Feminist Environmental Peacebuilding in Zimbabwe: Lessons learned from a Grassroots organisation centring women, peace, and everyday security

art by Sonya Montenegro (USA) of The Far Woods

Sandra Zenda, Glanis Changachirere, Tinotenda R. Chihera and Constance Mushayi (Institute for Young Women’s Development); Sophia Rhee, Meredith Forsyth and Mikaela Luttrell-Rowland (The Earth Institute)

Continuing to sideline women-led local activism as marginal to top- down peacebuilding efforts ignores critical expertise directly implicated in local arenas of security and crisis.

Context

The evolution of environmental peacebuilding as an inclusive framework has been driven as much by practice as it has been by theory and research. Yet, the field continues to focus on women as victims and passive targets for aid rather than as change-makers and knowledge-holders for building peace and addressing environmental harm.

As a collective of activist-scholars in the Global North and South, we echo calls from recent literature that emphasizes the importance of looking to women’s activism—particularly that of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) women—to highlight broader perspectives at the intersections between individuals, communities, and ecosystems.[i] Women’s activism across the globe is in many ways rooted in an approach that addresses not only immediate/evident examples of insecurity, but also questions of attenuated and structural violence that often go unnoticed or unaddressed. This is evidenced by Indigenous women in Colombia whose quest for reparative environmental justice broadens our notions of victimhood,[ii] and to women in the Pacific Islands whose views of security acknowledge the “slow violence” of rising sea levels and climate change as inseparable from the effects of militarism and colonialism.[iii]

The Institute for Young Women’s Development (IYWD), based in Zimbabwe, provides an important model for environmental peacebuilding which centres feminist analysis to hold governments and corporations to account for environmental harm. Their work demonstrates how gendered forms of knowledge and networks, including feminist economics and movement building, play a role in creating new avenues for dialogue and trust for peacebuilding,[iv] as well as widen opportunities to advance justice for the “slower acts of violence leading to insecurities that are felt in the individual’s everyday life”.[v]  

What’s been done

Located in Mashonaland Central in Zimbabwe, one of the country’s most politically volatile provinces with high levels of gender-based violence, IYWD’s advocacy and policy work links systemic environmental harm and social, political, cultural, and environmental conditions. By intertwining political education and feminist movement building, and often building upon Indigenous traditional practices rooted in Ubuntu that emphasize community help and common action (such as Mushandirapamwe and Nhimbe, which mean 'collective community work for a common goal’), IYWD works to foster unity and promote justice and accountability while challenging patriarchal norms and power structures that underlie existing environmental and governance issues. The organization, founded and led by young Zimbabwean women, upholds a multi-faceted approach to environmental peacebuilding, ranging from mobilizing young women through rights education and social accountability training, to disseminating regenerative farming practices to local communities.

At the core of how IYWD enacts everyday peacebuilding is an attention paid to structural inequalities and gendered power relations. For example, noting the deterioration of social services attributed to the misappropriation of funds and neglect in rural farming and mining communities, they initiated a series of Tax Justice Dialogues. While at first, IYWD's initiatives around tax justice may not appear to fit within existing “environmental peacebuilding" narratives, ultimately, by focusing on the tax contributions and challenging the corporate social responsibility of multinational mining companies and local authorities to advocate for improved social services, their work addresses systemic factors contributing to environmental harm and weakened governance.

In another recent campaign, IYWD organized dialogue platforms for young women to hold their local authorities accountable in light of water shortages caused by artisanal mining activities in the Mazowe River. Here, grassroots women's mobilization was central to addressing the actors directly responsible for water services and infrastructural investment in order to change policy agendas. By using consistent advocacy to confront the municipality and engage with stakeholders, IYWD's movement-building demonstrates how a feminist lens enables a stronger model of democratic accountability for local environmental peacebuilding. 

Looking ahead

Solutions to some of the most pressing issues of our time must be co-created with and grounded in the everyday realities and lived experiences of women. A powerful lesson for policymakers is to move beyond the often-performative “add women and stir” approach, as social and environmental well-being is collective and rooted in larger questions of gendered power. Grassroots women’s activism like that of IYWD looks toward embedding processes of evaluation and accountability that attends to structural, geopolitical, and systemic concerns in peacebuilding and policymaking processes. By demystifying and deconstructing power, and creating and demanding spaces for change, they work to emphasize power with, as opposed to power over—as IYWD states, "to change one person, it takes changing the community." IYWD highlights what is lost when gender-focused policy is limited to promoting inclusion over transformative and structural change. We argue that the future of environmental peacebuilding must broaden who is considered an “expert” and recognize that social change flows not only from decision-makers in positions of power, but also from women’s grassroots movement building.

Footnotes

[i] Yoshida, K., and Céspedes-Báez, L. M. (2021) ‘The nature of Women, Peace and Security: A Colombian perspective’, International Affairs, 97(1): 17-34. https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiaa173.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] George, N. (2014) ‘Promoting Women, Peace and Security in the Pacific Islands: Hot Conflicts/Slow Violence’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 68(3): 314-332. https://doi.org/10.1080/10357718.2014.902032.

[iv] Dunn, H., and Matthew, R. (2015) ‘Natural resources and gender in conflict settings’, Peace Review, 27(2): 156-64. https://doi.org/10.1080/10402659.2015.1037619.

[v] Krosnell, A. (2019) ‘WPS and Climate Change’ in Davies, S. and Jacquie True. Oxford Handbook of Women, Peace and Security, Oxford University Press: New York