Updated December 1997
This does not deny that gender questions are important in the etiology, the characteristics and the solution of many secondary environmental problems, particularly at the local level in poor and developing countries. Moreover, women are indeed the principal victims of many degraded local environments, including the very households of the poor, whether in urban or rural areas. In many parts of the world, gender discrimination, which affects access to land rights, to education, to health services, to equal employment, to participation in decision-making and to other basic rights, has real significance for local forms of environmental degradation. It also places women in greater jeopardy, at work or in the home. Environmental risks of different types are liable to have a greater impact on women's health as well as to increase women's burdens in the health care domain. Gender equity favors freedom of reproductive choice and thus lowers fertility. At the same time, given prevailing cultures and the consequent division of labor in many countries, women do often act as managers of natural resources and are primary producers and consumers, recyclers of domestic wastes and so forth. Nevertheless, it is essential to perceive that gender issues do not have a significant direct role in the genesis of critical environmental problems at the global level.
The dominant literature has taken a different stance. Its bottom line, as stated by one critic, appears to be that: "If only women and the environment were considered in development practice, the environment crisis would be solved....Rarely is a connection made between macro-economic and political processes: overconsumption of natural resources by the few in the North and poverty of the many in the South" (Braidotti et al. 1994:96). This literature has focused largely on the poor and traditional rural context, which is relevant to less than one half of humankind; by concentrating only on women, it reduces its scope to about one quarter. On a substantive level, this literature fails to address the critical issues which face humankind in the end-of-century development scenario.
Far from having a true gender approach, the literature has centered on the effects of environmental change on women as victims or as resource managers. This overlooks the fact that both the relation that women have developed with nature, and the attributes that would make them develop more sustainable practices, are culturally defined and thus evolve with cultural change. In fact, the roles of resource managers are gender roles that vary from setting to setting and over time within the same setting. Environmental change has itself been a source of gender role changes.
The assumption of the existence of innate attributes that favor sustainability amounts to grounding social characteristics in biology, and therefore defies the very concept of gender. In analyzing sustainability, it is important to take women into account, but there is also a need to include men in the analyses, as well as the relations between men and women. The literature fails to highlight the fact that environmental change also affects men, though differentially. Future studies should shift from a focus on women to a true gender approach. Gender roles are culturally constructed and they change with changing circumstances.
From the standpoint of sustainability, the main point suggested by this discussion is that it is essential to promote both empowerment as well as the cultural traits which benefit sustainability. Instead of re-asserting culturally-shaped traits as biologically-determined, more attention should be focused on promoting all avenues to sustainability. Moreover, it is ultimately essential not to lose sight of which problems are really compromising the future of the planet. Both men and women will have to work hard at developing the values and fostering the attitudes and behavior patterns consonant with more sustainable forms of development.
At the same time, more systematic reflection on the potential, possible and desirable rectification of the dominant development model is thus the primary consideration in efforts to favor sustainability in the medium and long range. Realistically, what factors can be expected to contribute to this "revision" of the development model? In the current scenario, wherein the ethos of the "miracle-of-the-markets" has enormous political clout, the dominant viewpoint is that market factors will eventually provide the necessary correctives. An alternative answer is that environmental awareness and commitment have to be fomented. These two options merit further discussion.
The view of this paper is that blind faith in the capacity of market forces to prevent and/or regulate environmental damage is an extremely dangerous attitude for the future of humanity. The majority of economists who take the trouble to analyze the relations between markets and the environment actually end up concluding that, at least at the present time, market forces do not have built-in mechanisms for environmental protection. There are too many intangibles for price mechanisms to work effectively. "Global environmental costs" are recognized to be "a pure case of a market failure" (Panayotou 1994:167). Moreover, "consumer sovereignty" is by definition short-range; only a small parcel of all market forces are oriented to the long-term view and are willing to forego immediate returns in favor of long-range or societal benefits. Globalization of economic activity, by stepping up the pace and the stakes of competition, increases the risk that environmental corners will be cut.
If market forces cannot be counted on to produce the necessary motivation, what other factors can provide the impetus for the correction of the current course of development? The principal answer has to lie in the qualitative and quantitative growth of environmental awareness. Better arguments will have to be conceived in order to convince more people of the need to re-assess the development process.
It is true that considerable environmentally-friendly technology has been developed by the private sector over the last quarter century. However, it would be naive to attribute this to the free play of market forces. Environmental safeguards began to be introduced in recent decades, not because they were profitable, but because environmentally-aware groups generated enough political momentum to force changes in production and/or waste collection - often after violent struggles with business interests. Almost invariably, the initial reaction of industrial and business concerns accused of pollution and degradation was to deny the facts, to hide the evidence and to persecute the accusers. Only after environmental indignation had spread to other segments of the population were practices changed and new technology incorporated.
There is no reason to believe that future outcomes will be different. To the extent that consumers are concerned and environmentally aware, they can exert a significant influence on local, national and global environmental outcomes. Undoubtedly, large corporations with their financial and technological resources who can profit from technological greening can have a significant impact on environmental outcomes. But without pressure from consumers, concern with short-term profits will almost invariably lead to cutting environmental corners. In turn, pressure from consumers will only arise and persist if there is widespread environmental awareness based on good arguments and credible information. Future outcomes will thus depend on the strength of environmental concern.
Unfortunately, the future dynamism of environmental movements is unpredictable. After steady growth in environmental concern from the 1960s to the 1980s, the last few years appear to have witnessed a relative slump in consciousness raising (Dowie 1996; Tokar 1997). Part of the problem may be that issues have proven to be too complex for continued massive mobilization of public opinion. Environmental problems, at both the national and world level, have increasingly shown themselves to be more difficult than had originally been touted in the romantic dawn of environmental activism. Tradeoffs and conflicts of interests in environmental cleanup have been detected.
Whatever the reason for the current lethargy, environmentalism needs a new jolt of energy: women's movements could provide the stimulus. Just as in the case of environmental management, women do not have any inherent or genetic advantages in promoting environmental awareness. Nevertheless, culturally-determined circumstances have historically combined to make women a most vocal and effective force in 20th century social change. Thus, at this particular moment in time, we can envisage women's movements as potentially playing a primary role in the promotion of sustainability. Feminism has repeatedly proven capable of breaking down some of the most strongly entrenched and apparently-indestructible social structures. If it were now to turn their attention systematically to the environmental plight of our Planet, it could become the most important single force in the transformation to sustainability.
In order to assume this role, however, postures founded on disordered truths, half-truths and ideologically-rooted arguments must be eschewed in favor of factual and defensible positions. The contention that there is a universal and significant relationship between gender relations and sustainability, or that putting more emphasis on women as natural resource managers will resolve environmental problems that compromise humanity's survival, detracts attention from other more promising and pressing avenues for social mobilization.
Moreover, strategies pertaining to different levels of generality must be clearly differentiated. One finds an ubiquitous tendency, both in the environmental movement and in the feminist literature, to discuss issues which refer to individual actions and local resource management in the same breath as global environmental threats. This absence of hierarchical discrimination ends up weakening both levels of arguments. It is thus important that policy suggestions be founded on a clear perception of differences in levels of generality and on the efficacy of different actions.
In practice, it is much more enticing for donors and activists alike to focus attention on local-level problems, projects and individual actions, which provide demonstrable results, than to try to grapple with macro-level issues. However, if we accept, as appears reasonable, that critical, global threats to the environment are fundamentally attributable to the current globalized model of development, then local-level actions have limited scope and, moreover, can eventually be neutralized by events occurring in the wider society or in the world as a whole. Consequently, curbing the crisis will eventually require broader and more collective effort, aimed at understanding global critical issues and acting upon them.
The main problem in generating this sort of consensus for thought and action does not appear to derive from lack of interest in the topic, but rather from its very complexity. In this domain, there are no easy one-time solutions or established precedents which tell us what needs to be done nor how to go about it. Activists, along with politicians and public opinion, abhor complexity. Hence, focusing on specific and manageable causes which can be readily apprehended and applauded by all, constitutes an understandably attractive alternative for would-be activists. Within this framework, focusing attention on women as victims of environmental problems or as privileged interlocutors with nature, is much more appealing than discussing the probable consequences of distinct models of growth, or of trying to understand the impacts of increased trade on global environmental problems, or their impact on gender relations. Nevertheless, women's movements can and should play a critical role both in the clarification of key issues and in mobilizing society towards holistic concerns which reach beyond immediate and local-level situations.
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