Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

Gender has long been recognised as important within environmental issues, but there has been considerable debate over how to conceptualise the gender–environment nexus. As feminist theorising around women and gender has changed, so have conceptualisations about gender and environment, leading to a key debate within ecofeminism and related literatures about whether there is an essential or a contingent relationship between women and natural environments. Within geography, most political ecologists work with the assumption that the gender–environment nexus is a contingent relationship, and thus investigate how gender relations are salient in the symbolic and material construction of environmental issues. In this paper I seek to build from this work and again raise the issue of how gender is conceptualised in relation to environment. I begin by briefly reviewing some of the work that has been done on gender and environment and then draw from poststructural feminism to suggest that gender itself has been undertheorised in work on environment. Once gender is reconceptualised as a process, the dynamic relationship between gender, environment, and other aspects of social and cultural life can be brought into view. What emerges is the need for political ecologists to examine gender beyond the household and community and the need to reconceptualise the gender–environment nexus. A case study of community forestry in Nepal is used to illustrate the importance of interrogating the processes by which gender relations become salient and are reproduced symbolically and materially.

Most theorists understand gender geographies as highly differentiated and shifting, in terms of both time and space. If gender is historically and geographically contingent then the analysis of gender should be attentive to the particular conditions that materialize the very idea of gender, giving it the appearance of being fixed and natural. The physical landscape, or waterscape in the case of southeastern Turkey, is potentially central to the ways that gender is invoked and lived in particular settings, with important effects. Using case-study work on irrigation-related changes in southeastern Turkey, I consider gender in relation to livelihoods and work practices, landholdings, and ethnicity revealing that, in addition to conditioning differential outcomes for residents of the plain, these categories of social difference are themselves fundamentally renegotiated and recast in relation to waterscape change. I argue that explicit consideration of environmental conditions and practices is central to understanding the operation of gender in certain contexts, as well as to understanding the lived experiences of women and men, providing insights for gender theory and politics.

Through a succession of liberal and state-socialist regimes in Hungary, the interconnections of gender, class, and soil management established much of the social framework within which soil scientists produced constructs that affected scientific explanations of and prescriptions to soil-degradation problems. Various metaphors, analogies, conflations, and externalisations shaped notions of soil productivity, the producing subject, and the nature of soils. Their legitimacy and justification emerged from the evolving interplay of rural processes, the economic policies of succeeding regimes, and capitalist world-system dynamics. The results of the study suggest that physical scientists have actively promoted regime ideologies, that gendered scientific constructs need not be grounded in dualistic syllogisms, and that industrialised state-socialist scientific practices largely conformed to bourgeois principles.

In this paper we develop a critical analysis of the new paradigm of culture and development, in which culture is taken seriously as a factor in development thinking and policy. Our analysis aims to understand how and where concepts of culture have come into development thinking and planning. Viewing cultures as multiple and development as a set of culturally embedded practices and meanings, our approach raises issues about how development paradigms have adopted explicit concepts of culture and/or carried within them implicit cultural norms. In this paper we develop a postcolonial and poststructuralist account sensitive to the historically and geographically variable and contested nature of the connections of culture with development, and analyze the ways in which ‘culturally appropriate development’ is thought and practiced in the Andes.

In the past two decades there has been a growing emphasis within the international development industry on promoting group activity. In this paper we chart how interpretation of the loose concept of social capital has shaped donor and NGO discourses on, and their preoccupation with, groups. Donors are using blueprints of group cooperation in an asocial and aspatial manner that ignores local specificities of place, space, and cultural context. An empirical case is examined that demonstrates how donor discourse is reinterpreted, translated, and even rejected by players at different spatial scales. The reasons for the continued donor preoccupation with groups in the face of local resistances are explored.

In this paper we explore the way in which ‘local community’ has been conceptualised in initiatives to promote natural resource management (NRM) in postconflict Ethiopia and Mozambique in the late 1990s. Both countries have seen a shift towards policy discourses that stress ‘participatory’ approaches to NRM, and a search for legitimate and authentic cultural institutions at a local level that can act as a vehicle for implementation of this new policy approach. Yet, engagement with a range of local institutions has often conflated terms such as ‘indigenous’ and ‘traditional’ with ‘local’, ‘community’, and ‘communal’, missing contestation over their social and cultural authenticity and making mistaken assumptions about the rootedness of institutions in geographical space. Examples of forest management initiatives in Manica Province, Mozambique, and land and water management in Borana, southern Ethiopia, are contrasted to consider the differences and similarities in the nature and outcomes of such external interventions.

In many countries the provision of hospital services has changed from a cottage industry with many small operators to an industry in which large corporate chains are now starting to predominate. Transnational corporations have increasingly invested in the provision of hospital services when traditional areas of investment have become no longer attractive. Although corporate involvement in the provision of hospital services has become an issue of considerable significance in recent years, geographers have paid little attention to such trends. Within Australia, changes in access to capital and shifts in investment, the role of the state regulatory environment, and, to a lesser extent, the emergence of corporate managerialism are the key factors underpinning corporate transformation. A case study of Mayne Health Ltd, formerly the largest corporate provider of hospital care, is used to illustrate such trends. The corporate transformation has been geographically uneven at both the state and local levels and reflects local variation especially in state regulatory environments and the extent to which corporate providers have entered into new public–private partnerships at the local level. We suggest that the implications of such trends are far from clear and that more research is needed on this fundamental restructuring of hospital services.