ABSTRACT
The startling pace of environmental change in the Third World during recent decades has directed increasing attention in regional studies to political ecology. This research framework combines the broad concerns of ecology with political economy, especially the ways that institutions like the state, market, and property rights regulate land use practices (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Bryant 1991; Peet and Watts, Chapter 1 in this volume). The growing association of environmental change with femalebased social movements and gender conflict within rural households, however, suggests the need for improved understanding of gender relations and the domestic sphere since class as well as non-class struggles over resources are frequently mediated in the idiom of gender (Carney and Watts 1991; Guyer 1984; Shiva 1989; Sontheimer 1991). This poststructuralist emphasis on gender and household relations offers political ecology a better conceptualization of the complex and historically changing relations that shape rural land-use decisions (Peet and Watts, Chapter 1 in this volume).
