Gender, the Environment, and International Development

Women’s international activism, relationships, and organizations have often been fraught with challenges due to cultural differences, power differentials, and national conflicts. There is no reason to assume that women’s work on environment and development issues since the 1970s would be any different. Yet, women’s international organizations have helped bring to light environmental justice concerns in such a way as to undermine some of the underlying power dynamics inherent in these relationships. Namely, by revealing the connection between human rights abuse, limits to women’s livelihoods, and environmental degradation, activists from the Global North and Global South have found ways to collaborate while criticizing aspects of Western culture that perpetuate institutionalized racism, sexism, and classism; they have thereby preventing wholesale imposition of Western values onto non-Western communities. Through a close analysis of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), founded in the 1970s, this brief presentation will discuss both the pitfalls and possibilities of women’s organizing across national borders with an eye to environmental, social, and economic injustices. As WEDO activists tried to cooperate internationally on terms stipulated by those in developing nations they listened to those often ignored in conversations about rural and urban development programs (most often women and people in poorer communities). In turn, these alliances provided women in developing nations, such as Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai of Kenya, the added international support needed to force environmental and social changes to better women’s lives within the domestic realm of the nation.