Reclaiming Knowledge from the Margins: Gendered Pathways to Sustainability in the Global South

This editorial research article introduces the second issue of Gender and Sustainability in the Global South (GSGS) and synthesizes the collective insights of fourteen studies published in this volume. Following the inaugural issue’s foundation of six articles, the current issue expands the journal’s thematic and geographic scope – spanning Africa, Asia, and cross-regional comparative contexts – to foreground feminist, decolonial, and intersectional approaches to sustainability. Across the papers, contributors examine gendered governance, education, care, labor, and digital innovation as intertwined terrains of transformation. Drawing from empirical studies in Zimbabwe, Malawi, Indonesia, Nigeria, China, Iran, Kenya, Afghanistan, and beyond, the issue demonstrates how gender justice is integral to ecological resilience, equitable governance, and epistemic renewal. Building on five conceptual anchors – structural intersectionality, gendered governance, knowledge co-production, care ethics, and digital empowerment – the editorial highlights how Southern feminist scholarship is reframing sustainability from lived experience and collective agency rather than technocratic abstraction. All these studies contribute to a growing body of Global South knowledge that reclaims sustainability as a moral, political, and epistemic project of justice.