Towards North-South Interconnectedness: a Critique of Gender Dualities in Sustainable Development, the Environment and Women's Health

Abstract

Well-established bodies of scholarship that inform contemporary global debates on gender, environment and health are fundamentally based on dualistic representations of women, such as First/Third World, rich/poor and victim/polluter. In this paper, we argue that recent socioeconomic transitions — affluence in the global South and rising inequality in the global North — demand the development of gender analytical frameworks that better recognize the diversity of roles that women play in the changing global social order that impact on their health. Our paper (a) critiques the dualisms found in three influential bodies of scholarship, namely gender, environment and development, science, technology and society, and sustainable development; and (b) through our critique, conceptually develops an ‘interconnectedness’ perspective that focuses on the increasingly shared lived realities of women in the North and the South, to understand the emerging complex relationships between gender, environment and health.