In this essay, I argue that the recent poisoning in Flint, Michigan, is a powerful example of both environmental racism and the everyday functioning of racial capitalism. As a journal devoted to le...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10455752.2016.1213013

Flint, Environmental Racism, and Racial Capitalism

This study reviews the literature on gender relations and climate change. Gender analysis contributes to our understanding of: (1) vulnerability and climate change impacts; (2) adaptations in different contexts; (3) responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions; (4) inequalities in climate governance; and (5) knowledges and social action on climate change. Overall, the literature has established that gender relations are an integral feature of social transformations associated with climate change. This poses a challenge to gender-blind social research into climate change. Without gender analysis, we omit key aspects of social life in a changing climate. It is vital that the gendered character of climate change is recognized and further explored in the social sciences and humanities. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e451. doi: 10.1002/wcc.451

For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Gender and climate change

Departing from liberal accounts that understand ‘modern-day slavery’ and unfree labour in isolation from markets and shifting global networks of production and reproduction, this article highlights the need to investigate how far and in what ways the deepening and extension of neoliberal capitalism has given rise to the contemporary spectrum of unfree labour relations. Building on feminist political economy frameworks, the article argues that the neoliberal resurgence of unfree labour has been rooted in fundamental shifts in power, production and social reproduction whereby capital's security has increasingly come to rely upon the deepening of labour market insecurity for certain sections of the population. It highlights the need to understand unfree labour within the context of broader relations of inequality and hierarchical social relations, particularly along the lines of race, gender and citizenship, arguing that broader and more systemic evaluations of labour and unfreedom are essential to u...

Unfree Labour Beyond Binaries

This article lays out both a critique of the oxymoron ‘sustainable development’, and the potential and nuances of a Post-Development agenda. We present ecological swaraj from India and Degrowth fro...

/pdf/the-post-development-dictionary-agenda-paths-to-the-j7xz8b9j19.pdf

The Post-Development Dictionary agenda: paths to the pluriverse

In the mid-1990s, fairtrade-organic registration data showed that only 9 % of Oaxaca, Mexico’s organic coffee ‘farm operators’ were women; by 2013 the female farmer rate had increased to 42 %. Our research investigates the impact of this significant increase in women’s coffee association participation among 210 members of two coffee producer associations in Oaxaca, Mexico. We find that female coffee organization members report high levels of household decision-making power and they are more likely than their male counterparts to report control over their coffee income. These significant advances in women’s agency within the household are offset by the fact that the women experience significant time poverty as they engage in coffee production while bearing a disproportionate share of domestic labor obligations. The women coffee producers view organizational labor as a third burden on their time, after their reproductive and productive labor. The time poverty they experience limits their ability to fully participate in coffee organizational governance and consequently there are few women leaders at all levels of the coffee producer businesses. This is problematic because it limits women’s ability to fully benefit from organizational membership: when women fully participate in governance they gain valuable business and leadership skills and producer associations with active female members may also be more likely to develop and maintain programs and policies that enhance gender equity. Our findings indicate that targeted agricultural development programs to improve gender equity among agricultural smallholders should involve creative ways to ease women’s labor burdens and reduce their time poverty in order to facilitate full organizational participation. The research findings fill a gap in existing studies of agricultural global value chains (GVCs) by demonstrating how the certified coffee GVC depends on women’s under and un-paid labor not only within the household but also within producer organizations.

The triple burden: the impact of time poverty on women’s participation in coffee producer organizational governance in Mexico

Patriarchy and accumulation - revisited' asks why a book, which first appeared in 1986, still finds so much interest today. The answer is that the analysis of that book is still valid, namely that the unpaid work of women in the household, the work of subsistence producers, working in the informal sector and the work of nature constitute the hidden underground of the capitalist world economy and its accumulation model. In this connection, I use the metaphor of an iceberg economy, where the largest part is hidden under the water. I called this devaluation of work then a process of housewifisation. Today, one speaks of precarisation of work. This work, however, is no longer restricted to women but includes men as well. It is the optimal work for capitalism. And most people in the world do this type of work. The problem is that our concept of labour which still refers only to wage labour, does not at all reflect this reality.

/pdf/patriarchy-and-accumulation-on-a-world-scale-revisited-1ky3y7ccks.pdf

Maria Mies

Papers

Patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale revisited. (Keynote lecture at the Green Economics Institute, Reading, 29 October 2005)