1992
Well before 1992 and the Earth Summit (UN Conference on Environment and Development) in Rio de Janeiro, women’s groups across all regions of the world were active at the forefront of efforts linking social, environmental, and economic dimensions of sustainable development, with particular emphasis on gender equality and human rights. At the Earth Summit, DAWN plays a key role in the “Women’s Tent”, bringing together feminists and women’s organizations in a shared space to foreground their perspectives on the cost of ignoring environment issues affecting women’s lives. DAWN also played a key role in pushing North-led environmental groups away from neo-Malthusian ideas on population. DAWN’s panel on Debt and Trade exposes the connections between debt, trade, environmental degradation, and gendered inequalities, while its booklet Environment and Development: Grass Roots Women’s Perspective (Rosina Wiltshire) critiques overconsumption and technocratic fixes, and advanced grounded feminist visions of ecological and economic justice.
DAWN’s interventions in Rio demonstrate a visionary grasp of environmental justice, calling for feminist, locally grounded alternatives to unsustainable growth models—what will later be articulated in DAWN’s PEAS (Political Ecology and Sustainability) framework. These insights—linking gender, poverty, environment, and economic structures—anticipate today’s central debates on climate justice and sustainability.
This moment also sees the creation of the Women’s Major Group (WMG), which grew to encompass 390 NGOs. DAWN, together with Women International for a Common Future, WEDO, and the Global Forest Coalition, convened one of the WMG’s formative meetings. For several years thereafter, DAWN served as an organizing partner of the WMG, which became a crucial mechanism for institutionalizing feminist perspectives within global sustainable development debates.
