The professor and researcher of the Applied Economics Unit of the University of Valencia, Isabel Pla, and the doctoral student of this same university Sandra Guevara de Molina, have participated in a research on the synergies between gender and environment as an integrative proposal of approach to sustainability. The study has been published in the journal of CEPAL, a publication of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean of the United Nations, whose aim is to contribute to the examination of the economic development problems in the region.
The current crisis has changed our lives and also the perception of our society and our world. However, the crisis we suffer is not a bad isolated moment. As the report, Our ‘Common Future’, of the World Commission on Environment and Development concluded, we are lead to successive relapses if poverty and inequality prevails in the planet. "Although there has been some progress since the United Nations Convention on Environment and Development in 1992, we have not adopted yet a development path that takes into account how ecosystems or the persistent social and gender inequalities work” Guevara said. For his part, Isabel Pla, coordinator of the Microcluster Gender and Sustainability, explains that “Sustainable development could be improved with the preferential integration of the gender perspective and of the ethics of care”. The researchers have studied the link between these elements and explore synergies between gender and environment, and at the same time they suggest an approach to sustainability.
During the last years, the crisis has required humans to pay an enormous price. It has affected the incomes of workers and has increased the vulnerability of marginalised people, restricting the access to health and education and aggravating conflicts. A variety of economic and financial measures have been adopted focused, mainly, to restore the economic balance reducing the fiscal deficit, avoiding the collapse of financial institutions, and more recently, in the growing economic recovery. And it is still thought that growth is the panacea of the economic diseases of the world.
“Although 20 years have gone since the United Nations Convention on Environment and Development, where the ecological deterioration of our planet and its implications for humans was outlined as a centre of attention, even today we are facing the same problems, worsen, though, by new challenges that have resulted from the absence of a global perspective”, Sandra Guevara stressed.
For its part, the United Nations Convention on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) emphasized the great importance of growth, but from a green perspective, as well as the need for institutional agreements to promote sustainability. In this context- Isabel Pla has said- it is important to recognize that sustainable development cannot be achieved without recognizing the benefits that ecosystems provide to us, but also persistent inequalities in our societies, such as those related to gender from an intersectional perspective.
Ecofeminists, term attributed to the French writer Françoise d’Eubonne, have highlighted the need to challenge the invisibility of women, which shares many features with the invisibility of nature. The researchers from the University of Valencia have explored in this article the possible synergies between ecology and feminism, and the ways in which these two areas could reinforce each other. Thus, they outline an integrative approach to sustainability and examine the possible transformation of the prevalent Western economic model to incorporate ecological and feminist perspectives.
One of the approaches adopted by ecofeminists, for example, focuses on the close relationships between humans and nature as a development of the impact of gender inequalities in the current structure, and the many challenges that women of the world have to face because of their limited access to economic resources and their relationship with nature. Other approaches include the need to review the conceptualization and the development.
The economic discourse of overcoming the crisis focuses, above all, on markets and products and ignores the people who produce them, consume and, often, have a very limited access to goods and services. And that especially affects women, who have a much higher workload - considering that globally they are responsible for unpaid work at home and with the family- and suffer a precarious integration into global labour markets. All this, in a context of an increasing feminization both of poverty and vulnerability.
The conclusion of the article is, on one hand, that if we want to overcome not only the crisis but also this model, a decisive intervention of the State as guarantor of rights will be necessary, and also, on the other hand , an economic system that does not deplete and destroy the planet. It is necessary to recognise the constant interrelation between ecosystems and people throughout the world. The nature of this interconnection in the socio-ecological system makes the mere impact on just one part of this system affects the global balance: hence the importance of carrying out environmental assessments on a global scale and ensure that distribution practices are fair and for international justice. For researchers, this leads to a necessary joint development of global alternatives between movements like environmentalism and feminism. And still two determining conditions should be added: public policies ensuring the implementation of far-reaching changes in the fundamental values, and a committed and determined institutional action to make the world see the need for this transformation and generating consensus and leadership to apply it.
Only from this holistic concept, with new basic values and promoting cooperation on competence, can be achieved the overcoming of the model which only considers products and material gains as an index of well-being, while ignoring the quality of life that includes personal and emotional issues of humans beings living in a habitable and not threatened with exhaustion and destruction world.
More information:
Towards an integrative approach to sustainability: exploring potential synergies between gender and environment, Isabel Pla Julián & Sandra Guevara de Molina. Cepal Review 110 (2013)
http://www.eclac.cl/publicaciones/xml/0/51560/RVI110PlaJulian.pdf
Last update: 5 de march de 2014 12:21.
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