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An Intersectional Exploration of Climate Institutions
Abstract
Governing bodies at different levels are authoritative institutions and civil servants/policy-makers are key actors in realizing global and national climate objectives. They have largely failed to create effective, legitimate, democratic, and just policies. This is problematic in light of research that views the climate transition as a social and behavioral concern and stresses the importance of paying attention to social effects in policy-making. The authors explore the Swedish climate institutions: the Environmental Protection Agency, the Traffic Administration, the Energy Agency, and the Innovation Agency. They analyzed key policy documents and 31 interviews questions on how social issues are understood and dealt with in institutional practices. The authors confirmed that emphasis has been on technological innovations and economic incentives. Although policy-makers recognize the relevance of social concerns, efforts to date seem insufficient. The main challenge is how to incorporate such concerns when action is restricted by institutional path dependencies. The authors’ approach starts in feminist institutionalism and adds intersectionality in an analytical lens that helps explore how power relations are embedded within climate institutions and can explain their effects. Insights are that power relations are context-specific and situated in a certain place and time. The authors’ method of how to pursue contextually sensitive and situated analyses of complex intersections of power can be used across contexts in further comparative studies.
... Much of the previous intersectional work has been criticised for being too anthropocentric and for its lack of attention to the interconnection between human/society and nature power relations (cf. Lykke 2010; Kronsell et al. 2021). To enlargen the political analyses to also incorporate nature and the material as a sphere of analysis, this article's take on intersectionality is inspired by the so-called material and posthumanist turn within feminist thinkinga turn that criticises the idea of the natural world and technical artefacts as a mere context to humanity, resource, restraint, or raw material for technological progress, economic production, or social construction. ...
... The underlying causes of climate change, as well as the suggested solutions (such as the CE), are embedded and entangled in unequal power structures, relationships, and practices (cf. Kronsell et al. 2021). Sustainable transformations thus require a restructuring of societal relations; offering alternative development pathways towards new modes of practice and re-formed relations between humans, societies, the economy, and the natural world, including materials and things. ...
Transitions to a circular economy (CE) have, in recent years, emerged as a popular approach to deal with the challenges related to the systemic crises of the Anthropocene. However, mainstream CE discourses have been critiqued for being ecomodernist and for focusing too much on managerial issues, at the expense of justice and social aspects, and thereby risking not leading to the systemic changes so direly needed. Given this backdrop, as well as cities key role in responding to sustainability challenges, this article adopts a posthumanist intersectionality-perspective to explore the transformative potential of a municipal policy in which CE has been adopted as a key strategy for achieving change. A critical policy analysis of the City of Gothenburg’s new Environment and Climate Programme reveals that, apart from a focus on efficiency, the Programme also includes a politics of sufficiency and decreased consumption, thus potentially taking a first step within Swedish public sector towards an outspoken post-growth paradigm. The analysis, moreover, provides insights into what notions of citizens (or Gothenburgians), justice, responsibility, and nature–human relations the Programme is underpinned by. Drawing on these findings, the article proposes practical implications for urban policymakers and avenues for further research.
Climate institutions, such as government agencies, are important sites for climate change action. However, the type of action available to any institution will relate to the historical experiences of the institution and those embedded within it. Thus, institutions may exhibit path-dependency, based on previous experiences, such as gender-blindness. This may make the inclusion of gender and other climate-relevant social factors appear less appropriate in comparison to technical and economic solutions. This has direct consequences for the types of climate action undertaken and how climate change is framed, thus often as a scientific, technical problem rather than a societal problem with intersectional dimensions. This chapter focuses upon two climate institutions: the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency and the Swedish Transport Administration. Based on the interview data, it explores how civil servants frame possibilities for institutional action and changes in climate policy-making. It highlights that respondents would alternatively see change resulting from government direction and as something that motivated civil servants could lead on. Respondents often asserted that civil servants should aspire to remain apolitical and serve the will of the democratically elected government. Drawing on an intersectionality-inspired feminist institutionalism and organisational studies literature, we suggest several ways for civil servants to take action without damaging their institutional legitimacy. This will increase the possibility of further intersectional understanding and recognition of climate-relevant social differences in climate policy-making.
Climate change effects, views and approaches vary based on geographical location, class, gender, age and other climate related social factors. It is thus relevant to explore how various government bodies/authorities involved in dealing with climate change represent and act on social difference across diverse societies. This article performs a discourse analysis of climate policy documents from three Swedish government agencies: the Transport Administration, the Energy Agency, and the Environmental Protection Agency. This in order to explore how the different agencies represent social difference: what is made visible; what is obscured; what are the impli-cations? We collected a purposive, collated sample of literature through online searches and personal communications with agency staff. We apply an intersectional approach to the sampled literature. The article finds that while each agency articulates an awareness of social difference, this tends to manifest in broad terms. It argues that this has the effect of obscuring differential climate impacts and effects of climate action, with potential environmental justice implications. Finally, the article concludes by proposing that incorporating intersectional approaches will support more effective, inclusive and equitable climate action, in Sweden and elsewhere.
There are large discrepancies in the transport sector along gender lines in travel patterns and means of transportation used, but also in attitudes and norms among citizens, planners and decision-makers, with women generally more positive towards measures involving the lowering CO2 emissions. At the same time, the number of women involved in transport-related decisions is low. This is a problem for gender equality but possibly also for sustainability. A careful review of previous studies indicated a lack of analyses on the subject based on quantitative data at the local level. We investigated a possible link between women’s presence in local policymaking and more sustainable transport policies, and whether it is possible to capture such an effect. The main contribution of this paper is a methodological approach in which, besides generating unique data on representation in municipalities (confirming men’s dominance, specifically in transport policymaking), possibilities for quantitatively measuring gender and the level of sustainability in transport planning are discussed and tested. Challenges in collecting relevant data and analyzing possible covariances in the data set are discussed and presented as well as suggestions for further investigations into the possible link between gender and sustainable transport performance.
Since the 1990s, feminist institutionalists have argued that women parliamentarians work within the confines of a gendered institution which impacts on their capacity to reform both parliamentary process and policy. In this chapter, I consider the linkages between the theory of feminist institutionalism and the relatively new research on gender-sensitive parliaments, which has led to a new understanding of parliaments as workplaces. Practical implications arise from these theoretical revisions, notably the need to refocus parliamentary development assistance around a ‘theory of change’ that aims to transform parliaments, as institutions, rather than relying on capacity building initiatives for women alone. ‘Feminist institutionalism and gender-sensitive parliaments’ concludes by considering opportunities for ongoing dialogue between theory and practice.
This posting outlines the concept of "environmental justice" as I recently described it for an encyclopedia entry in the field of "Action Research". In this discipline, the term "environmental justice" describes more than a fair outcome. It is a social movement, and a theoretical lens, that is focused on fairness in the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens, and in the processes that determine those distributions. In both cases, an attention to environmental justice means amplifying the voices of poor, racialized and Indigenous communities in environmental and natural resource policy-making venues -- places that have typically produced decisions resulting in those communities bearing more than their "fair share" of environmental harms. It also means, increasingly, paying attention to the manner through which disadvantaged and historically oppressed peoples within those communities will often be disproportionately harmed, often along familiar social gradients of gender, class, sexuality, caste, and (dis)ability. Effective research in the environmental justice framework has tended to involve robust partnerships between local communities, organizations and/or groups of activists seeking to achieve environmental justice, and university-based researchers employing participatory-action methodologies. These collaborative efforts have proven to be very fruitful in many cases, but should not be understood as easy or straightforward to implement. New models are emerging that seek to combine and enhance the expertise, capacities and perspectives of the partners in order to meet primarily, the needs of communities, and secondarily, the aims of researchers.
Zusammenfassung Abels und Mushaben (2012) argumentieren, dass in der Europaischen Union ein doppeltes Demokratiedefizit bezogen auf Geschlecht existiert: Frauen seien in den EU-Institutionen unterreprasentiert und der EU-Politik fehle es insgesamt an einer Geschlechterperspektive. Dieser Beitrag tragt mit einem spezifischen Fokus auf Klimapolitik zu dieser Forschungsperspektive bei. Die EU ist eine wichtige Konstrukteurin des internationalen Klimaregimes und sie hat sich gleichzeitig verpflichtet, Gender Mainstreaming umzusetzen. Daruber hinaus sind in Europa geschlechtsspezifische Unterschiede bezogen auf das Verhalten zum und Ansichten uber den Klimawandel dokumentiert. Dieser Artikel untersucht, wie relevant das doppelte Demokratiedefizit in der EU Klimapolitik ist. Wir stellen die Anteile der Expertinnen und Experten bei den zustandigen Referaten fur Klimapolitik in der Europaischen Kommission dar und zeigen mit Dokumentenanalysen und Interviews mit politischen Entscheidungstrager*innen, dass geschlechtsspezifische Aspekte in den EU Klimadokumenten nicht enthalten sind. Mittels feministischem Institutionalismus kommen wir zu dem Ergebnis, dass die bestehenden geschlechtsspezifischen Machtverhaltnisse innerhalb der Kommission die erforschten Klimaeinheiten beeinflussen und diese mannlich konnotierte institutionelle Praktiken reproduzieren. ----- Abstract Abels and Mushaben (2012) argue that there is a double democratic deficit in the European Union regarding gender: women are underrepresented within the EU institutions and gender awareness is lacking in EU policymaking. This article contributes to this scholarship with a specific focus on the climate domain. The EU is an important constructor of the international climate regime and the Union is committed to gender mainstream all its policies and processes. Furthermore, there are documented gender differences in Europe regarding behaviour and views on climate change. This article investigates the relevance of the double democratic deficit for the EU´s climate policymaking. We map the representation of female and male experts at the European Commission´s climate units and search for gender recognition in the EU´s climate documents. There we discover silence regarding gender, confirmed through interviews with policy-makers. Using feminist institutionalism we conclude that existing gender power relations within the Commission affect the explored climate units, which reproduce masculine institutional practices. ----- Bibliographie: Magnusdottir, Gunnhildur Lily/Kronsell, Annica: The Double Democratic Deficit in Climate Policy-making by the EU Commission, Femina Politica, 2-2016, S. 64-76. https://doi.org/10.3224/feminapolitica.v25i2.25353
Intersectionality originates in feminist critical theory as a perspective for analyzing how categories of difference – such as gender, class, race and age – are co-constructed and embedded in dynamic relations of power. In a previous article, we discussed how intersectionality can be used as an analytical tool for research on climate change, and sketched out a methodological framework for this purpose. In the present paper, we extend the intersectional lens to explore how the categories of ‘human’ and ‘nature’ are made meaningful in relation to each other.
Drawing on theories from the fields of ecofeminism, critical animal studies and posthumanism, we assemble an intersectional analytical lens, focused on a crucial theme in all of these fields: the dualistic construction and representation of humans and nature as separate entities, and how such dualism plays out in relation to issues of knowledge and subjectivity. The analytical lens is then engaged to explore the concepts of biodiversity and eco-system services, which have during the past few decades emerged as keywords for conceptualizing human-nature relations in environmental research and policy. We assess debates around the concepts of biodiversity and eco-system services in scholarly publications, and how these reflect, reinforce, or contest dualistic and hierarchical constructions of human-nature relations. Here, we look for principal tendencies, as well as challenging perspectives and voices.
Climate change and related adaptation strategies have gender-differentiated impacts. This paper reviews how gender is framed in 41 papers on climate change adaptation through an intersectionality lens. The main findings show that while intersectional analysis has demonstrated many advantages for a comprehensive study of gender, it has not yet entered the field of climate change and gender. In climate change studies, gender is mostly handled in a men-versus-women dichotomy and little or no attention has been paid to power and social and political relations. These gaps which are echoed in other domains of development and gender research depict a ‘feminization of vulnerability’ and reinforce a ‘victimization’ discourse within climate change studies. We argue that a critical intersectional assessment would contribute to unveil agency and emancipatory pathways in the adaptation process by providing a better understanding of how the differential impacts of climate change shape, and are shaped by, the complex power dynamics of existing social and political relations.
In this paper I expand upon the recent use of the term " Critical Environmental Justice Studies. " This concept is meant to capture new developments in Environmental Justice (EJ) Studies that question assumptions and gaps in earlier work in the field. Because this direction in scholarship is still in its formative stages, I take this opportunity to offer some guidance on what Critical Environmental Justice (CEJ) Studies might look like and what it could mean for theorizing the relationship between race (along with multiple additional social categories) and the environment. I do so by (1) adopting a multidisciplinary approach that draws on several bodies of literature, including critical race theory, political ecology, ecofeminist theory, and anarchist theory, and (2) focusing on the case of Black Lives Matter and the problem of state violence.
This article explores whether women can become the change agents for a sustainable transport sector and how such a change can be accomplished through transport policy. Based on the Swedish case, women still on average have transportation behaviour with lower environmental impact than men have; women also tend to have stronger preferences for improving sustainability in the sector. The results imply that there are interesting behaviour and attitude characteristics expressed by women that ought to be recognised and applied e.g. through contesting prevailing norms and methods, in order to achieve sustainability goals for the sector. Altogether this suggests that women, beyond democracy reasons, should become more active as change agents to challenge the dominant male norms. Policy implications of these findings include measures to improve gender equal participation would e.g. make it possible to take advantage of these differences. Putting more emphasis on the relationships between travel patterns, sustainability and gendering on all levels in transportation planning as a measure for improved sustainability. Implementing new ways of framing the problems to be solved, challenging existing norms working against gender equity and raising consciousness of sustainability issues. Using gender mainstreaming to monitor policy impacts on different groups of men and women. However, today there is a lack of incentives to apply these tools. Since there is a tremendous complexity in the relationships on all levels, more research is needed together with improved dissemination of knowledge for the competence to increase within the transport sector.
This article uses feminist institutionalism to examine how gender mainstreaming has been sidelined in European Union (EU) climate change policy. It finds that, with a few exceptions largely emanating from the European Parliament's Committee on Women's Rights and Gender Equality, EU responses to climate change are gender-blind. This is despite the Treaty obligations to gender mainstream policy in all areas and despite the intersections between climate change and development policy, which is renowned for having taken gender equality and women's empowerment seriously and for instigating gender mainstreaming and specific actions as a means to achieve them. The persistent invisibility of gender can be attributed to various forms of institutional resistance.
Issues that women traditionally organize around—environmental health, habitats, livelihoods—have been marginalized in debates that treat climate change as a scientific problem requiring technological and scientific solutions without substantially transforming ideologies and economies of domination, exploitation and colonialism. Issues that GLBTQ people organize around—bullying in the schools, hate crimes, marriage equality, fair housing and health care—aren't even noted in climate change discussions. Feminist analyses are well positioned to address these and other structural inequalities in climate crises, and to unmask the gendered character of first-world overconsumption; moreover, both feminist animal studies and posthumanism bring awareness of species as an unexamined dimension in climate change. A queer, posthumanist, ecological and feminist approach—brought together through the intersectional lens of ecofeminism—is needed to tackle the antifeminist threads companioning the scientific response to climate change: the linked rhetorics of population control, erotophobia and ecophobia, anti-immigration sentiment, and increased militarism.
This article explores the link between gender representation and climate policy-making in Scandinavia. We ask to what extent equal descriptive representation (critical mass) results in substantive representation (critical acts). Our study shows that women and men are equally represented in administrative and political units involved in climate policy-making, and in some units women are in the majority. However, a text analysis of the outcomes, that is, the Scandinavian climate strategies, reveals a silence regarding gender, further confirmed through interviews. Accordingly, a critical mass of women does not automatically result in gender-sensitive climate policy-making, recognizing established gender differences in material conditions and in attitudes toward climate issues. In interviews, we also note that policy-makers are largely unaware of gender differences on climate issues in the Scandinavian context. We discuss why a critical mass of women in climate policy-making has not led to critical acts and offer alternative explanations informed by feminist IR theory. For example, poststructural feminism claims that masculine norms are deeply institutionalized in climate institutions; hence, policy-makers adapt their actions to the masculinized institutional environment. Thus, substantive representation should be understood in relation to gendered institutional processes.
Since publication of the Brundtland Report in 1987, the notion of sustainable development has come to guide the pursuit of environmental reform by both public and private organizations and to facilitate communication among actors from different societal spheres. It is customary to characterize sustainable development in a familiar typology comprising three pillars: environmental, economic, and social. The relationships among these dimensions are generally assumed to be compatible and mutually supportive. However, previous research has found that when policy makers endorse sustainable development, the social dimension garners less attention and is particularly difficult to realize and operationalize. Recent years though have seen notable efforts among standard setters, planners, and practitioners in various sectors to address the often neglected social aspects of sustainability. Likewise, during the past decade, there have been efforts to develop theoretical frameworks to define and study social sustainability and to empirically investigate it in relation to "sustainability projects," "sustainability practice," and "sustainability initiatives." This introductory article presents the topic and explains some of the challenges of incorporating social sustain-ability into a broad framework of sustainable development. Also considered is the potential of the social sustainability concept for sustainability projects and planning. This analysis is predicated on the work represented in this special issue and on related initiatives that explicitly discuss the social pillar of sustainable development and its relationship to the other dimensions.
Investigations of the interconnectedness of climate change with human societies require profound analysis of relations among humans and between humans and nature, and the integration of insights from various academic fields. An intersectional approach, developed within critical feminist theory, is advantageous. An intersectional analysis of climate change illuminates how different individuals and groups relate differently to climate change, due to their situatedness in power structures based on context-specific and dynamic social categorisations. Intersectionality sketches out a pathway that stays clear of traps of essentialisation, enabling solidarity and agency across and beyond social categories. It can illustrate how power structures and categorisations may be reinforced, but also challenged and renegotiated, in realities of climate change. We engage with intersectionality as a tool for critical thinking, and provide a set of questions that may serve as sensitisers for intersectional analyses on climate change.
New institutionalism (NI) may no longer qualify as being ‘new’, but since re-emphasizing institutions as a central explanatory variable in political analysis over two decades ago, it continues to provide scholars with a useful perspective through which to analyse political dynamics and outcomes that shape everyday life. The renewed focus on institutions has rebalanced the structure/agency scales back toward the former without losing important insights about the role and impact of political actors. NI has allowed for greater understanding about the co-constitutive nature of politics: the various ways in which actors bring about or resist change in institutions; and the way institutions shape the nature of actors’ behaviour through the construction of rules, norms and policies.
In June 2001 the European Council adopted the EU Programme for the Prevention of Violent Conflict. The story of how conflict prevention became an integral and legitimate part of EU policy and practice illustrates the influence of powerful ideas and successful norm advocacy of a small state managing to punch above its weight in the EU. The aim of this article is to analyse norm advocacy as a potent addition to traditional strategies of gaining influence in the Union. By tracing the process of Swedish promotion of conflict prevention the article explores norm advocacy strategies, such as framing, agenda-setting, diplomatic tactics and the power of the Presidency. The EU institutional setting also provides ample opportunities for a small state to exert normative power, and in areas where great powers are generally regarded as dominant, such as the CFSP and the ESDP.
In the limited literature on gender and climate change, two themes predominate – women as vulnerable or virtuous in relation to the environment. Two viewpoints become obvious: women in the South will be affected more by climate change than men in those countries and that men in the North pollute more than women. The debates are structured in specific ways in the North and the South and the discussion in the article focuses largely on examples from Sweden and India. The article traces the lineage of the arguments to the women, environment and development discussions, examining how they recur in new forms in climate debates. Questioning assumptions about women's vulnerability and virtuousness, it highlights how a focus on women's vulnerability or virtuousness can deflect attention from inequalities in decision-making. By reiterating statements about poor women in the South and the pro-environmental women of the North, these assumptions reinforce North–South biases. Generalizations about women's vulnerability and virtuousness can lead to an increase in women's responsibility without corresponding rewards. There is need to contextualise debates on climate change to enable action and to respond effectively to its adverse effects in particular places.
Series Blurb: Oxford Readings in Feminism provide accessible, one-volume guides to the very best in contemporary feminist thinking, assessing its impact and importance in key areas of study. Collected together by scholars of outstanding reputation in their field, the articles chosen represent the most important work on feminist issues, and concise, lively introductions to each volume crystallize the main line of debate in the field. Is there too much gender in politics, too much stereotyping of female and male? Or is there too little gender, too little attention to differences between women and men? Should feminists be challenging male dominance by opening up politics to women? Or is 'women' a fictitious entity that fails to address differences by class or race? Is equality best served by denying differences between the sexes? Or best promoted by stressing the special needs of women? The essays in Feminism and RPolitics answer these questions in a variety of ways, but all see feminism as transforming the way we think about and act in politics. Spanning issues of citizenship and political representation, the ambiguities of identity politics, and the problems in legislating for sexual equality, the readings provide an exciting overview of recent developments. This outstanding collection will be essential reading for any feminist who has doubted the importance of political studies, and any student of politics who has doubted the relevance of feminism.
At all levels of society, our world is becoming increasingly dominated by an inability, even refusal, to engage with others' ideas. It does not bode well either for democracy or for science. Mikael Klintman's book offers just the kind of in-depth exploration of the issues that surround this disturbing phenomenon that is desperately needed.' R.I.M. Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Oxford University and author of Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language 'Few things could be more important right now than trying to shed new light on "knowledge resistance" in the Internet age. It may not be a new phenomenon, but the way it impacts on our lives today, it is an existential threat to humanity. Mikael Klintman’s book provides valuable perspectives on knowledge resistance and suggests how we, as individuals and societies, could find ways to manage and prevent its harmful forms.' Björn Ulvaeus, songwriter, producer and member of the Swedish pop group ABBA and tireless promoter of critical thinking in the spirit of the Enlightenment 'A must-read, especially in these turbulent times. An insightful approach to a complex issue.' Nazli Choucri, Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This book considers how public sector institutions can be transformed to better support sustainable development by exploring the concept of green inside activism and its importance for institutional change. The phenomenon of inside activism has been shown to be crucial for green policy change and this book focuses on public officials as green inside activists, committed to green values and engaged in social movement, acting strategically from inside public administration to change public policy and institutions in line with such value commitment. The book theorizes how green inside activism can contribute to a more sustainable development through institutional change. This theorizing builds on and relates to highly relevant theoretical arguments in the existing literature. The authors also consider the legitimacy of inside activism and how it can be reconciled with democratic ideals. This innovative work will appeal to students and scholars of public policy, political science and environmental politics.
Attempts to understand the production and impacts of climate change and proposals for mitigation and adaptation through gender analyses are thin on the ground.
This book explains how gender as a power relationship in uences climate change- related strategies and considers the additional pressure that climate change puts on uneven gender relations and the ways in which men and women experience the impacts of these in different economic contexts. The chapters dismantle gender inequality and injustice through a critical appraisal of vulnerability and relative privilege within genders. Part I addresses conceptual frameworks and international themes concerning climate change and gender, and explore emerging ideas concerning the rei cation of gender relations in climate change policy. Part II offers a wide range of case studies from the Global North and the Global South to illustrate and explain the limitations to gender-blind climate change strategies.
This book will be of interest to students, scholars, practitioners and policymakers interested in climate change, environmental science, geography, politics and gender studies.
Climate change is one of the most urgent priorities on the global agenda. The impacts are already being felt, with every country in the world grappling with the challenges of mitigating the causes and—especially for developing countries and vulnerable populations—adapting to its effects. Increasingly, the evidence reveals that the impacts of climate change are not gender-neutral. Women and men experience climate change differently and their capacity to cope with it varies.
The 2007 UNDP Human Development Report cautions that gender inequalities intersect with climate risks and vulnerabilities, concluding that climate change is likely to amplify and exacerbate existing patterns of gender disadvantage. Thus, women’s historic disadvantages, their limited access and control over decision-making, environmental and economic resources, and their restricted rights, make them more vulnerable to climate change.
A response to Stacy Alaimo: ";Insurgent Vulnerability and the Carbon Footprint of Gender";.
In this book, feminist scholar Nina Lykke highlights current issues in feminist theory, epistemology and methodology. Combining introductory overviews with cutting-edge reflections, Lykke focuses on analytical approaches to gendered power differentials intersecting with other processes of social in/exclusion based on race, class, and sexuality. Lykke confronts and contrasts classical stances in feminist epistemology with poststructuralist and postconstructionist feminisms, and also brings bodily materiality into dialogue with theories of the performativity of gender and sex. This thorough and needed analysis of the state of Feminist Studies will be a welcome addition to scholars and students in Gender and Women's Studies and Sociology.
Gender mainstreaming refers to the process of incorporating a gender perspective to any action, policy, legislation or action in order to ensure that the concerns of all are addressed and that gender inequalities are not perpetuated through institutional means. However the implementation of gender mainstreaming across the globe has not necessarily resulted in advances for women, as it is usually associated with a winding back of women-focused policies and programs. Emerging research indicates that climate change has significant gendered impacts and yet policies and practices designed to address and shape mitigation and adaptation strategies have failed to incorporate gender mainstreaming. Further the scientific and technological focus of many of these institutional responses has led to a lack of attention to social outcomes more generally. This has resulted in a lack of attention to the vulnerable groups, including women. This paper outlines an argument not only for gender mainstreaming of climate policy but also for policy focused specifically on women's empowerment. Gender mainstreaming is essential in ensuring that not only climate policies and programs are comprehensive, but so too are women-focused policies designed to ensure that women are supported and empowered to take action on their own behalf.
Feminist Political Ecology explores the gendered relations of ecologies, economies and politics in communities as diverse as the rubbertappers in the rainforests of Brazil to activist groups fighting racism in New York City. Women are often at the centre of these struggles, struggles which concern local knowledge, everyday practice, rights to resources, sustainable development, environmental quality, and social justice. The book bridges the gap between the academic and rural orientation of political ecology and the largely activist and urban focus of environmental justice movements.
This paper examines whether particular subjective features are better suited than objective feature, to study the ability of the Nordic EU member states to have a say within the environmental policy of the EU. The Nordic states will be placed within a conceptual framework intended to explain states’ ability to exercise influence internationally. The paper will argue that raditional quantitative measures normally defining size of states, such as the population, territorial size, GDP and military strength, do not give a clear picture of their influence within the EU. The paper argues that subjective features, which are concerned with how various domestic and external actors regard the Nordic states in environmental matters, have enabled the Nordic states to punch above their weight in EU environmental policy-making. Also, it is maintained here that features such as Nordic politicians’ ambitions and prioritizations and their ideas about EU decision-making processes may indicate their states’ ability to influence within the Union. Furthermore, we claim that states’ administrative competence and the degree of domestic cohesion, combined with the degree to which the state maintains an external united front are important indicators of their success in the EU.
A women's rights perspective can inform and structure research on climate policy impacts on women. To date, climate policy analysis has mostly considered women as agents of climate protection, that is, objects of mitigation policies, rather than subjects in their own right. However, climate change mitigation involves direct and indirect distributive effects depending on which sectors are involved, which instruments are chosen and how funds are obtained and allocated. Since gender roles impact on individual livelihoods and activities, distributive effects are likely to be gendered. This paper suggests that women's human rights can be used as a framework for research aiming to fill this gap. They provide a well-developed, tested range of criteria for gender justice. Such assessments would allow for a more systematic and comprehensive understanding of the gendered distributive effects of climate policies, notably with regard to the particularly understudied situation in the industrialized world.
Over the last two decades, women have organized against the almost routine violence that shapes their lives. Drawing from the strength of shared experience, women have recognized that the political demands of millions speak more powerfully than the pleas of a few isolated voices. This politicization in turn has transformed the way we understand violence against women. For example, battering and rape, once seen as private (family matters) and aberrational (errant sexual aggression), are now largely recognized as part of a broad-scale system of domination that affects women as a class. This process of recognizing as social and systemic what was formerly perceived as isolated and individual has also characterized the identity politics of people of color and gays and lesbians, among others. For all these groups, identity-based politics has been a source of strength, community, and intellectual development. The embrace of identity politics, however, has been in tension with dominant conceptions of social justice. Race, gender, and other identity categories are most often treated in mainstream liberal discourse as vestiges of bias or domination-that is, as intrinsically negative frameworks in which social power works to exclude or marginalize those who are different. According to this understanding, our liberatory objective should be to empty such categories of any social significance. Yet implicit in certain strands of feminist and racial liberation movements, for example, is the view that the social power in delineating difference need not be the power of domination; it can instead be the source of political empowerment and social reconstruction. The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite- that it frequently conflates or ignores intra group differences. In the context of violence against women, this elision of difference is problematic, fundamentally because the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class. Moreover, ignoring differences within groups frequently contributes to tension among groups, another problem of identity politics that frustrates efforts to politicize violence against women. Feminist efforts to politicize experiences of women and antiracist efforts to politicize experiences of people of color' have frequently proceeded as though the issues and experiences they each detail occur on mutually exclusive terrains. Al-though racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices. And so, when the practices expound identity as "woman" or "person of color" as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling. My objective here is to advance the telling of that location by exploring the race and gender dimensions of violence against women of color. Contemporary feminist and antiracist discourses have failed to consider the intersections of racism and patriarchy. Focusing on two dimensions of male violence against women-battering and rape-I consider how the experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, and how these experiences tend not to be represented within the discourse of either feminism or antiracism... Language: en
New Institutionalism has shown that the ‘rules of the game’ are crucial to structuring political life in terms of constraining and enabling political actors and influencing political outcomes. A limitation of this approach, however, has been its overemphasis on formal rules, with much less attention paid to how informal rules work alongside and in conjunction with formal institutions to shape actors and outcomes. This article contributes to an emerging literature that highlights the importance of informal institutions by bringing into focus one element that has been hidden in these debates – the influence of gender norms and practices on the operation and interaction between formal and informal institutions. It highlights some of the key benefits of a gender analysis for understanding political institutions in both their formal and informal guise and considers some of the challenges in building a research agenda that requires new methods and techniques of inquiry.
An ongoing crisis in Australian agriculture resulting from climate crises including drought, decreasing irrigation water, more recent catastrophic flooding, and an uncertain policy environment is reshaping gender relations in the intimate sphere of the farm family. Drawing on research conducted in the Murray-Darling Basin area of Australia we ask the question: Does extreme hardship/climate crises change highly inequitable gender relations in agriculture? As farm income declines, Australian farm women are more likely to be working off farm for critical family income while men continue to work on farm often in circumstances of damaged landscapes, rising debt, and limited production. This paper examines the way gender relations are being renegotiated in a time of significant climate crisis. Our research suggests that climate crises have indeed led to changes in gender relations and that some changes are unexpected. Whereas one would logically assume that women’s enhanced economic contribution would increase their power in gender negotiations, we argue that this does not necessarily occur because their contribution is viewed as a farm survival strategy. Men are committed to prioritizing the farm and view women’s income generating work as critical to this purpose and yet, paradoxically, long for a return to traditional farm roles. We find that women are actively resisting traditional gender relations by reshaping a role for themselves beyond the farm—in the process moving physically and mentally away from a farm family ideology, questioning gender inequalities, and by extension their relationships.
This article explores the place of race, class, gender, sexual and national identities and cultures in global climate change. Research on gendered vulnerabilities to disasters suggests that women are more vulnerable than men to many meteorological disasters related to climate change, specifically flooding and drought. This is because of their relative poverty, economic activities (especially subsistence agriculture) and the moral economies governing women's modesty in many cultures. Research on historical and contemporary links between masculinity and the military in environmental politics, polar research and large-scale strategies for managing risk, including from climate change, suggests that men and their perspectives have more influence over climate change policies because of their historical domination of science and government. I expect that masculinist identities, cultures and militarised institutions will tend to favour large-scale remedies, such as geoengineering, minimise mitigation strategies, such as reducing energy use, and emphasise ‘security’ problems of global climate change.
This article argues that climate change not only requires major technological solutions, but also has political and socio-economic aspects with implications for development policy and practice. Questions of globalisation, equity, and the distribution of welfare and power underlie many of its manifestations, and its impacts are not only severe, but also unevenly distributed. There are some clear connections, both positive and negative, between gender and the environment. This paper explores these linkages, which help to illustrate the actual and potential relationships between gender and climate change, and the gender-specific implications of climate change. It also provides examples of women organising for change around sustainable development issues in the build-up to the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), and demonstrates how women's participation can translate into more gender-sensitive outcomes.