Gendering Agenda 21: women's involvement in setting the environmental agenda

Abstract

The Agenda 21 programme agreed at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) made explicit provision for fully participatory environmental decision-making. Specifically, this was to include women, along with children and ‘indigenous peoples’. Research conducted into women's participation in environmental programmes in the UK suggests that very little specific effort has been made to encourage women to participate in the formulation of Local Agenda 21 (LA21) programmes. Moreover, research into reactions to environmental problems, and into local government strategies for dealing with such, reveals that there is both a distinctive set of environmental concerns and an approach to these which arguably could be assigned to gender. This paper argues that LA21 represents an ambiguous area of policy formation, falling, as it does, between the public space of formal politics and the intermediate space of the neighbourhood or community. Whilst this will affect all who engage in the process,...