As the
world moves towards Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the post-2015 era, there is an emerging debate
about how target-setting and implementation might integrate across the 17 goals
proposed by the Open Working Group (OWG) so that the inextricable links between, say, climate
change, water and food are properly addressed. Feminists and others rightly
celebrate that goal 5 in the Outcome Document – ‘Achieve gender equality and
empower all women and girls’ – survived the fraught, politicised OWG process.
But while retaining this as a ‘standalone’ goal is a victory that may guard
against the perils of gender mainstreaming and marginalisation, arguably the
integration of this with the implementation of the other SDGs is the most
important task of all.
As the newly published World Survey on the Role of Women in Development 2014 argues, gender
equality must be integral to sustainable development. This is the latest in the
flagship series of a five-yearly World Survey on the Role of Women in Economic
Development reports, prepared by UN Women. I had the privilege, together with IDS
and STEPS Centre colleagues Lyla
Mehta and Preetha Prabhakaran, of leading its conceptualisation. This included authoring
the background conceptual framing chapter laying out a ‘gendered pathways
approach’, and working with international feminist scholars to shape
contributions in areas where gender-sustainability intersections are biting
hard.
Interlocked
pathways
The
report shows how the
effects of unsustainable patterns of development often intensify gender
inequalities, as women and girls are disproportionately affected by economic,
social and environmental shocks and stresses. It argues that around many issues – whether work and
industrial production, population and reproduction, food and agriculture, or
water, sanitation and energy - dominant development pathways have often contributed
to both unsustainability and gender inequality. Both are produced by
development models that support particular types of under-regulated, market-led
growth and the persistence of unequal power relations between women and men.
Such pathways rely on and
reproduce gender inequalities, for instance by exploiting women’s labour and
unpaid care work. They also produce environmental problems, as market actors
seek and secure profit in ways that rely on the overexploitation of natural
resources and the pollution of climates, land and oceans. As troubling intersections of
unsustainability and gender inequality threaten or exceed planetary boundaries
around climate change, biodiversity and pollution, so shocks, stresses and
feedbacks may undermine gendered rights and capabilities even further.
But the reverse is also possible: gender equality and sustainability can
powerfully reinforce each other in alternative pathways. Women’s
knowledge, agency and collective action are often central to these, whether in
managing local landscapes, adapting to climate change, producing and accessing
food, or securing sustainable water, sanitation and energy services. We see this in examples where women are fully
involved in forms of local forest governance that deliver both livelihood and
conservation benefits, as Bina Agarwal has traced, and where networks of grass-roots women leaders
are working to scale up capacity to reduce vulnerabilities to climate change in
their communities). For pathways to be truly
sustainable and advance gender equality and the rights and capabilities of
women and girls, those whose lives and well-being are at stake must be involved
in leading the way, through community groups, women’s organisations and other
forms of collective action and engagement – supported by appropriate forms of
investment and public services.
Women as
‘sustainability saviours’? Beyond
stereotypes to a relational view
However,
a simple “win-win” relationship between gender equality and sustainability
cannot be assumed. Indeed, a policy focus on women can risk casting them as
‘sustainability saviours’ in ways that stereotype their roles in relation to
the family, the community and the environment. Such responses often add ‘environment’
to women’s already heavy unpaid care and work burdens, without conferring
rights, resources and benefits. Power imbalances in gender relations shape whether
women’s actions and work translate into the realisation of their capabilities. And
gender is always and everywhere cross-cut by other, intersecting power
relations and inequalities, whether around class or ethnicity, age or place.
Hence
analysis of interactions, tensions and trade-offs between different dimensions
of gender relations and of sustainability is needed, along with attention to
the structural foundations of gender discrimination and struggles against this.
Recent policy attention to women and girls, from campaigning around the ‘girl effect’ to debates around the UK’s Girl Summit earlier this year , while laudable in many respects, often lack this
relational perspective. Instead, women and girls are treated as individual
victims, saviours or development beneficiaries in ways that may entrench
stereotypes, while ultimately failing to empower. If goal 5 is to do its vital
integrative work for the SDGs and the post-2015 agenda, then attention to
gendered power relations, in all their rich, intersecting variety, must remain
centre stage.
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