Framing Situated Knowledge: A Knowledge Framework for Gender and Sustainability in the Global South

What is it about?

Framing Situated Knowledge: A Knowledge Framework for Gender and Sustainability in the Global South” develops a comprehensive, interdisciplinary framework designed to rethink how gender and sustainability scholarship is conceptualized, produced, and mobilized across Global South contexts. The article responds to converging planetary and social crises—climate disruption, ecological degradation, gendered poverty, and postcolonial development inequalities—arguing that prevailing sustainability paradigms remain structurally limited by technocratic, gender-blind, and Global North–centric epistemologies. In response, the authors advance a five-pillar knowledge architecture that integrates feminist, decolonial, and participatory traditions into a coherent analytical and methodological model. These pillars include: Situated Knowledge & Epistemic Justice; Structural Intersectionality & Decolonial Feminism; Relationality & Care Ethics; Ecosocial Resistance & Grassroots Praxis; and Methodological Pluralism & Ethical Co-Production. Together, they offer a multi-scalar lens through which sustainability challenges can be understood not merely as environmental or technical problems, but as historically embedded, power-laden processes shaped by colonial legacies, gendered labor systems, and epistemic hierarchies. Drawing on cross-regional illustrations—including energy-access brokerage, gender-transformative climate governance, and women-led agroecology networks—the article demonstrates how grassroots knowledge systems generate alternative sustainability pathways grounded in lived experience and collective agency. Methodologically, it foregrounds participatory action research, photovoice, multilingual dissemination, and reflexive ethics as tools for redistributing epistemic authority. By synthesizing theoretical debates with applied case material, the article constructs not only a conceptual framework but also an operational research and practice agenda capable of guiding scholars, policymakers, and practitioners working at the intersection of gender justice and ecological transformation.

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Why is it important?

The importance of this article lies in its timely intervention into one of the most pressing intellectual and policy gaps of our era: the disconnect between global sustainability governance and the situated realities of marginalized communities in the Global South. As climate crises intensify, evidence shows that gendered vulnerabilities—shaped by poverty, care burdens, land dispossession, and political exclusion—are deepening rather than receding. Yet dominant sustainability frameworks continue to universalize solutions through technocratic metrics and policy templates that inadequately engage with lived inequalities. This article is significant because it challenges that epistemic status quo at its foundations. Rather than treating Global South experiences as empirical “case studies” appended to Northern theory, it recenters them as sites of theory production in their own right. In doing so, the framework advances epistemic justice as a core sustainability imperative—arguing that who produces knowledge, whose knowledge counts, and how knowledge circulates are inseparable from material outcomes in climate governance and development policy. The article also holds institutional implications: it calls for structural transformation in publishing, funding, peer review, and research design to address entrenched inequities that marginalize Southern scholars and vernacular knowledge systems. By bridging feminist political ecology, decolonial studies, and participatory development research, it offers a shared conceptual language capable of linking academic inquiry with grassroots praxis and policy reform. Its significance therefore extends beyond scholarship: it provides a roadmap for reconfiguring sustainability governance, research partnerships, and global knowledge hierarchies in ways that are more just, plural, and responsive to planetary futures shaped increasingly from the South.

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