Document(s) 4 of 15

This book is about the gender dimensions of natural resource exploitation and management in Asia. It provides an exploration of the uneasy negotiations between theory, policy and practice that are often evident within the realm of gender, environment and natural resource management, especially where gender is understood as a political, negotiated and contested element of social relationships. In recent years, there has been some disquiet that, amidst efforts to mainstream gender into natural resource management interventions and into development policy more broadly, gender has lost its critical and politicized edge, having been institutionalized into a series of tools and techniques that are far removed from the transformatory potential of gender as a feminist concept (Kabeer, 2005; Molyneux and Razavi, 2005; Leach, 2007).

The tension between gender as a technical fix and a more politicized view of gender is examined in this book. The chapters touch on theory, policy and practice, all with a shared focus on gender as a critical analytical concept for understanding the social and political dimensions of natural resource management and governance across a range of empirical settings. In different ways, and with varying commitments to particular conceptualizations of gender, the authors explore how gender subjectivities, ideologies and identities are produced, employed and contested within natural resource governance, and how gender discourses shape exclusions and possibilities within environment/development processes.

The book focuses on environments in Asia as a realm in which new realities are producing significant challenges for natural resource management, livelihoods and the mitigation of social inequalities. Across the Asian region, natural resource exploitation is accelerating dramatically as countries, cities and small communities are ever more incorporated into the global economy. Economic reform programmes that favour domestic and global market expansion rather than a social welfare agenda, policy responses to climate change, pressures associated with population growth and intensified geographical mobility, and urbanization and commoditization, are reconfiguring patterns of natural resource use and governance at both a national and local level and are having complex effects on peoples' lives. These processes are themselves not innocent of gendered power relations: they are inflected with gender discourses that set in motion differentiated and unjust life opportunities and exclusions. At the same time, sustainable development policy initiatives that seek to ameliorate environmental degradation and its negative livelihood effects not only bring gendered impacts and responses, they also work through and produce particular framings of gender and gendered power relations. The impact of this is apparent in the unintended consequences associated with sustainable development initiatives that target women as a homogeneous and undifferentiated social category, at times exacerbating social and gender injustices.

In part, this book offers a response to recent calls to re-establish more politicized gender at the heart of environment–development debates (Leach, 2007) and we are encouraged by a recent wave of politically committed and theoretically sophisticated contributions to the 'gender agenda' in the development literature (Harris, 2006; Jackson, 2006; Nightingale, 2006; Cornwall, 2007; Cornwall et al, 2007). In contributing to this new wave of interest, we aim to provide a necessary corrective to the naturalized assumptions about men, women and power that underpin the widely held notion within sustainable development policy circles (and reiterated in the recent UN review of ten years of gender mainstreaming initiatives in Asia) that women play a central role as effective managers of resources, and therefore should be key actors in natural resource management programmes (UN-ESCAP, 2004). At the same time, and in line with a broadly conceived feminist political ecology, we conceptualize our endeavours within emerging political economies, globalizing conditions and changing cultural landscapes in the Asian region in contemporary times.

In this introduction, we develop three themes that link the discussions of gender, environment and natural resource management provided by our contributors, and around which the book is organized. First, we consider the changing global context with which approaches to gender and environment must engage, paying particular attention to macroeconomic policies and changes in governance associated with neo-liberalism. Second, we explore the ways 'gender' has been incorporated in environment and development practices, especially within interventions designed to accomplish sustainable development goals. Finally, we examine the realm of gender, knowledge and authority, offering a critical consideration of gendered subjectivities that problematize simplistic mappings of gendered agency and environmental actions. Within each of these themes, our contributors respond in various ways to longstanding debates around gender, environment and natural resource management, many of which resonate with developments in feminist social theory more generally. We begin, therefore, with an overview of debates around gender, environment and natural resource management as these have unfolded in response to a widening engagement with environmental concerns within development policy frameworks since the landmark World Commission on Environment and Development.

Theorizing gender and environment: Conceptual antecedents and new theoretical pathways

The genealogy of gender and environment debates is well documented in the literature. Broadly, two key strands may be identified that generally map onto (1) liberal correctives to gender-blind scholarship within development policy and practice, and (2) relational perspectives that emphasize binary power relations between men and women. Common to both is a sense in which experiences of the environment are differentiated by gender through the materially distinct daily work activities and responsibilities of men and women. Consequently, men and women hold gender-differentiated interests in natural resource management through their distinctive roles, responsibilities and knowledge. Gender is thus understood as a critical variable in shaping processes of ecological change, viable livelihoods and the prospects for sustainable development. However, relational perspectives on gender purport to give greater emphasis to the dynamics of gender, emphasizing power relations between men and women over resource access and control, and their concrete expressions in conflict, cooperation and coexistence over environments and livelihoods.

In recent years, new work in this area has been influenced by feminist and post-colonial theories that effectively destabilize 'gender' as a central analytical category and explore multidimensional subjectivities, emphasizing how gender is constituted through other kinds of social differences and axes of power such as race, sexuality, class and place, and practices of 'development' themselves. This type of thinking not only critiques 'development', but effectively challenges the representational strategy adopted initially by those concerned with overcoming differences among women by articulating a centred developing world woman subject in order to press for women's rights to inclusion in international agreements around sustainable development (Mohanty, 1988; Saunders, 2002). Such a strategy served a specific rhetorical purpose that was intensified through the United Nations' World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland) report in 1987, and the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Brazil in 1992, where alliances amongst feminist activists from across the world were forged to produce the Women's Action Agenda 21 (Leach, 2007). This effectively linked concerns with women and gender with environmentally sustainable development: both having been traditionally marginal issues on the development agenda (Dankelman and Davidson, 1988).

Exploration of the links between gender and the environment in the South began in Asia, stimulated largely by compelling narratives of rural and indigenous women saving trees and thwarting the destroyers of forests and forest livelihoods.¹ Two popular strands – a particular variant of ecofeminism from a Southern perspective and WED (or 'women, environment and development') – posited natural connections between women and environmental resources, positing rural women of the South as the unrecognized caretakers of the environment, and in whose care the Earth and its resources had better chances of surviving for future generations (Dankelman and Davidson, 1988; Shiva, 1989; Rodda, 1991; Sontheimer, 1991). All pre-colonial societies 'were based on an ontology of the feminine as the living principle', Vandana Shiva (1989) argued, 'where rural, indigenous women are the original givers of life and are therefore the rightful caretakers of nature' (p42; see Tomalin, Chapter 12 in this volume for a fuller discussion). WED's logic, unlike Shiva's more spiritualist–cultural premise, was that women were adversely affected by environmental degradation due to an a priori gender division of labour. In this division, women are usually assigned reproductive roles, explaining why they were chiefly responsible for the collection of forest products and food for daily household subsistence. Planners interpreted this to mean that women should then be targeted in conservation projects since their daily roles connected them more closely to natural resources. Early examples in this policy genre have been work on women, forests and energy resources (FAO, 1989; DGIS, 1990), especially in the light of the global energy crisis in the 1970s in the course of searches for rural energy alternatives.

Both in the exploration of the 'feminine principle' in human–nature relationships, or in the analysis of gender divisions of labour in natural resource management, the emphasis has been clearly on women and women's roles. Whilst this might well provide a corrective to gender-blind and androcentric environment–development policy, within the context of mainstream development policy it has been translated from the politicized category 'woman' into what Cornwall (2007) describes as a combination of 'gross essentialism' with 'patronising paternalism' (p71). A number of scholars have identified problems associated with WED approaches that inadvertently give rise to such a description. First, research has challenged the notion that women have fixed caretaker roles and that they may just end up being key assets to be 'harnessed' in resource conservation initiatives (Rocheleau, 1991; Leach, 1992, 1994). Planning on the basis of fixed and reified 'roles' may, in the end, turn out to be counterproductive for women. Policy translations of WED are implicitly founded on the rational choice stream in policy studies that rely on simplifications around women's care of natural resources as atomized individuals with fixed attributes, and with roles that are disassociated from wider relationships and webs of power.

Secondly, Rao (1991) has argued for the need to contextualize women as they dynamically respond to complex environmental realities, and to consider how they enter into and engage in social relationships with men within the institutions of their natural resource-dependent societies instead of a priori perceptions on women's roles. Thirdly, both ecofeminism and WED also connote a victim status of rural women from the South, conveying images of women walking longer distances in the daily collection of food, fuel and fodder for their households as resources are increasingly depleted. As the 'main victims' of environmental degradation, ecofeminism and WED position women as the 'most appropriate participants' in environmental conservation, and thus a natural constituency for donor-initiated resource protection, conservation and regeneration (Dankelman and Davidson, 1988; Shiva, 1989; Rodda, 1991).

Disquiet with the translation of WED thinking into policy has run in parallel with critiques levelled at 'women in development' or WID perspectives that saw women as a stand-alone homogeneous group with a set of static and predefined roles that translated into their disadvantaged social lives (Rathgeber, 1990). Arguments have been made for more context-specific and historically nuanced understandings of the relationship of specific groups of women with specific environmental resources, especially as these are mediated by their complex relations with men, kin and other social actors. In other words, greater emphasis is given to gender and its structuring, relational and power dimensions. An early proponent of gender analysis as a useful framework for unpacking environmental relations was Jackson (1993a, 1993b), who proposed that analysis should focus on power relations between women and men, and that women be treated as a disaggregated group of subjects as gender roles are socially and historically constructed and being continually reformulated. Like others before her, Jackson challenged the idea of 'women' as a natural constituency for environmental projects, underscoring the contingent nature and fluidity of gender interests, an approach that has been discussed more fully in debates regarding practical and strategic interests elsewhere in the wider field of gender and development (Molyneux, 1985; Moser, 1993;Wieringa, 1994).

A number of perspectives have subsequently emerged that share a concern to emphasize dynamic social and political relations and contextual analysis, rather than universal assumptions and essentialist views of men's and women's engagement with the environment. Alongside the gender analysis approach associated with gender, environment and development or GED (Leach, 1992, 1994; Jackson, 1993a; Joekes et al, 1996; Green et al, 1998), feminist environmentalism (Agarwal, 1992, 1994) emphasizes the material aspects of the gender–environment nexus, in particular gender divisions of resource-based labour and culturally specific gender roles. Finally, feminist political ecology draws on the field of political ecology to focus on resource access and control, gendered constructions of knowledge, and the embeddedness of local gendered environmental struggles in regional and global political economic contexts (Rocheleau et al, 1996; Schroeder, 1999). These debates and their policy counterparts are evident in an explosion of ethnographies and edited volumes that have sought to capture the gender–environment nexus in various geographical and resource use contexts, for example forests, land and agriculture, and water (Fortmann and Rocheleau, 1984; Leach, 1994; Carney, 1996; Sachs, 1996; van Koppen and Mahmud, 1996; Ireson, 1997; de Bruijn et al, 1997; Jarosz, 1997;Tinker, 1997; Zwarteveen, 1998; Schroeder, 1999; Cranney, 2001).

In locating gender within changing contexts of ecological change, economic dislocations and windfalls, as well as legal normative frameworks, gender, environment and natural resource management scholarship has engaged with a range of empirical concerns. Work has centred on gendered property rights (water and land) (Brunt, 1992; Agarwal, 1994; Meinzen-Dick et al, 1997; von BendaBeckmann et al, 1997; Meinzen-Dick and Zwarteveen 1998); gender dynamics in local participation in development programmes and community-based institutions (Villareal, 1992; Mosse, 1994; Agarwal, 1997; Guijt and Shah, 1998; Cleaver, 2003; Colfer, 2005); the micro- and macro-politics of collective action (Rocheleau et al, 1996); geographical mobility (Elmhirst, 2001, 2002); gendered environmental knowledge (Fortmann, 1996; Jewitt, 2002; Howard, 2003; Momsen, 2007); livelihoods and resource use (Feldstein and Poats, 1989; Leach, 1994; Deere, 1995); history (Leach and Green, 1997; Resurreccion, 1999); and dynamics of gender in policy discourses and within environmental departments of development agencies (Crewe and Harrison, 1998; Kurian, 2000). In different ways, these studies hold a view of gender as relational: involving the interaction of men and women, structured through norms and institutions, reconfigured through individual agency. This is a view that is extended in different ways by contributors to this volume. Together, they also challenge the position that gender is primarily relevant only within households (a view that is often stated in mainstream environmental and political ecology research) and instead see gender as salient within policy and practice across a variety of scales, and within institutions central to natural resource governance, from gendered property relations to the gendered positions of actors within organizations charged with governing or managing natural resources.

In recent years, debates in GED and feminist political ecology have been taken in new directions through the influence of a performative approach to gender associated most notably with the feminist theorist Judith Butler (1990, 1994, 2004). Butler's work has had a profound impact on gender studies across the social science disciplines and holds a particular attraction for analyses that explore how gender is constituted in different contexts as a component of multiple and complex subjectivities. The performance of masculinities and femininities construct and reconstruct the gendered subject, as performativity is 'the vehicle through which ontological effects are established' (Butler, 1994, p33). This approach allows masculinities and femininities to be regarded as a process: fragmented, provisional and wrought through the interplay of culture, class, nationality and other fields of power, and, centrally for Butler, through regulatory frameworks such as normative heterosexuality. Those that subscribe to this kind of approach suggest that it challenges essentialist and binary views of relations between men and women that may overemphasize difference and opposition, and may essentialize particular patterns of gendered disadvantage (Jackson, 2006; Cornwall, 2007). Moreover, such an approach allows space to consider other kinds of gender relations that may be significant in people's lives beyond conjugal partnerships, for example seniority, status, co-sanguinity.

The significance of this view for gender, environment and natural resource management studies is that it shifts the direction and emphasis of analysis. Rather than seeing gender as structuring people's interactions with and responses to environmental change or shaping their roles in natural resource management, the emphasis is on the ways in which changing environmental conditions bring into existence categories of social difference including gender. In other words, gender itself is re-inscribed in and through practices, policies and responses associated with shifting environments and natural resource management, and whilst inherently unstable, through repeated acts, it comes to appear as natural and fixed. For example, work by Nightingale (2006) in Nepal and Harris (2006) in Turkey has shown how gendered subjectivities are defined and contested in relation to changing ecological conditions, becoming salient at particular moments through practices and discourses of gender associated with livelihoods, natural resources and wider development programmes and policies. Such frameworks, alongside the more politicized approaches to gender and natural resources outlined above, have been key to the development of a revitalized feminist political ecology that is being built around gender as an optic for analysing the power effects of the social constitution of difference (Cornwall, 2007). This has opened up new pathways for analysis that cross-cut the three key themes that are explored by the contributors to this book, and which we introduce below.

Gender, environment and natural resource management in neo-liberal times

Crucial to any contemporary consideration of gender issues in natural resource management is recognition of the ways that this is given shape by the processes and practices inherent in wider macroeconomic policies associated with neoliberalism in its various guises. Following a feminist political ecology framework, which sees gendered natural resource management as embedded within wider political economic frameworks, our contributors examine a diversity of settings, from societies undergoing market transformation, albeit at different paces, such as India, China, Nepal and mainland Southeast Asia's 'societies in transition' (Vietnam and Cambodia), to those with a longer history of export-oriented growth and neo-liberal reform (Thailand and Indonesia). To a greater or lesser degree, these are countries blighted by poverty and increasing disparities of wealth, and governed by semi-authoritarian states or what Molyneux and Razavi (2005) have referred to as masculine democracies.

Notwithstanding diversities across the region, processes associated with globalization, economic efficiency and the rescaling of social reproduction are critical to any consideration of gender and natural resource management, particularly where these have directly intensified the feminization of production, reproduction and community management (Nagar et al, 2002). Globalization, trade liberalization and policies that support export production are rapidly drawing landscapes and livelihoods across Asia into global markets in various ways (Razavi, 2002). This may include extractive activities of various kinds, the expansion of large-scale commercial production of industrial crops such as oil palm, or the incorporation of smallholder producers into global markets through the production of cash crops such as coffee or cocoa. The processes through which marketization of this sort proceeds are reconfiguring nature–society relations and environmental conditions that not only produce gender-differentiated effects and responses, but reconfigure categories of social difference, including gender and class. In Chapter 2, Hue Le Thi Van demonstrates the links between economic reform (doi moi), natural resource management policies and gender in Vietnam, where privatization of coastal aquaculture has brought about a transformation of resource access and control. Because of gender biases that run through the new institutional arrangements associated with economic reform, this process has built on and reinforced social hierarchies within communities, and converged with a wider reassertion of patriarchal power and family ideologies in Vietnam to create gendered exclusions around access to natural resources. She shows how, despite women's expanded role during the war years, gender biases in the reform process itself, coupled with a revitalization of male-dominated kinship relations, are undermining any gains achieved. Her work shows how gendered power is multi-scalar and is at work in various ways and at various levels.

Related to this process of globalized marketization, natural resource management is embedded in the increasing diversification of livelihoods: a process buoyed by policies that support entrepreneurialism and appear to be producing individualized portfolio livelihood strategies across Asia (Rigg, 2006). In their chapter on the commoditization of silk production (sericulture) among ethnic minority groups in Thailand, Barbara Earth and her colleagues discuss the gendered effects of policies that have sought to develop this sector, in line with wider macroeconomic strategies to enhance non-farm production and expand rural industry (Chapter 3). In a nuanced analysis of variations in the gendering of changing technological and management processes, the authors show how ostensibly gender-blind policies are not necessarily about gender exclusions but may be captured by particular groups – in this case, certain ethnic minority women – who are able to capitalize on their identifications with particular forms of local knowledge (traditional silk production) as these are revalued. This work is indicative of a need to avoid essentializing intra-household male–female gender relations: rather, gender is cast through the interplay between state and market systems, ethnicity and the wider realm of citizenship and belonging.

Associated with the diversification of farm livelihoods, enhanced geographical mobility is leading to the increasing engagement of rural people throughout Asia in urban and transnational labour circuits. A voluminous literature on migration reveals the gendering of this process, in terms of those who migrate, and those who are left behind (Resurreccion and Ha Thi Van Khanh, 2007). In Chapter 4, Elmhirst considers the disjunctures between mobile lives and livelihoods and the largely sedentarist, place-based assumptions that underpin the governance of natural resources. She examines the situation in Lampung province, Indonesia, where state-led displacement to facilitate commercial agriculture and forestry, coupled with the emergence of transnational migration as an aspect of rural livelihoods, has recast gender in particular ways, especially in instances where women migrate. In the context of migrant livelihoods, gender provides an optic for querying assumptions about de-agrarianization and the importance of land for the rural poor.

Whilst female-dominated migration in some parts of Asia has led to men negotiating productive and reproductive activities, perhaps even reconfiguring masculinities and femininities (Osella and Gardner, 2004; Resurreccion and Ha Thi Van Khanh, 2007), in other instances, male migration is associated with the feminization of agriculture. In Chapter 5, Linxiu Zhang and her colleagues explore how male-dominated rural–urban migration and the feminization of agriculture in China suggests the necessity of reconsidering the system through which the state contracts land out to farm households through male household heads, in circumstances where the key agents in agriculture are often women, whose dominion over land is dependent on their position in conjugal partnerships.

Their discussion leads into a second dimension of neo-liberal macroeconomic policy in Asia, where one mechanism for achieving economic efficiency and environmental protection has been the expansion of private property, sometimes in the form of individualized land rights (Agarwal, 2003; Razavi, 2003). The neoliberal 'commodity road to resource stabilization' is an issue that runs through a number of chapters in this volume, specifically Hue Le Thi Van (Chapter 2) and Elmhirst (Chapter 4) indicate the gendered exclusions that may be associated with programmes based on individualized and private property. In Chapter 6, Carol Yong Ooi Lin reveals the gender stereotypes and misplaced family ideologies that have given shape to land titling processes associated with the displacement and resettlement of minority forest-dwelling Orang Asli groups in Malaysia, following the construction of hydropower dams to serve wider national economic imperatives. In a neat example of the 'simplifications of rule' associated with many development schemes, a combination of Islamization and Malay culture within state discourses and practices has erased the informal mechanisms through which Orang Asli women gain access to resources, producing hierarchies that combine gender and ethnic exclusions. Similar processes have been noted in other parts of Asia where land reform is taking place, prompting intense debate between those advocating land titling in women's name as a means of empowerment (Agarwal, 2003) and those who call for greater recognition of what such programmes might erase (Jackson, 2003).

Gender interventions: The feminization of natural resource management

A longstanding feminist critique of neo-liberalism has demonstrated the negative gender impacts of the drive for economic efficiency and the scaling back of state services, demonstrating in various ways how macroeconomic policies have effectively rescaled social reproduction from the state to households and to individual women (Marchand and Runyan, 2000; Elson, 2002; Nagar et al, 2002). Whilst in recent times there has been a willingness to give social and political concerns greater emphasis (for example, through the World Bank's participatory poverty assessments and through the emphasis placed on issues such as social capital and good governance), this has not been translated into measures that tackle gender inequalities (Molyneux and Razavi, 2005). Indeed, a neo-liberal shift in the burden of care towards households and individual women is expressed in relation to the environment and natural resource management through the continued influence of programmes that draw upon the labour of women either directly or in unacknowledged ways. In some parts of Asia, women are being deliberately mobilized to constitute the unpaid labour force to meet the demands of conservation projects under the banner of 'women's participation', drawing on a view that women are the principal fixers of degraded environments (Kurian, 2000; Buchy and Rai, Chapter 7). Thus, a second theme of the book is the feminization of natural resource management; an issue that looms large in interventions seeking to enhance environmental governance in neo-liberal times. Within this particular realm of development policy, the twin objectives of efficiency and economic liberalization enshrined in the policies of multilateral lending agencies and government departments have entailed a rescaling of state power to the local level through a renewed interest in 'community' as a vehicle for achieving development objectives. As Meynen and Doornbos (2004) suggest, whilst the initial aim of decentralization of natural resource management was market deregulation and privatization, more recently the impetus has come from the so-called social face of neo-liberalism: empowering communities to deliver development objectives. Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) is based on the premise that local populations have a greater interest in the sustainable use of resources than the state or disparate corporate interests, that local communities by virtue of their everyday practices have an enhanced knowledge of local ecological processes, and that communities are more able to effectively manage resources through local forms of access (Tsing et al, 2005). Despite a recognition that there are few if any instances of communities operating in this way (Agrawal and Gibson, 2001), the popularity of this approach has seen an unlikely convergence between grass-roots organizations, multilateral development agencies, transnational conservation organizations and the World Bank, all of whom share an overall 'will to improve' (Tsing et al, 2005; Li 2007a, 2007b).

As Mosse (2006) put it, simplified and idealized notions of community institutions readily comply with external visions of how natural resource management ought to proceed, but frequently the realities of social processes confound the models and modes of analysis that dominate within donor agencies. Such realities include the exigencies of gender and other forms of social power. Interest in CBNRM has coincided with specific efforts to target gender equity in policy interventions through gender mainstreaming, which theoretically inserts gender concerns across policies and development practices at a number of levels (McIlwaine and Datta, 2003; Molyneux, 2004; Radcliffe, 2006). Whilst gender mainstreaming itself is highly uneven, reflecting differing levels of commitment and resource investment, it has also been critiqued by those who regard it as a means by which gender has been depoliticized and made technical (Cornwall, 2003). Marlène Buchy and Bimala Rai (Chapter 7) examine the convergence of CBNRM and gender mainstreaming in women-only forest user groups (FUGs) in Nepal. This is an exemplary case of the institutionalization of gender, which as Jackson (2006) suggests, all too frequently sees gender slipping into a focus on women, often cast as a homogeneous group with undifferentiated interests. Women as a group are incorporated for largely instrumental reasons to realize conservation goals without addressing the 'messy' politics of gender equality. Whilst FUGs were devised to give space for women to negotiate their needs, gendered identities within them are constructed through caste hierarchies and economic class. The multifaceted nature of power within women-only FUGs means that general participatory exclusions (see for example, Agarwal 2001) are intensified for poor and low-caste women as powerful women exert their influence. In other words, 'elite capture' takes on gendered forms.

In Chapter 8, Bernadette Resurreccion offers a critique of the 'simplifications of rule' associated with institution building for the co-management of fisheries in the Tonle Sap Great Lake, Cambodia. She describes the embeddedness of new resource management institutions within social relations of kinship and patronage, and reveals the importance of backstage informal negotiations through which women legitimize their claims to resources. In a manner that parallels the problems researchers have identified in the formalization of women's title to land, she shows how well-intentioned state policies are effectively undermined through the reinforcement of traditionally male-dominated networks of patronage, especially in 'transition' contexts where 'shadow state' practices remain as vestiges of conflict-ridden, strongman societies in Southeast Asia. Melinda Herrold-Menzies (Chapter 9) also discusses gender in the context of CBNRM, this time in relation to an integrated conservation and development plan in Caohai, China, an initiative that sought to lessen the impact of local people on resources in an environmentally sensitive area. Specifically, the project involved a microcredit programme – another arm of neo-liberal development policy that effectively devolves responsibility for securing economic opportunity away from the state and onto individuals cast as agents responsible for their own well being but without challenging issues of resource redistribution (Rankin, 2001). Herrold-Menzies shows how women were incorporated in a standard WID framework, sidestepping the processes that have produced gendered divisions of labour, largely adding another burden to women. This has exacerbated rather than challenged existing social hierarchies, and done little to serve the purpose of environmental protection. Part of the problem is that such programmes are often cast through the political rationality of neo-liberalism that runs through many microcredit programmes, effectively cultivating particular kinds of gendered subjectivities, and seeking to align the personal goals of individual women with those set out by policy makers (Goetz and Gupta, 1996; Rankin 2001).

Gendered subjects: Knowledge and authority in natural resource management

Throughout the book, cases demonstrate the ambiguity of gender interests, recognizing that gender exists through other social identities, and that gendered subjectivities are, as a result, invariably fractured and in process. The final theme that we consider in the book concerns the issues of subjectivity, gendered agency and environmental actions: core concerns within early contributions to feminist political ecology (Rocheleau et al, 1996). Since Rocheleau and her colleagues outlined the principles of feminist political ecology in the early 1990s, poststructuralist approaches to power, subjectivity and women's agency have grown in influence, placing the 'decentred subject' at the heart of many debates (Radcliffe, 2006). This kind of perspective sees gender neither as analytically central nor as the end point of critique and analysis (Fraser, 2004). People are conceptualized as inhabiting multiple and fragmented identities, constituted through social relations that include gender, but also include class, religion, sexuality, race/ethnicity and post-coloniality, as well as in multiple networks for coping with, transforming or resisting development (Nagar et al, 2002; Lawson, 2007). Of interest is how racialized/ethnic or religious subjects are co-produced as gendered, and how such complex subjects of development are formed and act in relation to the exercise of power.

The importance of this kind of approach lies in its power to problematize naturalized and undifferentiated categories of people and social relationships (men, women, gender relations), and critically in this context, relationships between people and the environment. It also places positionality – the subject positions of researchers, fieldworkers, farmers and other social actors – at the centre of analysis. Theoretical discussions around practice, politics and accountability inherent in the production of research and its associated texts have long held sway in debates regarding the politics of representation within academic scholarship (Chatterjee, 2002). Correspondingly, there is recognition, borne from similar theoretical premises, that issues of authority, authorial location and power are at work within development interventions, including those that are framed as participatory (Villareal, 1992). In Chapter 10, Kathleen O'Reilly takes up this analytical position in her discussion of gendered relations of power within a specific natural resource management project involving the delivery of clean drinking water to villages in northern Rajasthan, India. She offers a powerful critique of the dangers associated with assuming that mainstreaming gender into development projects is accomplished by appointing women as fieldworkers. As she puts it, this is based on a faulty assumption that there is a natural communication between all women. Her chapter explores the positionalities, knowledge and authority of women fieldworkers within the NGO charged with facilitating community and women's participation in the water project, all of which are complex and interwoven with class, insider/outsider and rural/urban relationships, negotiation of which either produces or subverts gendered power relations in natural resource management practices.

Whilst acknowledging that there is no essential connection between women and environmental knowledge, in Chapter 11, Lisa Price and Britta Ogle look at how work, activities and knowledge are constructed in socially differentiated ways and how this maps onto the landscape in complex ways that may be obscured in research, policy and practice that essentializes Asian rural landscapes into farms or forests. Working within a sustainable livelihoods framework that uses the languages of capital and economic metaphors to emphasize people's entitlements, assets and capabilities, they analyse women's roles, knowledge and authority in gathering indigenous wild vegetables that are scattered across the in-between spaces (field margins, roadsides and so on) in the agricultural landscapes of Lao PDR, Vietnam and Thailand. In their account, they demonstrate the complex intersections between knowledge, gender and power in relation to wild plants. They show that neo-liberal configurations of private property (and the power relations associated with such exclusions) prohibit gathering activities but not in obvious ways: exclusions may be negotiated according to the value of the species being collected and its end use (for home consumption or sale).

In the final chapter of the book (Chapter 12), Emma Tomalin revisits the refrain with which this introductory chapter began – critiques of the special relationship between women, religion and environmental resource use or management accorded by the powerful and compelling discourses of spiritual ecofeminism. The hegemony of discourses about women's primitive ecological wisdom have been influential, often in unacknowledged ways, across the field of natural resource management in Asia, and have served simultaneously as a powerful rallying cry for marginalized groups (Sturgeon, 1999) as well as for urban, middle-class environmentalist movements (Mawdsley, 2004). In adhering to an 'anti-development' perspective, ecofeminism has also chimed with post-colonial challenges to the 'Western' project of development itself (Saunders, 2002). Tomalin shows that whilst the criticisms of ecofeminism that have emanated from materialist perspectives on gender, environment and development have been important for puncturing the essentialism that may blight ecofeminist analyses (for example, Jackson, 1993a, 1993b; Leach, 2007), care must be taken not to jettison broader considerations of religion and religious identities from debates over gender, environment and natural resource management. In a conceptual and reflective discussion, Tomalin identifies a growing return to issues of religion within development studies generally, in part associated with a renewed interest on the part of Western governments and donors that may be motivated by wider geopolitical concerns. She outlines a possible research agenda for religion, gender and the environment that firstly uncovers how religious values may define and sustain gender roles and norms shaping control over resources, and secondly, that critically considers the ways in which religious attachment and participation in faith communities may serve as a source of social capital for collective action in the realm of natural resource management.

Together, the individual contributions to the book weave a multilayered and critical perspective on the intersection between gender, environment and natural resource management in Asia that speak within and across the three themes outlined in this chapter. Our aim is to explore gendered responses to shifting configurations of resource access and control wrought through processes associated with neo-liberalism and political decentralization in the region, through a combination of strong conceptual argument and empirical material drawn from a variety of geographical settings. There are many more stories to be told, and we hope that this book goes some way to open debate in this area at a time when a revitalized feminist political ecology is being articulated and as wider political economies of natural resource governance in Asia invite a vigorous analysis of gender across multiple sites and scales.

Notes

¹ These narratives are derived from Vandana Shiva's (1989) use of the Chipko Movement in India to demonstrate the vanguard role of rural women in environmental protection. Both factual and conceptual assumptions have been put into question by a special collection of journal papers in the Journal of Peasant Studies (vol 25, no 4, 1998). The same iconization was applied to northern upland women in the Philippines who supposedly disrobed before a group of engineers to protest the construction of a dam in 1974.

References

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