Radical Ecological Economics and Community Ecofeminism. Two Proposals for Understanding Alternative Socio-Metabolic Processes

Abstract

The epistemological challenge of radical ecological economics is to understand sustainability with environmental justice and to account for community subjects (men and women) and the potential they have to confront actions that modify their socio-metabolic configurations imposed by depredatory and extractivist development logics. 

For its part, community ecofeminism takes into account in its analysis the link between women and nature, criticises the development model and its extractivist practices, and suggests that women's perspectives and experiences differ according to their rural and/or peripheral situation, proposing as an alternative new social pacts and new forms of community strategies, which are incorporated into new feminine and masculine identities, underpinning processes of community agency that appeal to the sustainability/reproduction of life.

This chapter will analyse how these two theoretical proposals thus open up the possibility of identifying analytical categories with which to dialogue and explain in a more holistic way the emancipatory processes of indigenous-peasant communities, thus raising an interdisciplinary debate that contributes to the analysis of the sustainability of human and planetary life.