Gender has long been recognised as important within environmental issues, but exactly how and in what contexts it is relevant has been hotly debated. As feminist theorising around women and gender has changed, so have conceptualisations about gender and environment, leading to a key debate within ecofeminism and related literatures about whether there is an essential or a contingent relationship between women and natural environments. Within geography, most political ecologists work with the assumption that the gender-environment nexus is a contingent relationship, and thus investigate how gender relations are salient in the symbolic and material construction of environmental issues. This paper seeks to build from this work and again raise the question of how gender is conceptualised in relation to environment. I begin by briefly reviewing some of the work that has been done on gender and environment and then draw from post-structural feminism to suggest that gender itself has been under-theorised in work on environment. Once gender is re-conceptualized as a process, the dynamic relationship between gender, environment and other aspects of social and cultural life can be brought into view. What emerges is the need for political ecologists to examine gender beyond the household and community and the need to re-conceptualise the gender-environment nexus. A case study of community forestry in Nepal is used to illustrate the importance of interrogating the processes by which gender relations become salient and are reproduced symbolically and materially