To fight poverty and environmental degradation and to respect human rights and women's rights at major UN conferences of the nineties governments committed themselves. Sustainability without qualified participation of women will not work was the message of the Rio Janeiro Agenda in 1992. At the 4th World Conference on Women in Beijing a dual track strategy to this end: empowerment on the one hand and gender mainstreaming, the systematic integration of a gender perspective in all institutions and policy areas, on the other was identified. The unpaid care work of women and the precautionary principle are systematically taken as points of reference in the argumentative discourse.