Feminist Political Ecology Research Articles

When Agronomy Flirts with Markets, Gender, and Nutrition: A Political Ecology of the New Green Revolution for Africa and Women’s Food Security in Burkina Faso

AbstractAdvocates of the Green Revolution for Africa (GR4A) argue that the best way to address malnutrition is to incorporate smallholders into the global food economy via value chains involving the use of improved inputs, production technologies, and access to markets. Moseley and Ouedraogo critically assess these tactics using a feminist political ecology lens to analyze GR4A efforts in southwestern Burkina Faso which target female rice farmers. They examine the nature of the GR4A rice value chain, the degree to which a GR4A project is impacting the nutrition of participating women, and the influence of gender roles on GR4A rice project outcomes.

Interrogating differences: Intersectionality and participatory livelihood development in the upland forest of Tripura (Northeast India)

Intersectionality is used in academic and policy circles to show how mutually constitutive axes of power and social difference intersect to shape lived experiences of inequality. The concept has made inroads in investigations of participatory development to examine people’s engagement, participatory experiences, and outcomes. However, in doing so, there is sometimes a propensity to treat categories of difference as fixed or given. This myopic focus encourages generalizations around how people and groups experience power and difference, and obscures a complex understanding of how these are lived, enacted, and conditioned by diverse subject positions and embodied experiences and practices in participatory development- thus shaping intersectional subjectivity and project outcomes. This ethnographic case study shows how a tribal woman from an ethnic minority- named Purati- experiences, performs, and contests multiple aspects of difference and power in a participatory livelihood project in upland Tripura. Using feminist insights on intersectionality, interpellation, performativity, and feminist political ecology and resource governance literature, we show how multiple and shifting categories of differences are constituted in two encounters between Purati and those implementing the project. We highlight how aspects of difference and their intersections, constituted, and enacted in time and place, shape experiences of intersectionality in participatory development, and how navigating and variously responding to these can reassert and rearticulate intersectional power relations and subjectivity. This nuanced analysis of intersectionality further provides in-depth understandings of how the workings of difference and power shape participatory engagement, goals, and outcomes, and is key for debates and implementation regarding participatory development.

Decolonizing agriculture in the United States: Centering the knowledges of women and people of color to support relational farming practices.

While the agricultural knowledges and practices of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and women have shaped agriculture in the US, these knowledges have been colonized, exploited, and appropriated, cleaving space for the presently dominant white male agricultural narrative. Simultaneously, these knowledges and practices have been transformed to fit within a society that values individualism, production, efficiency, and profit. The authors use a decolonial Feminist Political Ecology framework to highlight the ways in which the knowledges of Indigenous, Black, and women farmers have been and are being colonized; a tradition that makes alternative agriculture a predominantly white space. The authors interviewed 10 BIPOC and women farmers in Colorado to understand what values and knowledges were shaping their often-appropriated agricultural practices. Three themes emerged: people, place, and patterns. By centering these values, farmers create relational agricultural practices that support the well-being of human and more-than-human beings. To support the widespread implementation of these practices, food systems practitioners must elevate the voices and knowledges of historically excluded farmers. Only then can truly just and equitable alternative agricultural practices be realized in the US.

Power in resilience and resilience's power in climate change scholarship

AbstractResilience thinking has undergone profound theoretical developments in recent decades, moving to characterize resilience as a socio‐natural process that requires constant negotiation between a range of actors and institutions. Fundamental to this understanding has been a growing acknowledgment of the role of power in shaping resilience capacities and politics across cultural and geographic contexts. This review article draws on a critical content analysis, applied to a systematic review of recent resilience literature to examine how scholarship has embraced nuanced conceptualizations of how power operates in resilience efforts, to move away from framings that risk reinforcing patterns of marginalization. Advancing a framework inspired by feminist theory and feminist political ecology, we analyze how recent work has presented, documented, and conceptualized how resilience intersects with patterns of inequity. In doing so, we illuminate the importance of knowledge, scale, and subject making in understanding the complex ways in which power and resilience become interlinked. We illustrate how overlooking such complexity may have serious consequences for how socio‐natural challenges and solutions are framed in resilience scholarship and, in turn, how resilience is planned and enacted in practice. Finally, we highlight how recent scholarship is advancing the understandings necessary to make sense of the shifting, contested, and power‐laden nature of resilience. Paying attention to, and building on, such complexity will allow scholarly work to illuminate the ways in which resilience is negotiated within inequitable processes and to address the marginalization of those continuing to bear the brunt of the climate crisis.This article is categorized under: Climate and Development > Social Justice and the Politics of Development

Community gardens as feminist spaces: A more‐than‐gendered approach to their transformative potential

AbstractIn recent years, research in urban agriculture (UA) initiatives has adopted a more critical and transdisciplinary approach, proposing that UA enables shifts in socio‐economic, community, environmental and urban paradigms. Following this critical agenda, this paper draws attention to the multi‐scalar transformative potential that participation in community gardens (as a form of UA) can provide to volunteers, informed by a feminist approach. Firstly, we review the literature on the diverse gendered benefits, and degrees of empowerment women have experienced from working in community gardens, both individually and collectively. Examples from the literature review are informed by concepts from feminist geographies that support the exploration of community gardens as sites of embodied, relational and multi‐scalar experience. Following that, we expand the discussion to review opportunities community gardens offer individuals to gain greater awareness of symbolic forms of oppression, and envision alternatives for social change, drawing on feminist geographies in ways that move ‘beyond gender’. These benefits are mostly informed by conscientisation, decolonial and feminist political ecology approaches. Finally, the paper suggests that community gardens can be conceptualised as feminist spaces, given their fluidity and capacity to enable critical perspectives in volunteers, which may result in alternative forms of political action. The paper concludes with suggestions for further critical research on UA spaces.

La participación de las mujeres zapatistas y el territorio desde el enfoque de ecología política feminista

Zapatismo is a social movement on which there is an extensive literature, mainly focused on the gender issue. However, analyzes of the territory from the perspective of feminist political ecology are uncommon. Therefore, this research combined this approach and a qualitative methodology to meet the following objectives: (a) Describe the participation of Zapatista women in a Zapatista Autonomous Rebel Municipality (MAREZ), (b) Analyze their proposal for an ecologically viable livelihoods, (c) Investigate access to the territory and its control for women based on Zapatista autonomy. The outcomes suggest that there are advances, contradictions, and challenges in the participation of women. The Zapatistas build territories from rivers, gardens, acahuales, and mountains, whose access and control are influenced by gender roles and, therefore, women seek to transform. For instance, agroecological options achieved the ecologically viable livelihoods and have changed gender relationships in the study communities. In conclusion, the construction of the Zapatista territories is in dispute with other actors and has made it possible to promote the participation of women in this process.

Toward a feminist political ecology of household food and water security during drought in northern Nicaragua

Bacon, C., L. C. Kelley, and I. T. Stewart. 2021. Toward a feminist political ecology of household food and water security during drought in northern Nicaragua. Ecology and Society 27(1):16. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-12716-270116

A feminist political ecology of farm resource entitlements in Northern Ghana

With the unprecedented feminization of agriculture globally, literature has emerged over the past decade suggesting that gender equality in agriculture could be advanced if gaps in access to farm resources between women and men are reduced. This paper examines gendered farm resource entitlements in northern Ghana. Based mainly on six months of immersive qualitative research, this case study draws from and contributes to feminist political ecology scholarship (FPE) on smallholder farming and agricultural development. The analysis describes some of the intensifying gender and intersecting inequalities (e.g., gender and ethnicity) of land access related to development interventions aimed at commercializing farming. Gender disparities in access to agricultural extension, chemical fertilizers, agrochemicals, high yielding seed varieties, tractor services, credit packages and marketing contracts supported by the state, donors and NGOs are also found. FPE is useful for revealing how these gendered resource disparities are related to agricultural commercialization and increasingly erratic rainfall and aridity, making smallholders more vulnerable to land dispossession. Women’s dependence on men to farm while operating under these changing economic and environmental conditions, coupled with their weaker entitlement rights to resources, threatens to push many, particularly ethnic minority women, out of farming altogether. The ways that intersecting identities shape access to land also complicates understandings of the role of community outsiders who are both the dispossessors of land and those who are intensely vulnerable to dispossession. While rural development studies generally consider women’s farm resources compared to men’s, this does little to explain the intensifying intersectional vulnerabilities.

Gendered infrastructure and liminal space in Delhi’s unauthorized colonies

This paper takes an embodied approach to the lived experiences and everyday politics of liminal neighborhoods and infrastructures in Delhi’s unauthorized colonies, which lack official entitlements to networked infrastructures such as water and sewerage. Bringing a feminist political ecology lens to critical infrastructure studies, I show how gendered social relations, subjectivities, and the unequal experience of urban liminality are tied to accessing water and its fragmented infrastructures beyond the network. In particular, liminal infrastructural space is produced in unauthorized colonies through not only these neighborhoods’ quasi-legal status and unequal access to urban water, but also through gendered discourses and the socially differentiated ways water infrastructures are co-produced, managed, and made livable by residents. As water is primarily accessed beyond the network via tubewells and tankers, I demonstrate how these fractured modalities ultimately constitute gendered infrastructural assemblages that enable water’s circulation across neighborhoods but also serve to deepen forms of gendered marginality and differentiation. Here, gendered infrastructural practices and labor to negotiate and supplement fragmented components of water infrastructure shape subjectivities and possibilities for social relations and urban claims-making. These infrastructural assemblages expose both the situated experience of urban liminality, as well as its transcendent possibilities.

Gender-Focused Bilateral Aid in the Environmental Sector

According to feminist political ecology, women are uniquely and disproportionately affected by forest loss in many low- or middle-income countries (LMICs) because of gender divisions with regard to labor, land access, and forest resources. However, most macro-comparative theories of development (including economic dependency, ecological modernization, treadmill of production, world society, and neo-Malthusian theories) tend to ignore gender. We draw on ideas from feminist political ecology to examine how gender-focused bilateral aid in the environmental sector impacts forest loss from 2001 to 2015. To do so, we analyze data for 79 LMICs using ordinary least squares regression. We find that more gender-focused bilateral aid in the environmental sector is related to less forest loss. We also find support for economic dependency theory (more agricultural and forestry exports are related to more forest loss) and neo-Malthusian theory (more population growth is related to more forest loss). The main finding on bilateral financing supports the idea that gender should receive more attention in cross-national research, especially the integration of gender-related measures into analyses to refine and expand conventional macro-theories of development.

Paradigms of “Vulnerability”: from Post-structuralism to Eco-feminism

What are the most useful lenses to wear and from which positioning is most effective to speak today, in order to answer the need for a paradigm shift within the critical thinking concerning the culture of Capitalism? An increasing number of authors support an interdisciplinary approach carried out, not only in academic environments, by political ecology and ecofeminism, connecting the critique of capitalism with that of patriarchy, and re-establishing a relationship between theory and praxis, in which the latter produces knowledge through embodied experience. The following article agrees with this hypothesis, but its aim is not so much to delineate the contours of what feminist political ecology is and what new conceptual categories it introduces, but to understand instead what is the dialectical necessity that produces this approach and what it distances itself from. To do so, I will use the process of resignifying the category of vulnerability in the contemporary feminist debate in the poststructuralist approach, as an antithetical example to the feminist political ecology lens and posture. The aim is to begin paving an autonomous path for this critical matter, beginning by delineating the antagonism toward poststructural feminism as one of the conflicts which produces it.

Global Discourses and Local Disconnects: Gender, Aging, Health, and Well-Being in Uganda

Women comprise a larger share of the world’s aging population. Because older women occupy two stigmatized statuses, they are deemed a particularly disadvantaged group requiring attention. International organizations claim that the feminization of population aging has the potential to become one of the biggest challenges to gender equality of the twenty-first century due to cumulative impacts of inequalities in later life. Yet, discussions uncritically assume that older women are a permanent minority, ignoring the possibility that the direction of gender inequality or its absence varies. This article engages with these contradictions by examining links between gender, aging, and inequalities. Drawing on human geography perspectives of gender, embodiment, and temporalities, interviews with elderly men and women (n = 53) and key informants (n = 34) in Uganda demonstrate that old age health and well-being is an amalgamation of gendered experiences and social dynamics (re)produced and (re)articulated across the life course. Illuminating how gender inequalities are embodied through diverse spatial and temporal relations exposes a counternarrative to global discourses, revealing that gender and aging are experienced and navigated in sometimes unexpected and contradictory ways. Putting forth a feminist political ecology life course perspective highlights needed geographic attention to antecedent place processes that relationally co-constitute gender – age inequalities.

Embroidering Resistance: Emotional, embodied, everyday struggles of women affected by dams in Brazil

The article analyzes the daily emotional struggles embodied by peasant women affected by a hydropower dam in South Brazil and the use of arpilleras – a popular arts textile technique – as a means of resistance. The article is based on ethnographic research done in collaboration with the Movement of People Affected by Dams (MAB) in a region affected by the Baixo Iguaçu dam, which is the sixth and last dam constructed on the Iguaçu River. I use a Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) approach in order to analyze women’s resistance, highlighting the emotional, embodied, and everyday dimensions of their struggles. Listening to women and paying attention to their narratives embroidered in arpilleras reveals that the implementation of a dam project brings about material impacts as well as complex gendered, emotional, and embodied effects. The article demonstrates that resistance to dams not only takes place in protests and direct action, but also in the everyday, embodied and emotional struggles, women’s networks, and through art. By embroidering arpilleras, women affected by dams in Brazil organized in the MAB are developing a political strategy that uses art as a powerful and gendered tool in their resistance to dams, with transformative effects.

North Atlantic fishy feminists and the more-than-human approach: a conversation

Fisheries and aquaculture have been the subject of feminist research and activism globally for decades. The result is a rapidly expanding body of literature examining women and fisheries and gender relations from oceans to plate. This body encompasses diverse and substantive critiques of mainstream fisheries research, policy and practice that ignore women’s contributions showing how local practices, political economies and state policies (re)produce gender inequalities around access to fisheries resources and related wealth. Their work has had positive results. Some fishy feminist work draws on ecofeminism and feminist political ecology to explore links between resource degradation, neoliberal capitalism and patriarchy, but more needs to be done. This paper places existing North Atlantic feminist fisheries research in conversation with an emerging body of feminist scholarship interrogating human-fish relations. It makes the case for applying an ecofeminist lens in future work foregrounding how relations among humans, fisheries and fish are shaped by intersecting capitalist, colonial, speciesist and patriarchal systems of oppression. This lens would highlight the multiple oppressions that arise from altered fishery and aquaculture arrangements and dynamics in the age of the Anthropocene. Putting these bodies of work into lively conversation contributes to both the feminist fisheries/aquaculture and the more-than-human literatures.

“Now the Forest Is Over”: Transforming the Commons and Remaking Gender in Cambodia's Uplands

Communal lands and natural resources in rural Cambodia have transformed over the past 30 years as the country attempts to transition from conflict to liberal democracy and integrates into global agricultural value chains. We find that gender relations are changing as a result of land privatization and the ensuing social and ecological crises of production and reproduction. The forest has become a space for the articulation of new masculinities modulated through class and racialised power, while women are increasingly relegated to the private space of the home and village, negotiating expectations that they perform care, farming and food provisioning work while juggling household debt. We ground our argument in a large sample of qualitative interviews conducted between 2016 and 2020 in the upland provinces of Kampong Thom, Kratie and Ratanakiri that provide narrative accounts of the transformation of common forest and grazing lands, logging livelihoods and food provisioning practices. Using a feminist political ecology perspective, we highlight the contradictory processes of enclosure of the commons, which operate simultaneously as sites of violence, resistance, adaptation and continuity.

English

The disparities in access to productive resources keep on smothering agricultural growth and development, particularly in developing countries. This study was informed by the feminist political economy (FPE) framework to assessing the relationship between gender and access to agricultural productive resources among cassava farmers in Kenya. The research utilised mixed methods including the use of a survey instrument and focus group discussions. The FGDs included 30 participants. A cross-sectional survey of 92 farmers was conducted using simple random sampling and purposive sampling. The purposive sampling technique was used to select 2 out of 4 administrative wards in Rongo Sub County. Socioeconomic and gender and access to productive resources used descriptive statistics and Chi-square, respectively in SPSS Version 23. Qualitative data were analysed using NVivo. The findings showed that access to resources such as farmland, agricultural credit, agricultural extension services, and ICT, family and hired labour, and improved cassava varieties were gendered. The gendered access to productive resources cut across class, age, education and socio-cultural norms inform access to and control over resources. The study suggests that agricultural advisory services must prioritise women of low educational background and class living in patrilineal settings. This ought to be approached from a transactional gendered outlook considering men and women skewed access to agricultural productive resources to close the gender gap.  Key words: Gender disparity, feminist political ecology, cassava farmers, productive resources, Rongo Sub County.

Illuminant intersections: Injustice and inequality through electricity and water infrastructures at the Gujarat Solar Park in India

Solar park development in India represents yet another frontier of capital accumulation under the auspices of climate change mitigation and rural electrification, producing new social frictions in the process. The decarbonization of India’s electrical grid has put disproportionate burdens on marginalized populations, a trend particularly evident with the Gujarat Solar Park. Aside from solar arrays, it remains unclear how the vast infrastructures that sustain the Gujarat Solar Park will influence social power asymmetries at the local scale. For example, solar parks need periodic cleanings to function properly, requiring vast amounts of water. But dryland farmers from the region lack adequate water resources for irrigation and domestic purposes. Drawing on literature from feminist political ecology and critical infrastructure studies, this study investigates how the socio-material assemblage of water and electrical infrastructures of the Gujarat Solar Park unevenly distributes surreptitious burdens across differently positioned peasants. This study builds upon the conceptual frameworks of infrastructural violence and infrastructural intersectionality to illuminate the pernicious gender and caste politics of India’s renewable energy transition. Solar infrastructures, built to ameliorate energy insecurity, may exacerbate water scarcity and pose additional threats to food security by grabbing arable land and denying marginalized smallholders engaged in food production near solar parks the water resources they need to feed themselves and the nation.

Towards an integrated theoretical framework for understanding water insecurity and gender-based violence in Low-and middle-income countries (LMICs).

Disparities in access to basic needs and resources such as water is largely borne out of power imbalance across scale. In examining these power dynamics in the context of health inequalities, scholars have deployed Feminist political ecology analytical framework to situate gender and other forms of vulnerability as emerging from unequal power relations, and political ecology of health to emphasise the health implications of inherent relational power in the distribution of resources. Although appealing, the two theoretical frameworks over time have proven to be limiting in the study of intersectional vulnerabilities such as gender-based violence and water insecurity which reflect multiple dimensions of unequal power structures. This study expands the theoretical space for the study of inequalities in health geography by demonstrating the utility of incorporating feminist political ecology with political ecology of health to form an integrated theoretical framework - Feminist Political Ecology of Health (FPEH). This proposed theoretical framework gives guidance for engaging with a suite of questions and methods related to multifaceted problems such as water insecurity and gender based-violence. The paper highlights these theoretical issues and then discusses how FPEH can enrich research on water security and gender-based violence in Low-and middle-income countries (LMICs).

Collective Rural Women Access, Use, and Control Over Communal Land in Mexico: A Post-capitalist Feminist Political Ecology Approach

Rural women's access to land is fundamental for their individual and household well-being, equity, and empowerment. In Mexico, the agrarian reform of 1992 and customary gendered rights shaped land use, access, and control. Rural women's access to collective land is relevant since social property—ejidoandagrarian communities—represents 52% of the national territory. As an expression of the collective organization, commons were also performed to use and control communal land and biophysical resources collectively. This paper examines the collective peasant women's bargaining process to access, use, and control communal land. The post-capitalist feminist political ecology approach allowed us to distinguish and analyze gendered strategies employed by a cooperative led by women at different levels—household, community, and government—to access and use communal land and biophysical resources by the process of commons—commoning. Rural women's collective efforts are located in Hidalgo, central Mexico. Firstly, the Agrarian Reform modifications related to gender equality issues are investigated, followed by examining rural women's socioeconomic conditions. The case study permitted us to identify and analyze critical factors that enhanced long-term agreements to control communal land beyond the Agrarian Law scope by the commoning examination. The collective rural women's strategies to use communal land improved well-being based on gendered peasant knowledge, organization, and stakeholder support. Nevertheless, the strategies increased women's burden and reinforced the existing gendered norms such as female altruism. Furthermore, the need to discuss the bargaining process over communal land concerning a diversity of commons is argued: knowledge, social, and biophysical, in which gender and care are critical variables.

Rocking the boat: intersectional resistance to marine conservation policies in Wakatobi National Park, Indonesia

Much scholarship has stressed the need for conservation initiatives to consider local livelihood realities in order to effectively manage marine ecosystems; however, the gendered implications of marine conservation often remain overlooked. This paper takes a feminist political ecology approach to examine intersectional resistance to conservation policies in one of Indonesia’s largest and most populous marine protected areas (MPAs), Wakatobi National Park. We show that current Park policies and management fail to account for the livelihoods and culture of local ethnic minority fishers. In response, and along lines of gender, ethnicity, and class, ethnic minority fishers resist conservation measures in novel ways. Justified by their moral economy, these include continuing to access natural resources surreptitiously, allying with each other, and critiquing authorities. While many fisherwomen face additional barriers due to local cultural gender norms, they resist by pursuing livelihood activities against their husband’s wishes. A key mechanism for this gendered resistance is increased mobility for women, achieved through their clever use of new infrastructure. Concurrently, Park authorities work to regain control through ‘creative enforcement’ by accepting bribes, intimidating locals, and wasting fishers’ time – techniques that further expose class, ethnic, and gendered frictions. Overall, we find that MPA residents use resources differently across intersectional lines and reveal the extent to which everyday resistance can undermine conservation efforts if regulations ignore local needs. We thus stress the need for an intersectional and multi-scalar approach that is contextualized within local communities and wider infrastructures to improve marine conservation research and policy.