Women’s Environmental Activism: Linking Daily Life with Life and Death

• In Event: The Next Frontier: Climate Change and Women in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

In Africa, environmental issues, when they are addressed at all by the international community, are generally couched in terms of development, like in the Sustainable Development Goals. However, as environmental degradation threatens communities’ way of life and their very existence, climate change and other problems are also increasingly framed through human security and even international and national security discourses. When it comes to African women and the environment, though, the development frame dominates, usually with an example about how far women must walk to fetch water. Environmental problems are linked with women’s daily lives and assumptions of their vulnerability, rather than seeing how women can and do deal with environmental issues as a threat to fundamental peace and security for communities and countries.

Women’s empowerment has, over the past 20 years, been incorporated into international security discourses, largely as a result of women’s activism in the Global South. This activism has not only been a demand for individual human rights and empowerment, but also asks for accountability by countries everywhere to protect individuals and communities from non-state-based threats, whether it is environmental issues, terrorism, or economic crises. Part of the work that local women activists in sub-Saharan Africa are engaging in, therefore, is advocating for inclusion of environmental concerns in attempts by the international community to address broader security. Women’s security necessitates some level of economic security and stability to achieve physical security, and women are recognizing that addressing environmental issues in multiple contexts is part of that. Whether the environmental issues are related to climate change, desertification, land degradation, or water pollution, land-use conflicts and inability to provide for families and communities are at the center of women’s security needs. Rather than securitizing the environment in a move intended to shift the debate out of the political realm and into being taken up by more security-oriented apparatuses, addressing environmental degradation as a women’s security issue illustrates the insecurity faced by women and by communities, particularly in contexts where peace and security is already threatened by more traditional security threats.

Therefore, this paper will reveal how environmental degradation contributes to women’s insecurity in their daily lives, both within conflict and post-conflict situations, as well as a part of the chronic “underdevelopment” that characterizes life in West Africa. Through interviews conducted with leaders of local women’s NGOs in West Africa working on women’s peace and security issues, this paper will reveal the ways in which women articulate environmental degradation as both a security issue and a development issue. In each of four West African countries—Côte dʼIvoire, Guinea, Mali, and Sierra Leone—women activists emphasize that environmentalism is key to their and their nation’s security, though the exact contours of their project depend on the country context. Ultimately, this paper asks whether and how environmental concerns are addressed by international programs and agendas targeting women’s security needs, part of the UN Security Council’s Women, Peace, and Security agenda or even the Sustainable Development Goals.

Author

• Carrie Reiling, Washington College