Sustainable management & Gender roles: exploring the social ripples of Climate Change

Picture Courtesy: Rumna Mukherjee

A lot of global changes to accommodate the needs for a greener future is gaining momentum; from containment of greenhouse gases to afforestation projects, species awareness, and ban on illegal trades and practices are being robustly planned and executed. However, an issue such as environmental and climate change is often multifaceted with roots deep in various aspects other than ecology and environmental sciences. One such lesser-known yet sought-after grey area is the effect of gender roles on sustainable management practices— a shadowed aspect encompassing existing societal facets of oppression and violence against women which are frequently dealt apathy, indifference, or normalized.

Sustainable management in association with gender roles is a unique connecting link that highlights and brings together two foundational pillars of society: ecosystem and social constructs of gender. A series of discourse that started in the early 1970s about the varying consequences of gender gaps and their environmental impacts and interrelations has now evolved into a major stream calling for active participation and increased awareness in the field about existing loopholes, and knowledge gaps of this relatively elusive and evasive topic circling the premise of women’s rights, underrepresentation in decision making, traditional and cultural norms and socio-economic barriers. Inequality across various aspects have prevailed for women since auld Lang syne across cultures. Orthodoxy practiced across various cultures were seen to often be androcentric and parochial; the son always getting a larger claim to the father’s property, the married woman having no rights over her husband’s land and so on. Zeroing into the context of sustainable management, rights to own land often ensures contribution to resource availability, livelihood, and food security. The addition of equality to this existing equation secures equal contribution of indigenous women to afforestation practices in addition to equal rights to economic independence and overall empowerment of a minority within a minority. Various collaborative projects headed by global institutions such as IUCN, IPCC and WEDO, have made considerable progress in various indigenous communities to raise awareness and sensitize the communities by setting up a communal dialogue between the villagers to understand the need to cast away traditional gender and cultural norms in return for sustainable living standards and being the custodians of change. Mounting evidence over the years has further highlighted the dearth of women representatives or women leaders in national politics or in ministerial portfolios.  However, it has been noted that countries with a relatively higher representation of women in governance has shown better outcomes than others and even more so in the context of sustainable development. Increased participation of women as stakeholders of change ecosystem and coastline restorations across various communities in Vietnam, Kenya, and Thailand has resulted in a much-anticipated positive change, therefore, making their active involvement more of an organic necessity— one that reminds me of Margaret Atwood’s brilliant saying, “We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.”.

There are no two ways about oppression and exploitation have always been an unfortunately common occurrence with women. A cursory Google search can list out a cornucopia of cases, findings, data, and intensively researched articles listing out the causalities and their analysis, but despite the number of efforts in the field the probability of silencing dissent in both cis and transgender women remains shockingly high. With prevalent gender discrimination, evidence suggests a high occurrence of violence or crimes against women have been reported more times than not in order to subjugate and/or reinforce traditional normality within them often leaving them as victims of abuse in situations beyond their control. Establishing access to women folk to services or organizations working in the HRD sector is an important milestone yet to be achieved across many rural and socio-economically backward areas around the globe. The transformative power of women involvement in a multi-sectoral discourse specifically in the field of sustainable development and climate crisis continues to remain an untapped potential in many countries; although, with promising initiatives and ventures are being proactively drafted for a more gender-responsive approach in order to pave the way for holistic gender equity.  

- Swagatama Mukherjee