Introduction
by Ann Dale, Marilyn Macdonald and Christine Massey
This annotated bibliography is intended to provide access to a rich source of thinking and analysis on gender and sustainable development. Although the bulk of writing in this domain has concentrated on developing countries and the Third World, much work needs to be done to make the links explicit between gender and sustainable development in the North. This bibliography, combined with the policy agenda from the Vancouver Women and Sustainable Development conference, policy woven from a web of values, is meant to offer an accessible and broad range of tools for use in a variety of situations, from national sustainable development planning to local community initiatives.
Guiding Principles and Definitions
Women make up about half of the world's population and contribute to over two-thirds of all the labour hours worked by the human race (Jacobson 1992). They are also an integral part of every society's framework of social relationships, of leisure activities and of understandings of community and spirituality. Women, therefore, have an important role to play in the changes necessary for the implementation of sustainable development. For we require fundamental changes in the way we make decisions, in the way we do business, in our social institutions, and in our institutional relationships if we are to realize sustainable development in the 21st century. Ensuring that women's perspectives, through gender equality, are actively included in planning and decision-making ensures that all problem-solving skills, perspectives and commitments to action are brought to bear on sustainable development issues. By including women's perspectives in decision-making, valuable knowledge and expertise is gained which can play a key role in solving global sustainability issues such as population change, sustainable livelihoods, poverty alleviation, pollution control, land, water and species conservation, to name but a few.
Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations to meet their own needs (WCED 1987). Within this context, sustainable development can be regarded as a process of reconciliation of three imperatives: (i) the ecological imperative to live in balance within the Earth's biosphere (ii) the social imperative to ensure the development of systems of governance that have "cultural sustainability" and (iii) the economic imperative to ensure a decent material standard of living for all. Debating which is more fundamental is counterproductive since the three imperatives are interdependent. Given this interconnectedness, failure in any one, will make it impossible to address the other two.
Equal access to resources -- ecological, economic and social--is essential to achieving sustainable development. The empowerment of women through their equal participation in sustainable development decision-making is also a necessary condition for its full realization domestically and globally. Immediate and long-term equal access, for all, to the fundamentals of life is a basic precondition for sustainable development. And yet, in all countries of the world, access to resources and participation in decision-making is not equal for men and women. A world in which half the world's population does not have equal access to resources leads to an increasing gap between the haves and the have nots.
Gender, a fundamental organizing principle in human societies, is a cultural construct of sex roles, a definition of "masculine" and "feminine". Feminist scholars define gender as the social organization of sexual difference, or a system of unequal relationships between the sexes (Modhadam 1990). As Papenek (1989) states: "Gender differences, based on the social construction of biological sex distinctions, are one of the great 'fault lines' of societies--those marks of difference among categories of persons that govern the allocation of power, authority, and resources."
The full participation and inclusion of women in sustainable development planning and strategies cannot be realized without gender equality. Gender equality means that women and men have equal conditions for realizing their full human rights and potential, for contributing to national political, economic, social and cultural development, and for benefitting equally from the results. Equality is essential for human development and peace. Attaining gender equality demands a recognition that current social, economic, cultural and political systems are gendered; that women's unpaid status is systemic; that race, ethnicity, disability and sexual orientation affect this pattern; and that it is necessary to incorporate women's perspectives, priorities and values into all major social institutions (Canadian Federal Plan for Gender Equality 1995). And gender equality must be understood in the positive sense of more sustainable and fulfilling masculinities and femininities, not merely the rewriting of feminine roles to fit into the current (and often harmful) masculine constructs.
Gender equality will not be effected into sustainable development without incorporating gender analysis into sustainable development decision-making, planning, policies, practices and programs. Gender analysis is based on the belief that policy cannot be separated from the social context, and that social issues are an integral part of economic issues, as well as ecological ones. Gender analysis, is not just an "add-on", to be considered after costs and benefits have been assessed, but is an integral part of good policy analysis. A gendered analysis promotes evaluation of existing institutions. Moreover, it can contribute to an adequate and effective vision of sustainable development that includes women--their experience, their perspectives, and their place in the social structure--at the core of a sustainable future.
It follows from these definitions that any research on sustainable development and gender is inherently interdisciplinary. Research which seeks to combine an analysis of gender and sustainable development, therefore, approaches a meta-theoretical level, entering into multiple "domains" of interest. Feminist theories cannot be derived deductively from existing disciplinary knowledge, there must be an integral inductive element. And our perceptions shape our beliefs about our current reality. Just as our beliefs about human nature affect the ways in which we conceptualize social reality, so the ways in which we understand and experience that reality affect our views about human nature. Consequently, a feminist theory is viewed better as a network of normative, conceptual, empirical and methodological claims than as a deductive system (Jagger 1983).
The tremendous variety of work and life experience of contemporary feminists represents an ongoing dialectic between strength and weakness. The strength lies in the wide diversity of perceptions of social reality and of women's oppression. And its weakness is in the almost paralyzing plurality of voices. There is no one feminist movement, but rather, movements, and thus, feminist research is inherently pluralistic in addition to being interdisciplinary. There is no longer one movement, but many movements, thus, there are a multiplicity of approaches, both at the theoretical and methodological level.
Any annotated bibliography on gender and sustainable development has to reflect, therefore, the interdisciplinary and pluralistic nature of feminist research. Consequently, we decided a traditional literature search would not reveal the depth and richness of the "emerging domain" of gender and sustainable development. Adopting the principle we used for the Women and Sustainable Development: Canadian Perspectives Conference, that women work largely by personal contacts, we cast a pebble into the pond to see how many small circles we could create. We have adopted, therefore, a modified Delphi approach to compile the information, beginning with a small group of women who we originally contacted and branching out from there. From this process we hope to gain yet another outcome of the Annotated Bibliography -- the establishment of a network of women on gender and sustainable development.
How to Use this Bibliography
We made a decision not to publish a strictly academic annotated bibliography in order to reflect the diversity of women who participated in the planning for the Women's Conference and the subsequent development of this bibliography. The annotated bibliography reflects the voices of activists, researchers, and public policy specialists, thereby creating a document that ultimately is more accessible to a diverse audience. By combining the rigour of academe and yet, at the same time, directly reflecting voices, such as in the Spirituality section, we believe we have achieved a richer document.
The classification scheme we developed for the bibliography is the same as the one we used for the policy document from the Vancouver Conference, policy woven from a web of values. The five main classifications are The Earth, Community, Power and Sustainable Livelihoods, as well as Spirituality. There are two other sections entitled Tools for Change and References, that include two subsections, Documents and Journals. After much debate, these titles were selected as being somewhat intuitive and with appeal to a wide range of individuals who would be using the bibliography.
In some ways, when one is dealing with such a meta-level issue as gender and sustainable development, everything relates to everything else and new properties emerge from that holistic nature. Classification systems are, therefore, partial and subjective, as are all classification schemes. Although we recognize our subjectivity, we hope that our broad categories make common sense and are an aid, not a hindrance to the reader.
The Earth refers to information dealing with women and nature, women and resources, everything that we do with respect to our earth and our relationships with nature. Biodiversity is, therefore, included in this section, as is a lot of ecofeminist literature, much of which examines gender and nature. Community refers to all aspects of community, its structuring, form and process, and includes the built and non-built communities. Power refers to issues such as governance, dominance and patriarchy, as well as women and violence. At one time, we were considering calling this section Relationships, since most human activities are fundamentally about relationships, or the lack of relationship, even in politics. But after further discussion, we felt that the real issue was power, how gender as a construct is used to reinforce and justify existing power relationships. Sustainable Livelihoods is defined in its broadest sense to include global economic issues of trade and debt and development. Although Spirituality could be put into Community or The Earth, we believed it was a sufficiently broad category to stand alone.
Each of these sections includes sub-sections where necessary to help the reader identify references more easily. Wherever possible, we have tried to identify the links between gender and sustainable development for each section, and much work needs to be done to make these links explicit in the North American context, as well as between the North and the South. Although there is now agreement that sustainable development involves integration between the ecological and economic imperatives, there is still far less acceptance about reconciling the social imperative, and equity within this context.
Following-up
This bibliography is an evolving document, and we have tried to be as inclusive as possible in this first draft. Needless to say, it has been an Amazonian effort to compile this first draft, and although there are gaps in each section, we are pleased with the robustness of the material that has been compiled to date using the "pebble" approach. The process has been instructive in learning about the range of the literature available, the variety of disciplines in which it is being carried out as well as about the kind of work not being done. For instance, feminist critiques of scientific approaches have focused on the social sciences, and on biology in the natural sciences, few have concentrated on the other natural and applied sciences or on the current understanding of ecology. We encourage you to fill the gaps by submitting annotations, either for references we already have listed but await annotations, or completely new references.
Where Credit is Due
Editors
Marilyn Macdonald Professor, Women's Studies, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6, Canada, Tel: 604-291-5688, Fax: 604-291-5518 Ann Dale Professor, Science, Technology and Environment Division, Royal Roads University, 2005 Sooke Road, Victoria, BC, V9B 5Y2, Tel: 250-391-2600, ext. 4117, Fax: 250-391-2610
Senior Associate, Sustainable Development Research Institute, University of British Columbia; Senior Associate, Canadian Biodiversity InstituteChristine Massey Researcher, Centre for Policy Research on Science and Technology (CPROST), Simon Fraser University, 515 W. Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC, V6B 5K3 Canada, Tel: 604-291-5257 Fax: 604-291-5165 Contributors
Ann Dale Professor, Science, Technology and Environment Division, Royal Roads University, 2005 Sooke Road, Victoria, BC, V9B 5Y2, Tel: 250-391-2600, ext. 4117, Fax: 250-391-2610
Senior Associate, Sustainable Development Research Institute, University of British Columbia; Senior Associate, Canadian Biodiversity InstituteHeather Eaton St. Michael's College, Toronto School of Theology, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Tel: 416-696-0102 , Fax: 416-696-0102 Caterina Geuer David Suzuki Foundation, Suite 219-2211 West 4th Ave, Vancouver, BC, V6K 4S2, Canada, Tel: 604-732-4228, Fax: 604-732-0752 Melody Hessing Professor, Sociology, Douglas College, PO Box 2503, New Westminster, BC, V3L 5B2, Canada, Tel: 604-527-5315, Fax: 604-224-3369 Barbara Kavanagh University of Victoria Karen Krug Environmental Policy Institute, Brock University, St. Catherines, Ontario, L2S 3A1, Canada, Tel: 905-688-5550 ext.3291, Fax: 905-682-9020 Marilyn Macdonald Professor, Women's Studies, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6, Canada, Tel: 604-291-5688, Fax: 604-291-5518 Christine Massey Researcher, Centre for Policy Research on Science and Technology (CPROST), Simon Fraser University, 515 W. Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC, V6B 5K3 Canada, Tel: 604-291-5257 Fax: 604-291-5165 Karen Messing CINBIOSE - Centre pour l'étude des interactions biologiques entre la santé et l'environnement, Université du Québec á Montréal, CP 888, Succursale Centre-ville, Montréal, Québec, H3C 3P8, Canada
Tel: 514-987-3334, Fax: 514-987-6183Maureen Reed Assistant Professor, Geography, University of British Columbia, Geography Rm 217, 1984 West Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2
Tel: 604-822-5970, Fax: 604-822-6150Arja Vainio-Mattila Environmental Policy Institute, Brock University, 18 Springbank Dr, St. Catherines, Ontario, L2S 3A1, Canada
Tel: 905-688-5550 ext. 4574, Fax: 905-682-9020
Research Assistants
Isabel Cordua-von Specht Sustainable Development Research Institute Nikki Skuce Sustainable Development Research Institute