Feminist political ecology

Feminist political ecology is a feminist perspective on political ecology, drawing on theories from Marxism, post-structuralism, feminist geography, ecofeminism and cultural ecology. Feminist political ecology uses feminist intersectional frameworks to explore ecological and political issues. Specific areas in which feminist political ecology is focused are development, landscape, resource use, agrarian reconstruction and rural-urban transformation (Hovorka 2006: 209). Feminist political ecologists argue that gender is a crucial variable in constituting access to, control over, and knowledge of natural resources.

Feminist political ecology combines three gendered areas: knowledge, environmental rights, and grassroots activism. Gendered knowledge encompasses the maintenance of healthy environments at home, work, or in regional ecosystems. Gendered environmental rights include property, resources, space, and legality. Gendered environmental politics and grassroots activism emphasizes the surge in women's involvement in collective struggles over their natural resources.

The design of mainstream environmental policies is often based on gender-neutral assumptions, ignoring women's knowledge systems in resource management. Hearn and Hein (2015) pointed out that this blindness stems from the traditional decision-making framework's binary opposition between "scientific knowledge" and "local experience," leading to the systematic marginalization of women's practical wisdom. Mollett (2017) further criticized the developmentalist discourse for simplifying women as passive victims of environmental crises, rather than subjects with political agency. This narrative conceals structural power inequalities. From a postcolonial perspective, it is revealed that the gender blindness in policies is essentially a continuation of colonial logic, which devalues non-Western ecological knowledge as "irrational".