Integrating Gender, Peace and Environment: The Gender Dimension of Environmental Peacebuilding
Publisher: Research Handbook on International Law and Environmental Peacebuilding
Author(s): Sarah Mead and Marie Jacobsson
Date: 2023
Topics: Conflict Prevention, Gender, Governance, Renewable Resources
Countries: Colombia, Yemen
The interlinked nature of environmental protection and natural resource management on the one hand, and peacebuilding on the other, has been clearly established in the foregoing chapters. This chapter contributes to a better understanding of this interplay by examining environmental peacebuilding from a gender perspective. Women have a key role to play in peacebuilding: their involvement in peace processes enhances both the likelihood of concluding peace agreements, and the durability and implementation of the same. Women are, however, persistently excluded from peacebuilding processes. This is particularly unfortunate in the context of environmental peacebuilding given the gendered nature of environmental knowledge and natural resource management. The UN Environment Global Gender and Environment Outlook Report notes that almost all available evidence makes clear that, ‘within a household, resource use, priorities and decisions are gender-differentiated. Many environmentally consequential decisions made within households are filtered through gender norms and roles’.