Women as Environmental Leaders

• In Event: Interactive Roundtable Discussion Session

Short Description

Climate change is exacerbating environmental disasters like floods and fires across the globe. The challenge of preventing further destruction falls on those called to be environmental leaders. Women lead movements and organizations to make progress in addressing global environmental challenges. Across campuses, young women promote sustainable behaviors. In this roundtable, we present a proposal for a course and book based on intergenerational conversations between future and current women environmental leaders, with a goal of understanding and celebrating how women lead.

Detailed Abstract

Climate change, deemed a super-wicked environmental problem because of the complexity of addressing it (Levin et.al, 2012), is exacerbating environmental disasters like desertification, floods and fires across the globe. Attendant issues such as water resource scarcity and loss of farmland interact with poverty and inequality to create environmental refugees and foster environmental conflict zones (Diehl, 2018). The challenge of preventing further destruction and conflict falls on those called to be environmental leaders (Gallagher, 2012). This existential challenge is occurring in the midst of an ongoing conversation about women’s special abilities to lead collaboratively, relationally, transformationally and inclusively (Eagly & Carli, 2003; Post, 2015; Business and Sustainable Development Commission, 2018), characteristics posited to underlie success in environmental leadership (Gallagher, 2016).
Women like former German Environment Minister Angela Merkel, USEPA Administrators Carol Browner, Christine Todd Whitman, Lisa Jackson and Gina McCarthy, former United Nations Framework on Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres, Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai and Kate Brandt, Google’s Sustainability Officer, have stepped up to lead movements and organizations to make progress in addressing global environmental challenges. In small communities from Hanalei, Kauai to Gambia to rural Alabama, unsung women like Maka’ala Kaaumoana, Isatou Ceesaye, and Catherine Flowers are inspirational environmental leaders working on problems such as watershed protection, plastics waste reduction and environmental justice. Moreover, across campuses young women are joining the fight to promote sustainable behaviors like earth-friendly diets, reduced consumption, efficient transportation, increased use of renewable energy and diminished greenhouse gas emissions.
As women increasingly engage in collaborative and transformational leadership to prevent a looming global environmental crisis, scholars must study this community of leaders. Their stories must be collected, their practices must be analyzed and lessons must be offered to a new generation of leaders. In an organizational context, it is known that critical knowledge can be transferred when experiences are shared (Argote et.al, 2000). By extension, sharing environmental leadership experiences across generations would promote knowledge transfer from current to nascent leaders. A productive mechanism for promoting intergenerational knowledge transfer is to engage youth in conversation with older leaders.
With this as backdrop, we are beginning to engage in a new research and teaching project to collect women’s environmental leadership stories. We plan to develop an active learning-based course in which undergraduate and graduate students will work together to gather data on women’s environmental leadership practices. Students would identify leaders, develop interview protocols, reach out to leaders and record shared conversations with them. We will then analyze the recorded data to summarize key practices. The project will culminate in a book, which highlights leadership stories and offers generalizable lessons on women’s practice of environmental leadership. This project builds on past teaching and research collaborations, in which we mentored diverse groups of students as they conducted community-engaged research on environmental restoration, environmental justice and social entrepreneurship in under-resourced communities (Vidra et. al, forthcoming, 2019).
In this roundtable, we will present our proposal for the course and book based on intergenerational conversations between future and current women environmental leaders. We will seek feedback from attendees on leaders to connect with and questions to ask, with a goal of understanding and celebrating how women lead.

Presenters

• Deborah R. Gallagher, Duke University

• Rebecca Vidra, Duke University