Introduction: Women, ecology, and economics: new models and theories

The Call for Papers mentioned such possible topics as "The parallels between women's work, environmental services and natural resource use with regard to valuation, status as 'externalities,' sustainability, complementarity with financial capital, incorporation in national accounts, etc.; the role of women in creating the conditions for sustainable economies and sustainable trade; women's health as an environmental and economic issue; the economic implications of women's position as environmental stewards, especially in the South; and the impact of globalization on women, from an ecological economics perspective." The journal's editors suggested an additional topic of interest which we listed as women and population policy.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad

Canadian Indigenous female leadership and political agency in climate change

The Canadian federal election of 2015 was a watershed moment for women’s political agency, indigenous activism and climate justice in Canada. Since 1990, skyrocketing fossil fuel extraction, especially in the Alberta tar sands, had generated escalating environmental crises on First Nations territories. Extreme weather events due to climate change were impacting communities across the country, with particular implications for women’s caring and other unpaid work. Ten years of attacks on women’s organizations and priorities by the conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper had angered female voters. In response, indigenous and settler women’s organizing on climate and environmental justice, fossil fuel extraction and voting rights was an important factor in Harper’s October 2015 defeat. Justin Trudeau, elected on promises to address climate change, indigenous rights and gender equity, now faces the challenge of delivering on both distributive and procedural climate justice. This story of extraction, climate change, weather, unequal impacts, gender and political agency in a fossil fuel-producing country in the Global North has implications for gender and climate justice globally. Canada contains within its borders many examples of environmental racism stemming from fossil fuel extraction and climate change, paralleling global injustices. The politics of addressing these inequities is key to a successfully managed energy transition away from fossil fuels. In the Canadian case at least, women’s leadership – especially indigenous women’s leadership – is emerging as crucial.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada IDRC and SSHRC File Agreement No. 2017-0082 and SSHRC File #: 895-2013-1010 Project period: 01-April-14 to 31-Mar-2

Participation and Watershed Management: Experiences from Brazil

Public participation is emphasized in many new institutional approaches to resource management, especially watershed governance. The implementation of participatory management frameworks, and capacity-building for civil society participants, deserve close attention. This paper reports on an ongoing project in Sao Paulo State, Brazil, which is designed to strengthen the ability of local and NGO representatives to participate in democratic water management structures.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad

Ecofeminism, Commons, and Climate Justice

Much recent work in ecological economics, degrowth, climate justice, and political ecology focuses on ‘commons’ as an emergent paradigm for sustainable governance institutions to address or rectify ecological crisis. This paper summarizes definitions and typologies of commons, give some examples of commons which help to further climate justice, and discusses these ideas from an ecofeminist perspective.his research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, FRN IDRC and SSHRC File Agreement No. 2017-008

Environmental activism and gender

In the following sections, this chapter discusses and provides a number of examples from around the world to illustrate each of these aspects of environmental activism and gender — the empirical, theoretical, and dynamic—ending with a few concluding remarks.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad

Feminist Ecological Economics

This article provides an overview of feminist ecological economics, with special attention to three particular aspects: its theoretical foundations and relation to other schools of thought, its implications for activism and public policy, and directions for future research work.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad

NAFTA and the Future of Environmental Regulation

While NAFTA contains more "green" language than any previous trade pact, the agreement is also unprecedented in the freedom it allows investors and the extent to which it curtails government policy flexibility - important areas of concern for the environment. Especially in Canada, where environmental policy is primarily a provincial responsibility, questions have arisen about the workability and constitutionality of federally-negotiated international agreements like NAFTA which may have broad impacts on the ability of provincial governments to regulate and set environmental policy. Without embarking on constitutional questions in detail, this paper briefly explores some of the environmental policy issues raised by NAFT

EQUITY, ECONOMIC SCALE, AND THE ROLE OF EXCHANGE IN A SUSTAINABLE ECONOMY

This paper explores these theoretical and practical issues, considering the question of the environmental and ecological impacts of economic activity from the viewpoint of the scale at which this activity takes place and the exchanges across time and space which affect its sustainability. Following a consideration of the dynamics of economic change in the next section, the paper discusses the meaning of trade/exchange, economic scale, and political/ecological/economic boundaries before returning in the final section to the two equity-related issues outlined above.This research was supported by the International Development Research Centr

Climate Justice, Gender, and Intersectionality

Women are generally more vulnerable than men to environmental disasters and extreme weather events due to four main factors, which are related to women’s gendered roles in society: women are economically disadvantaged in comparison to men and are more likely to live in poverty; sexual and reproductive health and physical demands on their bodies during pregnancy, child-bearing and rearing, and menopause put them at special risk; their lives tend to be longer and they spend more time as seniors / widows, with resulting economic and health implications; and their social options are restricted so that they often fill paid and unpaid roles related to physical and emotional caring that put them at special risk of environmental injustice. This means that environmental and climate injustice are gendered in both rich and poor countries, and this can be manifested in a variety of ways: housing, transportation, food insecurity, stress, mental illness, disability, heat exposure, interruptions of electricity and water services, violence against women, partner and elder violence, toxic exposure, health vulnerability, worker safety, political voice/agency/leadership, and many others. Gender also intersects with other categories of vulnerability such as ethnicity, ‘race,’ sexuality, dis/ability, etc. to heighten climate risk and injustice. The gendered effects of extreme weather events are often not disaggregated in government statistics and research literature, and an explicit gender focus, including attention to the access of women and marginalized people to participation in climate policy setting, has been minimal. Both at the local level and globally, climate change adaptation and response initiatives can downplay or suppress democratic, equity-enhancing politics.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, FRN IDRC and SSHRC File Agreement No. 2017-0082 and IDRC GRANT NO. 106002-00

Education for Regeneration

It seems to me that we must think in terms of regeneration and resurgence, as Simpson says, not mere sustainability. Following centuries of colonization and imperialism, industrial “development”, toxic pollution, and carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels, the status quo is not to be sustained, but rather remediated. The impacts on the most vulnerable are crucially important for us all as a species. It is a myth that the rich will always be able to buy their way out of crises, and in any case, building an attractive future for humans requires regenerating the Earth for all life. One good place to start is by recognizing the heinous impacts of capitalist growth-driven economic systems. As someone who was trained as a neoclassical economist, I can state that the more you learn about economics, the more pernicious you realize it is. We need to admit the impossibility of privatizing all that is valuable, and the need to instead equitably govern the life-support systems (water, soil, air, forests, culture) that sustain humans and all life. This requires building education processes and systems that will be capable of transmitting skills for personal and collective responsibility, conflict resolution, “two-eyed seeing, 5 ” awareness of nature and others, and discerning appropriate behaviours. It also requires continually articulating for ourselves, and publicly, that individual greed is not deserving of respect or adulation; linking personal wealth with political power is not the only or the best way to run human systems; it always eventually leads to downfall. Humans can do better. An example of a sustainable way to culturally embed the redistribution of wealth, and balance material wealth against respect for long-term leadership (rather than allowing wealth and political/economic leadership to reinforce each other) is the potlatch ceremony traditional to several First Nations on the Pacific Coast