Ungrounded cosmopolitanism: Intersections of moral responsibility and gender in environmental activism in rural Solomon Islands

This article explores how environmental activism, in particular resistance to large scale logging companies, occupies a gendered cosmopolitan space at a village level in Solomon Islands. I compare the modes of action a group of village women's environmental activism and opposition to large scale logging in the Western Province of Solomon Islands which operates within culturally prescribed parameters for “good” women with the case of a woman in a village nearby who operates individually in a way that challenges the gender status quo. I conclude that Solomon Islands village women may practise a form of “grounded” cosmopolitanism negotiated through gendered cultural expectations of women's morality, but that contravening gender norms in cosmopolitan practice results in social unmooring.