Empowering Women through Tree Planting? Gender and Global Environmentalism in Northern Ghana.

The Earth Summit of 1992 ushered in art era of global environmental management based on conventions signed by governments, international panels of experts, global environmental monitoring centres, and interventions of international non-governmental organization (NGOs) working in collaboration with donor nations and aid recipient governinents. The framework for global environmental management articulated within the Report of the United Nations Commission on Environment and Development (UNCED) is based upon a conception of sustainable development which draws together strands of economic development based on neoliberal, free market development with environmental protection. Breaking with previous conceptions of environmental protection, as being dependent upon a transformation of world capitalist markets and a limitation of economic growth, it is argued that environmental protection is dependent upon sustained economic growth and the expansion of new technologies that make more efficient utilisation of natural resources possible without depleting the natural environment. The UNCED report is participatory and inclusive. It places a special emphasis on community participation in the management of resources within localities and addresses the needs of ensuring the rights of minorities to natural resources and to participation in environmental management, including the rights of worriers and "indigenous people". This is clearly seen in the capacity building programme on promoting Sustainable and Rural Development of UNCED, which li...