Environment and women: Traversing through the environment debates in the development discourse

Abstract

Women’s involvement in leading mass movements towards protecting environment has attracted the attention of scholars around the globe. These scholarships from various disciplines have placed women at the core of the environment-development debate almost for the past two decades. The mainstream debates on development tried to involve women in the ‘development’ discourse, arguing for more and more inclusion of women in the ‘development’ process. While the alternative development approach perceives that the very concept of ‘development’ is by nature a ‘violent idea’, which is based on the western capitalist value of destroying nature. The alternative approach to development has also raised diverse debates on environment and  development. These diverse viewpoints are labelled as various schools of thoughts, like ‘the eco-feminism’, ‘feminist environmentalism’, ‘feminist political ecology’ etc. These groups of scholarships try to analyze the interconnections between development, ecological degradation and women. 

These debates force us to think of how feminist critical analysis towards ecology and women approaches the concept of development. Keeping this question in mind this paper is an attempt to map various debates on environment, women and development.