THE GENDER AND ENVIRONMENT DEBATE:

LESSONS FROM INDIA

BINA AGARWAL

What is women's relationship with the environment? Is it distin

from that of men's? The growing literature on ecofeminism in th

West, and especially in the United States, conceptualizes the lin

between gender and the environment primarily in ideologi

terms. An intensifying struggle for survival in the developin

world, however, highlights the material basis for this link and set

the background for an alternative formulation to ecofeminis

which I term "feminist environmentalism."

In this paper I will argue that women, especially those in poor

rural households in India, on the one hand, are victims of environ-

mental degradation in quite gender-specific ways. On the other

hand, they have been active agents in movements of environmen-

tal protection and regeneration, often bringing to them a gender-

specific perspective and one which needs to inform our view of

alternatives. To contextualize the discussion, and to examine the

opposing dimensions of women as victims and women as actors in

concrete terms, this essay will focus on India, although the issues

are clearly relevant to other parts of the Third World as well. The

discussion is divided into five sections. The first section outlines

the ecofeminist debate in the United States and one prominent In-

dian variant of it, and suggests an alternative conceptualization.

The next three sections respectively trace the nature and causes of

environmental degradation in rural India, its class and gender im-

plications, and the responses to it by the state and grass-roots

groups. The concluding section argues for an alternative trans-

formative approach to development.

Feminist Studies 18, no. 1 (Spring 1992). ? 1992 by Feminist Studies, Inc.

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Bina Agarwal

SOME CONCEPTUAL ISSUES

Ecofeminism. Ecofeminism embodies within it several di

strands of discourse, most of which have yet to be spelled o

ly, and which reflect, among other things, different positio

in the Western feminist movement (radical, liberal, social

body of thought ecofeminism is as yet underdeveloped

evolving, but carries a growing advocacy. My purpose is not

tique ecofeminist discourse in detail, but rather to focus

of its major elements, especially in order to examine whe

how it might feed into the formulation of a Third World p

tive on gender and the environment. Disentangling the

threads in the debate, and focusing on those more clearl

lated, provides us with the following picture of the ecof

argument(s):1 (1) There are important connections betw

domination and oppression of women and the domination

ploitation of nature. (2) In patriarchal thought, women ar

fied as being closer to nature and men as being closer to

Nature is seen as inferior to culture; hence, women are se

ferior to men. (3) Because the domination of women and the

nation of nature have occurred together, women have a p

stake in ending the domination of nature, "in healing the al

human and non-human nature."2 (4) The feminist movem

the environmental movement both stand for egalitarian,

archical systems. They thus have a good deal in common

to work together to evolve a common perspective, theo

practice.
In the ecofeminist argument, therefore, the connection between

the domination of women and that of nature is basically seen as

ideological, as rooted in a system of ideas and representations,

values and beliefs, that places women and the nonhuman world

hierarchically below men. And it calls upon women and men to

reconceptualize themselves, and their relationships to one another

and to the nonhuman world, in nonhierarchical ways.

We might then ask: In what is this connection between nature

and women seen to be rooted? The idea that women are seen as

closer to nature than men was initially introduced into contempo-

rary feminist discourse by Sherry Ortner who argued that "woman

is being identified with-or, if you will, seems to be a symbol of-

something that every culture devalues, defines as being of a lower

order of existence than itself.... [That something] is 'nature' in the

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issue of the means by which certain dominant groups (predicated

on gender, class, etc.) are able to bring about ideological shifts in

their own favor and how such shifts get entrenched. Fourth, the

ecofeminist argument does not take into account women's lived

material relationship with nature, as opposed to what others or

they themselves might conceive that relationship to be. Fifth,

those strands of ecofeminism that trace the connection between

women and nature to biology may be seen as adhering to a form of

essentialism (some notion of a female "essence" which is un-

changeable and irreducible).10 Such a formulation flies in the face

of wide-ranging evidence that concepts of nature, culture, gender,

and so on, are historically and socially constructed and vary across

and within cultures and time periods.1l

In other words, the debate highlights the significant effect of

ideological constructs in shaping relations of gender dominance

and forms of acting on the nonhuman world, but if these con-

structs are to be challenged it is necessary to go further. We need a

theoretical understanding of what could be termed "the political

economy of ideological construction," that is, of the interplay be-

tween conflicting discourses, the groups promoting particular dis-

courses, and the means used to entrench views embodied in those

discourses. Equally, it is critical to examine the underlying basis of

women's relationship with the nonhuman world at levels other

than ideology (such as through the work women and men do and

the gender division of property and power) and to address how the

material realities in which women of different classes (/castes/

races) are rooted might affect their responses to environmental

degradation. Women in the West, for instance, have responded in

specific ways to the threat of environmental destruction, such as

by organizing the Greenham Commons resistance to nuclear mis-

siles in England and by participating in the Green movement

across Europe and the United States. A variety of actions have sim-

ilarly been taken by women in the Third World, as discussed later.

The question then is: Are there gendered aspects to these

responses? If so, in what are these responses rooted?

Vandana Shiva's work on India takes us a step forward. Like the

ecofeminists, she sees violence against nature and against women

as built into the very mode of perceiving both. Like Merchant, she

argues that violence against nature is intrinsic to the dominant

industrial/developmental model, which she characterizes as a co-

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Bina Agarwal
lonial imposition. Associated with the adoption of this develop-

mental model, Shiva argues, was a radical conceptual shift away

from the traditional Indian cosmological view of (animate and in-

animate) nature as Prakriti, as "activity and diversity" and as "an ex-

pression of Shakti, the feminine and creative principle of the

cosmos" which "in conjunction with the masculine principle

(Purusha) ... creates the world." In this shift, the living, nurturing

relationship between man and nature as earth mother was re-

placed by the notion of man as separate from and dominating over

inert and passive nature. "Viewed from the perspective of nature,

or women embedded in nature," the shift was repressive and

violent. "For women ... the death of Prakriti is simultaneously a

beginning of their marginalisation, devaluation, displacement, and

ultimate dispensability. The ecological crisis is, at its root, the

death of the feminine principle. .. ."12

At the same time, Shiva notes that violence against women and

against nature are linked not just ideologically but also materially.

For instance, Third World women are dependent on nature "for

drawing sustenance for themselves, their families, their societies."

The destruction of nature thus becomes the destruction of

women's sources for "staying alive." Drawing upon her experienc

of working with women activists in the Chipko movement-the

environmental movement for forest protection and regeneratio

in the Garhwal hills of northwest India- Shiva argues that "Third

World women" have both a special dependence on nature and a

special knowledge of nature. This knowledge has been systemati

cally marginalized under the impact of modem science: "Modern

reductionist science, like development, turns out to be a patriarch-

al project, which has excluded women as experts, and has simulta

neously excluded ecology and holistic ways of knowing which

understand and respect nature's processes and interconnectednes

as science."13

Shiva takes us further than the Western ecofeminists in explor-

ing the links between ways of thinking about development, the

processes of developmental change, and the impact of these on the

environment and on the people dependent upon it for their liveli-

hood. These links are of critical significance. Nevertheless her

argument has three principal analytical problems. First, her ex-

amples relate to rural women primarily from northwest India, but

her generalizations conflate all Third World women into one cate-

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Bina Agarwal

gory. Although she distinguishes Third World women from the

rest, like the ecofeminists she does not differentiate between

women of different classes, castes, races, ecological zones, and so

on. Hence, implicitly, a form of essentialism could be read into her

work, in that all Third World women, whom she sees as "em-

bedded in nature," qua women have a special relationship with the

natural environment. This still begs the question: What is the basis

of this relationship and how do women acquire this special under-

standing?

Second, she does not indicate by what concrete processes and

institutions ideological constructions of gender and nature have

changed in India, nor does she recognize the coexistence of several

ideological strands, given India's ethnic and religious diversity. For

instance, her emphasis on the feminine principle as the guiding

idea in Indian philosophic discourse in fact relates to the Hindu

discourse alone and cannot be seen as applicable for Indians of all

religious persuasions.'4 Indeed, Hinduism itself is pluralistic,

fluid, and contains several coexisting discourses with varying

gender implications.l5 But perhaps most importantly, it is not clear

how and in which historical period(s) the concept of the feminine

principle in practice affected gender relations or relations between

people and nature.

Third, Shiva attributes existing forms of destruction of nature

and the oppression of women (in both symbolic and real terms)

principally to the Third World's history of colonialism and to the

imposition of Western science and a Western model of develop-

ment. Undeniably, the colonial experience and the forms that

modern development has taken in Third World countries have

been destructive and distorting economically, institutionally, and

culturally. However, it cannot be ignored that this process im-

pinged on preexisting bases of economic and social (including

gender) inequalities.

Here it is important to distinguish between the particular model

of modernization that clearly has been imported/adopted from the

West by many Third World countries (with or without a history of

colonization) and the socioeconomic base on which this model

was imposed. Pre-British India, especially during the Mughal

period, was considerably class/caste stratified, although varyingly

across regions.16 This would have affected the patterns of access to

and use of natural resources by different classes and social groups.

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Bina Agarwal

Although much more research is needed on the political economy

of natural resource use in the precolonial period, the evidence of

differentiated peasant communities at that time cautions against

sweeping historical generalizations about the effects of colonial

rule.

By locating the "problem" almost entirely in the Third World's

experience of the West, Shiva misses out on the very real local

forces of power, privilege, and property relations that predate co-

lonialism. What exists today is a complex legacy of colonial and

precolonial interactions that defines the constraints and param-

eters within which and from which present thinking and action on

development, resource use, and social change have to proceed. In

particular, a strategy for change requires an explicit analysis of the

structural causes of environmental degradation, its effects, and

responses to it. The outline for an alternative framework, which I

term feminist environmentalism, is suggested below.

Feminist Environmentalism. I would like to suggest here that

women's and men's relationship with nature needs to be under-

stood as rooted in their material reality, in their specific forms of

interaction with the environment. Hence, insofar as there is a

gender and class (/caste/race)-based division of labor and distribu-

tion of property and power, gender and class (/caste/race) structure

people's interactions with nature and so structure the effects of en-

vironmental change on people and their responses to it. And

where knowledge about nature is experiential in its basis, the divi-

sions of labor, property, and power which shape experience also

shape the knowledge based on that experience.

For instance, poor peasant and tribal women have typically

been responsible for fetching fuel and fodder and in hill and tribal

communities have also often been the main cultivators. They are

thus likely to be affected adversely in quite specific ways by envi-

ronmental degradation. At the same time, in the course of their

everyday interactions with nature, they acquire a special knowl-

edge of species varieties and the processes of natural regenera-

tion. (This would include knowledge passed on to them by, for

example, their mothers.) They could thus be seen as both victims

of the destruction of nature and as repositories of knowledge

about nature, in ways distinct from the men of their class. The

former aspect would provide the gendered impulse for their resis-

tance and response to environmental destruction. The latter

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Bina Agarwal

would condition their perceptions and choices of what should be

done. Indeed, on the basis of their experiential understanding and

knowledge, they could provide a special perspective on the pro-

cesses of environmental regeneration, one that needs to inform

our view of alternative approaches to development. (By extension,

women who are no longer actively using this knowledge for their

daily sustenance, and are no longer in contact with the natural en-

vironment in the same way, are likely to lose this knowledge over

time and with it the possibility of its transmission to others.)

In this conceptualization, therefore, the link between women

and the environment can be seen as structured by a given gender

and class (/caste/race) organization of production, reproduction,

and distribution. Ideological constructions such as of gender, of

nature, and of the relationship between the two, may be seen as

(interactively) a part of this structuring but not the whole of it.

This perspective I term "feminist environmentalism."

In terms of action such a perspective would call for struggles

over both resources and meanings. It would imply grappling with

the dominant groups who have the property, power, and privilege
to control resources, and these or other groups who control ways

of thinking about them, via educational, media, religious, and legal

institutions. On the feminist front there would be a need to

challenge and transform both notions about gender and the act

division of work and resources between the genders. On the env

ronmental front there would be a need to challenge and transform

not only notions about the relationship between people and natu

but also the actual methods of appropriation of nature's resourc

by a few. Feminist environmentalism underlines the necessity

addressing these dimensions from both fronts.

To concretize the discussion, consider India's experience in th

sections below. The focus throughout is on the rural environment.

ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION AND

FORMS OF APPROPRIATION

In India (as in much of Asia and Africa) a wide variety o

items are gathered by rural households from the village

and forests for everyday personal use and sale, such as f

fodder, fiber, small timber, manure, bamboo, medicin

oils, materials for housebuilding and handicrafts, resin

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Bina Agarwal

honey, and spices.17 Although all rural households use the village

commons in some degree, for the poor they are of critical signifi-

cance given the skewedness of privatized land distribution in the

subcontinent.18 Data for the early 1980s from twelve semiarid dis-

tricts in seven Indian states indicate that for poor rural households

(the landless and those with less than two hectares dryland equi-

valent) village commons account for at least 9 percent of total in-

come, and in most cases 20 percent or more, but contribute only 1

to 4 percent of the incomes of the nonpoor (table 1). The depen-

dence of the poor is especially high for fuel and fodder: village

commons supply more than 91 percent of firewood and more than

69 percent of their grazing needs, compared with the relative self-

Table 1

Average Annual Income from Village Commons in Selected Districts of India

(1982-85)

State' and Per household annual average income from Village Commons

Districts

Poor Households2 Other Households3

Value Percent of total Value Percent of total

(Rs.) household income (Rs.) household income

Andhra Pradesh

Mahbubnagar 534 17 171 1

Gujarat

Mehsana 730 16 162 1

Sabarkantha 818 21 208 1

Karataka

Mysore 649 20 170 3

Madhya Pradesh

Mandsaur 685 18 303 1

Raisen 780 26 468 4

Maharashtra

Akola 447 9 134 1

Aurangabad 584 13 163 1

Sholapur 641 20 235 2

Rajasthan

Jalore 709 21 387 2

Nagaur 831 23 438 3

Tamil Nadu

Dharmapuri 738 22 164 2

Source: N.S. Jodha, "Common P

Political Weekly, 5 July 1986, 117

1 "State" here refers to administrative divisions within India and is not used in the

political economy sense of the word as used in the text.

2 Landless households and those owning < 2 hectares (ha) dryland equivalent.

3 Those owning > 2 ha dryland equivalent. 1 ha = 2.47 acres.

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