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CALL FOR PAPERS

Gender, Technology and Development
Special Issue
on
"Gender and Environmental Governance" Winter 2005

Across Asia, natural resource exploitation is accelerating dramatically as regions become ever more incorporated into the global economy. At the same time, structural adjustment programs and market reforms, coupled with the pressures associated with population growth, urbanization and commoditization, are reconfiguring patterns of natural resource governance at both a national and local level, with complex impacts on peoples’ lives. Within the development literature there is a general recognition that the environmental consequences of accelerated export-led industrialization and neo-liberalism have different impacts on, and in turn elicit different responses from men and women.
Throughout the 1990s, this recognition was expressed through debates regarding the links between environment, development and gender, particularly as donor agencies, governments and non-government organizations identified women as a critical component of sustainable development initiatives seeking to ameliorate environmental degradation and its negative livelihood effects as a response to gender-blind initiatives.

Thus, on the one hand gender-blind approaches to current decentralization and community-based natural resource management programs continue to exist, on the other, chief responsibility for care of the environment is being placed upon women. In both instances, the gendered power relations that underpin resource access and control are side-stepped.

This special issue of Gender, technology and Development seeks papers that put forward critical feminist perspectives on the intersection between gender relations and environmental governance in Asia in the context of contemporary policy concerns with decentralization and poverty alleviation. Specifically, the papers are envisaged to break new ground in this area in three important ways and contexts:

(i) GENDER IN THE CREATION OF LOCAL INSTITUTIONS: Papers will bring
attention to the gender implications inherent in the decentralization of natural resource or environmental governance as currently being encouraged by international development institutions and governments across Asia. While governments increasingly pursue programs to involve direct users in the management of natural resources, new patterns of stakeholder inclusion and exclusion are created, as gender stereotypes and assumptions lead the state to privilege particular social groups.

(ii) CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON WOMEN’S CARE FOR THE ENVIRONMENT: By
examining the complex contradictions associated with attempts to load community resource management on women in ways that chime with earlier ecofeminist writings, papers will critically examine community programs that assume women’s proclivity towards environmental protection and care. While some critical scholarly attention has been given in the past to the problems associated with assuming synergy between women’s interests and the environment, the feminization of natural resource management continues apace. In some parts of Asia, women are being deliberately mobilized to constitute the unpaid labor force to meet the demands of conservation projects under the banner of 'women’s participation', drawing on a view that women are the principal fixers of degraded environments.

(iii) PEOPLE’S MOBILITY: By recognizing people’s mobility and its
implications for natural resource management, the papers will depart from the implicitly sedentarist portrayal of rural livelihoods in much of the literature on gender and natural resources. This makes little sense in Asia where most peoples’ lives are marked by rural-urban or transnational connections shaped by global forces. Papers may address this important gap in the literature by highlighting how the links between gender and natural resource management are embedded in wider patterns of serial mobility and emerging cultural reassertions.

Please send your submission by May 20, 2005 to Ms. Anita Pandey Pant, Managing Editor, Gender, Technology and Development at Gender and Development Studies, Asian Institute of Technology, P. O. Box 4, Klong Lunag, Pathumthani 12120, Thailand or at gtdjournal@ait.ac.th . Papers required to be in the range of 5 to 10 thousand words inclusive of endnotes and references following the prescribed style of the journal available at http://gendevtech.ait.ac.th/gtd/gtd.htm.

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posted by Netwoman @ 6:34 PM