This article provides a historical account of local environmental struggles to draw attention to the interconnections between gender, environment and sustainable resource management.
Based on an ethnographic field investigation conducted on the matrilineal–matrilocal Garo community of Bangladesh, the article takes a feminist political ecology perspective. It argues that interacting with traditional culture, forest ecology and changing processes of centric resource governance, gender remains a salient variable in environmental issues. Local contexts of gender dynamics help configuring local people’s mode of participation in environmental struggles as well as being the consequence of those struggles.
Findings suggest that Garo women and men have sustained gender specific roles and interests through their struggles to ensure control over forest lands and tree resources. Furthermore, they have developed a class-based relationship with forest ecology which must be acknowledged in forest policies.
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Note: The article abstract is also available in Spanish and Chinese.
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