WOMEN AND MINORITY GROUPS IN ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT

Abstract

The work reported here explores how women and indigenous groups could potentially contribute to the process of environmental management. Women, indigenous communities and the poor are minorities due to their powerlessness. The result is that their opinions are not sought and minorities are not treated as contributors to modern development interventions. The objective of this paper is to examine how local knowledge and strategies contribute to the management of the resources of local environments. It is seen that women are marginalized in two ways. On the one hand, due to their gender, women are socialized as homemakers and family labour in farming and the management of other resources. On the other hand, women lack resources. Indigenous groups are marginalized due to the fact that their environmental management methods are not technical and cannot be institutionalized. The information extracted from two field studies conducted in Sri Lanka reveals that for women's and indigenous minority groups environmental management is an integral part of their resource use and therefore integrating locally evolved strategies is a way to stabilize, restore and sustain the survival systems. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment. Sustainable Development, Vol. 5, 11–20 (1997)