Women and Sustainable Development: An International Dimension

"The Bruntland Commission’s Report, Our Common Future, underlined in 1987 that there was a direct relationship between physical pollution and poverty. It thus placed elimination of poverty at the centre of sustainable development. As women constitute an overwhelming majority of the world’s poor, their advance has to be regarded as the cornerstone of sustainable development. Indeed, enhance the status of women and we have already initiated the process of environmental improvement. No wonder, therefore, that the greens and the feminists are in the forefront of sustainable development. The post-II World War era has seen the rise and the fall of many causes. But these two causes have made strongest progress because they tie together the present and the future of humanity. They represent the foremost concerns of the people–the empowerment of the poorest of the poor. This study was first published by the Commonwealth Secretariat (Vancouver, Canada) in 1992. Since then, the demand for resource materials on the recognition of the gender dimension in the work on sustainable development has multiplied manifold in the recent period. It reflects the growing acceptance of the fact that development without women is simply a distorted, crippled and a partial paradigm. This sea-change has encouraged me to revise my earlier study and publish it in the hope that it may help all those–both men and women–who are engaged in elaborating curricula for distant education dealing with women and sustained development."