Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Dr. Willie Soon; According to North Michigan Assistant Professor Professor Ryan Stock, despite having a “gender positive” female empowerment programme, Gujarat Solar Park is failing to meet mandatory UN gender targets.
Bright as night: Illuminating the antinomies of ‘gender positive’ solar development
Highlights
- The Gujarat Solar Park is an archetype of India’s sustainable energy transition.
- The solar park is mandated to facilitate ‘gender positive’ outcomes and boasts female empowerment.
- Configurations of labor under the political economy of solar have excluded women from employment opportunities.
- Corporate social responsibility schemes designed to empower women reproduced caste and class-based social power asymmetries.
- Solar park development in India represents an antinomy of a nature-society relation.
Abstract
India is undergoing a rapid transition to renewable energy; the Gujarat Solar Park typifies this transition. In addition to mitigating climate change, the Gujarat Solar Park boasts female empowerment through social development schemes. This manuscript is inspired by the following research question: To what extent are ‘gender positive’ processes and projects associated with solar development in India realized on the ground? Utilizing mixed methods fieldwork and drawing on literature from feminist political ecology, this paper demonstrates how the modalities of solar park development represent an antinomy of a nature-society relation. New configurations of labor under the political economy of solar have produced a gendered surplus population of landless peasants who are not absorbed into wage-labor employment in the solar park. Further, associated social development schemes actually disempower women, despite mandates of ‘gender positive’ outcomes by UN-based climate treaties to which this project is beholden. The opportunity to participate in one such scheme for female empowerment was reserved for only women of middle-to-high class status and those of dominant castes, thereby reproducing class and caste-based social power asymmetries. Female (dis)empowerment eclipses ‘gender positive’ guarantees of the solar park. This study highlights some unintended consequences of sustainable energy transitions in the Global South at the local scale. Designing development interventions related to climate change mitigation that boast ‘gender positive’ outcomes must be careful not to exacerbate gender disparities and economic exclusion in rural areas.
Read more: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305750X20303235#!
Obviously if you thought solar parks are something to do with renewable energy, you are mistaken; Solar parks are for implementing United Nations gender empowerment programmes.
My first thought was who is this guy?
From the website with the article:
“Ryan Stock is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Geographical Sciences at Northern Michigan University. His work examines development interventions, social power and intersectional social difference, and the political economy of environmental change.”
Really? He is actually paid to “examine development interventions, social power and intersectional social difference”?
CommieBob introduced us all to the phrase “Grievance Studies” in a comment several weeks ago. This is just another example.
“Ryan Stock is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Geographical Sciences at Northern Michigan University. His work examines development interventions, social power and intersectional social difference, and the political economy of environmental change.”
Assistant Professor of gobbledygook. As I like to say, at least bovine dung is useful as fertilizer.
My first thought was I get it now Greta you poor thing.
The who-zet failed to empower the what-zet with mandatory watch-ema-call-its over in where-zet?
Huh? :-\
(Yes, this was all rhetorical)
What really matters is that the UN is determined to perpetuate poverty.
“Solar parks are for implementing United Nations gender empowerment programmes.”
Solar is misogynist? Tear it down along with phallic wind turbines? I could get all snaggy and live with that but where’s the catch?
Quite simple. Just let them clean the solar panels.
Actually, you are closer to the truth than you think. If women got jobs cleaning solar panels, it would be a major change to the norm in the highly differentiated breadwinner roles in these societies. It is generally considered that the result of educated career seeking women is population control and fewer resources used by large families. However a basis of this assumption is that there are enough jobs to go around…which often isn’t the case in the very countries elitists try to implement their philosophy.
Here’s a fun one:
The director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University has just declared that the reason why Whites adopt Black children is to use them as props to hide their racism.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/cbs-news-ibram-x-kendi-white-parents-black-children-adoption
So desire to help someone is actually desire to show superiority….so it follows that desire to denigrate someone is actually showing belief that you are inferior.
Logic invalidated…QED…with a /sarc somewhere in there.
Communism = equal misery. except for the Party elites, who still live in abject of lives. North Korea is a communist utopia setup by the founding Kim. Equal misery, constant hunger, death everywhere at the uncaring hand of the state.
Gender/Sex equality:
Women in communist utopia wear no make-up. and wear brown or black gender neutral clothing. Everyone wears the same the worker’s class clothes.
Joel
Maybe “gender neutral” is a subtle plan for birth control. 🙂
It’s a race between Geneva and Brussels for world nanny state control.
In English there are typically 2 words for one thing, one derived from old Germanic roots, one is derived from French, eg. (Germanic left, French right)
keep – preserve
buy – purchase
wild – savage
snake – serpent
sex – gender
Right now the Spiteful Mutant (*) part of political left is trying to change the meaning for the French-English word gender, claiming that it means something different than in the past, that it meaning is solipsistic (internal state of the mind of a person defines reality).
(*) As in Spitefu Mutant theory by Michael Woodley and Edward Dutton
Think the last is incorrect. Fowler first edition says the only correct use of ‘gender’ is grammatical, and that when used to mean the sex of an individual it is used wrongly. That was 1920 or so.
Assuming this is right, gender was not used to mean the same as ‘sex’. Also, ‘sex’ is surely derived from the French?
Only 100% renewable energy produced by transgenders or non-binary persons of color will appease the climate justice hooligans.
And beer must be carbon negative. Soon wine and whiskey, too.
{sarc}
Barf! All I can say to that is: defund the UN!
Solar power should not be centralized.