Gender and International Environmental Law
Crises with Uneven Impacts
International environmental law has largely failed to live up to expectations, having done little to mitigate climate change and ever-increasing environmental destruction. In response to this, researchers at Newcastle Law School are working to understand the role gender theory can play in tackling environmental catastrophe, seeking to use gender theory to re-frame the law while also situating women’s lives at the heart of the law.
International environmental law has several gendered impacts. For one, it is widely known that environmental factors often impact women more than they do men – for example, shortages of water can have a particular impact on menstruating women who need access to clean water for hygiene reasons. Furthermore, environmentally caused food shortages have also been shown to impact women more than men, with women often being given the leftovers of the men to eat in situations where there is not enough food to go round, for example.
However, gender focuses on more than women’s lives alone. Rather, gender theory, which comes with its own unique way of viewing and theorising the world, can be used as a tool to analyse all areas of the law, providing insight into how to better examine the law. For example, ecofeminist perspectives have long argued for the need to centre human connections to nature, challenging anthropocentric views of nature as merely a resource to be exploited. Such a perspective could drastically change the way the law is currently drafted and applied.
Multiple Newcastle Law School researchers work on gender and international environmental law from a variety of perspectives. Some of these projects are showcased below.
Posthuman Feminist Approaches to International Environmental Law
Critical scholars of international environmental law have long shown how the environment is defined by international law as a resource to be extracted and exploited. This can be seen, for example, by examining the main underlying principle of the law: sustainable development. This principle purports that the extraction and exploitation of nature is legally allowed as long as it is done in a “sustainable” way. However, as many critics have pointed out, this just allowed for the exploitation of nature to continue without any real or meaningful limitation.
Noting this, researchers at Newcastle Law School are deploying a variety of gender theories to seek to re-cast the law. One such theory is posthuman feminism. Posthuman feminism can be defined as seeking to dismantle hierarchies between humans (such as gender, race and class) while also challenging the hierarchy of the human over the nonhuman, such as nonhuman animals or the environment. Drawing on posthuman feminism, Newcastle Law School researchers are seeking to re-frame international environmental law, challenging the anthropocentric and extractive underpinnings of the law and seeking, instead, to ask, what would happen if the environment’s interests were properly considered by the law?
Within this broad theme, researchers are working on a variety of issues, from those focusing on the law of the sea, to discussions of the rights of nature, to analyses of core environmental law principles such as the rights of future generations, to examinations of the environment in outer space law, to reflections on the increasing securitisation of environmental issues.
Intersectional Feminism and Critical Disability Approaches
One of the core ideas in feminist theory is the concept of intersectionality. This concept broadly notes the need to focus on multiple identities at once. For example, a white woman may have a very different experience of the world to a Black woman, just as a working class man may have a very different experience to a middle class man. While, at Newcastle Law School, we centre intersectionality in all of our feminist research, we are working in particular to bring issues of disability to the fore. This is because disability is often overlooked in international environmental law policy and scholarship. We are therefore working to fill this gap, drawing on critical disability studies to question the ableist assumptions that underpin the law and how it is applied.
Postgraduate Researchers
.jpg)
Associated Publications
Jones E. Posthuman feminism and global constitutionalism: Environmental reflections. Global Constitutionalism 2023, 12(3), 495-509.
Jones E. Posthuman International Law and the Rights of Nature. Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 2021, 12, 76-101.
Heathcote G. Filters and Fragments: Making Feminist Sense of Security. American Journal of International Law Unbound 2022, 116, 254-258.
Farran S. Deep-sea mining and the potential environmental cost of ‘going green’ in the Pacific. Environmental Law Review 2022, 24(3), 173-190.