Environment, Knowledge and Gender: Local Development in India's Jharkhand (Soas Studies in Development Geography)

Tracing global shifts in development thinking through to national level policy-making in India and its local scale implications, Sarah Jewitt employs detailed empirical data to investigate the practical value of radical populist and eco-feminist alternatives to more mainstream forms of development. The book: intervenes in gender-environment debates with reference to place-specific empirical evidence; provides a sustained critique of romanticized populist and eco-feminist approaches to rural development; critiques the romanticization of women's supposedly innate link with nature; emphasizes the socio-cultural as well as the practical importance of forests to local people; and reveals the contextually embedded but temporally fluid nature of environmental decision-making and knowledge distribution by gender, class and community.