Yvone Underhill-Sem on Feminist Political Ecology: Linking the Local to the Global

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Yvonne Underhill-Sem, a feminist geographer of Cook Island/New Zealand heritage, is a professor of gender and development at the University of Auckland, and the regional coordinator for Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) in the Pacific. Online, she shared with Isis International-Manila her thoughts on Feminist Political Ecology, the very theme of this WIA issue. Yvonne gladly examined the feminist political ecology framework, tracing its development, and looking at its strengths and challenges.

WIA: Feminist political ecology is a relatively, new and currently evolving framework. Could you trace its beginnings?

Yvonne Underhill-Sem [Yvonne]: Within geography, feminist political ecology became a recognisable area of study with the publication of the geographer Diane Rocheleau's edited book in 1997 entitled, Feminist Political Ecology: Global Perspectives and Local Experience (by D. E. Rocheleau, B. Thomas-Slayter and E. Wangari). Over the last decade, there has been a proliferation of political ecology studies focusing mostly on the developing world but although there has been a growing recognition that the themes of political ecology are applicable to First World …