ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how feminist political ecology and increased attention to social difference provides a useful conceptual terrain for interrogating environmental change and mainstream international development policies. Feminist political ecology (FPE) is an important and influential approach to gender and environment research in the social sciences. Feminist political ecology emerged to counter the tendency within political ecology to illuminate class logics and inequalities and state and global scaled struggles, rather than gender and patriarchal struggles at more micro-locales, such as within communities and households. The concept of intersectionality is credited to critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, who worked to understand race, gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity as interdependent and interlocking, rather than disparate and exclusive, social categories. Indeed, increased attention to race may open more critical analysis of natural resource control, distribution, and access as a way to help 'mainstream' gender in development policy and planning, in a more meaningful and plural fashion.
