Visualising Women’s Invisible Labour: Insights from India’s Joint Forest Management Cases
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.65544/860n6328Keywords:
care ethics, joint forest management, invisible labourAbstract
India's Joint Forest Management (JFM) is a community-based arrangement in which forest-fringe communities and the state jointly manage and protect forests. Despite mandated seats for women, literature shows that JFM benefits are unevenly distributed, and women's labour remains systematically undervalued. This paper employs Tronto's care ethics, integrated with feminist political ecology, to examine how women's forest labour is rendered invisible within JFM governance. Through a purposive review of Scopus and Web of Science literature (2019–2026), we analyse how gendered power asymmetries, intersecting with caste and other social identities, marginalise women's ecological knowledge and unpaid care labour. We further examine how institutional design failures and masculinised definitions of forest work compound this exclusion, leaving women's contributions unrecognised in forest governance. We argue that integrating care ethics into JFM policy can revalue women's labour and make participatory forest management more equitable and ecologically sustainable.
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