Unpacking sustainability

Abstract

To advance sustainability globally and equitably, a holistic approach to investigating economic, environmental, and social systems is needed. We extend sustainability research by considering gender explicitly in these efforts, employing feminist political ecology to improve understanding of such complicated interrelationships and to analyze the drivers and impacts of global unequal ecological exchange, namely the ecological deficit of countries to support economic value elsewhere. We employ structural equation modeling to test hypotheses connecting gender equity, neoliberalism attributes (e.g., size of government, degree of regulation), and overshoot. Our findings reinforce aspects of existing theoretical frameworks, including clear support for strong sustainability theories, such as unequal ecological exchange, and complicate dominant development narratives that modernization increases gender equity. We demonstrate the empirical importance of including measures of gender equity in sustainability research and the theoretical importance of feminist political ecology’s contribution to understanding gender and environment as linked oppressions not just for conceiving of new imaginaries but also enacting them.