Introduction

An eco-feminist analysis of debt-for-nature (DFN) swaps and underage marriage highlights what philosopher Karen J. Warren (1990) refers to as the ‘logic of domination’. DFN swaps are agreements through which select developing nations have foreign debt forgiven in exchange for investments in environmental conservation measures (Cassimon et al, 2011), while underage marriage is the formal marriage or informal union between a child under the age of 18 and an adult or another child. Underage marriage is a human rights violation, preventing women and girls from living their lives free from all forms of violence globally (United Nations, 1993). The ‘logic of domination’ represents an intersectional vision of how the oppression of nature mirrors the oppression of women and girls. While some criminologists have attempted to subsume eco-feminist thought into the discipline of criminology (Lane, 1998; Lynch and Stretsky, 2003; Gaarder, 2013; Davies, 2014; Lynch, 2017, 2018; Sollund, 2020; Varona, 2020), these publications do not utilise the ‘logic of domination’ to draw concrete parallels between the eco-violent commodification of nature and women's bodies. In this chapter, I offer an invitation to recapture the theoretical promise of eco-feminism, explaining how all types of oppression are ultimately connected to this same logic. The purpose of this chapter is fourfold. I begin with a brief analysis of human and environmental security through the prism of gender-based violence (GBV). This is followed by an examination of eco-feminist theory as it applies to Indonesia's DFN transaction and prevalence of underage marriage, expanding the conceptual terrain of debt. Finally, I offer some concluding thoughts on the interconnections of DFN swaps and various forms of violence against women in the context of human and environmental security.

Positionality

I offer the following author's note: at the time of this writing, I celebrate the five-year anniversary of the death of my grandmother, Aisha Omrow. Born in the hinterlands of Guyana, she often spoke of the institution of indentured labour – an insidious replacement for slavery in British Guiana that recruited servants from small towns in and around Kolkata, India – and the impact it had on my family. Being Amerindian – the Indigenous peoples of Guyana – she had witnessed the onslaught of ecologically destructive activities on ancestral lands, and the concomitant eco-violence against women and children.

Introduction

The UK claims to have a long tradition of animal welfare, including the creation of the world's first animal welfare charity, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which was founded in 1824 and which became the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA, 2022). The UK also claims its legislation goes beyond European Union (EU) requirements (World Animal Protection, 2020). Yet, 6.4 billion nonhuman animals are killed annually to support the UK food supply (Animal Clock UK, 2020) and more than 3.4 million animals were used for the first time in experiments in 2018 (Animal Aid, 2018). Jail terms for animal cruelty in England and Wales are the lowest in Europe (Bell, 2017). In order to decrease and ultimately eliminate nonhuman animal suffering, there needs to be better understanding of attitudes towards nonhuman animals. While previous studies have explored attitudes towards nonhuman animals using a range of variables, those that have studied gender as a variable have used the traditional binary definition of gender, ‘men’ and ‘women’ (Wells and Hepper, 1997; Evans et al, 1998; Woodward and Bauer, 2007; Lee et al, 2010; Tesform and Birch, 2013; Kendall et al, 2016; Byrd et al, 2017; Knight et al, 2017). These studies found that women are more likely to be concerned with nonhuman animal suffering (Wells and Hepper, 1997; Evans et al, 1998).

However, gender is not a biological construct or even a distinct category. Butler (1990: 31) defines gender identity as ‘a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo. … Gender is … an identity instituted through a repetition of acts’. While she recognises the limits to how much agency individuals performing gender can have (Butler, 2004), the idea of gender as a performative accomplishment redirects the attention from internal individual matters towards interactional and institutional realms (West and Zimmerman, 1987). Thus, gender identity becomes a matter of both bodies and cultures (Fausto-Sterling, 2019). The recognition of non-binary (NB) gender identity is relatively recent, with Australia offering a third gender ‘X’ option on all passports in 2011 (The Guardian, 2011), and the state of Oregon in the United States recognising non-binary gender identity in 2016 (Shupe, 2016).

Green criminology is an urgent field of criminology that has expanded tremendously alongside the growing nature crisis caused by human-induced climate change and dramatic species loss due to anthropogenic action, or lack of action. This in turn has led criminologists all over the world to engage in research on different forms of harms and crimes committed against nature and nonhuman animals. Cooperation between scholars in the Global North and the Global South has formed part of this transnational endeavour to address environmental crimes from non-colonialist, non-anthropocentric point of departures, bridging people, knowledge and scholarship. This book is an excellent example of the international character and fusion of different disciplines and fields of green criminology. Most importantly, this book presents us with the gendered aspects of green crimes and environmental harms and the ways in which neither offending nor victimisation of such harms are gender neutral, but caused by overarching structures, such as colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy.

While feminist theorisation has been important in critical criminology generally, in green criminology, unfortunately, it has been more absent and while intersectional theorisation swiped sociology and other social sciences in the beginning of this century, green criminology seemed generally unaffected by this theoretical approach. Applying intersectional theory methodologically is not an easy task due to its complexity (McCall, 2005). For example, when does one aspect of a person's identity, which renders the person vulnerable to oppression, end and another begin? What factors intersect where, when, how and why? These questions, I think, are questions many feminist social scientists have grappled with since intersectionality was introduced as a theoretical concept. Nonetheless, the underlying basis of this approach; that multiple features and mechanisms that shape different aspects of oppression and victimisation intersect, for example, class, ethnicity, gender, and not the least species affiliation, are important to keep in mind, and that is one important endeavour of this book.

Prior to intersectionality theory and perhaps more familiar to green criminology, eco-feminism appeared as an interdisciplinary feminist approach to the natural world, nature ethics and nonhuman animals. Ecofeminism (for example, Donovan and Adams, 1996; Kheel, 2007) as well as intersectionality are important in the analysis of offending and victimisation in regard to environmental crimes, harms and nonhuman victimisation. These perspectives are also vital in relation to activism and protest, so well exemplified in Part III of this book.

Introduction

This chapter interrogates the gendered impacts of environmental harm in Colombia. Following intersectional theory as developed by Crenshaw (1989), we focus on Colombia's Indigenous and Afro-descendent communities, who are placed in a particularly disadvantaged position due to both gendered and ethnoracialised systems of oppression (Tovar-Restrepo and Irazabal, 2014). To do so, we bring green criminology into conversation with the decolonial, Black and Indigenous feminism that has emerged from across the Americas as a way of exposing the connections between gendered harms and structural violence. In doing so, we wish to highlight how platforming and learning from this feminist scholarship and activism can lead to a more nuanced understanding of environmental harm and its legacies in Colombia.

The chapter proceeds as follows. The next section provides the research context for this chapter. We highlight the range of theoretical perspectives which have been adopted to interrogate the continuum of environmental harms perpetrated in Colombia and outline how we feel engagement with feminist scholarship can enhance green criminological knowledge in this area. In the third section we outline the continuum of environmental harm in Colombia, focusing on its impacts on Indigenous and Afro-descendent populations. We detail how Colombia's colonisation established harmful and exclusionary practices of land dispossession, which in turn lay the groundwork for one of the longest running conflicts in the Western world. We then turn to the environmental legacies of that conflict, before considering how demobilisation and ‘peace’ have created contemporary challenges from illegal and state-sanctioned extractivism. We highlight the sustained resistance to environmental harm in Colombia, and the increasing risks that environmental defenders face. In the fourth sections we turn to the feminist literature, drawing out four key insights regarding gendered environmental harm: first, the theorisation of the connections between territorial and female bodily autonomy; second, the exposure of the gendered vulnerabilities associated with dispossession and forced displacement; third, the ‘everyday’ gendered nature of environmental harms; and fourth, the important role of women in resisting environmental injustice and protecting their communities and territories.

Theorising gendered experiences of environmental harm in Colombia

Colombia is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world. Over half of Colombia's territory is covered in natural forest, including part of the Amazon rainforest (Bickerton, 2017), and 50 per cent of the world's moorlands are in Colombia (San Pedro, 2019).

Introduction

This chapter follows up on some of the observations made in the introduction to this volume where we briefly reflect on contributions to theoretical approaches notably by eco-feminists. The chapter focuses very specifically on these latter contributions and in the following pages I seek to advance and develop our theoretical and conceptual understanding of green criminology using eco-feminism as the springboard and benchmark for assessing the extent to which green criminology is gendered and for developing a framework for embedding a gendered approach to the green criminological and victimological project. Part of the task that is set for this chapter, therefore, is to help with the review of determining what has been achieved so far, and part is about stepping up and forward to thoroughly gender the green criminological project drawing on appropriate theoretical traditions and trajectories.

Ecological (eco-)feminism holds out for a gender-sensitive form of justice into the 21st century. In lay terms, eco-feminism is a feminist approach to analysing the relationships between humans and the natural world. The foundation of eco-feminism is the relationship between women, the earth and environmentalism. If we take this as the starting point, we can begin to ask some important questions about green criminology. A modern definition of eco-justice is one that encompasses environmental justice (relating to humans and their relationship with specific environments), ecological justice (referring primarily to the health and wellbeing of eco-systems) and species justice (involving rights and biodiversity concerns as these pertain to nonhuman animals and plants) (White, 2013). This definition is also a useful starting point, and conjoining this with our interest in exploring ecofeminism we can illuminate some important features about the state of green criminology knowledge more broadly. For example, we can expose what we know and do not know about who and what perpetrates crime and harm and who and what can be and are victims. The latter thread – the victimological – has been especially underdeveloped and until very recently knowledge of the gendered nature of victimisation has been scant. Broader questions about the nature and extent of victimisation have, however, surfaced such that scholars are now proposing that victimisation extends beyond humans to nonhuman species, that inanimate objects can be a victim, that multi-and poly-species victimisation is experienced.

Introduction

Citizenship is formally and historically connected to the nation state, even though this has not always been the case (cf Athens’ city-centred democracy). In today's understanding of democracy, however, scientific knowledge and technical expertise intersect with citizens’ ability to hold state power accountable to democratic values. Sheila Jasanoff (2017) describes how the nation state concentrates not only political power but also resources that enable investments in ‘big science’ projects. Based on these concentrations, she asks: if the demos should have a role in the technical framing and resolving of public problems, what analytical resources does STS provide to facilitate such participation? The answer to this question, as suggested by Jasanoff, is that ideas and practices around science and technology – priorities, investments, distribution channels, regulations, and so on – are co-produced with ideas about concerned citizens. Thus, STS scholars should call attention to the fact that practices of collective knowledge-making shape our very understanding of the demos to be served by democracy.

As we saw in the previous chapter, studies undertaken by STS scholars have focused on the relationships between modes of governing and how issues are made public and open to wider debate, how groups of the public are demarcated through the notion of invited and uninvited publics, and how the agency ascribed to invited publics tends to be circumscribed by instrumental motives. In this work, STS scholars frequently touch on one of the unresolved problems in democratic theory. This is about what properly constitutes the people. Yet, any democratic theory is based on an understanding that there is a people, a citizenry that is implicated in governing in indirect or direct ways and can hold government accountable. We discussed such unexplored assumptions in the first chapter of this book, and we referred to these as belonging to a shadow theory of democracy. The shadow is an inevitable companion to unacknowledged contradictions and taken-forgranted assumption within established ideas about democracy. If denied, it is a potential threat, but when openly acknowledged and dealt with, it is a potential resource to democracy.

STS scholars have suggested that citizen engagement with and contestation over science and technology should be understood as having a constitutive role in the development of alternative imaginaries of democracy. Such ideas point to the relations between governing bodies and concerned publics that are transgressing the boundaries of the nation state.

The emotional impacts of living through bushfires: a discussion with Katya (interview transcript)

Community, politics, justice

The field sites of this book demonstrate the possibilities and tensions inherent to carving out places of collective escape in the city. Community underpins these escapist spaces, both as an idea and a set of practices, and intersects sometimes uncomfortably with urban justice, the right to the city, and the commons. This intersection complicates easy conclusions around the politics of communal growing projects. Attending to urban land politics, organizational pressures and the cultural implications of political interpretations demonstrates the breadth of action and beliefs, all of which might contribute to an understanding of the politics of such spaces. Questions of who belongs in a community garden in the West End of Glasgow thus have broader significance, giving us space to think through what it means to make a city and what stymies the remaking of the city in different ways. The organizations and movements in this book are attentive to justice through the idea of inclusion and opening up green spaces for broad usage. Yet there are tensions between doing the work to build green, social spaces and the exclusions and incursions of others, and such tensions are illustrative of the broader tapestry of social justice in the city as they are enacted through the seemingly mundane terrain of growing plants together.

That community, justice and politics are entangled in such a way is most evident through the analytically political work of building a commons as it sits against a sometimes limited political imaginary. While the political (or otherwise) status of communal growing projects is a well-worn terrain for debate, this needs to be understood on the one hand as emerging from both internally transformative capacities and a claiming of space in the city that we might understand as staking a claim to the city (Lefebvre, 1996); but also as restrained in its imagination in everyday life by organizational conditions and popular ideas around what politics means (often seen as divisive, especially around constitutional matters that were very much present in the field between Scottish independence referendum in 2014 and the Brexit vote in 2016). Politics is thus as amorphous a category as community at times; yet people at both sites often felt the moral content of their action, the common good, was fundamental to understanding the significance of what they were building in communal growing projects.

In a forum on Making Kin Not Population (Clarke and Haraway, 2018), anthropologist Marilyn Strathern writes: ‘Population and reproduction are cunningly entangled; increasingly they are also entangled with climate. The cunning of the concept [population] is that it can be exposed where it hurts: try not thinking of babies when you think of population’ (Strathern et al, 2019: 160). In our study, we talked to people about how they make decisions about having children and we saw how this was entangled with their imaginings of, and relations to, population and climate crisis. Participants were not only speculating about their own reproductive futures, but were also observing those around them discussing and making reproductive decisions in relation to concerns about the environment, and, specifically, overpopulation.

In order to explore these connections, we asked participants in this study: “How do you feel about the idea of people having children in general, in the context of climate change?” Answering this question when you have recently had a baby might be tricky. Answering this question when you’ve just had a baby and are living through the start of a frightening global pandemic that has followed quickly on the heels of devastating bushfires is, as one of our participants said, “confronting”. Actually, we hesitated to ask. Although we really wanted to know what our participants think about wider issues relating to reproduction and climate, we did not want to evoke guilt or shame or to add to their already considerable list of worries. So, we posed the question at the end of the interviews, after a rapport had been built, and tried to keep it rather light in tone.

In this chapter we analyse participants’ responses as articulating the logics and affects of Pyro-reproduction as they unfold in their worlds. We explore the conceptual and material threads participants drew upon – perhaps consciously, perhaps not – to formulate their answers and to explain to us what they felt the connections between having a child and climate change might be. Sometimes their responses felt like a justification or a defence, at other times more like perplexity, but in almost all cases our question provoked disconcertment and even embarrassed laughter. Thinking about babies and population together, no matter how ‘natural’ the connection seems, exposes us where it hurts.

Developing policy recommendations based on comprehensive, in-depth research is not an easy task. Whether a recommendation is accepted by policy makers – and that is what matters in real life and what can (in our case) move us a step forward in addressing the difficult past – often depends on factors beyond the researchers’ control. This is one of the reasons why academic researchers, approaching the complexity of the social world in ways that are not straightforward, are often reluctant to write short and concise policy recommendations, even though they are aware that serious engagement in the process can have immense benefits for society (CARDI, 2012). In addition, researchers are often not adequately trained to communicate research findings in forms other than academic publications, even though publishing shorter, more widely understood texts is an important element in maximizing impact.

Finding a middle ground in making recommendations, which some may also view as watering down recommendations, is a process that takes time. However, if the recommendation is based on solid evidence on the one hand and does not fundamentally challenge the interests of key stakeholders on the other, the recommendation is more likely to be adopted. It should come as no surprise that this is difficult to achieve, especially in countries with a troubled past that are targeted by these recommendations.

This chapter explains the logic used to move from research findings to specific policy recommendations and is therefore organized as follows. First, it explains the process of creating the first version of the recommendations, which was based solely on the project's research findings. The second section explains how relevant interlocutors (policy makers and stakeholders) were involved in the process of revising the earlier versions of the recommendations. The third and final section describes how some of the interlocutors were additionally recruited for interviews and how some other perspectives from people who were not directly involved in this process were included in the final version of the recommendations.

Drafting the first version of the policy Recommendations

The RePAST research consortium had the aforementioned considerations in mind when thinking about how to compile the policy recommendations; they were to be written for the EU as an institution and for seven countries struggling with difficult pasts (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, Germany, Ireland, Kosovo, Poland and Spain).

Hearing a different story?

In Chapter 1, I drew on Adichie's (2009) discussion of the Igbo word ‘nkali’ to argue for the need to move beyond a troubled ‘single story’ of family for people who have been in care, recognizing dynamic complexity and diversity – and strengths as well as challenges – in order to avoid reinforcing stigmatizing binaries. This was an explicit focus of the Against All Odds? study, as our research team has written elsewhere: ‘If care experienced people are predominantly viewed (and studied) through a problem-focused lens, policy and professional approaches may become dominated by an inadvertently stigmatizing hegemonic discourse, focused on measurable risks and outcomes’ (Bakketeig et al, 2020, p 1). As we discuss in that paper, there is substantial international evidence that care experienced people face heightened risk of disadvantage across domains including education, employment, housing, financial security and health (for example, Stein and Dumaret, 2011; Courtney et al, 2011; Kääriälä et al, 2018; Häggman-Laitila et al, 2018; Berlin et al, 2021). Research on risk of disadvantage is hugely important in highlighting support needs for young people in and after care (and so informing the development of policy and professional frameworks), but we would add a note of caution. If research focuses only on risk, it may have the unintended consequence of exacerbating stigma: complex and diverse lives may be reduced to hegemonic narratives of the vulnerable or damaged subject. A growing body of work has documented the heterogeneity of care experienced lives, for example, modelling the relative contribution of experiences pre-care and while in placement (for example, Fowler et al, 2017; Rebbe et al, 2017) and illuminating the ways in which care systems may be protective for young people (for example, Arnau-Sabatés and Gilligan, 2015; Sebba et al, 2015; Holmes et al, 2018; Hanrahan et al, 2020). These studies demonstrate the value of building understanding of dynamic complexity and diversity – as we also aim to do in this book.

Boundary work

Although the spaces created at the North Kelvin Meadow and within the Woodlands Community Garden offer respite to some extent from a wide variety of pressures, this relies on boundary work. What makes escapist rhythms possible is a set of community practices that establish the collective basis for such rhythms. Reflecting on such practices foregrounds the uneasy payoffs central to communal growing projects; and thus makes space to consider the ways escape is an imperfect attempt to create just urban space. To do so, I begin from the ideology of inclusion and being ‘open’ that underpins the projects, taking it not as a fact or frame, but as a question. To whom are the projects open? Taking the case studies as contrasting organizations responding to specific sets of local dynamics, this demonstrates the vicissitudes of community as a practice of closure, indeed as a practice of boundary making and maintenance that reproduces class, race and gendered boundaries.

Community in sociological literature, though vexed and deeply fluid, has often spoken to the symbolic boundaries that emerge in the process of group formation across a variety of levels (see, for example, Cohen, 1985; Brint, 2001; Anderson, 2006; Belton, 2013). In discussions of belonging, which tend to focus rather more on the affective dimensions of communal life, identities emerge through contradistinction, as Benson and Jackson (2013) amply demonstrate. If community is situated then as something that is done, as a verb (Walkerdine and Studdert, 2015; Rogaly, 2016), then boundary making and maintenance are central to these social practices. Community is not a neutral thing that exists, but a set of dynamic practices that are replete with conflicting tensions. Situating communality as a central process and idea within urban growing (Traill, 2021), I argue that it is not an anodyne concept but a fluid boundary-making process with social and political ramifications for justice.

Taking justice as an everyday horizon towards which actors strive, the work of Fraser (2008) and Young (1990), although not entirely compatible, provoke the consideration not only of the distribution of resources, but also of recognition and process.