Focus: (Re)productivity

Transcending the Learned Ignorance of Predatory Ontologies: A Research Agenda for an Ecofeminist-Informed Ecological Economics

“…While the analysis of ecological economics is pointed to the Daly and Farley school of thought and its three pillars of sustainable scale, just distribution and efficient allocation [12,40,41], we consider the work of various scholars in the community [13,[42][43][44][45]. We join a small community of ecological economists and other transdisciplinary scholars spearheading (eco)feminist cross-pollination with traditional approaches to ecological economics [15,17,22,25,26,34,[46][47][48][49][50]. As leading scholarly disciplines, ecological economics and critical feminist perspectives have: challenged definitions, modified analytical tools and expanded our understanding [of economics] by confronting and dealing with the different forms of exclusions of ecological and care dimensions from most economic discourses as well as the inextricable embeddedness of the market economy within a broader economy of human provisioning and the latter in the ecosystems of our planet.…”

“…Ecofeminism asserts that "how we treat nature and how we treat each other are inseparably linked" [53]. For example, much like clean water and air, the labour of women in the home, such as cleaning, cooking and caring for children and elders, is taken for granted in many cultures and conventional economic systems [15,21,54,55]. While fundamental to the vitality of communities and economies, nature and women are mere externalities in formal economic accounts.…”

“…Using the established theoretical frames of ecological feminisms and ecofeminism in particular, we argue that the discipline of ecological economics is inhibited by a pervasive ignorance regarding power differentials and a limited epistemology rooted in Western, androcentric, anthropocentric thinking. Our analysis demonstrates how the logics of extractivist capitalism that justify gender biased and anti-ecological structures of power in the dominant growth-oriented economic paradigm also directly inform the theoretical basis of ecological economics and its subsequent post-growth proposals [14][15][16][17][18][19].…”

Environmental justice as a (potentially) hegemonic concept: a historical look at competing interests between the MST and indigenous people in Brazil

“…The initial post-colonial/neocolonial land distribution scheme of the independent Brazilian state sowed the seeds for many of the ensuing problems of environmental justice these two groups face currently. Indigenous claims for sovereignty over their lands and for the survival of their people and culture clash with the desperation of peasants facing an exploitative capitalistfeudal economic system fixated on productivity rather than reproductivity (Biesecker and Hoffmeister 2010). While migrating populations left other areas principally out of duress, the hegemony of the land-colonising processes meant that Brazil's landless peasantry were often led to believe they had little option but to usurp Amazonian lands from indigenous populations; or, when not directly taking active territories, it was their encroachment on frontiers (encouraged by the state) that paved the way (sometimes quite literally) for more organised extractive industries (Branford and Rocha 2002).…”

“…If hegemony is understood as an integrated principle without a convenient beginning or end, then one might postulate that it starts inside as self-oppression at the top, within the hegemons themselves against themselves, and does not end merely with humans, but extends far beyond, exerting violence onto the more-than-human world (Abram 1996;Biesecker and Hoffmeister 2010;Plumwood 2002;Vetlesen 2015).…”