ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the feminism and its ideas have been professionalised and like professional sectors, its members may also seek ways to legitimate knowledge, expertise. Gender mainstreaming today is almost an institutional pillar in development organisations, including in environmental conservation groups such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Maeve also expresses uneasiness with efforts to merge the social with the technical, thus faces the difficulties of ‘tran slating’ the social or gender knowledge in an environmental action context. Field experiences and close interactions with women can open new avenues of knowledge. Conventional scientific epistemologies cannot account for women’s experiences and sometimes consider them as legitimate knowledge, as scientific knowledge is traditionally premised on objectivity and rationality. The feminist adage ‘the personal is political’, puts forth the idea that personal experiences of women are a source of important knowledge, and that they can be understood socio-culturally and are politically contextual largely because they unpack situations of inequality.
