This didn't get through the eteher initially. Sorry about any crossposts. [EMAIL PROTECTED] ______________________________________________________________________ Date: Mon, 18 Sep 95 10:01:55 EDT Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >From Elizabeth Dowdeswell, Executive Director of United Nations Environment Program, to Beijing: Statement by Ms. Elizabeth Dowdeswell Executive Director United Nations Environment Programme to the High Level Panel on Gender, Environment and Sustainable Human Development Beijing, 6 September 1995 Madam President, Distinguished Delegates, Ladies and Gentlemen A decade has passed since the adoption of the Nairobi Forward Looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women. Ten years on from Nairobi we are faced with a number of questions: What has really been achieved during these years in terms of giving women an authentic voice in the development process? Has there been a tangible improvement in the quality of women's lives? How will the policies and plans for sustainable development that were discussed and elaborated at Rio help solve the dilemmas facing women in their very different environments and with their very different needs? Is the goal of sustainable development -- to establish equity between generations and to balance social, economic and environmental needs to conserve non-renewable resources and to reduce economic and social costs of the pollution produced by industrialization - - in line with the realities of women's lives. We have answers to some of these questions. First, the striking impression that although much of the edifice of the present development process has been erected on the backs of women living at the lowest economic levels, these women themselves have experienced little change in their own lives. Second, in every study the old story of women's double workload comes through very clearly. By separating remunerated work from the home, the present mode of development has made it more difficult to combine childbearing, child-rearing, and domestic maintenance with it. Since domestic maintenance must continue in any case, employment outside the home frequently doubles the working hours of women. Thirdly, the interests of women still require much investigation and stronger support. There is a need for concrete action that goes beyond the formal statements heard nationally and internationally. Certainly, there is now a more widespread sensitivity and activity related to women's issues, but as yet even women themselves are not fully aware of what may really be in their best interests. What has failed is not the idea of development per se but a set of attitudes and structures which have prevented women from being equal partners in development. With more resources available to women, and a more equitable distribution of workloads between men and women, the development story would have read differently. I agree that the failures have been more severe in the third world, but the problems underlying them are to be found on all continents. The pictures that emerges of women living at the poverty levels is not so different in low-income female-headed house-holds in industrialized countries. There is a growing recognition of the connections between the crises in development, the deepening environmental crisis, the growth of poverty and gender inequalities. Women are now perceived as privileged environmental managers and the source for solutions to the environmental crisis. Women's relationship with the environment has often been described as "special". Women's status and environmental conditions are intertwined in such a way that it gives women a unique stake in initiatives to improve environmental sustainability. As hewers of fuelwood, haulers of water, and tillers of the soil, women perform tasks which involve them in close daily interaction with the environment. These responsibilities give them distinct interest in conserving natural resources. Environmental policies often fail to take account of women's roles. And in doing so, they risk both having negative impacts on the natural resources which women rely on and failing to make use of women's important skills and knowledge. Here I would like to refer to some stereo-typed images of women's roles in the sustainable development debate. These images have wielded a significant influence on policy designs -- often in ways that have proved detrimental to women. First, women's close dependence on natural resources has often been interpreted into an image of women as victims of environmental degradation, struggling to find food and fuel from increasingly depleted land and treescapes. This implies that any outside intervention would be a help, and that women will willingly participate because they have no choice. And that benefits to women and the environment will necessarily go hand in hand. However, we have examples of social forestry projects motivated by such concerns that have proved unsuccessful because they failed to recognize opportunity costs on women's already stretched time. Second, women's role in managing natural resources had led them to be portrayed as key assets to be harnessed in resource conservation initiatives. But this approach might have negative equity effects for women. It might simply add environment to the long list of women's caring roles. Women cannot be treated as a source of cheap labour with little consideration given as to whether the project really serves their interests. Clearly, if women are really to benefit from the development process, we will have to explore and build on complementarities between women's interests and environmental needs. It is necessary to emphasize the positive notion of environment as an opportunity, that women can and should benefit from social forestry and conservation initiatives. Unfortunately, there is a disturbing tendency for some of us to slip uncritically into delineating women's roles into misleading stereotypes. Women's roles in environment cannot be discussed in a highly generalized way. They cannot be portrayed as environmental managers with little consideration of precisely what this means in terms of time, responsibility and knowledge. Even the assumption of women's "special relationship with the environment" has to be understood within specific social and economic processes. It must also be recognized that women do not operate in isolation. Their resource management activities are not exclusive of their relations with men and each other. Yet, men are invisible in much of the analysis. Does this mean that women's and men's resource management activities proceed along parallel tracks? And, that women are a distinct category when it comes to natural resource use and management? Is it not true that this exclusive focus on women's relationships with the environment has often translated in policy terms into separate women's programmes and projects? Such programmes are a poor vehicle to guarantee women access to needed resources, such as land or decision making power. It is easy for women's projects to become marginalized relative to those which affect a whole community. What we need to be talking about is more fundamental women's rights of access to natural resources and control over decisions related to them. Both women's natural resource managing activities and their economic opportunities may be constrained by their lack of control over crucial decisions related to resource use, while insecure land tenure and rights to products may limit women's incentives to invest in sound environmental management. Women have a profound and pervasive effect on the well-being of their families, communities, and local ecosystems. Therefore, inequities that are detrimental to them are detrimental to the society at large and to the environment. The achievement of sustainable development is inextricably bound up with the establishment of women's equality. One cannot be accomplished without the other. And their rights of access to natural resources is of paramount significance. Real economic empowerment of women must embrace all aspects of her life if it is to be meaningful: a new education, a new information system, a new social orientation, and a revaluation of those cultural attitudes and values relating to her political and economic marginalization. All these in the long term will be our best guarantees of a system that is gender-neutral and which enhances the status of women. There are some success stories. Much money has been spent to support forest management, watershed protection, village wood- lots, shelter belts and other forms of large environmental projects. Yet these projects still have an extra-ordinary high record of failures in most of Africa and in dry and hillside areas in Asia and Latin America. Yet there are some success stories on which we could build upon. How do we replicate these success stories? What enabling mechanisms can be designed to increase women's participation in these schemes? How can socio-economic information be integrated into our environment management schemes to profit effective assistance at the ground level? How to maintain an effective two-way link between the national governments, international agencies and local communities? How to ensure that the benefits of sustainable development reaches the marginalized, the politically invisible women? Failure of many conservation schemes has been attributed to the adoption of a top-down approach to development, ignorance of local systems, short-time horizons and use of complicated, difficult to maintain systems. It has also been realized that success obtained in the laboratory may have little relevance at the ground level. It has even been found difficult to replicate success obtained in one region in another region. One problem consistently cited in development literature is that the scale on which donors are used to dealing with large infrastructural projects is far too massive to promote the kinds of micro-behavioural changes in on-farm management that are needed for long-term success of agro-forestry, fuelwood and fodder production. Clearly, donors must look for better ways of supporting multitudes of small projects and working through non- governmental organizations in order to duplicate small successes. Yet simply helping governments and private voluntary organizations to dot the planet with small, decentralized projects is not likely to have enough impact to pull the poorest women from the poverty and environmental traps. A rush into small-scale, decentralized and non-governmental approaches to poverty might leave untended the question of system-wide barriers. A multitude of village-level reforestation projects does not add up to a strategy for solving a fuel-wood shortage in its current magnitude in much of Africa. The challenge remains how to multiply what are in many cases relatively small-scale initiatives into larger scale rural forestry programmes that will penetrate throughout rural areas as quickly as possible. It is clear that gender considerations will have to be incorporated in all phases of planning and implementation of environmental projects relating to women. In this context, I would recommend the following measures: - greater rigor in project selection, clearer and more realistic setting of objectives, greater care in design and preparation, fuller involvement of target groups in design and implementation and quicker adjustment when problems are identified; - review of all procedures to ensure that they are gender sensitive. Environment Impact Assessment should include gender considerations as well; - equal access to resources, services, education and training. It is important that equitable participation is reflected in the project design and in the monitoring system for assessing how different groups are affected by the project activities. The ability to address gender and assess effects and impacts on the target group -- men and women -- can only become effective if these considerations are incorporated from the very beginning. Women are confronted by a legacy of structures of inequality which are reinforced by misperceptions that have produced a seemingly unending cycle that retards the pace of their own personal development, relegates them largely to the reproductive sphere, affords them minimal chances or fails to harness their full potential for national development. This cycle has to be broken for their effective mobilization in the development process. * * * * *