only significantly improved the livelihoods of the community’s residents, particularly those of local women and girls, but have also succeeded in promoting sustainable development and strengthening the community’s resilience against environmental degradation.  

Where deforestation, for instance, had previously led to women and girls spending three or four hours of the day collecting firewood, the use of biogas fuel has freed their time up for attending school, while the forests around the village are slowly recovering. Today, Rubaya is considered a model community in Rwanda’s plan to establish green villages throughout the country—a process in which the explicit inclusion and empowerment of women are seen as key for ensuring that solutions serve every member of the community.² 

The story of Rubaya Village is only one manifestation of a long overdue paradigmatic shift, from perceiving environmental degradation as a “humanitarian crisis in which gender has no relevance” toward growing recognition of gender as critical to determining the relationship between individual vulnerability and environmental degradation.³ 

According to UNDP, Women, for instance, are 14 times more likely than men to die in chronic and catastrophic environmental hazard situations. Women also make up 70%  of the world’s poor; while people living in poverty are likely to be affected first and most seriously by environmental destruction.⁴ Rural women in particular often bear the cost of environmental degradation, in the form of poor harvests, lack of access to clean water, and longer journeys in search of firewood, as they tend to be more dependent on communal resources and subsistence farming.⁵ Yet, there is a substantial gap between women’s particularly high stake in environmental conservation and their ability to act on it:  from the community to the international level, women remain significantly underrepresented in institutions responsible for developing environmental policy. 

Gender-blind approaches to environmental conservation,  which neglect to address women’s higher vulnerability to environmental degradation and their lack of access to political representation, are thus bound to perpetuate existing inequalities and will likely fail to produce successful mitigation strategies. As the case of Rubaya Village shows,  improving the representation of women in environmentalist discourse and policy formation can be a first step towards 

raising awareness of gendered differences in experiencing impacts of environmental destruction, and the need to develop gender-sensitive solutions. 

However, the interaction of gender and environment highlights the need for a more profound engagement with the underlying social structures shaping human-nature relations. Environmental behavior, individual vulnerability to environmental hazards, access to institutional representation, and contextual environmental knowledge are significantly determined by pre-existing social norms, gendered division of labor, and gendered differences in resource allocation.⁶ Investigating the root causes of gendered vulnerabilities is therefore key to strengthening community resilience to environmental degradation and promoting environmentally sustainable development. 

I want to suggest that gender-sensitive environmental reform can draw from the theoretical framework of Ecofeminism,  a concept that emerged alongside the environmental and anti-nuclear proliferation movements of the mid-1970s.⁷ 

Ecofeminism’s central tenet is that the same ideologies that promote the subordination of women in society also sanction environmental degradation⁸, stemming from a  patriarchal logic that shapes both human-human and human-nature interactions.⁹ This logic is understood to be reflected in the binary perception of the world as sets of morally charged and hierarchical dualisms like culture nature, male-female, reason-emotion, or human-nature,  privileging hegemonic masculinity, to which the feminine — emotions, bodies, nature—is only of instrumental value.¹⁰ In ecofeminist thought environmental degradation and women’s subordination are intersecting oppressions that sustain patriarchal domination.¹¹ 

Despite its potential for theorizing gendered approaches to environmental issues, Ecofeminism’s considerable conceptual weaknesses were soon exposed to heavy criticism. The most dominant critique denounced its essentializing tendencies that assumed an either biologically or historically determined connection between women and nature, citing women’s role as caretakers or their embodied experiences such as childbirth or the menstruation cycle.¹² Assuming a universal caring attitude of women towards nature, critics claimed,  would not only reinforce inequality by employing existing dualisms but also homogenize women’s experience.¹³

 

“Women also make up 70% of the world’s  poor; while people  living in poverty are  likely to be affected  first and most seriously  by environmental  destruction.”

 

 

Due to this early stigmatization of Ecofeminism as an essentialist approach, and its failure to articulate an  “acceptable theoretical language for environmental social scientists”, few feminist scholars pursued the ecofeminist project.¹⁴ Environmentalist discourse subsequently shifted towards technical and policy solutions for material impacts,  and away from critical engagement with the ideological foundations of environmental degradation and individual vulnerability to it.¹⁵

 

Given the need for a more relational and structural understanding of gender, environment, and society, it seems worthwhile, however, to revisit ecofeminist theory and to reconceptualize it towards a Critical Ecofeminism. A Critical  Ecofeminism that rejects essentializing tendencies and incorporates more recent concepts of feminist scholarship,  would constitute an approach that still embraces gender as a critical variable determining the interaction of humans and the environment, but is also concerned with how gender intersects with other social categories such as race, class or caste.¹⁶ Instead of assuming a universalized gendered experience, critical ecofeminist thought could then provide analytical space for exploring how an individual’s location within the intersection of political, social, and economic power structures shapes both women’s and men’s interaction with the environment, the extent to which they are impacted by environmental degradation, and their ability to act on its protection.¹⁷

As in the case of Rubaya Village, such an understanding could translate into building community institutions that place decision-making in the hands of traditionally marginalized groups to find solutions that serve all members of a community. Critical Ecofeminism promotes an environmentalist policy that is not only concerned with the material impacts of environmental degradation, but also with the inequitable distribution of these impacts. In combining a structural understanding of social categories,  environmentalist research, and a normative agenda that is inherently critical of patterns of oppression, reconceptualizing  Ecofeminism thus offers a suitable framework for theorizing human interaction with the environment and for informing critical environmentalist discourse and practice.

References:

1.  UNDP- United Nations Development Programme (2010): Gender and Disasters, Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery.
2. UN Environment (2017): Women Take the Lead in Rwanda’s First “Green Village”, Oct. 2017.
3. Sherilyn MacGregor (2010): Gender and climate change: from impacts to discourses, Journal of the Indian Ocean Region, 6:2: pp. 223-238
4. World Hunger Education: Women and Hunger Facts
5. Bina Agarwal (2000): Conceptualising environmental collective action: why gender matters, in: Cambridge Journal of Economics, 2000, 24: pp. 283-310
6. Ibid
7. Mary Phillips (2016): Embodied care and Planet Earth: ecofeminism, maternalism and post-maternalism, in: Australian Feminist Studies, 31: 90: pp. 468-485.
8. Damayanti Banerjee and Michael Bell (2007): Ecogender: Locating Gender in Environmental Social Science, in: Society and Natural Resources, 20:1: pp. 3-19
9. Plumwood, V. (1993): Feminism and the mastery of nature. New York: Routledge, 1993
10. Mary Philips (2016): Embodied care and Planet Earth.
11. Susan Buckingham (2014): Ecofeminism in the 21st Century, in: The Geographical Journal, 170: 2: pp. 146-154
12. Mary Phillips (2016): Embodied care and Planet Earth.
13. Bina Agarwal (2000): Conceptualising environmental collective action
14. Damayanti Banerjee and Michael Bell (2007): Ecogender
15. Sherilyn MacGregor (2010): Gender and climate change
16. Susan Buckingham (2014): Ecofeminism in the 21st Century
17. Anna Kaijser and Kronsell, Annica (2013): Climate change through the lens of intersectionality, in: Environmental Politics

 

Hannah Reinl