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Despite laudable efforts by Sustainable Development Goal 6 to promote inclusiveness and sustainability, there is a danger that its global, target‐based focus may eclipse context‐specific sanitation priorities and constraints. Drawing primarily on qualitative village‐based research in Guwahati, India, this paper explores how specific geographical settings influence sanitation sustainability (“improved for where/when and how long?”) and user‐based priorities (“improved for whom?”). Emphasis is placed on sustainability concerns associated with pit emptying, poor construction and seasonal flooding. Shit flow diagrams are used to illustrate seasonal variations in estimates of safely managed sanitation. These estimates are compared with alternative criteria for monitoring access to “improved” or “safe” sanitation technologies. Our findings indicate that poor latrine construction and maintenance coupled with seasonal flooding cause frequent shifts between “improved and “unimproved” or “shared” systems along with significant changes in estimates of safely managed sanitation. Sanitation “stacking” (simultaneous use of a range of sanitation systems) also occurs due to preferences for open defecation coupled with high demand for existing latrines; especially during seasonal flooding. Arguments are made for the need to monitor seasonal variations in use, quality and continuity of access to sanitation facilities and capture data on sanitation “stacking” if “sanitation for all” is to be achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although India's Jharkhand movement resists classification as either an ethnic or an environmental movement, it has, at different times, mobilised clear elements of both with frequently violent outcomes. This paper examines the movement from a political ecology perspective and focuses on violence arising from natural resource-related grievances, notably land alienation, forest policy and employment from Jharkhand's mines. Drawing from political ecology's emphasis on the need to examine conflict from a range of different spatial scales, the paper emphasises the importance of a micro-political ecology approach for understanding how locally based conflicts over natural resources can harden into more established grievances that can be mobilised politically as part of a wider and potentially violent protest movement. It is also suggested that micro-political ecology approaches can assist participatory resource management initiatives in ameliorating local conflicts over access to resources, thus helping to prevent them from escalating into more widespread violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking the Jharkhand region of India as a case study, this article uses empirical data to intervene in ‘women, environment and development’ and ecofeminist debates regarding women's environmental knowledge. The article first outlines the adoption of gender/environmental issues into development planning and considers the dangers of overestimating women's agroecological knowledges and assuming that they can easily participate in development projects. It then highlights the local complexities of environmental knowledge possession and control with reference to gender and other variations in agricultural participation, decision-making and knowledge transfers between villagers' natal and marital places. Particular emphasis is placed on the economic, socio-cultural and ‘actor’ related factors that supplement gender as an influence on task allocation, decision-making, knowledge distribution and knowledge articulation. The article concludes that given the socio-cultural constraints women face in accumulating and vocalizing environmental knowledge, simplistic participatory approaches are unlikely to empower them. Instead, more flexible, site-specific development initiatives (coupled with wider structural change) are required if opportunities are to be created for women to develop and use their agroecological knowledges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]