Search

According to mythical world views from many traditions, there is a World Turtle that rests on a larger turtle, and that larger turtle rests on an even larger turtle, and on and on the turtles go. In other words, earth is held up by turtles, all the way down. Just as the World Turtle story, this study attempts to uncover what role gender may play in supporting or mitigating climate-related crises and conflict by offering a conceptual Gender-Climate-Security Framework for assessing the gendered climate-security risks within particular contexts. Using several theoretical traditions, including feminist political economy, feminist political ecology, and women, peace, and security (international security) theory, the study interrogates existing climate security frameworks with a gender lens. The resulting framework proposed in this study comprises two primary components: (1) gendered climate-related human security risks, and (2) gender intersections with each of four types of national/international security risks, including crime/violence/extremism, anti-state grievances, grievances between societal groups, and interstate tensions. Each of 15 climate security factors (early warning, healthcare, WASH, food security, recent shocks, long-term adaptation, poverty, life expectancy, education, standard of living, unemployment, socioeconomic development, infrastructure, corruption, and state fragility) are analyzed regarding how gender, climate change, and security factors may intersect one another. The study finds that there is ample evidence showing that women’s diminished human security is likely to lead to fewer system-level resources and tools that support climate security and aid in preventing climate-related conflicts. The study also finds an emerging body of research that suggests considering gendered factors in national/international climate security threats would be beneficial for avoiding or resolving climate-related tensions. As such, if gender is given due consideration in climate security contexts, it is likely to provide useful insights that could guide policy and program implementation. This proposed framework does not suggest there is a single best approach to assessing gendered climate security risks, but rather offers a diagnostic approach for engaging in bottom-up climate security assessments that are place-based and context-specific. A necessary next step is for policymakers and practitioners to test and evaluate this approach under various conditions. Ultimately, in seeking to build a framework to understand how gender intersects with climate security concerns, this study finds that, like numerous turtles that form the foundation of a mythical earth, layer upon layer, from the top all the way to the bottom, the impacts of climate change on Human Security and National/International Security cannot be understood without considering gender. In other words, it’s gender all the way down the climate security lifecycle, and humanity would be reckless to ignore it.

Thailand is considered one of the six most significant contributors to marine plastic pollution in the world. This has led to widespread media attention and condemnation of Thai people as “addicted to plastic,” with little attention paid to how such discourses actually take shape. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with Thai regulatory institutions, grassroots environmental organizations, plastic industry representatives, and recyclers, I analyze the social, political, economic, and environmental processes that shape Thailand’s plasticscapes. I propose a feminist political ecology of plastic waste which attends to people’s lived experiences and perspectives, power relationships underlying discourses that inform the issue, and Thai activisms. Following feminist ethnographic scholarship on the importance of situated knowledges that challenge dominant forms of expertise, I complicate current understandings by revealing that discourses across all groups interviewed center Thai consumption, often drawing on environmental tropes of Thainess, while decentering other potential sources of waste such as plastic waste imports. Meanwhile, findings suggest that those in power are reticent to alleviate the plastic pileup through measures that would challenge plastic production. Grassroots environmental organizers calling for strengthened regulatory measures struggle to find a voice in large-scale environmental improvement schemes. Therefore, I argue that proposed solutions must incorporate grassroots voices.

The thesis contributes to the scholarship on disaster recovery by centring the experiences of women as a category of analysis and a methodological approach. I argue that women s everyday realities are a site for disrupting the powerful circuits of knowledge and practice that articulate pathways of recovery through the notion of resilience. As a feminist research, analysing disaster recovery involves exploring possibilities for reclaiming alternative futures. Thus, my research asks: what possibilities for reimagining resilience might women s experiences of recovery reveal? I focus on the reconstruction of Tacloban City, Philippines, after its destruction by typhoon Yolanda in November 2013. To answer my question, I investigated: 1) how resilience has been inscribed in the institutional and social landscape of Tacloban, and 2) how women qualified, re-appropriated, or contested attempts to build their resilience as a way to map out possibilities for alternative pathways of recovery. Using PhotoKwento, a photo-based feminist method which I designed, the study focuses on urban poor women s experiences of disaster resettlement. My findings show that building back better has been enmeshed in a citizenship project aiming to produce responsible and resilient communities. I identify new modes of governing that employ state performances of care on one hand, and the instrumentalisation of women s participation and care-based practices in service of the state s visions for recovery, on the other. Foregrounded are women s navigations of precarity, insecurity, and the unknown amidst attempts to make them better . The thesis shows how the processes of self-formation; the workings of emotions and aspirations; and care relations with others and the environment counterbalance hegemonic views about resilient recovery. I underscore productive tensions as governmental practices, discourses, and prevailing ideologies are incorporated, negotiated, and contested in and through women s care-based practices, affective labours, and hopes for a better future after and beyond Yolanda. Lastly, I reconceptualise resilience as lived , grounded in feminist ethics of care. A lived resilience perspective requires broadening ethico-ontological horizons in order to view resilient recovery as a process of becoming not simply driven by the goal to rebuild what has been damaged, but as a regenerative practice that centers care as a normative basis for exploring post-disaster futures.

Solid pollution in the ocean, or marine debris, is not accumulating in one island in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean; rather, it is distributed throughout the world's oceans from surface to seafloor. The vast majority of this pollution is comprised of plastics, which both leach and attract other contaminants (plasticizers, flame retardants, colorants, and pesticides, for instance), and the vast majority of these are too small to see with the naked eye. Marine debris is a product of capitalism and a form of patriarchal violence. Toxicants leached by ubiquitous plastics disproportionately affect bodies sexed female at birth by acting as endocrine disruptors. The labor of maintaining life that materialist feminists call social reproduction of managing how much—rather, how little—plastic winds up in a household often falls on women in households. And this prevalence of plastics is the result of an economic system rooted in patriarchal values that was able to rise to hegemony via European colonialism. “Death to Disposability: Marine Debris as Violence” examines these political-economic violences of marine debris as a form of patriarchal violence though linguistic conceptualizations that characterize practices of enclosure and extraction in marine contexts. It does so by studying three flows of oil, water, and capital in the three water bodies of the open North Pacific Ocean, the Santa Barbara Channel, and the Skagerrak Strait. This project consists of three case studies—“Death to Disposability in the North Pacific Gyre” on the nonprofit The Ocean Cleanup, “Ecotoxicology: The Santa Barbara Channel, the California Current, and Invisible Violences” on formerly oil-producing Platform Holly, and “Still Holding: Picking up Pieces of Capitalist Expediency on the West Coast of Sweden” on the petrochemical company Borealis—and a book of poetry, Hold Fast. This project employs both qualitative and artistic research methods, namely discourse analysis, close reading, and poetry as research practice.

As part of a USAID-funded integrated pest management (IPM) project, this thesis presents research conducted across four communities in midwestern Nepal We conducted semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, and participant observation with local farmers and NGOs. Grounded in feminist political ecology (FPE) and drawing on the social relations approach (SRA), we sought to engage with the feminization of agriculture narrative and understand how it interacts with IPM practices and decision-making. This research responds to a growing interest within development in the feminization of agriculture as a potentially empowering or disempowering global process of change, conceptualized through the ways that male out-migration affects the labor and decision-making roles of women and other household members left behind on the farm. We find that contextual factors change the implications of the feminization of agriculture narrative. Co-residence with in-laws and varied migration patterns influence the dynamic nature of household structure and headship. Migration patterns have pushed women to take on new agricultural duties and manage increasing household labor responsibilities. Additionally, IPM vegetable cultivation is changing how farmers use and value their land through increasing crop diversification. Agricultural decision-making processes related to these different forces extend beyond the household, and participation in community spaces through the IPM project may contest traditional gender norms. We contend that the heterogeneity of household power dynamics muddies the potentially empowering or disempowering effects of the feminization of agriculture, and we emphasize the importance of community spaces as a locus of decision-making in the sustainability of new agricultural technologies.

This dissertation considers hidden dimensions of human-tiger relations between people who live in and adjacent to Sariska Tiger Reserve (Sariska), Rajasthan, India and the population of reintroduced tigers. While translocation of wild animals in India is not new, Sariska provides a relevant and high profile case study for examining the re-introduction of a charismatic carnivore as the site of the first tiger reintroduction in the world. This research demonstrates how human dimensions of reintroductions can be studied from a social science perspective to further our understanding of tolerance and intolerance towards reintroductions in the developing world. First, it is imperative to understand past human-wildlife relations and how those relations are re-negotiated spatially by people and predators. Secondly, it is critical to examine hidden costs from human-wildlife interactions, costs explicitly borne by women. And third, to consider these histories, re-negotiations, and hidden costs together to see their formative influences in perceptions of reintroduction benefits and negatives. This is accomplished through three field seasons (summers of 2014 and 2015; winter 2016-2017) utilizing 52 Focus Group Discussions as the primary data. The findings suggest that people’s experiences with Sariska’s original tigers impact their expectations, tolerance, and perceptions of the reintroduced tigers and the conservation policies directed at their conservation. Further, the findings argue women may suffer domestic abuse as a result of complex relationships between patriarchal society, gendered labor roles, and tiger presence. These hidden costs then influence women’s perception of benefits and negatives of tiger reintroduction. The hidden costs women endure and the consequential disparity in gendered perceptions, men perceiving more benefits and far fewer negatives than women, is a shortcoming that should be redressed with policy as well as communication strategies by conservation practitioners. This is an area of commonality between human rights groups looking for ways to improve women’s well-being and livelihoods that if addressed would also benefit the reintroduction of tigers to Sariska. To build these arguments, I integrate research from animal geographies, feminist political ecology, conservation social science and human geography. Adding to these literatures, this dissertation broadens the scope of social science examinations of apex predator reintroductions, and human-environmental geographies by incorporating theoretical frameworks and qualitative methods to provide new social-environmental knowledge and areas of inquiry.

Understanding women’s experiences of mangrove forest conservation in the Global South is important because mangrove forests are a crucial defense against climate change, and are also increasingly the targets of global climate change policies. The intervention of postcolonial feminist theory combined with feminist political ecology has the potential to bring forward women’s seldom-heard experiences of climate change in these valuable ecosystems. This work supports previous feminist political ecology scholarship focused on understanding women’s complicated relationships to the environment and the gendered effects of climate change policies, while challenging dominant conservation discourse around women as a monolithic group. This thesis focuses on women living in Madagascar’s largest mangrove, particularly under current mangrove reforestation efforts and emerging blue carbon climate change policies. This project explores how the women in this mangrove forest are situated along axes of power differently, the implications of social divisions for conservation, and the ways in which current mangrove conservation projects reproduce power relations in the mangrove by failing to recognize difference.

As global tensions over the rapid increase of large scale land acquisitions reached a fever pitch in 2012, Cambodia—an epicenter of “land grabbing”—announced a bold new initiative to develop post-conflict land registration and redistribution efforts inside agribusiness concessions. This “leopard skin” land reform imagined farmers’ fields and agribusiness plantations co-existing like animal spots on the landscape, with companies gaining a stable local labor force and farmers gaining tenure security, access to credit, and employment. My research focuses on the leopard skin reform as a lens through which to understand the nature of democracy in Cambodia. Based on two years of research, including an ethnographic account of Cambodia’s largest agribusiness concession, a survey of 270 land recipients in two provinces, and a participatory action research component, my research connects global, national and local scales to show how the politics of life on the land shapes the politics of state formation in Cambodia. I argue that the leopard skin land reform was first and foremost a political campaign that aimed to secure the loyalty of rural voters, produce ‘modern’ farmers, and wrest control over land distribution from local officials, while maintaining flows of domestic and international capital that are central to state power. Ambiguous legal directives and ‘unwritten rules’ guided the allocation of land, fostering uncertainty and fear within communities in ways that is typical of Cambodian state rule. This gives pause to broad claims that land reform will enable land tenure security. Cambodia’s project of land reform—and the longer trajectory of donor and state supported land management of which it is a part—reproduces gendered racialized forms of insecurity in rural areas by valuing economic production over ecological and social reproduction, and reinforcing patriarchal patronage networks over more horizontal mechanisms of land management. The land reform buttressed the personal power of the Prime Minister in the short term as it gave people hope that he may protect their foothold in rural areas, while, in the long term, the land reform intensified the erosion of rural people’s capacity for social reproduction by enclosing communal resources and undermining collective claims, with lasting effects on community solidarity. Furthermore, in the Cambodian context, communal land title is itself a weak advocacy tool, because any resistance strategy based on claims for state recognition is dependent on the state authorities who control (and can subvert) legal process. Theoretically, my work furthers scholarship that considers the relationship between life on the land, property and state power. I show how practices of state formation enacted through land reform draw on both the legal/sovereign realm of political power and the biopolitical realm of governing populations to produce state subjects, and I consider the various ways in which people struggle to appropriate and subvert these practices. More broadly, this study helps scholars to understand the central importance of land in post-conflict state formation.

The subject of climate change and adaptation strategies in sub-Saharan Africa is at the forefront of the conversation of poverty and its close link to environmental degradation. Climate experts argue that poverty and natural resource based livelihoods coupled with the low adaptive capacities of those living in sub-Saharan Africa make the region one of the most vulnerable to environmental disruptions associated with climate change. Sub-Saharan African women are viewed as the most vulnerable to climate change because their daily reproductive responsibilities rely heavily on a changing physical environment. Current research into climate change and sub-Saharan African women has prioritized women’s short-term vulnerabilities and has, therefore, failed to explore the role of women’s agency in long-term livelihood adaptive strategies. This thesis will use a hybrid of feminist political ecology framework and emotional geographies to identify the manifestation of women’s emotional agency in climate change livelihood adaptation strategies. This thesis will highlight research gathered as part of a case study of Maasai women in Kirya sub-village of Northern Tanzania. Semi-structured interviews with the Maasai women of Kirya sub-village were used as the primary method of data collection. In Kirya sub-village the women’s adoption of irrigated farming practices, creation of their own small business, and the working of paid laborers to neighboring farms were the predominant methods of livelihood adaptation strategies. Emotional agency can be clearly identified throughout women’s participation in livelihood adaptation strategies. Emotions act as key motivators in navigation of space. Women in Kirya sub-village found motivation in the anger they experienced related to their inability to meet their reproductive responsibilities. This emotional agency ultimately manifested itself through women’s participation in livelihood adaptation strategies, as they are able to mobilize their anger to access new livelihoods. With effects of climate change on natural resource based livelihoods only expected to intensify it is essential that sub-Saharan African women be seen as active and motivated participants in livelihood adaptation strategies.

This study examines women’s views on the political ecology of fuelwood use in the West Usambaras and asks how they view their access to fuelwood: (1) across the local landscape; and (2) as it is influenced by local, regional, national and international factors? Between May and August 2003, I worked with women in Mgwashi and Sagara villages to compile activity schedules, resource maps, photos and narratives, and Venn diagrams. This study demonstrates how the work of fuelwood can intersect women’s triple role, and considers the complex relations among regulated forests, the Sagara Community Forest, and locally-driven initiatives that are promoting agroforestry. My participatory research suggests that women’s unique, situated environmental knowledges need greater recognition in the ‘community’ management of Sagara Community Forest. The conservation of forest resources must be a collaborative process that supports women’s empowerment and encourages their self-mobilization.