Publication

This paper analyzes the interrelationships between gender, poverty and environmental change in rural India, focusing on variations across regions and shifts over time. The author identifies the major factors leading to environmental degradation, then traces why and how degradation, coupled with a loss of communal property, has particularly adverse implications for women and girls in poor rural households. The paper asserts that regions of high gender-environment-poverty vulnerability require special attention through schemes that give poor women greater control over economic resources, and especially over common property resources.