International relations are based on patriarchal norms – states are constructed and legitimized through masculinity making violence inevitable

Climate Change Discourse

Framing climate change as a problem for all humanity ignores its magnified effect on feminine bodies, particularly those in the Global South—a gendered interrogation is a prerequisite to policy solutions

Sultana 14

Farhana Sultana (Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University and a faculty affiliate/associate in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflicts and Collaboration (PARCC), Center for Environmental Policy and Administration (CEPA), South Asia Center, Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs, Tolley Humanities Faculty, International Relations Program, Democratizing Knowledge Collective, and Asian/Asian-American Studies.), “Gendering Climate Change: Geographical Insights”, August 2014, The Professional Geographer, 66(3) 2014, pages 373–374

In recent years, a veritable industry has emerged in relation to climate change vis-a`-vis research, reports, conferences, and projects. Despite more recent controversies and politicized debates on credibility of science, data, and predictions, the general consensus among scholars is that anthropogenic climate change has uneven and uncertain impacts. The contextual nature of climate change and the specificities of responses have been repeatedly highlighted in the milieu of generalizations and globalized discourses, and academics have responded with new research. Hazards geographers and political ecologists are increasingly contributing to climate change research, but Hulme (2008), Bailey (2008), and Moser (2009) have argued that geographers need to engage more critically and forcefully with climate change policies and politics. In responding to such a call, I posit that geographers need to further engage with the gendered implications of climate change across sites and scales, given the paucity of emphasis on such issues in the current literatures. Feminist geographers, especially feminist political ecologists, I believe, have much to contribute to these debates. Few scholars have focused on the ways that gender is a key factor in impacts, adaptation, or mitigation in the voluminous literature on climate change. Men and women experience, understand, and adapt to climate change in different ways, and it is important to understand changes currently taking place, and likely to happen in the near future, from a gendered perspective. Climate change is likely to exacerbate gendered vulnerabilities and differential abilities to cope with changes on multiple fronts. Although climate change is often framed as a global problem for all of humanity, the heterogeneity of its manifestations, impacts, and responses has to be carefully considered. Even though climate change is often portrayed as affecting the poor uniformly in the Global South, this is further complicated by gendered power relations that are intersected with other social differentiations (e.g., class, race, ethnicity, etc.). Implications for livelihood, survival, poverty, and social power relations can have subtle and overt gendered outcomes, which have to be analyzed in context. A focus on the various patterns of changes that exacerbate gender relations in livelihood opportunities, vulnerabilities, hardships, and survival can provide more comprehensive understanding of the ways that climate change impacts households and communities. Such analyses also shed further light on the ways that emerging adaptation programs are influenced by gender dynamics and are complicated by gendered power relations. Recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of heeding gender in climate change discourses, programs, and projects (Dankelman 2010). Such scholarship draws from insights gained in the disaster risk and reduction (DRR) literatures that have predominantly focused on case-specific events and empirical findings and have contributed to greater understandings of the role of gender in disasters and recovery. More broadly, the emerging gender and climate change literature draws from insights of gender development literatures. At the policy level, the clarion call of “No climate justice without gender justice” has become popular since the Bali COP conference in 2007, bringing attention to the fact that climate change is gendered in impacts, mitigation, adaptation, and policy processes. Although still nascent, scholarship in gender and climate change has drawn attention to the gendered differences in perceptions, responses, priorities, abilities, and preferences in the ways that climate change is understood in mitigation and adaptation discourses (Dankelman 2002, 2010; Denton 2002; Masika 2002; Nelson et al. 2002; Brody, Demetriades, and Esplen 2008; Terry 2009; Agostine and Lizarde 2012; see also the GenderCC Network). For instance, a study of women in South Asia found that poor women were particularly vulnerable to dramatic shifts in environmental change (e.g., erratic monsoons, extreme floods, etc.) but were knowledgeable about the needs and requirements of their households and communities to cope with changes as well as about alternative livelihood strategies (Mitchell, Tanner, and Lussier 2007). The constraints they faced were also articulated along class, gender, locational, and institutional lines, however. Feminist geographers and feminist political ecologists can add much to the ongoing debates in the climate change and adaptation literatures, explicating the textured ways that space, place, identities, and lived experiences are intersected by a range of processes and social relations. Seager (2006) and Mac- Gregor (2009) pointed out that gender is often selectively given attention, or not, in any research or policy context. Demetriades and Esplen (2008) and Nelson and Stathers (2009) further argued about the crucial importance of context-specific and complex gender analysis in climate change debates, so as not to reproduce the “women only” narratives that portray women simultaneously as victims and as solution providers, thereby increasing the long list of caregiving roles women are already assigned to. The collapsing of gender-as-women has been common in the existing gender and climate change literature, which is often written for and by the development practitioner and policy community. MacGregor (2009) pointed out that a lack of critical gender analysis or theorization of gender limits such literature, even while bringing very important attention to gender by privileging certain framings in the international arena. For instance, as Dankelman (2010, 11–12) indicated, it is important to look at women as a group as well as gender as a construct but pay greater attention to the experiences of women and focus on women in climate change debates. This might be strategically important, but it also has the potential to limit the attention to the complex ways that masculinities and femininities are constructed, negotiated, altered, and transformed through climate change processes. There can also be the tendency to essentialize women as a homogeneous group and overlook the multiple processes that constitute gendered subjects, identities, and bodies. The dominant focus has been on the impacts of climate change on women, but greater attention is needed to how gender is intersected by other axes (e.g., class, caste, age, etc.) as well as a relational analysis of both women and men across social categories in a changing climate. Given the importance of inclusion and equality, however, it is important not to romanticize women, women’s knowledge, or women’s participation in climate change mitigation or adaptation plans but to recognize their roles, responsibilities, constraints, and opportunities. Balancing inclusion without essentialization is thus crucial, albeit challenging. Such critiques resonate with those of feminist political ecologists and feminist scholars who have long argued that gender–environment relations risk being essentialized and reified without careful, con- textual, and fluid understandings of gender as a power relation (e.g., Agarwal 1992, 2000; Jackson 1993; Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter, and Wangari 1996; Nightingale 2006; Leach 2007; Sultana 2009b). Few feminist geographers have forayed into the climate change debates (e.g., Seager 2009; Bee et al. 2012). To this end, scholars can contribute to the analyses and framing of debates, bringing forth the complex ways that gender–environment relations are produced, performed, contested, and lived. Feminist political ecologists have argued that gendered dynamics of environmental change must be analyzed in ways that integrate subjectivities, scales, places, spaces, ecological change, and power relations (Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter, and Wangari 1996; Elmhirst 2011; Hawkins and Odeja 2011). Broader contexts and constraints that influence gender are crucial to understand and address in processes of climate change. Given the gaps in the literatures on climate change that engage with recent advances in feminist theories, it becomes imperative to bring such insights to bear on the important work that has been accomplished by gender advocates in their sustained and tireless efforts in the development and policy circles. In this regard, feminist analyses of the impacts of climate change remain important but also must be broadened to examine the ways in which gender complicates the assumptions made, the analysis proffered, and adaptation solutions pursued in any climate change program. Such insights can enrich the burgeoning literature on gender and climate change that is relevant to academia and policy circles. In this article, I highlight some key issues. Although my regional emphasis is on South Asia, the analyses and geographical insights are relevant elsewhere.

Current discourse of climate change excludes feminine perceived bodies – a masculine dominated scientific field and globalized climate policy means feminine perceived bodies don’t have a voice in policy implementation

Macgregor 13 (Sherilyn Macgregor is a Reader in Environmental Politics at University of Manchester, “Only Resist: Feminist Ecological Citizenship and the Post-politics of Climate Change”, Hypatia, Volume 29, Issue 3, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hypa.12065/full , accessed 7/13/16//KR)

Most approaches within the broad feminist environmental tradition share basic principles of feminist epistemology, namely that the social situation of the knower matters, that gender as a social category plays a role in epistemic norms, and that gendered, material, and political relations lie behind all knowledge-making practices. Interrogations of these topics by scholars such as Donna Haraway and Lorraine Code have shaped ecofeminist epistemological approaches in significant ways. What should we make of the dominant framing of climate change from this perspective? Does it matter that the definition of climate change as an existential threat, the research being done, and solutions being devised, rest principally in the hands of an elite group of mainly male, mainly white European and Anglo-American scientists from the affluent West? What are the implications of a situation where the choice is between accepting climate science as uncontested (inconvenient) Truth or being dismissed as a skeptic (or stupid)? Since the 1970s, the climate change phenomenon has been defined by a relatively small number of natural scientists. As Eugene Rosa and Thomas Dietz write, “[s]cience provides the framing and discourse for the problem and scientific elites promote the discourse” (Rosa and Dietz 1998, 442). For feminists, it matters that the majority of climate scientists are men from affluent parts of the world. Armed with their UNFCC and IPCC documents, men also dominate in the global climate policy arena and as prominent spokespeople whose worldviews and vested interests serve to construct the issue in stereotypically masculinized ways. For example, not only is the issue constructed in a way that demands techno-scientific solutions, from which there is money to be made, it is also presented as a threat to national and international security, for which a reinforcement of militarism is the answer. In both cases, there is certainty about the inevitability of climate change and a managerial program that serves elite male interests. Also relevant from a feminist epistemological perspective is that climate science operates at a global level, aggregating and calculating facts in ways that are often detached from local experience. This results in an “impersonal, apolitical, and universal imaginary of climate change” that is taking over “from the subjective, situated, and normative imaginations of human actors engaging directly with nature” (Jasanoff 2010, 235). Its definition as global “masks alternative voices that fundamentally challenge Western ways of knowing, being, and doing” (Smith 2007, 198). The exclusion of ways of knowing that challenge mainstream science means that the scope for meaningful feminist participation in the environmental arena may be reduced. Feminist epistemology has always aimed to critique Western science, and yet it is increasingly difficult to ask questions about climate science. This is not an argument in favor of climate change denial, but it is an expression of concern for what the presentation of an incontestable set of predictions about the future might do to a feminist green politics that is at once critical and visionary. Will ecofeminists join the growing number of movements dedicated to “resilience” and “transition” that appear to assume a set of conservative socio-environmental relations designed to ensure survival? Or can they maintain a principled stance for climate justice and a radically different future? Those invoking apocalyptic and survivalist discourses, such as the Transition Town Network, arguably want to turn back time, accepting “a notion that we need to return society back to a steady-state, before the great ecological disruption… to restore natural order as quickly as possible after disturbance” (Catney and Doyle 2011, 190). Will feminists be able to express deep reservations about the assumptions being made about humans and nature in the scientized and securitized climate discourse? Resistance is difficult when the climate consensus has a tone of unquestionable scientific-moral authority. In the UK, those who disagree with “the Science,” or who refuse to change their carbon-emitting ways, have been labeled “eco-sinners.” In 2006 the Bishop of London made headlines for declaring it a moral obligation to eschew environmentally unfriendly practices. He said, “making selfish choices such as flying on holiday or buying a large car are a symptom of sin. Sin is not just a restricted list of moral mistakes. It is living a life turned in on itself where people ignore the consequences of their actions” (Barrow 2006). Mouffe laments the encroachment of this kind of moral argumentation into the properly political sphere when she writes: “What is happening is that nowadays the political is played out in the moral register…. In place of a struggle between ‘right and left’ we are faced with a struggle between ‘right and wrong’” (Mouffe 2005, 5). With climate change, there is little room for ecofeminist critiques of scientific knowledge when an inaccessible, authoritative, and moralistic science sets the parameters of the issue.

Mere acknowledgment that the effects of climate change are worse for feminized and racialized bodies continues to collapse into essentialist solutions—a more complex understanding of what creates vulnerability in the first place is required

Resurrección 13

Bernadette P., Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), Asia Centre, Thailand, Gender & Development Studies, Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand. “Persistent women and environment linkages in climate change and sustainable development agendas.” Women's Studies International Forum 40 (2013) 33–43.

Two historical ‘moments’ define the global environmental agenda at the edge of the new millennium and henceforth have transformed it: the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and the subsequent and ongoing meetings and deliberations around the UNFCCC Conference of Parties (COP). This paper has inquired into the nature and extent of the feminist agenda within these environmental watershed events and processes. From this paper's exposition of key and summarised aspects of discursive practices prior to, during and after these events, I am led to conclude that a strong women–environment linkage has sustained the feminist agenda, despite the increased adoption of alternative and complex perspectives on gender relations and power in natural resource management sectors like forestry and water management towards the end of the 1990s (Leach, 2007). Climate change debates have reinstated the women– environment discourse, thereby demonstrating its resilience. This paper does not claim to disparage the women– environment linkages in environment and climate change political discourses, or to dismiss the merits of a politics based on social difference. What the paper suggests is that learning from the past, we see that problematic outcomes usually emerge when the simplifications that fuel politics segue into policy and programming. Thus in the hope of raising awareness on the traps that these simplifications may create, I have instead opted to explain the resilience of women–environment linkages despite their intellectual practical shortcomings, by investigating, “On what basis, at different times and in different places, does a non-fixed identity become temporarily fixed in such a way that particular groups and individuals behave as a particular kind of agency?” (Dirks et al., 1994: 32). Three reasons emerge. First, the pragmatic need for simplification in conducting climate and environmental politics, where a centred feminine subject who is both climate-vulnerable and agency-endowed, captures the imagination of institutions that are otherwise mired in technological minutiae and political deadlocking in the delicate task of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. To create a visible gender platform, feminists had to locate politically viable entry points that were more or less acceptable to scientists, policy makers and fellow social movement colleagues, as well as to their agenda for transformation. The discourse that links women with the environment stood up to this requirement. Through the essentialised qualities of women's close ties with environmental resources, feminists were able to make claims to a specific space in this political arena. Further, feminists coalesced around an ontological, fixed, simplified and centred feminine subject, simultaneously vulnerable but with change agent qualities. This claim to an essential feminine subject tied to nature homogenises other women subjects, blurring the possibility of more context-specific subjectivities rooted in class, ethnicity, age, eco-zones,17 and so on and denying the range of climate-related experiences possible, where positive opportunities may also inadvertently lie. Second, the discourse of climate change vulnerability has proven to be a strategic entry point for feminist advocacy. Inevitably, this will have to capitalise on sharp gender differences on the adverse impacts of climate change. WED and ecofeminist discourses have plenty to show insofar as women being a prime constituency of the hardest hit environmental victims and environmental protection stakeholders. The history of feminist engagement with global institutions shows us that this is fraught with difficulties since feminist advocacies and discourses are often blunted to suit and shoehorn into these institutions' hegemonic designs and discourses. Under such circumstances, the storyline of women being most vulnerable to climate change effects more easily dovetails with the pervasive positivist framing of most climate change discourses that measures impacts, counts victims, and looks for opportunities for mitigating actions. And finally, the inertia associated with WED projects since the 1990s has re-instated the WED women– environment discourse in contemporary climate change discussions and possibly, future localised interventions in climate mitigation and adaptation. That said, this brings me to policymaking, or the crafting of concrete responses to a claimed deficit: that is, how do we ensure that climate change does not increase the vulnerability of women and people more generally? This brings us to briefly consider the policy implications of adopting more useful approaches to gender, environment and climate change. From Cornwall (2007), we learn that it may be more useful to implement policy that is not premised on gross essentialisms or a priori differences and fixed oppositions between women and men in their dispositions towards environmental and climate change action, but to instead focus on the actual cultural, discursive or political practices that create such inequalities, vulnerabilities and constitute differences in the first place.18 In short, it may be more useful to address the drivers of gendered vulnerability as well as other types of vulnerability, rather than aim for focused targets of women's participation in projects, per se. This will shift the lens towards the practices that materialise the marginalisation, difference, and vulnerabilities of types of women, of certain categories of men and of particular ethnic groups, instead of designing programmes that are ‘one size fits all’. These practices are the elements worth mitigating, rather than creating programmes foisting responsibilities on women (only), tapping an imagined special and distinct agency, and thus passing on to them the additional burden of climate-related action which, may ultimately, let ‘men off the hook’. In short, while it may be politically strategic to muster the entry of gender into climate negotiations through a centred and climate-vulnerable feminine subject, climate programmes will be better served by more agile understandings of women, men and their actual multi-dimensional experiences and adaptations to a changed climate. A climate change policy regime will therefore benefit less from political imaginaries of women and environment ties, but from flexible readings of life on the ground, or in short, a stronger and more complex social analysis of climate, environment, power and people that informs response and action.

Climate change uniquely changes the identities of indigenous women – excluding them from the conversation is uniquely harmful to the identity of those who climate change effects the most; the alternative better solves for these harms while allowing a true solution to climate change

Whyte 14 [Whyte, K. P. (2014), Indigenous Women, Climate Change Impacts, and Collective Action. Hypatia, 29: 599–616. doi: 10.1111/hypa.12089 – Accessed 7/13/16]

However, the political responsibilities just outlined do not yet address the claims made by indigenous women that I discussed in the previous section, which include how indigenous women’s responsibilities, and hence identities, are implicated in climate change impacts and the unique forms of collective action that indigenous women take toward adaptation and mitigation. There are important reasons why this is the case. The first two political responsibilities are based on the passivity of indigenous women as members of indigenous peoples. Indigenous women are described primarily in terms of what they have not brought about. Yet the Mother Earth Water Walk and the Mandaluyong Declaration emphasize the agency of indigenous women that arises from the spiritual relations they maintain with relatives like water. In these cases, climate change impacts are seen as implicating the responsibilities these indigenous women enact within systems of responsibilities that matter to their communities. Moreover, these indigenous women have capacities for unique forms of collective action that can influence adaptation and mitigation beyond their communities, and serve as vehicles for more formal inclusion of indigenous women in policy processes from which they were previously excluded. The third political responsibility emphasizes the involvement of indigenous women as knowledge keepers and knowers in other senses who should be included within scientific and political organizations that have already been put in place by nonindigenous parties, like the IPCC. Yet McGregor understands indigenous women’s knowledge as being more than a body of insights about the environment; rather, knowledge involves being embedded within systems of responsibilities that one actively performs. Knowledge, then, refers to knowing what one ought to do to be a responsible environmental steward or guardian (in McGregor’s case, she discusses water). The Mandaluyong Declaration also expands the notion of knowledge by placing priority on what science can do for indigenous women if they are allowed to determine the purpose for which scientific research is employed. Both McGregor and the Declaration stress broader notions of knowledge that embrace indigenous women’s insights for establishing principles and structures of collective action toward adaptation and mitigation that are appropriate for their communities. For example, environmental scientists have often told indigenous peoples not to eat their first foods because of contamination. These scientific assessments often included indigenous women’s knowledge. Yet the impact of not eating traditional foods, which can sever multiple responsibilities among humans and certain species, can lead to far worse harms to indigenous identity, community well-being, and human health (such as having to eat more fast food) (Arquette et al. 2002; Ranco et al. 2011; see also Nadasdy 1999). Here, a major articulation of indigenous women’s knowledge is often understood according to knowledge of what responsibilities are important for indigenous communities’ collective continuance and how science can be redeployed to serve these responsibilities, instead of serving only the goals established by people of other heritages and nations