Simulación de la evolución del pH para 150 días

treats gender as a critical variable in shaping resource access and control, inter- acting with class, caste, race, culture and ethnicity to shape processes of ecolog- ical change, the struggles of men and women to sustain ecologically viable live- lihoods and the prospects of any community for sustainable development. FPE brings a feminist perspective to political ecology and draws on different bodies of literature and theories, including feminist geography and cultural ecology. Centring on resource access and control, FPE suggests that gender is intertwined with other axes/re- lations of social differentiation to (re)configure humans’ relationship with nature and nat- ural resources.

To problematise gendered access to resources, FPE focuses on three research themes: gendered environmental rights and responsibilities, gendered environmental knowledge, and gendered environmental activism. The three research themes of FPE cut

through various levels of analysis: the individual (environmental knowledge), the house- hold and the community (environmental rights and responsibilities) and the international and national (environmental activism). FPE proponents seek to explore the interconnect- edness between different levels of analysis in understanding gendered access to and con- trol of resources, gendered production and application of knowledge pertaining to the environment, and gendered conflicts and resistance to environmental injustice. Moreover, as noted earlier, FPE is concerned with how environmental ideas, attitudes and practices are gendered, rather than arguing for gender as the most important attribute in shaping these processes.

Focusing on the possible mechanisms through which gender and other social cat- egories such as ethnicity, class, social status, and culture intertwine, interact and mutually constitute one another, FPE proponents call for an intersectional approach (Elmhirst 2011, Ge et al. 2011, Nightingale 2011, Truelove 2011). An intersectional approach en- hances the inclusiveness of research on gender (in)equality and (in)justice, especially in relation to natural resource access and control where conflicts and resistance are likely to arise due to unequal power relations, by overcoming ‘the limitations of gender as a single analytical category’ (McCall, 2005:1771). In this research, I adopt and adapt the three themes of FPE and an intersectional cross-scale approach to tackle the questions of how the everyday politics of resource access is shaped by gender and other social attributes. Although gender is explicitly emphasised as one of the most crucial factors, the fact that the chosen case study is located in the uplands, which are mainly populated by an indig- enous ethnic group called the K’ho and operated under the traditional structures of mat- rilineal systems, means that ethnicity, social status and culture are also important influ- ences over the processes with which this research is concerned. Moreover, I seek to bring insights from my case study to further develop FPE. In the following paragraphs, I will explain how the three themes of FPE (environmental rights and responsibilities, environ- mental knowledge, and environmental activism) are contextualised to better reflect the actual practices of gendered access in the studied area.

First, environmental rights and responsibilities are interpreted in this research de- pending on the level of analysis. For instance, within the household, ‘environmental rights and responsibilities’ refers to the gendered division of labour, in which the different po- sitions of male and female members of the household determine what work is done by whom. When extended to the community, ‘environmental rights and responsibilities’ might manifest in local land and forest tenure rights and forest labour contracts between local people and state forestry institutions to protect the allocated forests. At the national

level, ‘environmental rights and responsibilities’ takes the form of adherence to legal doc- uments such as Land Use Certificates (LUCs), forest protection contracts, or policy texts.

Second, environmental knowledge needs to be critically examined. Knowledge does not refer to a set of practices, experiences and behaviours of local communities (i.e. indigenous knowledge) that have remained fixed and stable across generations. The dis- tinction between two bodies of gendered environmental knowledge (that of men and of women) is distinct, but in ways that, in most cases, are not clear. While ecofeminists suggest that women are inclined to be closer to nature and thus more knowledgeable about plants and trees in the forest (e.g. Shiva and Mies, 1993), in this research, I seek to chal- lenge this essentialist approach to gendered environmental knowledge and de-naturalise the women-nature link. In my research, knowledge is defined by the meaning ascribed to the environment, and to forests and land in particular, by people. Knowledge, accord- ingly, is not simply the technical ‘know-how’ of utilising land and forest-related re- sources. In this study, knowledge is situated within the politico-economic, social, cultural and spiritual spheres and has implications for land and forest management as well as for each individual in the community. It is therefore crucial to capture how knowledge is gendered and how this process influences men’s and women’s access to land and forests. Gendered environmental knowledge, by and large, is closely linked to gendered environ- mental rights and responsibilities; as to a certain extent, local ways of understanding and articulating their gendered environmental rights and responsibilities also constitute a part of gendered environmental knowledge.

Third, FPE is deeply concerned with agency and resistance, be they everyday forms of resistance or formal and more organised collective actions. Informal forms of resistance might gradually develop into socio-environmental movements and political in- volvement, although this is not always the case. FPE studies (including those that do not identify themselves as such) have focused on both open and subtle forms of resistance, as lively manifestations of the sort of ‘local agency’ that FPE builds upon. There are, however, only a few studies of FPE that use everyday forms of resistance in Southeast Asia (Park and White, 2017:1106). It is within this particular body of FPE literature that this research situates itself. Accordingly, this research attends to the everyday politics of forests in the village and the interplay between villagers and outsiders who are directly or indirectly involved in global and national forest projects. As I will show, due to the nature of the state of Vietnam, environmental and socio-political movements concerning natural resources are still not legitimised. In the Central Highlands specifically, these movements

are even more restricted, as they are seen by the state and state actors as related to histor- ical conflicts regarding indigenous territories in the past and the links between indigenous ethnic groups with Christian and anti-communist groups from overseas (Salemink, 2015). The three themes of FPE (gendered environmental rights and responsibilities, knowledge, and activism) provide a framework in which to situate local struggles around resource access within global and national discourses, policies, and influences as well as identify where (and if possible why) the mismatch is likely to arise. Also, FPE is grounded in feminist-oriented studies and an agency approach, which is closely aligned with my approach to this particular research.

Although both FPE and Ribot and Peluso’s (2003) theory of access are concerned with access relations and operate within a wide range of scales, FPE is not a theory of resource access per se. FPE, in fact, is a broader framework of how society and environ- ment work while Ribot and Peluso’s theory of access emphasises which social categories and power relations are at work in influencing individual’s access to resources. Bringing in the theory of access, therefore, is appropriate and useful for my research as it looks at a nested case study with a strong focus on a local level in relation to wider contexts of global and national levels.