Feminist political ecology

Feminist political ecology is a feminist approach within 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. Areas of focus include development, landscape, resource use, agrarian reconstruction and rural-urban transformation (Hovorka 2006: 209). Feminist political ecologists argue that gender is a crucial factor in shaping 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, and/or in regional ecosystems. Gendered environmental rights include issues of 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.

Mainstream environmental policies are often based on gender-neutral assumptions, overlooking women's knowledge systems in resource management. Hearn and Hein (2015) argue that this approach reflects a traditional decision-making framework that draws a binary distinction between "scientific knowledge" and "local experience," contributing to the marginalization of women's practical knowledge. Mollett (2017) further critiques developmentalist discourse for portraying women primarily 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".