Creating Just and Sustainable Futures: Feminist Political Ecology Contributions

Dear Colleagues,

Despite increased environmental awareness manifesting in numerous policies for sustainable development, the trajectory of increasing resource use and global emissions of greenhouse gases has not been curbed. Additionally, the environmental impacts from the wealthy parts of the globe are often displaced so that socioenvironmental problems strike distant peoples and territories. This means that new ways of visualizing and putting sustainable development into practice are needed. In this Special Issue, the focus is on how/whether feminist political ecology can help us to imagine just and sustainable futures and how these could be put into practice.

Even though there are varied and competing discourses of sustainability, a dominant interpretation has come to be that of ecological modernization. Questions of who/what causes or is affected by environmental problems are seldom highlighted, nor are questions of who is able to access different kinds of resources, or whose needs and desires are prioritized. Using a feminist political ecology perspective entails highlighting how policies/strategies/visions affect different societal groups and nonhuman entities. It also means focusing on women’s knowledge, gendered ways of handling ecological change, the value of local knowledge, and women’s socioenvironmental struggles. More recent feminist political ecology questions the essentialist view of womanhood and replaces it with a decentralized subject and poststructuralist power analysis that can be used for critical analysis of the existing order. In this Special Issue, we welcome contributions elaborating on what this could mean in terms of what futures are desirable. Describing varied futures can be a way of making feminist political ecology more tangible and engaging and also a way of intensifying the debate about what sustainable futures can imply or look like.

Dr. Ulrika Gunnarsson-Östling
Dr. Ivana Milojevic
Guest Editors

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• Feminist political ecology
• Futures
• Visions
• Knowledge
• Sustainable development