Critical ReviewOther Social Sciences
Situated Knowledge for Sustainability: A Gender-Sensitive Framework from the Global South
Sustainability research in the Global South is shaped by gender, colonial legacies, and local knowledge systems. A new five-pillar framework argues that situated knowledge—knowledge produced from specific social positions—is essential for addressing climate change and inequality simultaneously.
By Sean K.S. Shin
This blog summarizes research trends based on published paper abstracts. Specific numbers or findings may contain inaccuracies. For scholarly rigor, always consult the original papers cited in each post.
Sustainability research has long claimed universality—the assumption that climate science, environmental policy, and development economics apply equally regardless of context. Feminist and postcolonial scholars have challenged this assumption, arguing that knowledge about sustainability is always situated: produced by specific people, in specific places, from specific social positions. Whose knowledge counts as "scientific" and whose is dismissed as "local" or "traditional" reflects power structures that sustainability research itself must confront.
The Research Landscape
The Five-Pillar Framework
Liu and Heinonen (2025) advance a five-pillar framework for rethinking gender and sustainability scholarship in the Global South. The framework is grounded in decolonial feminist epistemology—the idea that knowledge production is shaped by colonial legacies and gender hierarchies, and that producing more just knowledge requires deliberately centering marginalized perspectives.
The five pillars:
Positionality: Researchers must acknowledge how their social position (gender, nationality, class, institutional affiliation) shapes what they study and how they interpret findings.Intersectionality: Gender does not operate in isolation. Its interaction with race, class, caste, ethnicity, and geography produces unique vulnerabilities and capacities that single-axis analyses miss.Epistemic plurality: Multiple forms of knowledge—scientific, indigenous, experiential, embodied—have legitimate contributions to sustainability research. Privileging scientific knowledge over others reflects epistemic hierarchy, not inherent superiority.Relational ethics: Research relationships in the Global South often involve power asymmetries (Northern researcher ↔ Southern community). Ethical research requires reciprocity, not extraction.Transformative intent: Research should aim not just to describe inequality but to change it. The framework explicitly positions sustainability scholarship as politically engaged.Women's Climate Adaptation in Durban
Udo, Bhanye, and Daoudiallo (2024), with 17 citations, provide the most empirically grounded study, examining women's climate adaptation strategies in Durban, South Africa, through a feminist political ecology and intersectionality lens. Their fieldwork documents how women in informal settlements develop adaptation strategies—water harvesting, community food gardens, mutual aid networks—that formal climate adaptation plans often overlook.
Key findings:
- Gendered vulnerability: Women face disproportionate climate impacts due to their concentration in informal housing, responsibility for water and food provision, and limited mobility during floods. These vulnerabilities are not biological but structural—products of gendered division of labor and unequal access to resources.
- Gendered adaptation: Women's adaptation strategies are often invisible to formal planning because they operate at the household and community level rather than the infrastructure level. A community food garden is not a "climate adaptation project" in planning terms, but it directly addresses food insecurity caused by climate-related agricultural disruption.
- Intersectional dynamics: Among women, vulnerability varies by race, age, disability, and household structure. Black women heading single-parent households in informal settlements face the most severe compound vulnerabilities—a pattern that aggregate gender statistics do not reveal.
Indigenous Knowledge and Education
Seleke and Teis (2025) examine how indigenous knowledge and gender perspectives can shape inclusive education policies in the developing world. Their systematic review finds that conventional educational models—designed in Western contexts and exported through international development programs—often marginalize indigenous knowledge systems and reproduce gender inequalities rather than addressing them.
The review identifies successful cases where education systems have integrated indigenous knowledge: land-based learning programs in Canada, culturally responsive science curricula in New Zealand, and community-governed schools in several African countries. The common factor is community control over curriculum content—rather than top-down integration of "indigenous content" into Western structures.
Digital Health with a Gender Lens
Kong and Bragazzi (2025) apply a gender-sensitive foresight perspective to the convergence of digital health and One Health in the Global South, using Delphi methodology with latent semantic analysis. Their study reveals that gender considerations are largely absent from current digital health and One Health convergence discourse—a gap that mirrors the broader tendency of technology-driven health initiatives to treat populations as undifferentiated.
Critical Analysis: Claims and Evidence
<
| Claim | Evidence | Verdict |
|---|
| Sustainability knowledge is situated rather than universal | Liu & Heinonen's epistemological framework | ✅ Supported — grounded in established feminist epistemology |
| Women face disproportionate climate vulnerability due to structural factors | Udo et al.'s Durban fieldwork | ✅ Supported — 17 citations, rigorous mixed-methods design |
| Women's adaptation strategies are invisible to formal planning | Udo et al.'s analysis of planning documents vs. community practices | ✅ Supported |
| Gender is largely absent from digital health/One Health discourse | Kong & Bragazzi's Delphi analysis | ✅ Supported |
Open Questions
Scaling situated knowledge: If knowledge is always situated, how can findings from specific contexts inform policy at national or global scales without losing their contextual specificity?Institutional change: The framework calls for epistemic plurality, but academic institutions reward specific forms of knowledge production (peer-reviewed publications in English). How can institutional incentives be restructured?Measurement: How do you measure the effectiveness of gender-sensitive sustainability interventions? Standard metrics (GDP, emissions, development indices) may not capture the dimensions that matter most to affected communities.Men and masculinities: Gender-sensitive sustainability research has focused primarily on women's experiences. How do masculinity norms contribute to unsustainable practices, and how can they be transformed?What This Means for Your Research
For sustainability researchers, Liu and Heinonen's five-pillar framework provides a practical checklist for ensuring that research design reflects situated knowledge principles rather than defaulting to universalist assumptions.
For climate adaptation planners, Udo et al.'s finding that women's adaptation strategies are invisible to formal planning suggests that community-level participatory assessment should supplement top-down vulnerability mapping.
Explore related work through ORAA ResearchBrain.
Sustainability research has long claimed universality—the assumption that climate science, environmental policy, and development economics apply equally regardless of context. Feminist and postcolonial scholars have challenged this assumption, arguing that knowledge about sustainability is always situated: produced by specific people, in specific places, from specific social positions. Whose knowledge counts as "scientific" and whose is dismissed as "local" or "traditional" reflects power structures that sustainability research itself must confront.
The Research Landscape
The Five-Pillar Framework
Liu and Heinonen (2025) advance a five-pillar framework for rethinking gender and sustainability scholarship in the Global South. The framework is grounded in decolonial feminist epistemology—the idea that knowledge production is shaped by colonial legacies and gender hierarchies, and that producing more just knowledge requires deliberately centering marginalized perspectives.
The five pillars:
Positionality: Researchers must acknowledge how their social position (gender, nationality, class, institutional affiliation) shapes what they study and how they interpret findings.Intersectionality: Gender does not operate in isolation. Its interaction with race, class, caste, ethnicity, and geography produces unique vulnerabilities and capacities that single-axis analyses miss.Epistemic plurality: Multiple forms of knowledge—scientific, indigenous, experiential, embodied—have legitimate contributions to sustainability research. Privileging scientific knowledge over others reflects epistemic hierarchy, not inherent superiority.Relational ethics: Research relationships in the Global South often involve power asymmetries (Northern researcher ↔ Southern community). Ethical research requires reciprocity, not extraction.Transformative intent: Research should aim not just to describe inequality but to change it. The framework explicitly positions sustainability scholarship as politically engaged.Women's Climate Adaptation in Durban
Udo, Bhanye, and Daoudiallo (2024), with 17 citations, provide the most empirically grounded study, examining women's climate adaptation strategies in Durban, South Africa, through a feminist political ecology and intersectionality lens. Their fieldwork documents how women in informal settlements develop adaptation strategies—water harvesting, community food gardens, mutual aid networks—that formal climate adaptation plans often overlook.
Key findings:
- Gendered vulnerability: Women face disproportionate climate impacts due to their concentration in informal housing, responsibility for water and food provision, and limited mobility during floods. These vulnerabilities are not biological but structural—products of gendered division of labor and unequal access to resources.
- Gendered adaptation: Women's adaptation strategies are often invisible to formal planning because they operate at the household and community level rather than the infrastructure level. A community food garden is not a "climate adaptation project" in planning terms, but it directly addresses food insecurity caused by climate-related agricultural disruption.
- Intersectional dynamics: Among women, vulnerability varies by race, age, disability, and household structure. Black women heading single-parent households in informal settlements face the most severe compound vulnerabilities—a pattern that aggregate gender statistics do not reveal.
Indigenous Knowledge and Education
Seleke and Teis (2025) examine how indigenous knowledge and gender perspectives can shape inclusive education policies in the developing world. Their systematic review finds that conventional educational models—designed in Western contexts and exported through international development programs—often marginalize indigenous knowledge systems and reproduce gender inequalities rather than addressing them.
The review identifies successful cases where education systems have integrated indigenous knowledge: land-based learning programs in Canada, culturally responsive science curricula in New Zealand, and community-governed schools in several African countries. The common factor is community control over curriculum content—rather than top-down integration of "indigenous content" into Western structures.
Digital Health with a Gender Lens
Kong and Bragazzi (2025) apply a gender-sensitive foresight perspective to the convergence of digital health and One Health in the Global South, using Delphi methodology with latent semantic analysis. Their study reveals that gender considerations are largely absent from current digital health and One Health convergence discourse—a gap that mirrors the broader tendency of technology-driven health initiatives to treat populations as undifferentiated.
Critical Analysis: Claims and Evidence
<
| Claim | Evidence | Verdict |
|---|
| Sustainability knowledge is situated rather than universal | Liu & Heinonen's epistemological framework | ✅ Supported — grounded in established feminist epistemology |
| Women face disproportionate climate vulnerability due to structural factors | Udo et al.'s Durban fieldwork | ✅ Supported — 17 citations, rigorous mixed-methods design |
| Women's adaptation strategies are invisible to formal planning | Udo et al.'s analysis of planning documents vs. community practices | ✅ Supported |
| Gender is largely absent from digital health/One Health discourse | Kong & Bragazzi's Delphi analysis | ✅ Supported |
Open Questions
Scaling situated knowledge: If knowledge is always situated, how can findings from specific contexts inform policy at national or global scales without losing their contextual specificity?Institutional change: The framework calls for epistemic plurality, but academic institutions reward specific forms of knowledge production (peer-reviewed publications in English). How can institutional incentives be restructured?Measurement: How do you measure the effectiveness of gender-sensitive sustainability interventions? Standard metrics (GDP, emissions, development indices) may not capture the dimensions that matter most to affected communities.Men and masculinities: Gender-sensitive sustainability research has focused primarily on women's experiences. How do masculinity norms contribute to unsustainable practices, and how can they be transformed?What This Means for Your Research
For sustainability researchers, Liu and Heinonen's five-pillar framework provides a practical checklist for ensuring that research design reflects situated knowledge principles rather than defaulting to universalist assumptions.
For climate adaptation planners, Udo et al.'s finding that women's adaptation strategies are invisible to formal planning suggests that community-level participatory assessment should supplement top-down vulnerability mapping.
Explore related work through ORAA ResearchBrain.
References (4)
[1] Liu, M. & Heinonen, T. (2025). Framing Situated Knowledge: A Knowledge Framework for Gender and Sustainability in the Global South. Global Sustainability through Gender Studies.
[2] Udo, F., Bhanye, J.I., & Daoudiallo, B. (2024). Evaluating the Sustainability of Local Women's Climate Change Adaptation Strategies in Durban, South Africa: A Feminist Political Ecology and Intersectionality Perspective. Sustainable Development.
[3] Seleke, B. & Teis, N. (2025). Towards inclusive education: indigenous knowledge, gender, and policy in the global south. Gender and Behaviour, 23(2).
[4] Kong, J. & Bragazzi, N. (2025). Framing the Convergence of One Health and Digital Health in the Global South With a Gender-Sensitive Foresight Perspective: Delphi Study. JMIR.