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"A major challenge in studies of environmental governance is dealing with the diversity of the people involved at multiple levels--villagers, development agents, policy-makers, private resource users and others--and taking seriously their aspirations, conflicts and collaborations. This book examines this challenge in two very disparate parts of our world, exploring what gender-equality, resource management and development mean in real terms for its inhabitants as well as for our environmental futures. Based on participatory research and in-depth fieldwork, Arora-Jonsson studies struggles for local forest management, the making of women's groups within them and how the women's groups became a threat to mainstream institutions. Insights from India, consistently ranked as one of the most gender-biased countries, are compared with similar situations in the ostensibly gender-equal Sweden. Arora-Jonsson also analyzes how dominant ideas about the environment, development and gender equality shape the spaces in which women and men take action through global discourses and grassroots activism. Questioning the conventional belief that development brings about greater gender equality and more efficient environmental management, this volume scrutinizes how environmental imaginations are key to crafting gender relations. It shows gender to be at the heart of environmental negotiations while at the same time making a case for environmental sensibilities as integral to gender relations. At the confluence of development, environmental and gender studies, the book contributes to a much-needed dialogue between these fields, proposing new futures in environmental management."

Past decades have been marked with grassroots struggles around the use and access to natural resources such as forests, both in the global South and in the global North. On the one hand, we have politicians, bureaucrats and others needing to deal with these issues at the national and global level. On the other, we have the material practices and struggles at the local level as well as a parallel discourse on decentralization to local areas from the past few decades. By tracing the historical changes in policies that touch on forests-peoples relationships in India and Sweden, I contextualize these trends by placing them in a historical context and examine the questions that are central to a critical examination for environmental governance today. I analyze how environmental policy-making shaped forest politics in the two places and what spaces it provided for environmental democracy—especially in relation to possibilities for people's participation and for gender equality. I bring attention to the imperative to take account of questions of increasing expert dominance in environmental governance and local struggles, the space for local people's participation in forest and rural politics, the gendering of these spaces and relationships and how that affects environmental politics.

AbstractWhat does it mean to study places in 'crisis' and how does that affect the research done on the 'rural'? To be considered to be in crisis is not really new as any literature review of rural studies indicates. And yet, we live now in a new context, with new challenges for 'rural' research, in particular that of sustainability. Sustainability is the new policy focus and is increasingly reflected in research on rural Europe. Although scholars are beginning to theorize on what is sustainable in and for rural areas, our intention is to take this further. We theorize on what the focus on crisis and, increasingly on sustainability, means for the research we do and the knowledge we produce on rural Europe. Our aim is to bring attention to the politics of past and present knowledge production on the rural to be able to imagine just and sustainable futures. In an analysis of literature primarily from Sweden and the UK, we argue that two construals, that of a rural crisis and that of rural–urban polarization, have set the tone for rural studies and may have overshadowed a more plural approach. We outline what might be needed from rural research to meet future challenges and what the notion of sustainability, with its emphasis on the entanglements of the social, economic and environmental, might mean for the future of rural research.

Two long-term trends characterized the response to the influx of asylum seekers in rural Sweden in 2015. First, a result of current policy-making on integration policy, is the focus increasingly focussed on individual immigrants, especially in relation to education, employment and housing provided the framework for the response. Second, the shift of rural governance from state control to collaborative arrangements with nonstate actors, enabled the unprecedented involvement of civil society in the reception and integration of asylum-seekers in rural areas. The consequences of the confluence of these two approaches are most visible in rural areas. In this paper, we explore the new landscape of collaborative governance in relation to migrant reception and integration and ask: what kind of space for maneuver might be available for migrants in the context of collaborative governance of integration in rural Europe? We argue that the new context of rural governance in tandem with integration policies focusing on individual migrants/ families rather than also considering group and ethnic belongings can leave newcomers at the mercy of an informal and unknown institutional terrain of collaborative governance, one that can exacerbate their vulnerability and lead to a situation of "double isolation"- from co-ethnic networks as well as from local society.

Environmental organizations play an important role in mainstream debates on nature and in shaping our environments. At a time when environmental NGOs are turning to questions of gender-equality and ethnic diversity, we analyze their possibilities to do so. We argue that attempts at ethnic and cultural diversity in environmental organizations cannot be understood without insight into the conceptualizations of nature and the environment that underpin thinking within the organization. Serious attempts at diversity entail confronting some of the core values on nature-cultures driving the organization as well as understanding the dimensions of power such as class, gender, and race that structure its practices. We study what nature means for one such organization, the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, and the ways in which thinking about nature dictates organizational practice and sets the boundaries of their work with diversity in their projects on outdoor recreation. We base our analysis on official documents and interviews, analyze how ''diversity'' and ''gender-equality'' are represented in the material and reflect on the interconnections as well as the different trajectories taken by the two issues. Our study shows that the organization's understanding of nature is a central and yet undiscussed determinant of their work with diversity that closes down as much as it opens up the space for greater inclusion of minorities. We argue that for environmental organizations wanting to diversity membership, a discussion of what nature means for people and their relationships to each other and nature is vital to any such efforts.