ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of gender, environment, and development scholarship that explains how early ideas and debates have shaped subsequent work. Interconnections between economic development, environmental change, and gender politics are an important topic of analysis in feminist scholarship. Inspired by rural women actively resisting deforestation in the Global South, scholars theorized the relationship between people's gender roles and identities and their attitudes toward nature. Early women, environment, and development (WED) work involved compelling narratives of poor rural and indigenous women and claims about them being among the hardest hit by – and the most active in trying to address – environmental degradation. Intellectual unease with the prominence of a simplified and centred feminine subject in WED and ecofeminist policy discourses spurred new directions in understanding the connections between gender and environment. WED discourses were prominent throughout 1990s and 2000s in gender, livelihoods, and natural resource planning and development organizations.
