Women and the ‘Right to Sustainable Development’ in the Age of Globalization
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Abstract
This paper argues for a reconceptualization of women’s inclusion and role in sustainable development practice and policy-making. It specifically focuses on ‘women’ rather than ‘gender’ as a way of thinking about women’s roles, inclusion and participation in sustainable development. This paper stresses that the human rights approach has been a strong theme in the sustainable development discourse in the past three decades, and particularly since the UN Conference on Environment and Development in 1992. It seeks to expand discussion not only on women’s right to the environment, but also other areas integral to their leadership and expanded agency in sustainable development, such as rights to safety, health and education and right to mobility. This paper brings a religion and human rights perspective to the discussions on women and their participation in sustainable development, and demonstrates that it is a crucial way of understanding the particular ways in which these connections actively restrict – or alternatively provide the opportunity to enable – women’s active leadership and role in sustainable development. This paper is structured as follows: the section after the introduction discusses feminist perspectives on sustainable development. It then provides an overview of the discourse on religion as an obstacle or opportunity to women’s fundamental human rights. In the second half of the paper, it discusses the intersections between religion, women’s rights and sustainable development by specifically focusing on issues that starkly illustrate the need for a religion-based human rights approach to women’s participation in sustainable development: the right to a clean environment and environmental resources; the right to safety and security; and the right to health and education.
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