Cecile Jackson

Doing what comes naturally? Women and environment in development

Abstract The idea that there is a positive synergy between womens interests and environmental conservation is examined here at two levels. First, we discuss the two main arguments in women, development and environment (WDE) literature, i.e. that women have a special and close relationship with nature, and that women are particularly altruistic and caring in their environmental management. We then scrutinize the WDE view that women are therefore the “natural” constituency for conservation projects and programs by demonstrating how a gender analysis provides both a superior framework for understanding womens and mens environmental relations and a potentially contrary view of the synergy between gender interests and environmental conservation.

Gender Analysis of Land: Beyond Land Rights for Women?

Gender analysts of development have worked on land and property relations in poor rural areas for over two decades and the JAC 2003 special issue carried a range of work reflecting some of these research trajectories. This article is both a response to Bina Agarwals paper on ‘Gender and Land Rights Revisited’, in which she reiterates her advocacy of land rights, and also an argument for why we should temper her transformatory expectations, recognize the complexity of what she sees as ‘social obstacles’ to women claiming land, and not rush to policy closure on land rights in all circumstances, or to blanket prescriptions. It argues for a renewed emphasis on reflexive ethnographic research with a focus on gender as social relations, on subject positions and subjectivities, on the meshing of shared and separate interests within households and on power residing in discourse as well as material assets.

Women/nature or gender/history? A critique of ecofeminist ‘development’

This article examines the women and environment linkage which characterises not only ecofeminist thought but, increasingly, also development discourse and practice ‐from NGOs to the World Bank. It suggests that gender analysis of environmental relations leads to very different conclusions, of potentially conflicting rather than complementary agendas, for gender struggles and environmental conservation.

Social exclusion and gender: does one size fit all?

Social exclusion has become the dominant discourse of disadvantage and need in many European countries, and is increasingly part of social policy approaches in development agencies. It offers an integrated framework for analysing social disadvantage, including gender as a form of exclusion. This article enquires into the gender implications of some of the core elements of social exclusion paradigms, questions whether an integrated approach works for gender, and argues that feminist research and gender analysis offer both better situated understandings of the character and experience of marginality, and useful insights for the emerging applications of social exclusion frameworks to developing countries. This discussion is contextualised with a brief account of how feminists have analysed marginality and integration in the South, in a tradition which has paralleled but not crossed into European social exclusion discourses. The potential traps in how social exclusion is conceptualised – in particular, implicit dualisms and issues of plurality, notions of actors and processes of exclusion, and the treatment of agency – are then addressed. The critique is tentative since the social exclusion field is still developing, and usage is both broad and flexible, but some core characteristics of exclusion concepts are emerging. Finally, it is argued, with reference to land based and labour based exclusions, that it is necessary for social exclusion to employ a concept of gendered subjects rather than that of an implicitly ungendered universal person.

Gender, irrigation, and environment: Arguing for agency

This paper is not a critique of waterpolicies, or an advocacy of alternatives, but rathersuggests a shift of emphasis in the ways in whichgender analysis is applied to water, development, andenvironmental issues. It argues that feministpolitical ecology provides a generally strongerframework for understanding these issues thanecofeminism, but cautions against a reversion tomaterialist approaches in reactions to ecofeminismthat, like ecofeminism, can be static and ignore theagency of women and men. The paper draws attention tothe subjectivities of women and their embodiedlivelihoods as a more useful approach to understandingthe ways in which women relate to water in bothirrigated agriculture and domestic provisioning.

Men's work, masculinities and gender divisions of labour

Gender analysis with an explicit focus on men and masculinities has yet to be applied to many developing country contexts or to issues of gender divisions of labour. This article explores the shape that such analyses might take, arguing for a greater conceptual emphasis, in studies of gender divisions of labour, on embodied subjectivities, on agency and on the complexity of gender domination, and for further methodological critique of definitions and measurement of work. Through a discussion of mainly south Asian examples it is suggested that specific groups of men experience well-being threats as a consequence of high work intensity. It is also proposed that we gain a better understanding of gender divisions of labour, including how women might make use of codes of manliness, through greater analytical attention to mens work and masculinities, since womens investments in subject positions, and agency, develops in relation to mens.

Rethinking gendered poverty and work.

This article argues for the development of an approach to labor in gender and poverty analyses which would attend to the content and character of work as fundamental to the experience of well-being by persons and to the formulation of development policies and research for poverty reduction and gender equity. An analysis of physical work is included. The existence of biological differences sociocultural lines and differences in personal projects suggests that there are gender differences in relation to the experience of heavy manual labor. Hard labor is connected to ill- and well-being through nutrition-health productivity linkages through intrahousehold allocations of resources and consumption and through local social relations valuations and discourses surrounding work. In combination these elements may generate new forms of gendered energy traps. Investigation of the various stressors experienced by poorer people in their labor dependent livelihoods together with the health consequences of these stressors would perhaps be most useful.

Work intensity, gender and sustainable development

Abstract Is labour-intensive employment compatible with social justice and environmental sustainability? This paper examines the question of how far small-scale, intermediate technology based on energy-intensive human work, which is central to prescriptions for poverty alleviation and sustainable development, is compatible with development objectives emphasizing gender equity. Work intensity is a neglected characteristic of labour but significant in the determination of human well-being and in the intra-household distribution of welfare. The intensification of energy expenditure does not affect men and women in a uniform way and needs to be gender disaggregated in order to reveal potential trade-offs between development strategies based on ‘labour intensive growth’ and the well-being of men and women. The paper draws upon the experience with treadle pumps for irrigation in Bangladesh as an illustration of such potential trade-offs and argues for more rigorous analyses of gender divisions of labour, which include work intensity in combination with time allocation.

Sustainable development at the sharp end

This paper takes an actor-oriented approach to understanding the significance for policy and practice of field-worker experience at the interface between project and people. It is set in the context of an Indian project which aims to reduce poverty through sustainable, participatory agricultural change, based on low-cost inputs, catalysed by village-based project staff. Diaries kept by such staff are analysed to reveal how the social position of field-workers enables and constrains their interactions within and without the project, and the ways in which ‘street level bureaucrats’ shape projects through their discretionary actions. They show the Village Motivators struggling to communicate project objectives, to establish their roles and distinguish themselves fromother village-level bureaucrats, to negotiate participation, to overcome hostility to Participatory Rural Appraisal, to arbitrate access to consultants and seniors, to interpret project objectives and lobby for changes in these without admission ...

Men at work

This introductory essay argues that consideration of gender divisions of labour with a focus on men might move gender analysis in a direction which delivers greater attention to the relational, a more animated and agentic approach to those processes which produce divisions of labour, and a broadening of temporal frames and notions of reciprocity, as the context within which perceptions of gender equity are embedded. It argues that class variation is absolutely critical to the linkages between employment and gender power experienced by men, and that money management is a key to successful achievement of adult manliness, but beset with contradictory messages. The essay makes a number of methodological points; that invisibility might afflict some kinds of male work, that work definitions manifest exclusions, and that embodied understandings of work are as relevant to mens as womens work, before going on to raise questions about the meaning and value of provider identities to men and women. Attending more carefully to men as providers promises insights into the complexity of successful management of manliness, the possibility of other kinds of altruism than those modelled on a feminised notion of ‘care’, and the implications of displacement and disengagement of men from household support. The final section signals the value of ethnographies of work for showing how employment by women threatens masculinities, how women can sustain masculinities by care of male self-perceptions, how the experience of male collectivity can be central to the pleasures of work for men and how masculinities might be, in places, changing in progressive directions.