Abstract
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Households in the affluentWest have become an important target of government andNGO
campaigns to encourage more environmentally sustainable behaviours, but there has been
little research into the gender implications of such policies. This article investigates the
role of gender and time in the sustainability practices of six heterosexual households
with young children, committed participants in the Sustainable Illawarra Super Challenge
programme in 2009. Women spent more total time on sustainable practices, and did so
more often.Men’s contributions relatedmostly to gardening and transport, in longer blocks
of time. In these households, sustainability became a highly gendered practice because
of the different roles in homemaking. Women resisted constructions of themselves as
being closer to nature, and shouldered expectations of sustainability as part of their roles as
mothers and household managers. They experienced time as overlapping and fragmented,
with no distinction between work and leisure. Men contributed to sustainable practices
mainly through activities understood as leisure, in longer blocks of time. Our temporality
lens also illustrates the gendered ways that old practices become deroutinised and
new practices reroutinised. While men were often responsible for the labour and upfront
time required to start or research a project, the responsibility of everyday implementation
and habit-changing commonly fell to women. These findings illustrate how gendered
analyses help identify both opportunities for, and constraints against, change towards
sustainability. Opportunities include the strong connections between both mothers’ and
fathers’ understanding of good parenting and the importance they attach to household
sustainability. Constraints include the temporal challenges faced by households, and how
these interact with wider structural and labour roles..