Feminist perspectives on sustainable development.

Feminist Perspectives on Sustainable Development is a collection of articles based on papers given at a four-day roundtable on Women, Environment and Alternatives to Development held at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague in May 1993. This collection appeared along with other similar collections in 1994 on women, environment and sustainable development, including Naila Kabeer's Reverse Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought and Braidotti et al.'s Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development: Towards A Theoretical Synthesis, to name two. Essentially similar books, though differing in the details of their arguments, each draw similar conclusions, taking stock of the past and current debates on feminism and development and the implications for gender analysis. A reflection of the concerns arising at that time with concepts such as "sustainable development" and the desire to link feminist thinking with prevailing "debates" on development, Harcourt's collection does not particularly stand out from the others. Papers in the first section set out the parameters of the feminist "position" (as if there is one position) on the debate on sustainable development (p.2), and how this feminist position differs from other alternative and mainstream positions both as a methodology and as a political stance. Papers in the second section challenge the assumption that the western model of economic development is universally applicable and argues for a recognition of the importance of women's role in cultural and social development. The section outlines alternatives to the dominant knowledge systems from the west and women's grass roots resistance to mainstream economic development. Section Three moves from theory to practice and details women's contribution to the UNCED (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development) process described from the perspective of politics and resistance. Section Four tracks the debate on the interrelationship between population growth and women and environment. Harcourt suggests that her book "reflects a historical moment where the international sustainable development debate has enabled women and men from diverse cultures and backgrounds to enter into the dialogue" (p.7). Since then the metaphorical power of sustainability has been revealed for the reinvention it is -- merely a transient label on a set of power relations between the north and south which run deep (see Adams in J. Crush, ed., 1995, p. 88). Much time and energy has been wasted by activists and academics alike on UNCED and the new rhetoric of sustainability, stemming from the Bruntland Report in 1987. In contrast to the editor's perspective, Sabine Hausler's article in the Part Three discussion the UNCED process suggests that UNCED was a failure of global proportions (p. 145) and that "sustainable development" has become the latest stage in development discourse where mainstream actors do business as usual. The starting point of the book's position is that development equals economic growth and that this is at the centre of development discourse, and that "economic growth remains firmly entrenched as the stated goal of development from which modern critiques of development begin" (p. 1). Since the book was published in 1994, much postcolonial, postmodern and feminist thinking has focussed on power structures in global development, and the management of other people, places and territories, including environments and women, as development. …