Abstract
Policies and strategies to fight global environmental degradation, gender inequality, and poverty are often inadequate, ineffective, or insufficient. In response, this article seeks potential synergies and leverage points between three significant interrelated discourses that are often treated separately—development, gender, and environment. Proceeding from a brief history of development thinking and poverty definitions, I describe indicators, strategies, and approaches to poverty reduction and gender equality. Second, I analyze how targeting, mainstreaming, and market-based initiatives all fail both to distinguish empirical from analytical gender and to incorporate environment and gender into development policy and action—despite their key role in meeting the normative goal of poverty reduction. Third, through a political-ecology lens, I suggest an integrated approach to poverty, inequality, and socioenvironmental challenges that arise at the intersections of development, gender, and environment, and for that, I draw examples from research on social and environmental change and action in sub-Saharan Africa.
Highlights
The dual ambition in this article is to trace how three different but interlinked discourses—development, gender, and environment—came together historically in ideology, theory, and practice to promote poverty reduction, and to identify emerging and contemporary synergies between them in that effort
High that climate change responses informed by sustainability will embody institutional, structural, or transformational opportunities to reduce poverty and turn vulnerability into well-being—no longer should poverty be addressed only as a core element of development and, or more so, as a persistent social problem intertwined with global inequality and environmental change
Framings of women and gender in the poverty alleviation and development debate are reproduced throughout the environmental debate despite repeated critique from feminist, political ecology, and other critical perspectives
Summary
The dual ambition in this article is to trace how three different but interlinked discourses—development, gender, and environment—came together historically in ideology, theory, and practice to promote poverty reduction, and to identify emerging and contemporary synergies between them in that effort. I turn to how environmental concerns gained attention in the global debate, how development and environment come together in theory and practice in ecological modernization, and how poverty reduction policies were later formulated in line with that, often with market-based instruments as a solution despite their limitations. To sum up far, the focus in poverty reduction policies and strategies has shifted over time from specific development aspects—basic needs, gender equality, rural development—to more diffuse (neo)liberal notions such as “equity in opportunities” (World Bank, 2005) only to drift back again to specific aspects such as education, human security, public health, and reproductive rights. The highly divisive debate on food regimes may serve to illustrate this polarization between mainstream depoliticized pleas for technology driven food security (Godfray et al, 2010) versus politically transformative peasant movements to achieve sovereignty (Holt-Giménez & Altieri, 2013)
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