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The lack of highly-trained ocean science professionals constrains sustainable development and management of the oceans. In Kenya, the government is committed to improving access to education for all, regardless of gender, ethnicity, and social status. Increasing female student enrolment has been one of the top priorities, particularly in science-related courses, which have long been male-biased. Feminist political ecology is applied as an analytical framework to understand how gender and ethnicity influence student access to, participation in, and experience in ocean science-related programmes. Data was collected through a questionnaire survey with students undertaking ocean science courses in seven public universities in Kenya. The findings revealed an underrepresentation of women and minority ethnic groups. Fewer female respondents than males received financial support from their families, and more female respondents than males reported that they had experienced discrimination related to their ethnicity and gender. In addition, a higher percentage of female respondents reported having fewer opportunities in higher education and ocean science careers than males. These findings reveal the persistent inequalities among students and suggest that Kenyan public universities need to pay more attention to how intersectional identities, such as gender and ethnicity, influence and shape the distribution of resources and opportunities if equitable diversity and inclusion are to be achieved. Also, they need to strengthen their gender policies and actions to tackle these social inequalities to promote gender equality in ocean science education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Pak Mun Dam remains one of north-eastern Thailand's most disputed infrastructure projects. Local livelihoods, particularly those of women, have been negatively impacted, leading many to participate in the resistance movement against the dam. While the fight continues, protests have waned in frequency and vigour. Many in the resistance movement have grown older and passed on, while others have accepted their fate brought on, in part, by the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand's use of resources to foment division among villagers. In the place of mass protests, local actors have turned to organising memorial events, in which resistance is expressed through local practices. This article explores the roles of women, particularly Mae Sompong, in shaping new geographies of resistance through the embodied performances of two memorial events—the Liang Luang Liang Wang and the Boon Mot ceremonies. While the annual Liang Luang Liang Wang ceremony commemorates the migration of fish upriver from the Mekong River into the Mun River and the Boon Mot ceremony commemorates Wanida (Mot) Tantiwittayapitak and other Pak Mun Dam activists who have died, both serve as reminders of past resistance and are catalysts for future contestations. Using a feminist political ecology approach, we contend that ethnic Lao villagers, especially women, constitute local geographies of anti-dam resistance through commemorative practices, ones that have been rendered unimportant and invisible by uneven power relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract All over the world, waste and its disposal are becoming a more prominent issue, as landfills swell up and growing evidence points to its contribution to climate change and environmental degradation. In the developing world, waste pickers sort through solid waste and sell it to vendors, who will recycle the product into something consumable. The work they do is vital to climate change mitigation, as well as urban cleanliness. In a way, waste pickers, especially in India, are vehicles of environmental justice, but they are often discriminated against and subjected to inhumane working conditions. In this environment, the pandemic hit, making waste pickers’ already precarious life even worse. This paper attempts to fill the gap in the academic literature by compiling a systemized literature review of the impacts of COVID-19 on waste-pickers’ lives using an environmental justice perspective. The review also uses a Feminist Political Ecology perspective to illuminate the double jeopardy that female waste pickers face in the era of COVID-19, which academia often ignores. Ultimately, this paper shows that COVID-19 exacerbated the preexisting injustices that the waste picker community face and created an immense burden on women. This paper will show that it is important to notice the differentiation between female and male waste picker challenges, especially at the crux of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper has important policy implications as well as research considerations for both environmental justice and feminist political ecology scholars.

As digital technologies become increasingly ubiquitous on farms, we need to reconsider relationships between technology and agriculture. Critical agrarian studies offers some analyses of digital technologies, but rarely engages feminist perspectives, risking the repetition of problematic assumptions about scale, subjectivity and power. We draw from the strengths of feminist political ecology to think through three digital technologies – remote sensing satellites, agricultural advice apps, and automatic milking systems – that are transforming agrarian policy, practice, and social life. In doing so, we expand critical agrarian studies' approach to the digital by attending to situated knowledges, gendered labor, and emotional, intersectional, multi-species relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In dryland pastoral environments, political and geographical marginalization has historically led to development strategies that poorly account for individual and communities’ spatial and socio-economic realities. These development legacies, including long-standing epistemic biases in defining what should be adapted, are often insufficiently considered within adaptation research and practice. This article sets out to analyze the historical emergence and enactment of formal education as a contested adaptation pathway in southern Kenya. For this, I combine the strengths of the historically situated analyses of the pathways scholarship and feminist political ecology’s attention to the performance of intersectional relations of power in everyday livelihood practices. I bring together both archival data and qualitative primary data from focus group discussions (n = 16) and individual interviews (n = 122) conducted in three pastoral communities. The results exemplify the ways that non-climatic factors, such as increased formal school enrolment, (re)shape everyday livelihood practices and social aspirations, molding the current adaptation space. Notably, enacting formal education as an adaptation pathway requires one to navigate increasing cash pressures, mobility, and labor constraints. Wealth disparities, gendered norms, and geographies intersect to shape patterns of vulnerability, with poorer pastoralists residing further away from school centers facing difficult trade-offs on their time and resources. Understanding pathways enactments contributes to problematizing current logics of development and adaptation needs, while yielding important information on socio-spatial differentiation processes in pastoral systems. It also opens the space for further research to use these critical insights to identify alternative adaptation pathways that support more just transformations towards sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All over the world, waste and its disposal are becoming a more prominent issue, as landfills swell up and growing evidence points to its contribution to climate change and environmental degradation. In the developing world, waste pickers sort through solid waste and sell it to vendors, who will recycle the product into something consumable. The work they do is vital to climate change mitigation, as well as urban cleanliness. In a way, waste pickers, especially in India, are vehicles of environmental justice, but they are often discriminated against and subjected to inhumane working conditions. In this environment, the pandemic hit, making waste pickers' already precarious life even worse. This paper attempts to fill the gap in the academic literature by compiling a systemized literature review of the impacts of COVID-19 on waste-pickers' lives using an environmental justice perspective. The review also uses a Feminist Political Ecology perspective to illuminate the double jeopardy that female waste pickers face in the era of COVID-19, which academia often ignores. Ultimately, this paper shows that COVID-19 exacerbated the preexisting injustices that the waste picker community face and created an immense burden on women. This paper will show that it is important to notice the differentiation between female and male waste picker challenges, especially at the crux of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper has important policy implications as well as research considerations for both environmental justice and feminist political ecology scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water scarcity has multiple negative repercussions for women across the world due to their gender role in sourcing and collecting water for household uses. While this is the case, the triggers of water scarcity and its implications for women’s non-agricultural livelihoods in the East and West Mamprusi municipalities of northern Ghana are poorly understood in the literature. Guided by the feminist political ecology approach, and drawing on a triangulation mixed-method, involving a survey of 394 women, focus group discussions, and complemented with temperature data, this paper contributes to the body of knowledge by examining the triggers of water scarcity and its implications for women’s non-agricultural livelihoods in northern Ghana. Findings revealed that although residents have limited water points, with some of them being unsafe for drinking, a combination of physical and human factors are adding woes to their water shortage. Again, women were found to be suffering unduly from the water shortages with multiple adverse repercussions for their non-agricultural livelihoods. These findings highlight not only the need for local governments to step up efforts in water provision, but also recognize the gendered effects of water shortage in the East and West Mamprusi municipalities of northern Ghana.

Abstract With increasing human-induced environmental degradation, women's nature-based livelihood activities are threatened. In semi-arid northern Ghana, shea processing (i.e., shea butter, a derivative of shea nut from the shea tree), a vital women-dominated economic activity, is at risk as naturally occurring shea trees continue to decline in numbers and productivity. The decline of the shea tree's number and productivity and the ensuing biodiversity loss have sparked conservation efforts by governments and local communities. This includes community-led conservation models, which have recently gained traction in the Global South. Ghana implemented the Community Resource Management Areas (CREMA)—a community-led conservation model to improve biodiversity and ecosystem services, including shea trees conservation in response to climate change. Research has not explored the impacts of community-led conservation efforts on women’s nature-based livelihoods in Ghana. Using a mixed-methods approach involving surveys (n = 517) and focus group discussions (n = 8), this study explored shea productivity outcomes under CREMAs. Findings show that women residing in CREMAs had significantly better shea harvesting outcomes than those outside CREMAs (α = −53.725; P

This study uses an embodied political ecology framework to evaluate the structural, discursive, and visceral effects of government food assistance policy in an agrarian community in southern Mexico. During the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), the government's efforts to resolve the growing double-burden of under- and over-nutrition included the expansion of food assistance programs alongside cash transfers conditioned on health and nutritional education. A parastatal company sourced and distributed foodstuffs to community and school kitchens, where mothers prepared them into meals. This research explores how women participating in government food assistance in the agricultural community of Santa Inés del Monte, Oaxaca, evaluated the foods they received and conceptualized broader changes in their food system and community health. Qualitative research methods, including interviews, focus groups and a community survey of 87 households, were conducted in the community in 2015, 2017 and 2018. Through attention to visceral experience, this study demonstrates how sensations of taste, embodied knowledge, nutrition discourses, gendered development programs, and structural marginalization combined to produce an outcome in which mothers accepted and prepared foods in the community kitchens that did not meet their standards of food quality. However, this study also finds that participating mothers and other residents continue to conceive of direct food production—especially organic production of local heirloom crop and animal varieties—as the best way to access good nutrition. These findings suggest the need for attention to knowledge politics in the design and evaluation of culturally appropriate food security policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the locales where hydropower dams in the Mekong River Basin have been constructed, ethnically and economically marginalized groups who depend on rivers and their tributaries for well-being often bear the greatest burdens: loss of fisheries and river-based livelihoods, riverbank gardens, and sacred sites, to name a few. In December 2018, the controversial Lower Sesan 2 Dam in northeastern Cambodia started operations, exacerbating old challenges and creating new ones for the riverine communities along the Sesan and Srepok Rivers. In this article, I employ a feminist political ecology framework to explore the varying ways that personal and community well-being are impacted in two ethnic Lao locales of Sre Kor (Na Kor in Lao language) commune and Phluk village as a result of the Lower Sesan 2 Dam. While the dam has disrupted flows of water and fish habitats and migrations, rendering new ecological circumstances, I argue that infrastructural violence can variably hide intimate geographies of well-being and un-wellness. Only by interrogating the silences of intimate geographies of the body and home in local villages and communal ethnic spaces will such impacts of violence become visible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With increasing human-induced environmental degradation, women's nature-based livelihood activities are threatened. In semi-arid northern Ghana, shea processing (i.e., shea butter, a derivative of shea nut from the shea tree), a vital women-dominated economic activity, is at risk as naturally occurring shea trees continue to decline in numbers and productivity. The decline of the shea tree's number and productivity and the ensuing biodiversity loss have sparked conservation efforts by governments and local communities. This includes community-led conservation models, which have recently gained traction in the Global South. Ghana implemented the Community Resource Management Areas (CREMA)—a community-led conservation model to improve biodiversity and ecosystem services, including shea trees conservation in response to climate change. Research has not explored the impacts of community-led conservation efforts on women's nature-based livelihoods in Ghana. Using a mixed-methods approach involving surveys (n = 517) and focus group discussions (n = 8), this study explored shea productivity outcomes under CREMAs. Findings show that women residing in CREMAs had significantly better shea harvesting outcomes than those outside CREMAs (α = −53.725; P < 0.01). These findings demonstrate the potential for targeted conservation initiatives that are community-led, such as the CREMAs, to improve the conservation of economically significant naturally occurring trees like Shea. With the increasing impacts of climate change and environmental degradation, such models would be instrumental in achieving sustainable development goals like SDG5-gender equality, SDG10-reduced inequalities, SDG13-Climate action, SDG14-life below water, and SDG14-life on land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservation has been a largely exclusionary and exploitative process that has its roots in western colonial expansion. This paper offers a perspective on the relationship between the conservation apparatus and young adults who live in and around Protected Areas and have grown up within a conservation regime. Following Feminist Political Ecology's call to better understand the situated and heterogeneous relationships to nature within communities, I bring attention to the lives of Soliga tribal youth in a Tiger Reserve in South India. I challenge mainstream perceptions that youth inevitably want to leave their forest homes, arguing that the difficult choices youth must make today, are informed by decades of life under restrictive laws that alienate communities from the forest over generations. Young people's lives and aspirations are contradictory and nuanced, and their relationships to the forest remain strong and should not be discounted. This research contributes to a significant gap in the literature, and illustrates the need to include the experiences of youth as a central tenet of unfolding dialogues on inclusive and decolonial approaches to conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although previous studies have examined the causes of deforestation from a cross-national, quantitative perspective, these studies tend to neglect the role of women in mitigating forest loss. Yet, evidence from case studies shows that when women own land they tend to protect forests, replant trees, and engage in agricultural practices that place less pressure on forests. Building on this work, we use ordinary least squares regression models to analyze data on forest loss derived from satellite imagery for a sample of 67 low- and middle-income nations. The results suggest that improving gender equality in immovable property rights does help save trees. Furthermore, our analysis also suggests that men and women have different priorities when it comes to forest sustainability. Women's rights have a protective effect on forests, while men's rights have no statistically significant effect. Given the extent to which we rely on forests for health, environmental, and economic reasons, these findings imply that when women's rights are curtailed, the consequences extend beyond women themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 has made visible and deepened inequalities globally, while also manifesting the vital role of functional food, health, and care systems in a context of strong socio-ecological interdependencies. We here mobilize bio– and necro–politics to problematize the declaration of agricultural workers as 'essential' and the accompanying policies during the early months of the pandemic, focusing on the region of Lleida, Spain. We show how this proclaimed indispensibility was aiming mostly at securing cheap labor to agri-business while workers continued to be treated as expendable. An intersectionality lens allows us to understand discrimination and racism as health determinants, operating within and defining 'glocal' food necropolitics and COVID-19 biopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I address hegemonic masculinities and their geographical contingencies. I focus on when and how space matters and how hegemonic upper-caste masculinities are socio-spatially produced, constituted, and contested. I draw on relational theories in the geographies of masculinities and feminist political ecology. Current theorizing in these fields highlights the role of space/place/environment in the production of subjectivities such that ideas of gender and space arise as co-constitutive. Drawing from these literatures, in this article, I explore the role of construction of and power over land and space; and how land is gendered and caste-laden in the performance of hegemonic masculinities. I also focus on the ways hegemonic masculinities respond to vulnerabilities and challenges within said space. Through this conceptualization, I advance the inter-disciplinary discourse in sociology and geography on the intersectional and spatial emergence of the masculine. Using empirical evidence from Punjab (India) I explore the construction of masculinized spaces and their control by dominant-caste men and highlight the mutually constitutive relationships between space, masculinities, and the caste axis of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Shea tree holds significance in the socio-ecological landscape of northern Ghana. With the escalating impacts of climate change, the diminishing presence of Shea trees has emerged as a significant concern. From a feminist political ecology standpoint, this research focuses on understanding the factors contributing to this decline in the Upper West Region of Ghana and the adaptation and mitigation strategies women propose to address the decline. Findings from eight (8) Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) reveal an interaction between anthropogenic activities like illegal logging, mechanized farming, and recurrent bushfires and climate-related factors such as heightened prevalence of pests and diseases and reduced pollination activity. To counter these challenges in the short term, suggested adaptation measures include promoting farmer-managed natural regeneration, beekeeping, restoring Shea landscapes, and establishing credit schemes for women based on Shea production. Long-term strategies like creating shea-conservation zones and planting drought-resistant and fast-yielding Shea varieties are proposed. This research underscores the pressing need for policy frameworks that incorporate approaches for both mitigation and adaptation purposes. It emphasizes the role played by women in driving these solutions within their communities, stressing their inclusion in policy formulation processes to conserve Shea trees effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the effects of climate change are being felt more frequently, discussions on how to combat such a massive issue are increasingly prevalent. Finding solutions to the climate crisis requires an understanding of how mainstream economic systems have led to the climate crisis and using these same principles to get out of the climate crisis is misguided. Economic actions have inherent value biases that have real political effects. Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) as a theoretical model presents a better understanding of how values that are inherent in economic models such as reliance on efficiency, markets, and continual economic growth have created the foundation for the climate crisis. Solutions must remedy these value shortcomings to become more ecocentric, reciprocal, and foster a healthy common to make substantial progress on the issue.

In light of national and regional EU agendas favouring water privatization under forms of neoliberal technocracy, water movements have emerged to contest this paradigm by reframing water as a common good and demanding remunicipalisation (reclaiming public control over water services). As a result, unique cases of water remunicipalisation have aligned their politics with a commons discourse, as in the case of Naples, Italy. However, implementing a commons discourse within an experimental urban setting, embedded in a context of neoliberal technocracy and socio-cultural dynamics is imbued with tensions. Combining literature on commons with that of feminist political ecology, this paper unravels the micro-politics and macro-politics that create tensions in experiments of constructing and institutionalising an urban water commons. The focus of this paper is on ‘lived experiences’ of activists in an ecological (water) struggle, as an entry point to study the (de)construction of the institutionalisation of a commons-oriented water project. Results point to four factors that leave the Naples’ water commons project at risk: enclosing knowledge(s), imbalanced gendered experiences, enclosing practices of participation, and lastly the antagonistic politics at a national and regional scale that continue to isolate the case of Naples as anomaly. By focusing on the neglected facets of embodiment in constructing and institutionalising commons projects, we draw attention to the importance of including embodied knowledge(s), experiences, and practices in the construction, institutionalisation, and ultimately the study, of water commons.

Conservation has been a largely exclusionary and exploitative process that has its roots in western colonial expansion. This paper offers a perspective on the relationship between the conservation apparatus and young adults who live in and around Protected Areas and have grown up within a conservation regime. Following Feminist Political Ecology's call to better understand the situated and heterogeneous relationships to nature within communities, I bring attention to the lives of Soliga tribal youth in a Tiger Reserve in South India. I challenge mainstream perceptions that youth inevitably want to leave their forest homes, arguing that the difficult choices youth must make today, are informed by decades of life under restrictive laws that alienate communities from the forest over generations. Young people's lives and aspirations are contradictory and nuanced, and their relationships to the forest remain strong and should not be discounted. This research contributes to a significant gap in the literature, and illustrates the need to include the experiences of youth as a central tenet of unfolding dialogues on inclusive and decolonial approaches to conservation.

The underground--for decades the invisible 'other' of landscape and terrain in geography--has emerged in political ecology literature as the source of 'stuff', or material things, resources and commodities that are not deemed intrinsically valuable until extracted. As a corrective, this paper offers a feminist political ecology perspective that brings subaltern women's voices to the forefront, and argues that the underground is co-constituted as a gendered space by gendered humans. As evidence, I take the readers on a journey into the belly of a coalmine where humans labour, and bring out women's voices that narrate their experiences and imaginations to create the underground as a space teeming with social life. These alternative and gendered narratives reinstate the diverse, complex, and secret lives of this netherworld, draw attention to the politics of imagining space, and potentially shift geographers' focus to interpreting the underground as a gendered social space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present systematic review was undertaken to obtain a detailed understanding of how climate change perceptions and adaptation differ globally by gender and different intersections among the farmers. Findings from 41 studies selected following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol, mostly from Africa and Asia, suggest that climate change perceptions and adaptation are highly contextual and considerably varied by gender and different intersections. Existing gender role, farmers' age, education, knowledge, marital status, intra-household power structure, religion, social status and ethnicity were intersecting with gender and climate change perception and adaptation. Apart from gender and intersectionality, access to resources, social network and local institutions are found to be important correlates of adaptation strategies by farmers. While agriculture being feminized, mere technological changes are not conclusive to climate change adaptation rather socio-cultural, structural and political changes in inevitable. Female farmers were tend to be more concerned and fatalistic about climate change which reminds us the urgency of culturally appropriate climate change communication to obtain informed decision regarding climate change. Future climate change research could be more gender transformative by exploring the existing inequalities lying in different intersections of gender rather than highlighting binary gender differences only. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This multi-authored collection of papers examines the complex realities of research on natural resource industries, including the messy entanglements of extraction, materiality, and everyday social life this research entails. Of central importance to the contributors is how scholars confront fieldwork challenges ethically, methodologically, and corporeally. The collection has two key objectives. First, it expands our understanding of extractive industry by bringing together work on resources conventionally understood as extractive (e.g. oil and minerals) alongside resource-intensive industries not typically examined through an extractive lens, for instance fisheries, agricultural monocultures, water, and tourism. As such, it considers the historical and current conditions that facilitate the extraction of resources in parallel, cyclical, and reproducing forms. Second, the collection examines scholarly positionalities, methodologies, and dilemmas that arise when studying nature-intensive industries, including the extractive dimensions associated with social research itself. Together, the pieces argue that research concerning extractive industries entails multiple scholarly positions—positions problematically inflected with colonialism and always shaped by power relations. Contributors to the section draw largely from feminist, postcolonial, anti-racist, and historical materialist insights to frame and problematize the corporeal and representational concerns arising from their scholarship on nature-intensive industries, including personal dilemmas that they have encountered in their work. Overall, the collection is driven by the realization that research, and the analyses it entails, may serve as a tool for emancipatory intervention yet also reproduce inequality. The futures of the people and ecosystems at the center of our studies impel constant reflection so that our work, and that of the next generation of scholars, may offer critical analysis that contributes to transforming—rather than reinforcing—oppressive relations associated with extractive sectors and industries.

Mainstream development thinking suggests that increasing agricultural production will increase wealth and lead to improved diets. However, in Burkina Faso, even better off rural areas are still experiencing widespread nutrition insecurity. Wild plants play a key role in rural diets and serve as a nutritional safety net. This research investigates the use of wild plants for dietary diversity among women rice farmers and their households in southwestern Burkina Faso. We use data collected through semi-structured interviews with 131 women over the 2016–2020 period. We find that wild foods are important for dietary diversity, especially for poor households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines changes in formal and informal land access rules for women in the Kafue Flats of southern Zambia and identifies alternatives to land privatization. In rural African communities dependent on subsistence production, access to common pool resources (CPRs) such as fisheries, wildlife or wild fruits made an important contribution to household food and nutritional security. In the pre-colonial period, the use of agricultural land and associated CPRs was governed by local institutions of common property, characterized by more-than-human relationships embedded in the local animistic ontology. To examine how women's pre-colonial access rights were increasingly disregarded in the wake of new statutory laws, we analyzed qualitative ethnographic data on livelihoods and food security from three time periods between 2002 and 2018. The findings show how customary law land tenure has remained important, despite being complemented by statutory law designed to also protect women's property rights. We conclude that women's customary access rights to land and CPRs must be taken into account in the drafting of formal legislation, as suggested by successful examples of bottom-up institution building in other regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This agrarian geography of Kentucky begins on the streets of the state's largest city, in the throes of antiracist struggle. It tracks the state's lingering colonial settler power dynamics through the racism of plantation, extraction, and carceral geographies. It then traces how resistance to these exploitations take root in place-based agri-food initiatives unfolding through urban-rural solidarity against white supremacist policing, prison systems, labor exploitation, and extractivism. It begins with a brief overview of the scale of reference of Kentucky itself. Situating the state entails addressing the trauma and topophilia (love of landscape) of its agrarian past and present. It draws upon bell hooks' literary invocations of Kentucky-based agrarian visions, as well as place-based political ecology scholarship (seven years of Kentucky Agrarian Questions practitioner panels at the Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference at University of Kentucky). Following Black and abolitionist geographies, this agrarian geography traces rural and urban shared struggles for food sovereignty, environmental justice, and liberation from racism of carceral systems. It introduces Kentucky grassroots projects connecting and uniting rural and urban struggles against carceral violence and the racism therein, such as Hood to the Holler (a political initiative emerging from Black Lives Matter mobilizations for Breonna Taylor). The essay ends with reflections on the political-ecological contradictions and imperative of working through and beyond a settler-colonial-state scale of reference like Kentucky. To extricate from and dismantle plantation modes and carceral legacies, abolitionist agrarian geographies recover the reality of Black and Indigenous agrarian history, presence, and futures. As such, rooted in place-based reckoning, resistance, and responsibility, they offer hope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary proposes a research agenda for the concept of feminist digital natures (FDN). To demonstrate how we see FDN connecting existing research efforts, we review both the well-established and much-needed work in three overlapping areas of scholarship where we see the potential for productive discussions, new questions, and empirical analysis: feminist digital geographies (FDG), digital natures (DN), and feminist political ecology (FPE). We offer specific and grounded examples of topics and questions that scholars might pursue through an FDN approach. We encourage sustained, collaborative, and critical attention to the uneven consequences and political terrain of understanding natures as increasingly digitally monitored, managed, manipulated, and represented. We can and should think with digital relations, and we might benefit from new creative conversations across our areas of inquiry and action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aspiring to India's COP26 pledge of attaining 500 gigawatts of non-fossil energy capacity by 2030 will entail nothing short of a colossal transformation of rural spaces. Solar park development has already disrupted the lives and livelihoods of marginalized peasants through land dispossession, uneven provisioning of electricity and water resources, dislocation of fuelwood and grazing access, and the diminution of labor opportunities. However, it remains unclear how affected peasants internalize the burdens of decarbonization. The aim of the paper is to address the following questions: How are the geographies of solar energy transitions embodied? How do dispossessed peasants respond affectively? Drawing on feminist political ecology literature and fieldwork that included household surveys and semi-structured interviews, the author finds that the dispossessed embody a range of affective responses, including emotional geographies and embodied resistance, that enable or constrain the place-making of equitable alternative sites of solar energy generation. The author concludes that as India rapidly erects large-scale solar infrastructures—indisputably imperative efforts to confront the climate crisis—the embodiment of injustices suffered by the dispossessed will haunt low-carbon futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Despite the Payment for Forest Environmental Services (PFES) program being recognized for its achievements in promoting environmental conservation and empowering forest-dependent communities, its vertical impacts require a more nuanced investigation, given the constantly changing policy landscape in Vietnam. In 2023, we employed the Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) approach to examine gender disparities in PFES participation, resource accessibility, decision-making power, and knowledge of PFES across 66 households in A Luoi district, Thua Thien Hue province, Vietnam. Our findings reveal striking gender gaps in PFES participation, resource accessibility, decision-making power, and knowledge, with men dominating meetings and training programs, and having their names predominantly listed in forest land certificates, while women's perspectives are often overlooked. These inequities are deeply entrenched in patriarchal ideologies and traditional social prejudices, which have systematically excluded women from development programs. Moreover, our research uncovered a significant lack of knowledge about PFES among both men and women in the study community, partly attributable to institutional factors and command-and-control structures. We argue that achieving gender-equitable governance requires a multifaceted and nuanced approach that recognizes the complexity and diversity of institutions at the household and community level. Gender equality is a constantly evolving process with a wide range of issues and debates at various levels. Therefore, a long-term, gender-sensitive approach that empowers women and recognizes their critical role in forest governance is imperative for promoting equitable and sustainable development.

Elderly women in depopulating and aging rural Japan confront their everyday challenges collectively through business practices based on kokorozashi – altruistic entrepreneurial practices through which they generate livelihoods and improve collective well-being. Drastic demographic changes and intensified economic globalization in the 1980s provoked precarity in rural livelihoods that depend on natural resource management. These changes simultaneously have opened up opportunities for women to start businesses assisted by state policies for rural revitalization and women’s empowerment. Previous studies have examined different contributions and pathways that rural women’s businesses have made to collective well-being. These studies rarely investigate how ethics come into play in collective natural resource management and its constitutive relationships among commons, subjectivities, and more-than-human elements. Drawing on a postcapitalist feminist political ecology’s approach to commoning, we investigate power dynamics and intersecting affective processes, including those related to gender, aging bodies, rurality, and more-than-human elements and demonstrate how ethical subjectivities and more-than-human communities are emerging in aging and depopulating rural Japan.

Research in environmentality has provided an analysis of environmentally friendly subject formation through the influence of conservation governance. Within this research, examination of subject formation from the local community perspective is also gaining attention. However, a gender perspective in environmentality research remains marginal. This study thus contributes to environmentality research by drawing on intersectional feminist political ecology to examine women's engagement with ecotourism in the context of India's Corbett Tiger Reserve. Ecotourism as a form of market-based conservation has been commonly framed as an expression of neoliberal environmentality. Neoliberal environmentality is reflected in market-centred incentives used to promote conservation and support for local people via employment in conservation-based work - a supposedly 'win-win' dynamic. Through ethnographic research, I provide insights into different forms of women's engagement with tourism. The analysis reveals that this engagement does not necessarily produce the environmentally friendly subject that environmentality analysis predicts. Rather, women's engagement is shaped by intersecting dynamics of caste and class and motivated by factors including but not limited to monetary benefits. This study thus questions the dominant approach to investigating neoliberal environmentality in particular, that tends to emphasise the influence of monetary incentives in producing environmentally friendly subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During my doctoral defense at the University of Eastern Finland on January 27th, 2023, I introduced my doctoral research with the present lectio praecursoria. This lectio delves into the plurality of experiences, values and knowledge interwoven in the development of community forestry in the Sierra Sur of Oaxaca, Mexico. In the last 40 years, Mexico has promoted community forestry as an alternative to forest management directed by the central government or private companies. As an alternative, community forestry is based on social justice and environmental sustainability principles, aiming for communities to use forests for social and economic development while conserving them. The research examines how forest communities have created their paths to achieve these objectives, like creating community forestry companies for wood and non-wood forest products. Based on ethnographic methods and documental analysis in the Sierra Sur of Oaxaca state, the research investigated the challenges, paradoxes and changes forest dwellers face when managing and working in their community forestry companies while conserving their forests. Furthermore, this study contributes to understanding how different environmental governing rationalities intersect when 1) socio-territorial conflicts arise, 2) women's access to productive labor is encouraged, and 3) the plural values of the forest are adapted. The lecture addresses one of the critical inquiries of this research: how various environmental governing rationalities intertwine in community forestry to shape and regulate people's behavior and interactions with forests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In India, with over 355 million menstruating individuals, challenges persist for women in achieving proper menstrual hygiene management (MHM), crucial for gender equality. Despite governmental and NGO efforts, MHM schemes distributing plastic products contribute to a significant waste problem, harming the environment. To mitigate this, menstrual waste incinerators in schools and sustainable menstrual products, such as the menstrual cup, have been posited as solutions to this growing issue. Both solutions can be classified as ecological modernization (EM) techniques to addressing this issue, which critical scholarship, such as Feminist Political Ecology (FPE), takes issue with. This project explores India's menstrual waste management, delving into incinerators and sustainable menstrual products' (SMPs) benefits and challenges, unravelling a complex situation, where both EM theory and FPE theory play a role in. The goal is to scrutinize how stakeholders can address menstrual waste without compromising women's right to choose products aligned with their bodies. To understand this situation, 54 in-person interviews with college students in Coimbatore unravel women's lived experiences with incinerators and SMPs. The findings reveal that women are aware of the environmental consequences of commercial sanitary napkins. SMPs and incinerators offer relief from the environmental guilt that women experience, and while these EM interventions might promote 'menstrual enclosure,' as some scholars have suggested, our research participants emphasize their liberatory potential rather than enclosure. Even though such EM solutions have several social and infrastructural problems that limit their availability and use, they serve as important means for women in India to reclaim agency over their bodies. • Women are aware of the environmental consequences of commercial sanitary napkins. • EM interventions ease environmental guilt; participants stress their liberatory potential. • Despite social and infrastructure issues, EM solutions help Indian women reclaim agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The African Green Revolution (AGR) aims to modernize, intensify, and commercialize agriculture through increasing technology adoption by smallholder farmers. AGR interventions also promote gender equality, aiming to close the 'gender gap' in agriculture by enhancing women's access to purchased inputs, technology, land, and finance. With an empirical focus on Rwanda, this article examines the gendered implications of the AGR. We critically reflect on the notion of gender gaps and the associated tendency of development research to treat gender as a variable, assessing outcomes for male-headed versus female-headed households in terms of their access to material assets. We argue that these assessments overlook (1) the differential impacts of AGR policies within households and (2) how agricultural modernization influences gendered access to material resources as well as immaterial responsibilities, norms, and identities. Our findings from a mixed-methods study with four Rwandan communities show how the AGR empowers men as 'modern' farmers while marginalizing women's agricultural spaces, labor, and crops. We argue that development research and practice should move beyond the narrow focus on gender gaps to additionally consider how technologies and policies are themselves gendered in ways that can constrict food security, entrench inequitable power dynamics, and further marginalize women. • Africa's Green Revolution (AGR) fosters technology-led agricultural intensification. • In Rwanda, the AGR intersects with gendered land use and livelihood practices. • Men's economic opportunities are enhanced while women's livelihoods are constrained. • A focus on 'gender gaps' neglects how technologies and policies are gendered. • Evaluations of the AGR should approach rural transformation as a gendered process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Power relations shaping climate-migration-gender interactions are underestimated. • Feminist political ecology reveals power differentials across multiple scales. • Addressing global and local forces shaping gender and social inequities is crucial. • Intersecting inequities shape local experiences of climate change and migration. • Policies must tackle unequal exchange and local injustices to address root causes. Research on climate and migration interactions has greatly evolved from environmentally deterministic explanations to more sophisticated and complex accounts of human (im)mobilities in a changing climate. Despite acknowledging gender and social inequalities as key factors shaping vulnerability and resilience, the multi-scalar power relations influencing human (im)mobility in the context of climate change have been underestimated. This paper argues that a feminist political ecology of migration can enhance our understanding of the gender and social inequities embedded in the climate-migration nexus by conceptualizing power relations across different scales in our world economy. Through a critical review of the literature, this paper highlights the ways in which a feminist political ecology approach can help unpack the power differentials that shape climate and migration interactions. The paper concludes that a more nuanced understanding of power relations across different scales is crucial for both advancing the conceptual understanding of the complex nexus between climate, migration, and inequality, and addressing the root causes of these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research article calls for explicit attention to micro-politics through engagement with a feminist intersectional lens for enabling convivial conservation. Convivial conservation provides a vision for equitable conservation through simultaneously pursuing structural change and addressing context specific micro-politics. This research article draws on feminist intersectional research and feminist political ecology to argue that convivial conservation needs to explicitly engage with the ways that intersections of class, gender, caste, and other identity positions shape the micro-politics of power around land rights and opportunities for benefitting from conservation interventions. It draws on findings from two forest villages near the Corbett Tiger Reserve in India to demonstrate the micro-politics that shape the variegated access and tourism dependencies experienced by different local residents. Engaging with learnings from implementation of the progressive Forest Rights Act (FRA) which intended to redress these issues, this analysis highlights that the FRA serves as both a cautionary and potentially transformative example for furthering the convivial conservation vision of local people's engagement with conservation areas.

While it is known that women have a strong presence in struggles for Environmental Justice, there is a lack of knowledge about their role in them, particularly in struggles opposing mining projects. We aim to fill this gap by undertaking the first global systematization of the available data on women's anti-mining activism, using a multi-case perspective. We analyze 151 mining conflicts identified through the Environmental Justice Atlas, examining the impacts mining activities have had on women, how women responded to these, how they organized to oppose mining projects, and what challenges they faced in their activism. While our analysis reinforces many aspects discussed by Feminist Political Ecology scholars on the challenges women face in their activism, it also raises new questions about the specific impacts mining has on women, the repertoire of actions they have at their disposal as part of their activism, and how they organize to oppose mining projects, patriarchal dynamics within movements, and to question prevailing narratives of progress.

Since 1990, 420 million hectares of forest have disappeared worldwide with the majority being lost in low- and middle-income nations. Given this alarming trend, what can be done to safeguard such a vital resource? Drawing on feminist political ecology, we suggest that protecting women's legal rights to immovable property might help alleviate the problem of forest loss in low- and middle-income nations. Building on existing theoretical and case study work, we use ordinary least squares and two-stage instrumental variable regression models to examine the association between women's immovable property rights in 2000 and forest loss from 2001 to 2015 across 65 low- and middle-income nations. The results suggest that higher levels of women's property rights are associated with lower forest loss, net of various controls. This finding implies that when the rights of women are curtailed, the repercussions extend beyond women themselves. Indeed, the repercussions are felt throughout all of society, including on the natural environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rwanda is often depicted as a success story by policy makers when it comes to issues of gender. In this paper, we show how the problem of gendered inequality in agriculture nevertheless is both marginalized and instrumentalized in Rwanda's agriculture policy. Our in-depth analysis of 12 national policies is informed by Bacchi's What's the problem represented to be? approach. It attests that gendered inequality is largely left unproblematized as well as reduced to a problem of women's low agricultural productivity. The policy focuses on framing the symptoms and effects of gendered inequality and turns gender mainstreaming into an instrument for national economic growth. We argue that by insufficiently addressing the socio-political underlying causes of gendered inequality, Rwanda's agriculture policy risks reproducing and exacerbating inequalities by reinforcing dominant gender relations and constructing women farmers as problematic and men as normative farmers. We call for the policy to approach gendered inequality in alternative ways. Drawing on perspectives in feminist political ecology, we discuss how such alternatives could allow policy to more profoundly challenge underlying structural constraints such as unequal gender relations of power, gender norms, and gender divisions of work. This would shift policy's problematizing lens from economic growth to social justice, and from women's shortcomings and disadvantages in agriculture to the practices and relations that perpetuate inequality. In the long term, this could lead to transformed gender norms and power relations, and a more just and equal future beyond what the dominant agricultural development discourse currently permits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In times of devastating ecological crisis, where can we find a route map to collectively halt current trends of destruction? In this review, we examine feminist studies' recent contributions to activism and theorizing regarding extraction, emerging ecologies, and multispecies justice. By bringing in salient research from the fields of feminist political ecology, ecofeminism, and decolonial/anticolonial feminisms, we point to the ways in which feminist thought and action has opened up spaces for recognizing, envisioning, and making life-affirming ecologies rather than extractive systems of destruction. We refer to the former as emergent and emancipatory ecologies, that is, ecologies always in the process of becoming and capable of defying and subverting oppression based on gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, caste, ability, species and other forms of discrimination—and, thus, capable of protecting and defending life and living worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Achieving gender well-being and equality is one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. A close examination of female livelihood time allocation can reveal gender inequality in livelihood choices between males and females. Using the feminist political ecology framework, this paper examines how gendered knowledge, roles, and responsibilities influence female livelihood time use in a patriarchal society like Bangladesh. We use a nationally representative household survey data to create Multiple Linear Regression Model to understand the association between economic, cultural, and environmental shocks with the total time allocation toward livelihood activities by women. Our results suggest that use of 'Purdah' by Muslim women acts as a negative detrimental factor towards their livelihood time allocation, thus affirming the complex role of culture and gendered economic activities. Women also allocate less time toward livelihood activities during pregnancy and/or breastfeeding. We find that female livelihood time use also depends on their ability to speak in public, their autonomy in livelihood decision processes, and their ownership in business enterprises. This research suggests creating more robust and gender sensitive policies in Bangladesh that can help achieve the United Nation's goals of Sustainable Development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Futures thinking is an expanding interdisciplinary field which is seen as a key element of transitioning towards a more sustainable planet and society. Developing fairer futuring is increasingly urgent in the context of the radical reconfiguration of current systems needed to meet complex global sustainability challenges. However, explicit consideration of uneven power and participation and the nature‐society relations that feature in contemporary futuring processes has been given little explicit attention to date. This deficit is addressed in this paper through a critical review of dominant futuring approaches and outlining insights from critical perspectives which (a) identify limitations of current futuring approaches and (b) provide important perspectives to help shape fairer futuring in geographical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the unprecedented feminization of agriculture globally, literature has emerged over the past decade suggesting that gender equality in agriculture could be advanced if gaps in access to farm resources between women and men are reduced. This paper examines gendered farm resource entitlements in northern Ghana. Based mainly on six months of immersive qualitative research, this case study draws from and contributes to feminist political ecology scholarship (FPE) on smallholder farming and agricultural development. The analysis describes some of the intensifying gender and intersecting inequalities (e.g., gender and ethnicity) of land access related to development interventions aimed at commercializing farming. Gender disparities in access to agricultural extension, chemical fertilizers, agrochemicals, high yielding seed varieties, tractor services, credit packages and marketing contracts supported by the state, donors and NGOs are also found. FPE is useful for revealing how these gendered resource disparities are related to agricultural commercialization and increasingly erratic rainfall and aridity, making smallholders more vulnerable to land dispossession. Women's dependence on men to farm while operating under these changing economic and environmental conditions, coupled with their weaker entitlement rights to resources, threatens to push many, particularly ethnic minority women, out of farming altogether. The ways that intersecting identities shape access to land also complicates understandings of the role of community outsiders who are both the dispossessors of land and those who are intensely vulnerable to dispossession. While rural development studies generally consider women's farm resources compared to men's, this does little to explain the intensifying intersectional vulnerabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]