Changing the Boundaries: Women-Centered Perspectives On Population And The Environment

by Janice Jiggins

Overview

Changing the Boundaries explores gender relations with respect to education, reproductive health services, and agricultural resources -- three factors that are widely recognized as being central to the struggle for gender equity, population control, and environmental sustainability. As well as defining the role of women in the population-environment quandary, author Janice Jiggins explains how that role is the key to understanding issues of population and environment.

Throughout the volume, she makes extensive use of research, experience, and documentation that draws on the views and publications of women in the global South, much of which is available to development practitioners but is rarely found in academic libraries. Data, arguments, concepts, and analysis from a wide and varied range of sources are woven together to link the experience of women's daily lives with population policies and global environmental politics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597268417
Publisher:	Island Press
Publication date:	04/16/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	311
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Janice Jiggins received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Sri Lanka and, at the time of publication of Changing the Boundaries, was an independent development consultant in the Netherlands.

Read an Excerpt

Changing the Boundaries

Women-Centered Perspectives on Population and the Environment

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By Janice Jiggins

ISLAND PRESS

Copyright © 1994 Island Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59726-841-7

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CHAPTER 1

Why Women's Perspectives Matter

Questioning the Crisis

The idea that urgent global environmental action and population control are needed is both exaggerated and misdirected. Although serious and growing problems exist, policy and action will not accomplish their goals unless they are accompanied by an understanding of the relationship between the laws of nature and the patterns of human behavior that drive global change.

The outcome of human behavior is sensitive to the ways that the interactions among people are organized. Although history, to a certain extent, locks people into particular forms of organization, institutions are not immutable. One of the key principles underlying the organization of human interaction is that of gender. The form of relations between the sexes changes over time and varies from place to place, but there is no society, class, age group, or household that is not structured by the different and distinctive experiences of men and women in their relationships to each other and to the material world.

The nuances of gender relations are the key to understanding impacts on the environment and fertility. Gender relations influence fundamental interactions in the network of collective behavior that links events at the intimate, domestic, or local (micro) levels and at larger scales such as at the nation, region, or global (macro) levels. That is, gender analysis can help explain how individual decisions and behaviors in the local, domestic, and intimate spheres result in the collective behavior of human beings that drives environmental change. A purposeful effort to change the relations between the sexes, in order more fully to honor the values of women and to draw on women's knowledge and skills in nurturing and protecting life, is one of the keys to changing the outcome of collective behavior.

Crisis-driven arguments for policies to bring about global change are sustained by extrapolation of present trends. Human behavior is adaptive, however, evolving organically as people respond to circumstances and learn their way into the future. People are responding, and will continue to respond, to changing circumstances. The question is not if but how, and how fast, people will adapt their behavior in response to the evidence of accumulating pressure on resources.

More specifically, the question of gender relations addresses how men and women experience poverty and environmental degradation and what their different responses are. If policies treat men and women alike, or meld women's interests with those of men, the desired results cannot be achieved. Measures taken to relieve household poverty may not necessarily improve the condition of women, nor is it obvious that what benefits the environment automatically benefits women, or conversely, that what benefits women necessarily benefits the environment.

Further, the faster or more radically that social, economic, and physical conditions change, the more hazardous it becomes to assume that the relationships underlying present trends will continue. Past behaviors cannot be extrapolated to conditions that do not have historical or present analogues. Beyond the near term, the future cannot be predicted.

Nonetheless, we can comprehend and explore observed trends and determine the general principles that govern the relationship between natural law and human behavior. The principles of gender relations provide powerful guidelines for the interventions that will encourage sustainable development.

Investing in Women

This book explores gender relations with respect to three interventions that are widely understood to promote the goals of gender equity, population stabilization, and environmental sustainability. These are educating women, providing access to reproductive health services (including maternal and child health services), and providing women secure access to agricultural resources, such as land, and to production inputs, such as credit and training.

According to data from the World Bank, if the education of girls and women had been raised 30 years ago to the level that boys and men then enjoyed, fertility levels today would be nearing the target of global population stabilization. Further, household welfare among the poorest would be higher and local management of natural resources less problematic.

An analysis of national survey data gathered from 300,000 women in 44 countries between 1985 and 1992 shows that about a third of married women in developing countries are now using modern contraception. The needs of many people in developing countries still are not being met, however, including those of men and women who do not currently have access to services, adolescents of both sexes, unmarried women, women and men who are dissatisfied with their present method of birth control or are using it incorrectly, women faced with an unwanted pregnancy, and those who have a reproductive health problem. If all such people had access to services, fertility levels would approximate lower level population targets.

As in most parts of the world, in Africa women carry out a major part of all farm work and are responsible for most of the domestic food production. A recent study conducted in four countries in Africa by the World Bank shows that a 15 percent increase in food production could be achieved, without new resources, if women only had better access to land, production inputs, such as credit, fertilizer, and improved seeds, and markets.

The three interventions do not sound particularly challenging or controversial. The evidence of their efficacy has been available for some time. There are two main reasons, however, why what is known has not been acted on, has been acted on with insufficient vigor, or has been acted on with disappointing results. One is the reluctance of male- dominated establishments around the world, at all levels, to make investment in women a priority. This is changing, as men come to realize that it is in everyone's interest to put women at the center of the developmental and environmental agenda. The second reason is more problematic. It is not sufficient simply to educate women, provide contraception, and give women land. The way in which these things are done and the complementary adjustments that are necessary to make them effective are important.

The imperative that links the three interventions is the need to remove the constraints on the ability of women to make decisions and to act on those decisions. Far from threatening the social good, strengthening the power of women to choose and act is congruent with the social good and an essential condition for the achievement of environmental and population goals.

Although women are perceived as the means by which the goals of development, population control, and environmental sustainability can be achieved, the views of women themselves may not coincide with those of planners and policymakers. It is in the detail of how the policies and programs are constituted and implemented that the benefits or costs to women become clear. The detail must be sensitive to the context that colors existing relations between men and women. Assumptions about how women might react are often wrong. In parts of Africa, for instance, women may choose to use modern contraception to space their children rather than to reduce the total number of children they have. In India there has been a long-term decline in the proportion of females in the population in relation to males; the decline has occurred largely as the result of systemic discrimination against females. Yet in these areas even educated women may choose, or be forced by family pressures, to use family planning services to bear sons rather than daughters.

Assumptions about what is in the interests of women also can be wrong. Women in Zimbabwe, for example, often grow drought-sensitive maize even in drought-prone areas, with adverse effects on land management. The reason is that grinding mills are available for the large-seeded maize but not for the more drought-resistant but small- seeded millets and sorghums that still must be processed by women by hand. Moreover, men are expected to carry the costs of such a crisis as crop failure by purchasing food in the cash economy and sending it back home to support their families, thus reducing the incentive for women to maintain sorghum production. This example illustrates that what is desirable in terms of rural household food security and land and water management may not be the best or even a viable option for women bounded by the prevailing division of labor by gender.

Safeguarding Women's Rights

Women need to be at the forefront of the global agenda to ensure that developmental, environmental, and population policies are sensitive to gender relations and to women's own interests. They need to be there especially because many of the current proposals profoundly threaten the basic human rights of women. For example, although it is true that the goal of population stabilization could be reached by restricting births to 2.1 children per woman, policies that start from such cold arithmetic tend to lead to coercive control of female fertility. Population and environmental policies that target the reproductive functions of women have in the past threatened women's personal freedom and choice.

Pressure to direct the reproductive choices of women has been exerted through a spectrum of incentives and sanctions that include financial and fiscal measures and material rewards such as the promise of securing title to land. Governments have applied pressure in favor of increasing birth rates, as in the early revolutionary years of the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran, or in Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu. Pressure also has been brought to bear to channel women's sexuality and fertility into behaviors approved by the Roman Catholic church, as in contemporary Poland. Most notably, China's stringent population control policies have given rise to a marked imbalance in the ratio of boys to girls. It is thought that this imbalance is due mainly to a combination of the underregistration of girls at birth, selective abortion, and the registration of the neonatal death of girl babies as stillbirths, but infanticide also occurs. Many Chinese demographers estimate that possibly a fifth of female births now go unrecorded.

In situations in which women's access to resources for survival are already limited, the pressure to control childbearing may remove the one livelihood strategy available to women. Policies that seek to improve land management by assigning title to a private owner typically give title to men, thereby depriving women farmers of access to land or pushing them onto land that is marginal for cultivation. These examples argue for deeper reflection on the choices to be made and who is making them.

Some might wish to sweep aside the human rights argument in the name of global necessity, but to do so undermines the very conditions for large scale, rapid transformation in human behavior. Attempts at enforced, involuntary change breed reactions, as in China, that undermine the achievement of policy goals. Conversely, voluntary transformation requires, as a condition of change, widespread participation in determining the nature of the problem and what needs to be done about it. Women as well as men must be involved in decision-making.

Further, women bring to the debate a unique voice. For many women, their experience of life and the way they relate to people and the natural environment bring a different vision of the relationship between physical and human resources. Women's vision includes nurturance rather than control, the management of networks of relationships rather than hierarchical dominance, and a concern for future generations as a guiding principle for today's decisions.

In brief, the crisis needs to be redefined. By working with the human capacity to adapt to circumstance in ways that strengthen the capacity of women to make decisions, take action, and contribute to the debate, we can meet the challenges of controlling population growth and sustaining the environment humanely as well as effectively.

Honoring Women's Values

For humankind to have a future, the deep economic and social inequities that divide people must be healed. Although women from different backgrounds each have their own sense of the priorities that are relevant in their context, many find common ground in the values and principles that shape women's experience of life in society, the workplace, and the family. The heart of the current human dilemma, many women argue, lies in an imbalanced reliance on masculine values and experience and on the power of patriarchy, that is, the social and economic arrangements by which men dominate women.

From Dualistic to Holistic

Women are materially connected to food, water, and energy, biologically connected to reproduction, and socially connected to family and community in ways that men are not. Their distinctive experience gives rise to a strong sense of the interconnectedness of life. Characteristically, women experience life without a marked distinction between what needs to be done for material survival, for bearing and raising children, and the maintenance of the family and household. This experience is what gives rise to an instinctive appreciation of wholeness, of life as a system in which everything is connected to everything else.

Theorists in the women's movement reject the assumed dualism of a separate self and other on which the rationalization, specialization, and quantification of industrial economies ultimately rest. They argue that the violence, dominance, and hierarchy that accompany dualism represent only part of the human potential. Respect for diversity, nurturance, and a potential for oneness mediated by reciprocity are also part of the human capacity. In the views of many women, the worldwide human dilemma cannot be resolved until these feminine qualities and potentials are valued more strongly, shared more widely, and expressed more clearly in the solutions to the global challenge.

From Masculine to Feminine Spirituality

Women and sympathetic male colleagues also are rediscovering or reaffirming the distinctive feminine experience of spirituality in their effort to develop the moral and spiritual basis for a common future. For the most part, feminine spirituality has been lost or subordinated in the dominant religious ideologies of today. The supremacy of the masculine has become deeply enshrined in structures of power and spiritual leadership.

Three threads are intertwined in the essence of the feminine experience. One thread has to do with the need for women to generate at the personal level the courage and energy to engage in action and to channel that energy creatively and constructively. As one activist confessed, "It is very difficult to stand on the front lines with only outrage to sustain us." The personal quest is affirmed and nourished through honoring historical female spiritual leaders, through assertion of the role of women and the experience of feminine spirituality within established religions, and through the rediscovery of feminine attributes in the religious pantheon.

Another thread follows the biological and social transitions of women's experience of life as a series of biological and social thresholds that are moments of personal, social, and spiritual transformation. These transformations, for example at the onset of menstruation, marriage, and menopause, are typically transitory, conditional, and vulnerable experiences. The idea of rapid changes in state, which is central to ecological theory, is inherent in the feminine condition and, feminist theorists argue, confers on women a preparedness to deal with the abrupt transformations in global resources that environmentalists predict. Neither the timing nor the occurrence of change can be wholly determined or controlled. Because women are biologically vulnerable, for example, to sexually transmitted infection, infertility, and unwanted pregnancy, and socioeconomically vulnerable to the death of a spouse, divorce, and being forced to raise children on their own, the unforeseen and unforeseeable at any moment can open up another pathway, across other thresholds. Women's experience of natural and social forces thus is fundamentally contingent and embedded in larger systems of interaction and complexity.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Changing the Boundaries by Janice Jiggins. Copyright © 1994 Island Press. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments

PART I. Women and Sustainable Development
Chapter 1. Why Women's Perspectives Matter
Chapter 2. The Game Is Not Fairly Divided

PART II. Nullis in Verba, or Don't Take Anyone's Word For It
Chapter 3. Do We Know What's Going On?
Chapter 4. Food and Agriculture: Is There Room to Maneuver?
Chapter 5. Energy and Trees: Where Do Women Really Fit In?

PART III. The Education of Women And Girls: The Best Bet
Chapter 6. A Price Worth Paying
Chapter 7. The Mahila Samakhya Program, India

PART IV. An Exploration of Reproductive Health
Chapter 8. The Shrieking Sisterhood
Chapter 9. Reproductive Health Initiatives in Bangladesh And Nigeria

PART V. Women, Agriculture, and Natural Resources
Chapter 10. Green and Just
Chapter 11. Five Cases
Chapter 12. Conclusions

Notes
Bibliography
Index