NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #19/NN_1992_19.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/6292

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From: [e-mail] (Rich Winkel)
Subject: Women's Rights & UNCED
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/** gen.newsletter: 136.4 **/
** Written  4:56 pm  Aug 28, 1992 by ecologycntr in cdp:gen.newsletter **

by Pam Simmons

Principle  20 of the Rio Declaration promises women full
participation in environmental management and development. There
are, however, two unwritten conditions. Women are not given the
option to refuse to participate, and their participation is to be
channeled by states. Both conditions create problems for women.

How is UNCED going to ensure women's participation? Agenda 21 says
women are to be "empowered" to be environmental "managers";
women's status is to be improved; their potential is to be tapped
and catalyzed into appropriate, consensual action; and their
essential role in sustainable development will be recognized.

This is what is intended to happen to women. This is what women
will be allowed to do. But where are the women in this? Where are
the active, dissenting, powerful, self-respecting women? Many of
these women do not want to be labeled "managers" or to have their
"potential" exploited. Status will not, cannot, be passed out like
manna from heaven. Status will be, and has been, fought for and
gained through women's many specific battles, for votes and for
trees, against violence and discrimination. This is participation.
Who exactly will gain from women's participation in development?
Official development projects do not address the exploitation of
women in export-processing zones, the sex tourism industry or
agribusiness. They do not question the basic sexual and
international divisions of labor. Instead, they reinforce them, to
ensure a source of cheap labor and economically dependent women.

It is clear from UNCED rhetoric and agreements that governments
and inter-governmental bodies will be responsible for steering us
along the road to sustainable development. This is a problem for
women. Such bodies are steeped in a patriarchal tradition that has
not only excluded women from participating but has also mostly
ignored women's interests except where they echoed men's. In too
many instances the state has acted as an instrument of oppression
against women, either by refusing to intervene in private matters
such as "domestic" violence or by unnecessarily interfering and
harassing women who dare to speak or act without the patronage of
men.

Robert Goodland of the World Bank, one of these "neutral"
international bodies, in writing on the need for state
intervention in population control, states that "poverty,
abandoned babies, unwanted children, starvation, massive
deforestation, extinctions and irreversible environmental abuse
are greater evils and dangers than freedom of choice for women."
But freedom of choice for women is a prerequisite for solutions to
any of the above: something made clear by the Women's Caucus at
Rio in their call for measures to ensure the rights of women to
decide the number and spacing of their children.

Women will play a vital role in future social change. But the role
will not be conferred on them by official delegates at
international conferences. The real issues will not be addressed
by delegated management and participation within set parameters.
The parameters themselves are the issues, and women themselves
will carve out their role in their everyday battles to conserve
their environment and to win respect.


This article was posted on NGOnet, a computer network established
to serve Non-Governmental Organizations participating in the
Global Forum in Rio.  Reprinted by permission.

** End of text from cdp:gen.newsletter **