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In this chapter, we share the insights of feminist political ecology (FPE) for degrowth, building from the debates on “caring communities for radical change” at the 8th International Degrowth Conference in August 2021. We discuss how FPE links to the principles of degrowth as an academic and activist movement and why it is necessary to take feminist political ecology perspectives on care and caring communities in resisting, questioning, and counteracting the structural racial, gender, and wider social inequalities that uphold and are perpetuated by growth-dependent economic systems. As we critically reflect on the experiences of paid versus unpaid, collectivised versus feminised care work, we argue that care is crucial to social and ecological reproduction in order to build just, sustainable and convivial societies.

This commentary reflects on the shifts in my personal and political lifeworld across time and space by sharing a story of changing awareness about ‘life-in-common’ in the Australian landscape; a landscape that is marked by historical, ecological and resource struggle and injustice. My commentary takes up the rethinking of differential belonging and ‘life-in-common’ as part of the search for alternatives to capitalism and a way to overcome socioecological crises which pays attention to the deep connections of nature and culture. I reflect on life-in-common as an Australian white settler feminist political ecologist wishing to understand how to address the erasures and violence that mark the Australian landscape.

Our chapter builds on an intergenerational transnational exchange about how feminists can create safe places of engagement via the internet as part of embodied active research processes. We tell two stories separated by over two decades that illustrate how safe feminist and queer places are co-created and embodied as vital for connections and communication in cyberspace. Inspired by feminist geographies, we employ the term “place” as a term to explain a virtual sense of belonging where people could explore possibilities of embodied politics within cyberspace. Our two stories illustrate how embodied sexuality and gender power relations are shaped in the digital world. It explores the potential for feminists in online worlds to create places where individual and collective transformative processes are possible.

Partha Dasgupta’s book _Time and the Generations: Population Ethics for a Diminishing Planet_ (2019) engages us in one of the most taboo issues in development debates: the environmental consequences of population. He asks what level of economic activity our planet can support and what that implies for the optimal global population. As a leading British-Indian economist, Dasgupta models how adverse externalities — poverty, degradation of the environment, resource stress — impact the economy and through his mathematical logic shows the importance of knowing optimum population numbers. [...]

In my commentary I take up the challenge of finding an academically fuelled strategy to make the necessary deep inroads into the Sustainable Development Goals by looking at lessons learnt from the struggles of the transnational feminist movement involved in UN multilateral debates and the transformative work of feminist political ecology on the ethics of care and caring-with others, including more-than-human others. I propose these feminist strategies offer some insights in how to shift dominant knowledge systems.

In this article, we set out how menstrual activism is emerging as a novel strand in global feminist health demands that challenge the norms and practices which condone and institutionalise gender inequalities. Menstruation has moved from being understood principally as a biological function, invisible in the public sphere, to a vibrant form of global body politics with a flourishing set of diverse practices. We examine how menstruation has been brought to global attention in two ways: one through a global development discourse that promotes menstrual health by improving hygiene and the sanitary infrastructure in the Global South; and two through the upswell of feminist groups involved in menstrual activism around the world. The article is a contribution to moving closer towards productive alliances between these two strands as together they contribute to important changes in menstrual health and sexual rights.

Given a history in political ecology of challenging hegemonic “scientific” narratives concerning environmental problems, the current political moment presents a potent conundrum: how to (continue to) critically engage with narratives of environmental change while confronting the “populist” promotion of “alternative facts.” We ask how political ecologists might situate themselves vis-à-vis the presently growing power of contemporary authoritarian forms, highlighting how the latter operates through sociopolitical domains and beyond-human natures. We argue for a clear and conscious strategy of speaking power to post-truth, to enable two things. The first is to come to terms with an internal paradox of addressing those seeking to obfuscate or deny environmental degradation and social injustice, while retaining political ecology’s own historical critique of the privileged role of Western science and expert knowledge in determining dominant forms of environmental governance. This involves understanding post-truth, and its twin pillars of alternative facts and fake news, as operating politically by those regimes looking to shore up power, rather than as embodying a coherent mode of ontological reasoning regarding the nature of reality. Second, we differentiate post-truth from analyses affirming diversity in both knowledge and reality (i.e., epistemology and ontology, respectively) regarding the drivers of environmental change. This enables a critical confrontation of contemporary authoritarianism and still allows for a relevant and accessible political ecology that engages with marginalized populations likely to suffer most from the proliferation of post-truth politics. Key Words: authoritarianism, environmental policy, political ecology, post-truth, science.

This reflection, drawing on three chapters in this book, sets out the case for a feminist political ecology approach in supporting activist scholars aiming to create just spaces which question the mainstream discourses of the green economy and sustainable development in order to address the emerging questions in the gender and energy nexus.

This article explores the ways in which western modernity, as Boaventura De Sousa Santos suggests, can play tricks on intellectuals when we try to teach revolutionary ideas in reactionary institutions. I reflect on my efforts to use Post-Development (PD) as a tool to engage students in critical reflections on development in a post graduate course in 2015/2016. One of their assignments was to create an International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) Development Dictionary emulating the Sachs’s collection. The results were mixed. On the one hand, they produced wonderful digital collations of concepts, ideas and critiques, but on the other hand, many felt that learning about PD had turned their world upside down. Given the strong reactions of the students, and also my colleagues, I reflect on the possibilities and also the problems of using PD as a tool to teach development studies to international students (most of whom are from the Global South). My experiment in asking students to engage in their ...

This reflection explores questions surrounding the co-optation of feminism by development processes in what could be seen as a process of dilution of feminist demands. In the vignettes that follow, I reflect on one training session in South Asia, held for two weeks in 2014, in order to explore the ambiguities of feminists working inside development. [...]

In response to Juan David Parra Heredia’s criticism of her earlier article about her use of post-development as a tool in teaching development studies, Wendy Harcourt reflects further on how the co...

The chapter explores the challenges of gender for Development Studies in the new Millennium. It looks at the implications of applying a gender lens to the complex economic, social and cultural processes shaping development processes. The underlying premise of the chapter is that development itself is powerfully gendered. It argues that applying a gender lens to Development Studies helps to reveal important insights into how power and knowledge operate in development practice. It presents some of the latest contributions of gender analysis to Development Studies in a discussion of gender and diversity; body politics; post development, feminist political ecology and sustainable development.

The article looks at how recent thinking on gender has led to discussions on how development itself is powerfully gendered, with important implications for international development studies. The essay is based on reflections from editing two handbooks for Palgrave and Oxford University Press. It describes how feminist critiques of gender can create dilemmas in international development studies and practices by examining five issues. These include the engagement of theory and practice-based knowledge, development as transformative politics, inter-sectionality issues and the inter-section with sustainability issues. The author concludes that radical theoretical agendas require new methodologies that bridge the divide between practice-based analysis and ‘global’ theory, on the basis of research in high-income countries. The challenge here is to learn from theory and research in the Global South, through those who are breaking new ground from the perspectives of living and working in the South.

As editor of the Development journal for 23 years, Wendy Harcourt takes a walk down memory lane in order to review the main themes that stand out for her as we consider what lies ahead. She reflects on four major themes which she argues informs development’s past and future: diversity, body politics, post-development and sustainable development.

The article raises questions about how the economic crisis is being played out ‘in place’, taking an embodied, generational and gender perspective. ‘Place’ is used in a political context by examining how global realities are experienced in place, and the author argues the need to look at the everyday realities of the crisis from a gendered ontological perspective in order to counter grand narratives of gloom and doom where women (whether old, young, migrant, heterosexual or otherwise) are particular victims. By discussing local contexts of the gendered realities of the crisis in three southern Europe areas, the author shows the possibility of changing the crisis narrative from one of overwhelming paralysis to one of potential transformation. The focus is on the rise of resistance, solidarity economies and new types of communities in the search by women in southern Europe for alternatives to neoliberal capitalism.

An awkward, tabooed subject for many years, sexuality is now emerging as a field of innovative and important work in development studies. The books under review bring nuanced analysis to three diff...

(2014). Going Beyond the Comfort Zone: Reflections on the ISS Sexuality Research Initiative Interculture Dialogue on Sexuality, Reproductive Health, and Rights in Development. Gender, Technology and Development: Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 131-145.

(2014). Negotiating Global Body Politics. Gender, Technology and Development: Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 1-8.

The chapter interrogates the co-optation of feminist understandings of body politics in development practices and programs by constructing an ethnoscape of a recent South Asian training on gender, generations and sexuality. In a reflection on the potential of ruptures in the praxis of body politics, the chapter concludes with a consideration of how feminists can act from the ‘privilege of the middle’.

In the following extended interview Jacqueline Pitanguy shares her views on body politics and human rights in public policies in Brazil with the editor of Bodies in Resistance, Wendy Harcourt. Jacqueline Pitanguy has played a key role in Brazilian feminist politics. From 1986 to 1989 she held a cabinet position as President of the National Council for Women’s Rights (CNDM), designing and implementing public policies to improve conditions for women in Brazil. The CNDM played a key role in assuring woman’s rights in the new Brazilian Constitution and in developing programs in the areas of reproductive health, violence, legislation, labor rights, culture and education, and black and rural women rights. In 1990, she founded Citizenship, Studies, Information and Action (CEPIA), an NGO based in Rio de Janeiro. CEPIA conducts research and does advocacy work mainly on reproductive health, violence against women (VAW) and access to justice.

This intergenerational dialogue explores global body politics from our different historical standpoints. Inspired by Alexandra Garita's reflections on sexual and reproductive justice the three authors look at what sexual and reproductive health and rights means to them.