Well-established bodies of scholarship that inform contemporary global debates on gender, environment and health are fundamentally based on dualistic representations of women, such as First/Third World, rich/poor and victim/polluter. In this paper, we argue that recent socioeconomic transitions -affluence in the global South and rising inequality in the global North -demand the development of gender analytical frameworks that better recognize the diversity of roles that women play in the changing global social order that impact on their health. Our paper (a) critiques the dualisms found in three influential bodies of scholarship, namely gender, environment and development, science, technology and society, and sustainable development; and (b) through our critique, conceptually develops an 'interconnectedness' perspective that focuses on the increasingly shared lived realities of women in the North and the South, to understand the emerging complex relationships between gender, environment and health.

In this paper, I focus on the revival of an Indigenous community seed festival known locally as Burlang Yatra (‘Indigenous Biodiversity Festival’) in the district of Kandhamal in Odisha (India). This annual event brings together millet farmers to share knowledge and practices, including exchange of Indigenous heirloom seeds. Such community seed festivals remain largely underappreciated (and underexplored). Investigating Burlang Yatra through a social-ecological lens allowed for a greater understanding of its capacity to build and strengthen relationships, adaptation, and responsibility, three key principles that together link the social and the ecological in a dynamic sense. These principles, driven by intergenerational participation and interaction as well as social learning, can be seen as fostering ‘social-ecological memory’ of millet-based biodiverse farming. The festival’s persistence and revival illustrate a form of grassroots self-organising that draws on values of an Indigenous knowledge system. Within a restorative context, it has the capacity to repair and restore cultural and ecological relationships that the community has with their own foods and practices. This paper offers a new understanding of community self-organising from a social-ecological perspective and particularly in a marginalised context as supporting the revitalisation of Indigenous food systems.

India has the largest area of rainfed dryland agriculture in the world, with a variety of distinct types of rainfed dryland farming systems producing most of its coarse cereals, food legumes, and minor millets, and large amounts of livestock. All these are vital for national and regional food and nutritional security. Yet, the rainfed drylands have been relatively neglected in mainstream agricultural and rural development policy. As a result, significant social-ecological challenges overlap in these landscapes: endemic poverty, malnutrition and land degradation. Sustainable intensification of dryland agriculture is essential for helping to address these challenges, particularly in the context of accelerating climate change. In this paper, we present 100 questions that point to the most important knowledge gaps and research priorities. If addressed, these would facilitate and inform sustainable intensification in Indian rainfed drylands, leading to improved agricultural production and enhanced ecosystem services. The horizon scanning method used to produce these questions brought together 40 experts and practitioners involved in a broad range of disciplines and sectors. This exercise resulted in a consolidated set of questions covering the agricultural drylands, organised into 13 key themes. Together, they represent a collective programme for cross-and multi-disciplinary research on sustainable intensification in the Indian rainfed drylands.