Gender and sustainable development

Emma A. Foster

Chapter 55 in Handbook on Gender in World Politics, 2026, pp 364-369 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Primarily focusing on United Nations’ discourses relating to sustainable development, this chapter traces the ways that gender has been understood and integrated. The chapter outlines the impact of (eco)feminist activism and scholarship on these debates, highlighting the extent to which (eco)feminist activities around the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), more famously known as the Rio Earth Summit, worked to get gender, or more precisely the position of women, acknowledged. The chapter goes on to illustrate that gender, when coupled with sustainable development, has been based on universalised and essentialised categories of women and men, tending to cast women as closer to the natural world in a myriad of ways. This resonates with some elements of ecofeminism, which has been critiqued by both feminists and other ecofeminists, for being essentialist in its understandings of both women and nature. Finally, the chapter looks at the ways in which gender plays out in contemporary governance relating to climate change in the context of the Anthropocene. Ultimately, the chapter argues that despite the rhetoric placing women as crucial to environmental management, women remain underrepresented in decision-making roles and over-represented in grassroots activism.

Keywords: Climate Justice; Ecofeminism; Rio Earth Summit; Sustainable Development; United Nations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781803923765
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781803923772.00067 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:21594_55

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().