Gender and Sustainability

Lessons from Asia and Latin America

Edited by María Luz Cruz-Torres and Pamela McElwee

The University of Arizona Press

This is one of the first books to address how gender plays a role in helping to achieve the sustainable use of natural resources. The contributions collected here deal with the struggles of women and men to negotiate such forces as global environmental change, economic development pressures, discrimination and stereotyping about the roles of women and men, and diminishing access to natural resources—not in the abstract but in everyday life. Contributors are concerned with the lived complexities of the relationship between gender and sustainability.

Bringing together case studies from Asia and Latin America, this valuable collection adds new knowledge to our understanding of the interplay between local and global processes. Organized broadly by three major issues—forests, water, and fisheries—the scholarship ranges widely: the gender dimensions of the illegal trade in wildlife in Vietnam; women and development issues along the Ganges River; the role of gender in sustainable fishing in the Philippines; women’s inclusion in community forestry in India; gender-based confrontations and resistance in Mexican fisheries; environmentalism and gender in Ecuador; and women’s roles in managing water scarcity in Bolivia and addressing sustainability in shrimp farming in the Mekong Delta.

Together these chapters show why gender issues are important for understanding how communities and populations deal daily with the challenges of globalization and environmental change. Through their rich ethnographic research, the contributors demonstrate that gender analysis offers useful insights into how a more sustainable world can be negotiated—one household and one community at a time.

Contributors

Stephanie Buechler
María Luz Cruz-Torres
Linda D’Amico
Georgina Drew
James Eder
Lisa L. Gezon
Pamela McElwee
Neera Singh
Hong Anh Vu
Amber Wutich

Reviews
Editor

[Gender and Sustainability] will interest gender and environment scholars, easily serving as a resource for graduate-level or advanced undergraduate courses.’—Gendered Perspectives on International Development Resource Bulletin

‘This is a book that deserves to be read carefully by those engaging in recent iterations of sustainability science.’—Gender and Development

‘The consistently clear language makes the book appropriate for introducing undergraduates to the material, as well as an enjoyable read for more experienced scholars.’—Gender, Place, and Culture

‘A particular strength of this volume is its focus on the many scales of interaction that link the global and the local, especially the ways that different scales of activity may influence gender relations through transfers of ideas and power centers.’—David Griffith, co-author of Fishers at Work, Workers at Sea: A Puerto Rican Journey through Labor and Refuge

María Luz Cruz-Torres is an associate professor in the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University. She is the author of Lives of Dust and Water: An Anthropology of Change and Resistance in Northwestern Mexico, also published by the University of Arizona Press. Pamela McElwee is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Ecology in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University.

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