Certain ecofeminist positions have significantly influenced views on women and the environment in international fora and among donors in ways that are a cause for concern. These are especially positions that define women's relationship with nature in "essentialist" terms. Cecile Jackson, for instance, observes that "ecofeminist approaches have colonised the views of development agencies." 2 Rosi Braidotti et. al similarly note that "the idea of women's privileged position in environmental management and their closer connection with nature" is "embraced wholeheartedly" by many. 3 Indeed, at times these connections are even expressed in oft-repeated ecofeminist metaphors of women "healing" or "reweaving" the world.

Such influences also extend to global agendas, such as spelled out in the 1992 Women's Action Agenda 21. Here a passing mention of women's rights in resources was obscured in the overarching message that "our wounded planet needs [the] healing touch of women" and that "women have a special relationship with nature" and thus a special role in promoting sustainable development. What has therefore tended to be picked up by policy advocates is the idea of women's naturalized roles, not rights. As a result, assumptions about women's special ability to "heal nature" can easily translate into schemes which increase women's work burden, without any assurance of their share in resources, or of men sharing women's workloads.

Mies and Shiva prescribe the revival of subsistence economies in various ways, on the false assumption that in such economies women's position was complementary and equal to men's. Although they concede in passing that in future men need to share more in domestic and subsistence work, they say little about how this might be achieved. This is unlikely to happen merely by calling upon men to "redefine their identity" and to "share unpaid subsistence work: in the household, with children, with the old and sick." 11 Nor is it apparent how the rural women Shiva praises for being "not owners of their own bodies or of the earth, but [who] cooperate with their bodies and with the earth in order `to let grow and to make grow,'" 12 can change a long-entrenched division of labour. In fact, attempts to revive subsistence economies could further entrench women in unremitting, undervalued labour.

Certain ecofeminist positions have significantly influenced views on women and the environment in international fora and among donors in ways that are a cause for concern. These are especially positions that define women's relationship with nature in "essentialist" terms. Cecile Jackson, for instance, observes that "ecofeminist approaches have colonised the views of development agencies." 2 Rosi Braidotti et. al similarly note that "the idea of women's privileged position in environmental management and their closer connection with nature" is "embraced wholeheartedly" by many. 3 Indeed, at times these connections are even expressed in oft-repeated ecofeminist metaphors of women "healing" or "reweaving" the world.

Such influences also extend to global agendas, such as spelled out in the 1992 Women's Action Agenda 21. Here a passing mention of women's rights in resources was obscured in the overarching message that "our wounded planet needs [the] healing touch of women" and that "women have a special relationship with nature" and thus a special role in promoting sustainable development. What has therefore tended to be picked up by policy advocates is the idea of women's naturalized roles, not rights. As a result, assumptions about women's special ability to "heal nature" can easily translate into schemes which increase women's work burden, without any assurance of their share in resources, or of men sharing women's workloads.

Within many ecofeminist writings themselves there is also a notable persistence of the idea that the women's movement and the environment movement automatically share a common emancipatory agenda and "egalitarian perspective" as was emphasized by Carolyn Merchant many years ago. 4 Vandana Shiva has likewise argued, "woman and nature are intimately related, and their domination and liberation similarly linked. The women's and ecology movements are therefore one." 5

Given their influence and persistence, such ideas warrant testing against ground experience; they should be challenged where found wanting. This article, written from the position that ecofeminist views have historically proved problematic -- because of their assumptions about the relationship between women and nature and about the inherent connections between feminism and ecology -- takes a rather different view. It considers the experience of community forestry in India and uses these experiences to further substantiate an alternative perspective of feminist environmentalism, elaborated elsewhere. Whether or not ecofeminism, as a distinct movement, responds to these critiques remains, in the context of at least a decade of argument, an open question. In that spirit, this paper is offered as a continuing challenge.

Women and Community Forestry

A range of forest management initiatives has emerged in India in recent years, especially in the form of village community forest groups (CFGs). Some are state-initiated under the Joint Forest Management (JFM) programme launched in 1990, in which village communities and the government share the responsibility and benefits of protecting and regenerating degraded local forest land. Others have been initiated autonomously by elders or youth clubs; yet others have historically mixed origins, such as the van panchayats or forest councils of the northwestern hills. Today there are over 36,000 JFM groups alone, apart from a few thousand other groups. These are in addition to the protection efforts spearheaded by environmental movements such as Chipko in northwest India.

Based on my fieldwork and existing case studies a brief sketch is presented here of how these groups perform. In terms of regeneration, many have had notable success. Where the rootstock is undamaged, natural regeneration begins apace. Many JFM forests I visited in 1995 and 1998 showed impressive results. Barren hillsides which five years earlier had yielded little except dry twigs and monsoon grass were covered with young trees. Biodiversity had also increased, incomes risen, and seasonal outmigration fallen. But from a gender perspective the results were far less impressive.

The CFGs are managed through a General Body (GB) constituted of all village households and an Executive Committee (EC) of between nine and fifteen members. Few women are members of either. Typically less than 10% of GB members are women. Under the JFM programme in several states the rules allow membership to only one person per household. This is invariably the male head. The autonomous groups have no formal membership rules, but follow traditional norms which excluded women from village decision-making bodies. Also, even where women are members, usually few attend; those that do rarely speak out and when they do speak their views are seldom taken seriously or their interests and expertise recognized.

Women's lack of direct membership and participation in decision-making adversely affects theirs and the family's welfare, efficient institutional functioning, and scope for women's empowerment.

To begin with, the forest management rules framed by the all-male groups take little account of women's concerns. In many JFM villages, women are barred from collecting even dry twigs. Where earlier they could fulfill at least part of their needs from the protected area, they were now forced to travel to neighboring sites, spending extra hours and risking punishment if caught. In some sites in Gujarat and West Bengal, women who earlier spent one to two hours to collect a headload of firewood, ended up spending four to five after forest closure, and journeys of half a kilometer lengthened to eight or nine. Some sought help from young daughters, with negative effects on the latter's schooling. When neighbors too closed their forests, women bore the costs of economizing and switching to inferior fuels such as cropwaste, even weeds, which generate more smoke and cause health problems. In many regions firewood shortages persist even after eight to ten years of regeneration, since rules banning entry remain in place, and few alternative solutions have been sought by the community.

Typically the self-initiated autonomous groups are even more male-biased. Many all-male youth clubs in eastern India, for instance, have not only banned forest entry, they have been selling the forest products obtained from thinning and cleaning operations. Poor households cannot afford to buy this firewood and other forest products which they had earlier collected free. Moreover, the cash generated through the sales is often put in a collective fund. Women have little say in fund use. In several cases the money has been spent on a clubhouse or club functions.

Even where the groups distribute cash benefits through the male members, there is no guarantee of equitable sharing or even any sharing within the family. In many cases, the men have been known to use the money for gambling, liquor or personal items. Hence where women are not part of the GB and get excluded from receiving the benefits directly, both their and their children's welfare can be affected adversely. Not surprisingly women, when asked about their preferences, typically vote for equal and separate shares for husbands and wives.

Welfare apart, women's exclusion from decision-making can negatively affect the long-term efficiency and sustainability of these initiatives (whatever the immediate gains). Since it is typically women who have to collect firewood and grasses regularly, their lack of involvement in framing workable forest use rules often compels them to violate the rules, in order to fulfill essential needs. Excluding women also means that replantation plans lack the benefit of their particular knowledge of plants and species which could enrich the selections, enhance biodiversity, and increase the overall productivity.

Thus what initially appear to be success stories of participative community involvement in resource regeneration are found to be largely non-participatory and inequitable in relation to women. This highlights too the problem of treating "communities" as ungendered units and "community participation" as an unambiguous step toward equity.

What constrains women's formal participation?

Apart from exclusionary membership rules in many states, several factors restrict women's effective participation in the formal forest protection groups, such as:

Logistical constraints associated with women's double work burdens: Women have longer workdays than men, and meetings are often called when they are busy with domestic chores or fieldwork. Women (especially young mothers) can thus rarely attend long meetings, unless family or friends cover such responsibilities.

Official male bias: In government schemes, male forest officers rarely consult women about tree choice or micro-plans for forest development. Many women also complain that the officers "always crosscheck with the men to verify the truth of [women's] words. And if ever there is any conflict or contradiction between the women and the men, the foresters always settle the disputes in favour of the men." 6

Social constraints: These take various forms: female seclusion practices; subtle disapproval of women's presence in public spaces; restrictive norms of appropriate female behavior and public interaction; social perceptions, articulated in various ways, that women are less capable than men, or that their participation is not appropriate or necessary; and so on. Village women claim that the committee meetings are considered to be only for men, and they are seldom called to meetings. It is assumed that men's views represent those of all family members.

The absence of "a critical mass" of women. Women are often reluctant to attend meetings if they are only a few. Most also feel they cannot change procedures individually, and would be more able to speak up if present in large numbers.

Women's lack of recognized authority: Many women find that when they do attend meetings their opinions are disregarded causing them to drop out. The experience of a woman van panchayat member is indicative: "I went to three or four meetings... No one ever listened to my suggestions. They were uninterested." 7

Exceptional CFGs with 30%, 50% and sometimes even 100% women in the formal committees do exist, suggesting that the constraints are not entirely insurmountable. But such cases are few, catalysed by a local NGO, or by specific circumstances such as high male outmigration.

More common are women's informal patrols formed where men's groups are ineffective. This enhances the efficiency of protection. But it also adds to women's work burden and responsibility, without increasing their authority for punishing offenders which is still the domain of the formal (typically all-male) bodies.

A Challenge for Ecofeminism

My research calls to question several of the premises about women's relationship with the environment that continue to be popular in ecofeminism and that are often transmitted uncritically into global policy literatures. First, it challenges any romantic claim that the women's movement and the environment movement both stand for egalitarian, non-hierarchical systems, or are automatically in sync. As the CFGs show dramatically, an agenda for "greening" need not include one for transforming gender relations; indeed efforts at greening by male-biased institutions might sharpen gender inequalities.

Second, although Mies and Shiva 8 (among others) claim that women have a special stake in environmental regeneration, it is clear that women alone do not have such a stake. Both women and men whose livelihoods are threatened by the degradation of forests and commons are found to be interested in conservation, but from different and at times conflicting concerns, stemming from differences in their respective responsibilities and the nature of their dependence on these resources. Men's interests can be traced mainly to their dependence on the local forests for supplementary income, and/or for small timber for house repairs and agricultural tools, which are their responsibility. Women's interests are linked more to the availability of fuel, fodder, and non-timber products, for which they are more directly responsible, and the depletion of which has meant ever-increasing workloads. In other words, there is clearly a link between the gender division of labour and the gendered nature of the stakes.

The women I interviewed from some Gujarat villages were unambiguous about this:

Q: On what issues do men and women differ in forest protection committee meetings?

A: Men can afford to wait for a while because their main concern is timber. But women need fuelwood daily.

Third, women's concerns, even if pressing, do not necessarily translate into effective environmental action by the community or by women themselves. Case studies of several autonomous forest-management initiatives in east India highlight both the gendered motivation for forest protection and the unequal distribution of power which has enabled men's interests to supersede women's:

In most of the cases protection efforts started only when the forest had degraded and communities faced shortage of small timber for construction of houses and agricultural implements. Although there was a scarcity of fuelwood, it hardly served as an initiating factor. 9

Although firewood is a household necessity and not just a women-specific one, since it is women's unpaid labour that goes into providing it, the cost to women remains invisible or of insufficient importance to generate a community response.

Women's own responses too are far from automatic. The experience of a Rajasthan NGO is illustrative:

[T]here is nothing "automatic" in the extent of women's active participation in the development of village common lands, no matter how acute their hardship of searching for fuel and fodder... Continuous interaction with [the NGO's] women staff has been [a] crucial input for facilitating women's genuine participation.

As I have elaborated elsewhere in my concept of feminist environmentalism, people's relationship with nature, their interest in protecting it, and their ability to do so effectively, are significantly shaped by their material reality, their everyday dependence on nature for survival, and the social, economic and political tools at their command for furthering their concerns. Ideological constructions of gender, of nature, and of the relationship between the two, can impinge on people's response to the environmental crisis, but are not its central determinants.

To the extent that both women and men of poor households are dependent on natural resources, they would both have a stake in environmental regeneration. However, whether this leads them to initiate environmental action, and what benefits they derive from such action, would be contingent, among other things, on their ability to act in their own interest. Gender-specific interest in alleviating the environmental crisis, as also the ability to do something about it, would typically be linked to the division of labor, property and power between women and men.

On the feminist front, these insights point to the need to challenge and transform not just ideas about gender but also the actual division of work, resources, and political space between the genders. On the environmental front they point to the need not only to transform notions about nature, but also to grapple with the material factors (economic, institutional, etc.) that determine how people interact with nature.

Mies and Shiva prescribe the revival of subsistence economies in various ways, on the false assumption that in such economies women's position was complementary and equal to men's. Although they concede in passing that in future men need to share more in domestic and subsistence work, they say little about how this might be achieved. This is unlikely to happen merely by calling upon men to "redefine their identity" and to "share unpaid subsistence work: in the household, with children, with the old and sick." 11 Nor is it apparent how the rural women Shiva praises for being "not owners of their own bodies or of the earth, but [who] cooperate with their bodies and with the earth in order `to let grow and to make grow,'" 12 can change a long-entrenched division of labour. In fact, attempts to revive subsistence economies could further entrench women in unremitting, undervalued labour.

Rather, to move from being the main victims of environmental degradation to being effective agents of environmental regeneration, poor women will need to overcome not just disabling gender ideology, but social and political barriers. They will also have to contend with the pre-existing advantages that men as a gender (albeit not all men as individuals) enjoy, in terms of greater access to economic resources and public decision-making forums. How this can be achieved is the real challenge ahead.

1 This paper is based largely on excerpts from the much longer paper "Environmental Management, Gender Equity and Ecofeminism," Journal of Peasant Studies, 25(4): pp. 55-95.

2 C. Jackson (1993). "Woman/nature or gender/history? A critique of ecofeminist `development,'" Journal of Peasant Studies, 20 (3): p. 398.

3 R. Braidotti, R.,E. Charkiewicz, S. Hausler and S. Wieringa (1994). Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development: Towards a Theoretical Synthesis. London: Zed Books. p. 95.

4 C. Merchant (1980). The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, p. xix. New York: HarperCollins.

5 V. Shiva (1988). Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival, p. 47. London: Zed Books.

6 S. B. Roy, R. Mukherjee, D.S. Roy, P. Bhattacharya and R.K. Bhadra (1993). "Profile of Forest Protection Committees at Sarugarh Range, North Bengal," Working Paper no. 16, IBRAD, Calcutta, pp. 15-16.

7 C. Britt (1993). "Out of the Wood? Local Institutions and Community Forest Management in Two Central Himalayan Villages," p. 146. Draft Monograph, Cornell University.

8 Vandana Shiva, op. cit; Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva (1993). Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books.

9 ISO/Swedforest (1993). "Forests, People and Protection: Case Studies of Voluntary Forest Protection by Communities in Orissa", Swedish International Development Agency, New Delhi, p. 46.

10 M. Sarin and C. Sharma (1993). "Experiments in the Field: The Case of PEDO in Rajasthan", in A. Singh and N. Burra (Eds.), Women and Wasteland Development in India. Delhi, Sage Publishers, pp. 91-127.

11 Mies and Shiva, op. cit, p. 319.

12 Shiva, op. cit, p.43.

Bina Agarwal is Professor of Economics at the Institute of Economic Growth at Delhi University. Her most recent book is A Field of One's Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia; it has won several awards.