Abstract

Both academic and practitioner views of women’s engagement with the environment have shifted over the years, from a women and environment focus that portrayed women as having a natural, inherent, and altruistic relationship to nature to an emphasis on the gendered nature of access and control of resources, resource policies and politics, and management (see chapter by Elmhirst in Part I). This shift has reflected a more critical turn to approaches emerging from the field of political ecology that focus on “gender and the environment” rather than “women and the environment” (Elmhirst 2011; Jackson 1993).