Environmental degradation, economic development, and gender: A comparative analysis

The project has as its goal to advance a comparative law analysis between Colombia and South Africa in terms of legal interventions to counteract or prevent environmental destruction and its particular gendered effects. The two legislations will be used to explore the translation of knowledge into the legal architecture of environmental and economic development, particularly agrarian policy, and gender, as well as the representations and misrepresentations that occur along the way. Beyond discussing these diverse policies, the goal is to theoretically analyze what happens when law is part of the problem, when there is too much reliance on public law and less on the interaction with economic development policies along with a superficial definition of gender equality.
The comparison between South Africa and Colombia comes from the observation that although distant geographically, the countries share crucial characteristics. Both of them reformed their constitutions in the early 1990s and have advanced transitional justice processes to face the past. During the ensuing period, the foundational texts and judicial interpretation have been celebrated as progressive and critiqued for their limitations. High levels of inequality in terms of access to resources such as land characterize both nations and the gendered effects of climate change are pressing.