This book casts a light on the daily struggles and achievements of ‘gender experts’ working in environment and development organisations, where they are charged with advancing gender equality and social equity and aligning this with visions of sustainable development. Developed through a series of conversations convened by the book’s editors with leading practitioners from research, advocacy and donor organisations, this text explores the ways gender professionals – specialists and experts, researchers, organizational focal points – deal with personal, power-laden realities associated with navigating gender in everyday practice. In turn, wider questions of epistemology and hierarchies of situated knowledges are examined, where gender analysis is brought into fields defined as largely techno-scientific, positivist and managerialist. Drawing on insights from feminist political ecology and feminist science, technology and society studies, the authors and their collaborators reveal and reflect upon strategies that serve to mute epistemological boundaries and enable small changes to be carved out that on occasions open up promising and alternative pathways for an equitable future. This book will be of great relevance to scholars and practitioners with an interest in environment and development, science and technology, and gender and women’s studies more broadly. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351175180, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book considers the gendered dimensions of climate change. It shows how gender analysis has been widely overlooked in debates about climate change and its interactions with poverty and demonstrates its importance for those seeking to understand the impacts of global environmental change on human communities.

Over the past 20 years scholars, policymakers, and the media have increasingly recognized the links between both traditional and non-traditional security issues and the changing condition of the global environment. Concepts such as 'environmental security' and 'resource conflict' have been used to hint at these significant linkages. While there has been a good deal of scholarly work conducted that seeks to identify the ways that actors link these concepts, there has been little examination of the intersection between approaches to environmental security and gender. This book explores this intersection to provide an insight into the gendered nature of both global environmental politics and security studies. It examines how the issues of security and the environment are linked to theory and practice, and the extent to which gender informs these discussions. By adopting a feminist environmental security discourse, this book provides crucial redefinitions of key concepts and offers new insights into the ways we understand security-environment connections. Case studies evaluate if, and how, environment and security discourses are being used to understand a range of environmental issues, and how a feminist environmental security discourse contributes to our understanding of security-environment connections. This multidisciplinary volume draws on literature from the environmental sciences, security studies and sociology to highlight the complex human insecurities that often accompany environmental change. As conceptualizations of security continue to shift and broaden to include environmental issues and concerns, it is imperative that gender informs the debate.

This book explores how climate institutions in industrialized countries work to further the recognition of social differences and integrate this understanding in climate policy making. With contributions from a range of expert scholars in the field, this volume investigates policy-making in climate institutions from the perspective of power as it relates to gender. It also considers other intersecting social factors at different levels of governance, from the global to the local level and extending into climate-relevant sectors. The authors argue that a focus on climate institutions is important since they not only develop strategies and policies, they also (re)produce power relations, promote specific norms and values, and distribute resources. The chapters throughout draw on examples from various institutions including national ministries, transport and waste management authorities, and local authorities, as well as the European Union and the UNFCCC regime. Overall, this book demonstrates how feminist institutionalist theory and intersectionality approaches can contribute to an increased understanding of power relations and social differences in climate policy-making and in climate-relevant sectors in industrialized states. In doing so, it highlights the challenges of path dependencies, but also reveals opportunities for advancing gender equality, equity, and social justice. Gender, Intersectionality and Climate Institutions in Industrialized States will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate politics, international relations, gender studies and policy studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003052821, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

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. Gender Equality and Sustainable Development calls for policies, investments and initiatives in sustainable development that recognize women’s knowledge, agency and decision-making as fundamental. Four key sets of issues - work and industrial production; population and reproduction; food and agriculture, and water, sanitation and energy provide focal lenses through which these challenges are considered. Perspectives from new feminist political ecology and economy are integrated, alongside issues of rights, relations and power. The book untangles the complex interactions between different dimensions of gender relations and of sustainability, and explores how policy and activism can build synergies between them. Finally, this book demonstrates how plural pathways are possible; underpinned by different narratives about gender and sustainability, and how the choices between these are ultimately political. This timely book will be of great interest to students, scholars, practitioners and policy makers working on gender, sustainable development, development studies and ecological economics.

Civil society participants have voiced concerns that the environmental problems that were the subject of multilateral environmental agreements negotiated during the 1992 Rio processes are not serving to ameliorate global environmental problems. These concerns raise significant questions regarding the utility of negotiating agreements through the UN. This book elucidates the complexity of how participants engage in these negotiations through the various processes that take place under the auspices of the UN—primarily those related to climate and biological diversity. By taking an ethnographic approach and providing concrete examples of how it is that civil society participants engage in making policy, this book develops a robust sense of the implications of the current terrain of policy-making—both for the environment, and for the continued participation of non-state actors in multilateral environmental governance. Using data gathered at actual negotiations, the book develops concepts such as participation and governance beyond theory. The research uses participant observation ethnographic methods to tie the theoretical frameworks to people’s actual activities as policy is generated and contested. Whereas topics associated with global environmental governance are traditionally addressed in fields such as international relations and political science, this book contributes to developing a richer understanding of the theories using a sociological framework, tying individual activities into larger social relations and shedding light on critical questions associated with transnational civil society and global politics.

Required for peace and security, economic governance, sustainable development and humanitarian support, International Organisations (IOs) are central to the structure of global governance. Introducing the importance of governance in IOs, this Handbook addresses the collective challenges and synthesises the expertise of global or regional representativeness for international cooperation.

This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the field of gender and water governance, exploring how the use, management and knowledge of water resources, services and the water environment are deeply gendered. In water there is a recognized gender gap between water responsibilities and water rights and bridging this gap is likely to help achieve not just goals of equity but also those of sustainability. Building on a rich legacy of feminist water scholarship, the Routledge Handbook of Gender and Water Governance is a collection of reflections and studies that can be used as a prismatic lens into a thriving and ever proliferating array of feminist water studies. It provides a clear testimony of how hydrofeminism has evolved from rather instrumental gender and water studies to scholarship that uses feminist tools to pry open, critically reflect on and formulate alternatives to water development-as-usual. The book also shows how the community of feminists interested in studying water has diversified and expanded, from often white female scholars studying projects and gender relations in the so-called Global South, to a varied mix of scholars and activists theorizing from diverse geographical and political locations – prominently including the body. It is organized into five interconnected parts: Part I: Positionality and embodied waters Part II: Revisiting water debates: diplomacy, security, justice and heritage Part III: Sanitation stories Part IV: Precarious livelihoods Part V: New feminist futures Each of these parts brings out the gendered nature of water, shedding light on the often neglected care and unpaid labour of women and its relationship with extractivism and socioeconomic inequalities. The overall aim of the handbook is to apply social science insights to water governance challenges, creating synergies and linkages between different disciplines and scientific domains. The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Water Governance is essential reading for students, scholars and professionals interested in water governance, water security, health and sanitation, gender studies and sustainable development more broadly.