The Gender and Environment Debate: Lessons from India

Bina Agarwal’s article is a turning point between ecofeminism and feminist political ecology. It rejects romantic accounts that present women as naturally closer to nature or naturally better environmental caretakers, arguing that such claims obscure differences of class, caste, land rights, and labor among women.

The paper matters because it moves the gender-environment debate from cultural symbolism to material relations. Agarwal asks who owns land, who can access forests and water, who performs fuel and household labor, and who has voice in environmental policy. Environmental crisis becomes a question of gendered, classed, and caste-marked resource politics.

For FemRes, this text belongs with Ecofeminism, Caste and Gender, Development Studies, and Environmental Justice. It helps readers see that serious ecofeminism cannot stop at “women love nature”; it must ask how resources, institutions, and power are distributed.