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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 95 10:01:55 EDT
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>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.
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