[URBANTH-L]CFP: Gender, Technology and Development

Angela Jancius acjancius at ysu.edu
Tue Apr 26 13:12:22 EDT 2005


CALL FOR PAPERS
Gender, Technology and Development
Special Issue on Gender and Environmental Governance Winter 2005

Across Asia, natural resource exploitation is accelerating dramatically as
regions become ever more incorporated into the global economy.  At the same
time, structural adjustment programs and market reforms, coupled with the
pressures associated with population growth, urbanization and
commoditization, are reconfiguring patterns of natural resource governance
at both a national and local level, with complex impacts on people's lives.
Within the development literature there is a general recognition that the
environmental consequences of accelerated export-led industrialization and
neo-liberalism have different impacts on, and in turn elicit different
responses from men and women.  Throughout the 1990s, this recognition was
expressed through debates regarding the links between environment,
development and gender, particularly as donor agencies, governments and
non-government organizations identified women as a critical component of
sustainable development initiatives seeking to ameliorate environmental
degradation and its negative livelihood effects as a response to
gender-blind initiatives.

Thus, on the one hand, gender-blind approaches to current decentralization
and community-based natural resource management programs continue to exist;
on the other, chief responsibility for care of the environment is being
placed upon women.  In both instances, the gendered power relations that
underpin resource access and control are side-stepped.

This special issue of Gender, Technology and Development seeks papers that
put forward critical feminist perspectives on the intersection between
gender relations and environmental governance in Asia in the context of
contemporary policy concerns with decentralization and poverty alleviation.
Specifically, the papers are envisaged to break new ground in this area in
three important ways and contexts:

(i)  GENDER IN THE CREATION OF LOCAL INSTITUTIONS:  Papers will bring
attention to the gender implications inherent in the decentralization of
natural resource or environmental governance as currently being encouraged
by international development institutions and governments across Asia.
While governments increasingly pursue programs to involve direct users in
the management of natural resources, new patterns of stakeholder inclusion
and exclusion are created, as gender stereotypes and assumptions lead the
state to privilege particular social groups.

(ii)  CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON WOMEN'S CARE FOR THE ENVIRONMENT:  By
examining the complex contradictions associated with attempts to load
community resource management on women in ways that chime with earlier
ecofeminist writings, papers will critically examine community programs that
assume women's proclivity towards environmental protection and care.  While
some critical scholarly attention has been given in the past to the problems
associated with assuming synergy between women's interests and the
environment, the feminization of natural resource management continues
apace.  In some parts of Asia, women are being deliberately mobilized to
constitute the unpaid labor force to meet the demands of conservation
projects under the banner of women's participation, drawing on a view that
women are the principal fixers of degraded environments.

(iii)  PEOPLE'S MOBILITY:  By recognizing people's mobility and its
implications for natural resource management, the papers will depart from
the implicitly sedentarist portrayal of rural livelihoods in much of the
literature on gender and natural resources.  This makes little sense in
Asia, where most people's lives are marked by rural-urban or transnational
connections shaped by global forces.  Papers may address this important gap
in the literature by highlighting how the links between gender and natural
resource management are embedded in wider patterns of serial mobility and
emerging cultural reassertions.

Please send your submission by May 20, 2005 to Ms. Anita Pandey Pant,
Managing Editor, Gender, Technology and Development at Gender and
Development Studies, Asian Institute of Technology, P.O. Box 4, Klong Lunag,
Pathumthani 12120, Thailand or at gtdjournal at ait.ac.th.  Papers required to
be in the range of 5 to 10 thousand words inclusive of endnotes and
references following the prescribed style of the journal available at
http://gendevtech.ait.ac.th/gtd/gtd.htm.




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