Ecovillages are burgeoning communitarian phenomena in postindustrialized countries whose members push for ecologically sustainable change. The author situated a case study of an urban ecovillage in the social movement literatures on political opportunity structures and collective identity construction in an endeavor to bridge macro-structural movement and micro-identity construction theories. Using participant observation and interview data from ecovillagers, she answers three research questions to investigate how ecovillagers’ collective goals for sustainability are negotiated in the context of regulations and dominant consumer ideologies. Informed by literatures on collective identity, the author asked, “What are ecovillagers’ goals? What work do they do in their everyday lives to achieve these goals?” Additionally, to understand villagers’ interactions with political opportunity structures, she asked, “How do members negotiate actions within a larger political environment that both facilitates and constrains them?” From her data, she determined how ecovillagers conceptualize their collective identity and actions within the context of constraining institutions.

Understanding how carbon dioxide emissions (CO₂) can be decoupled from economic growth is an important part of planning for climate change mitigation. A variety of critical environmental theories contend that the oppression of marginalized groups is interconnected with the mistreatment and destruction of nature. As a result, social equity, or the removal of barriers of structural inequality, often coincide with environmental quality and reduced environmental degradation. To date, there is limited research on the dialectical relationship between inequality, economic growth, and the environment. The present study seeks to further understand the relationship between social inequality and the environment by assessing how gender equality decouples economic growth from CO₂ emissions. We construct a fixed-effects panel regression model with robust standard errors that accounts for clustering in 140 nations to assess how gender inequality interacts with GDP per capita to influence CO₂ emissions per capita. Our findings indicate that in nations with more gender equality, the association between GDP per capita and CO₂ emissions is much lower than in nations with higher levels of gender inequality.

The carbon intensity of well-being (CIWB) (a ratio measuring the amount of CO₂ emitted per unit of life expectancy at birth) is an increasingly popular way to measure the ecological efficiency of nations. Although research demonstrates that economic development typically reduces this efficiency, little research has explored the extent to which social equality improves it. This study uses panel data for 70 nations between 1995 and 2013 to assess how various aspects of gender equality affect the ecological efficiency of nations. We estimate a series of Prais-Winsten regression models with panel-corrected standard errors (PCSE) to assess how increases in the percentage of women in parliament, expected years of education for women, and the percentage of women in the labor force independently affect CIWB. Our findings indicate that across all nations, increases in the percentage of women in parliament and expected years of schooling reduce CIWB; however, increases in the percentage of women in the labor force increase CIWB. Our results further show that the relationship between different dimensions of gender equality and CIWB differs between more developed and less developed nations. Finally, we find that increases in the number of women in parliament and women’s education attenuate the relationship between women’s labor force participation and CIWB. We discuss the variation in our results by reviewing relevant eco-gender literatures and feminist economics.

In cities around the world, environmental concerns have spurred urban activists to organize alternative forms of settlement. Here, we assess efforts by one ecovillage in the Pacific Northwest to change their lifestyles in accordance with ecological principles. Drawing from the concepts of restitution and the political-economic opportunity structure (PEOS), we find that ecovillagers intend to mitigate the antagonism between humans and nature, but they face limitations from the larger urban and political-economic contexts. As such, this study describes the routine practices and experiences of urban ecovillagers as an example of the micro-level dynamics and tensions implied in metabolic rift theory.