Social Science – Sociology Assignment 11

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gide20

Identities Global Studies in Culture and Power

ISSN: 1070-289X (Print) 1547-3384 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gide20

Intersecting identities and global climate change

Joane Nagel

To cite this article: Joane Nagel (2012) Intersecting identities and global climate change, Identities, 19:4, 467-476, DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2012.710550

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2012.710550

Published online: 01 Aug 2012.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 1683

View related articles

Citing articles: 7 View citing articles

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power Vol. 19, No. 4, July 2012, 467–476

Intersecting identities and global climate change

Joane Nagel

(Received 1 July 2012)

This article explores the place of race, class, gender, sexual and national identities and cultures in global climate change. Research on gendered vul- nerabilities 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 activi- ties (especially subsistence agriculture) and the moral economies governing women’s modesty in many cultures. Research on historical and contempo- rary 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.

Keywords: gender; masculinity; climate change; militarism; identity

Introduction

Identities and cultures based on race, class, gender, sexuality and nationalism are critical to understanding all social processes, especially those associated with human well-being. Global climate change is no exception. There is a growing international scientific and political consensus that climate change poses one of the greatest contemporary challenges to human civilization (IPCC 2007, Roston 2008, Hoegh-Guldberg and Bruno 2010). Research on climate change is based mainly on the natural sciences and engineering, and these disciplines and perspectives set the research priorities and inform the policy agenda. These investigators recog- nise that social factors play a critical role in both the causes and consequences of climate change, but they generally do not collaborate with social scientists and have only the most rudimentary understanding of social processes relating to climate change causation, mitigation and adaptation. Even when social factors are considered, studies tend to be applied and descriptive: public opinion surveys, policy analyses and economic models (Stern 2007, Nordhaus 2011, Pidgeon and Fischoff 2011, Weber 2011). There is relatively little recognition in the climate change literature of the relevance of gender, race, class and nationalism and cer- tainly not sexuality. When I recently commented to a natural science colleague

ISSN 1070-289X print/ISSN 1547-3384 online © 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2012.710550 http://www.tandfonline.com

468 J. Nagel

that there might be a gendered dimension to climate change, he laughed out loud: ‘Doesn’t climate change affect everyone?!’ The answer to that incredulous ques- tion is ‘no’, climate change does not affect everyone equally, nor does everyone respond uniformly to climate change. This article presents three examples of how identities and cultures based on gender, race, class, sexuality and nationalism are relevant to understanding the impacts of, and adaptations to, climate change.1

Gender, sexuality and the nation

The two consequences of increased global temperatures observed in the last cen- tury are the warming of the Earth’s oceans and the melting of polar ice sheets (IPCC 2007, NSIDC 2012). These combine with an observed and predicted increased intensity of hurricanes and associated storm surges to make coastal flooding a highly expected outcome of global climate change (Webster et al. 2005, Stammerjohn et al. 2008, Sallenger et al., 2012). A widely studied hurricane in Bangladesh in 1991 illustrates the interplay among gender, sexuality and the nation in the kinds of large storms researchers expect to increase in frequency and inten- sity as the Earth’s oceans warm and sea level rises. Cannon (2002) notes that Bangladesh is one of the few countries in the world where men live longer than women. Researchers argue that women’s poverty and vulnerability to weather- related flooding are among the reasons for women’s shorter lives. (Begum 1993, Choudhury et al. 1993). When the flood waters receded after the 1991 monsoon, the International Federated Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies estimated that 140,000 had died in the flooding; 90% of the deaths were women and children (Schmuck 2002). What accounts for this disproportionate number of women’s deaths?

Research on gender and nationalism tells us that women and men occupy different spaces in national economies – both material (work) and moral (respectability). Women’s domestic responsibilities and cultural expectations for their modesty can expose them to extreme weather events, particularly in the case of ‘hydrometeorological’ disasters such as floods or storm surges (Spring 2006). A number of material and moral economic factors combined to make Bangladeshi women especially vulnerable when the waters rose in 1991. They were responsible for the home – caring for children, finding food, water and fuel, cooking meals, growing crops and tending livestock – which tied poor women to low-lying residences. Their mobility was limited by cultural prescriptions for women’s proper dress, demeanour and public visibility – their long, loose cloth- ing restricted movement through water; they were ashamed to seek higher ground occupied by unrelated men; they could not swim. Women’s relative poverty made them less resilient – they had poor nutrition, poor health care and limited fam- ily support as divorced and widowed women were discouraged from remarrying (Cannon 2002).2 National and ethnic cultures, which restrict women’s mobility and resilience, make them more vulnerable to the effects of climate change – not only from storms and flooding but also from drought, in cases where women are

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 469

subsistence farmers, and from forced migrations out of drought and flooding con- ditions. While it is true that both men and women are affected by climate change, the effects are not always the same, nor are they always equal.

Race, class, gender and the moral economy

It is not only in developing countries or the Global South that gendered local and national identities and cultures shape vulnerabilities to storms and flooding. Seager (2006, p. 30) studied the natural and political disasters associated with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 and noted that:

Poverty combines with race and ideologies about gender to produce a metric of deep disadvantage in terms of mobility: even in a country as awash in cars as the United States, women are less likely to have a car or a driver’s license than their male counterparts.

Reports about post-Katrina New Orleans revealed a moral economy of raced, classed and gendered valuations of worth, credibility, dangerousness and deservingness that often shape responses to disasters like Katrina which affect the vulnerabilities of different groups. Officials and reporters described post-Katrina New Orleans as a ‘war zone’, where ‘anarchy’ reigned replete with sniping, loot- ing and raping (Tierney et al. 2006, Stock 2007). Contrary to initial media reports, the notorious murders in the Superdome were never documented, although several people died from natural causes or suicide, nor was there clearly documented evi- dence of widespread rape or sexual assault (Rosenblatt and Rainey 2005, Thevenot and Russell 2005). Racial cosmologies of Black male dangerousness, especially as sexual threats, no doubt added fuel to the rumours of rape and mayhem that char- acterised much early reporting about post-Katrina New Orleans. Ransby (2006, p. 218) found little sympathy for the presumed victims of this crime wave, Black women, who were depicted as ‘culprits in their own misfortune’ because of their presumed laziness, promiscuity and irresponsibility rather than because of low pay, lack of jobs and lack of affordable housing (see also Giroux 2006).3 Raced, gendered, sexual and other moral stereotypes, calculations of worth and blame, questions of responsibility, and notions of fairness can influence plans for and responses to disasters in different national settings and in the international arena.

Nation, class and the global system

The melting of the Arctic permafrost and polar ice sheets combined with coastal flooding resulting from climate change will have dramatic effects on many island nations and coastal communities globally. Coastlines around the world – in both rich and poor countries – will be reshaped by rising sea levels and storm surges, and the consequences and coping capacity of nations to these changes will be greatly influenced by national wealth and standing in the international system.

470 J. Nagel

Rich countries will have more resources to adapt to the impacts of climate change by designing barriers to storm surges, refitting buildings and coastal facilities, or rebuilding away from coastlines. Poor countries, especially island nations whose land and fresh water supplies are vulnerable to sea level rise, will have to rely on others in the global system to provide them with resources to adapt or migrate. While there is broad agreement that national wealth has contributed to climate change by industrialisation’s contribution to increased greenhouse gas emissions, there is no credible commitment by these global climate changers to assist poorer nations to cope with changes they did not cause. Small island states such as Tuvalu, Micronesia, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Maldives and mostly rural Indigenous occupants of Arctic coastal communities in Siberia, Alaska, Canada, Norway and Greenland have neither the resources nor the local or international influence to economically or culturally maintain their communities by remaining in place or migrating en masse as climate change floods or melts their homelands.4 Developed countries have not been quick to take on the responsibility for aiding relatively poor countries affected by other outcomes of rising global temperatures such as heat and drought, the negative consequences of which are easier to ignore or to dismiss as simply ‘weather’, misfortune, outcomes of war and conflict, or the result of poorly managed development policies.5 As in the case of Hurricane Katrina, the often non-white victims of these slowly unfolding climate-related disasters are dismissed as, at least in part, designers of their own demise by living in places where bad things just seem to happen naturally. The climate change-related ‘bad luck’ of poor countries and their populations illustrates both the vulnerabilities of some national identities and cultures to the actions and assumptions of other national identities and cultures. The power of national identities and cultures to keep in place conceptions of who ‘we’ are and what ‘we’ represent compared to ‘them’ is illustrated by the durability of this point of view even in the face of our obvious role in causing their problem.

Masculinity, militarism and science

Climate-related environmental transformations underway are escalating and will impact virtually all human communities. Identities and cultures play a role in vulnerability to or responsibility for causing global climate change. Responses to climate change also have a classed, raced, gendered and nationalist face. Strategies for mitigation (stopping or reducing the causes of climate change) and adaptation (learning to live with the consequences of climate change) are not merely technical matters (increasing energy efficiency, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, developing alternative energy sources, redesigning housing, transporta- tion and communities). The policies that shape local, national and international responses to climate change reflect the gendered power, privilege and preoccu- pations of mostly male policy-makers around the world (see, e.g. Bulhaug et al. 2008). Researchers note the paucity of representatives from Indigenous communi- ties, women’s groups and underclasses in shaping climate change mitigation and

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 471

adaptation policies, despite the relative vulnerability of these groups to the effects of climate change (Rohr 2009, UNEP 2009). Less documented is the place of gendered national institutional identities and cultures in shaping climate change responses and setting research priorities.

‘Gender’ is not synonymous with ‘women’, and understanding men’s place and perspectives in how nations respond to climate change is an important aspect of the relationship between gender and climate change. Men are influential in determining the causes of and responses to climate change through their domi- nation of politics and policy-making around the world. Masculine interests, and cultures imbedded in scientific and military organisations come to the fore in set- ting climate change research priorities and approaches to addressing the causes and impacts of climate change.

The marriage of militarism and science is reflected in the history of both polar exploration and climate research. Dodds (2006, p. 61, 2009) described Antarctica as ‘a stage on which men (and it has been men in the main) and their nations either carved out claims to the continent or initiated scientific programmes’. Unlike Antarctica, a competitive (and sometimes cooperative) arena for the men driv- ing international relations and scientific inquiries, Rosner (2009) observes that the Arctic has long been gender integrated, occupied by both women and men. It was into this already-inhabited northern realm that European and American often military-backed male explorer/scientists inserted themselves, exploiting Indigenous knowledge, while claiming Western discovery, conquest and owner- ship. Women largely were erased from the personal accounts and professional publications of these men of science and discovery, thus avoiding female pollution of the pure masculine challenge of men against nature. The Arctic reality, however, was more feminised. Palsson (2008) describes long-term intimate and profes- sional liaisons between some of the most famous early twentieth-century Arctic explorers, such as Robert Peary and Vilhjalmur Stefansson, and the Indigenous women and men with whom these Westerners lived and worked for extended periods of time over decades. Not only were Inuit women seen as convenient sex- ual partners by many Arctic ‘explorers’, and as means to keep the men in their crews ‘contented’, Native women also had essential skills in hunting and fish- ing, skinning, seamstressing, cooking local fish and animals and polar survival. They sometimes became mothers of explorers’ children, suitable partners in their place, but invisible in the lives of these men when they returned home to honour and fame.

It is not only in the history of polar exploration that we find a marriage of mas- culinity, militarism and science. Fleming (2007, 2010) catalogues historical efforts (stretching back two centuries and beyond) by the United States and other govern- ments to use and control climate for military purposes. These projects included timing war campaigns to weather forecasts, cloud seeding to create storms and other techniques designed to shift weather patterns. He describes ‘a long paper trail of climate and weather modification studies by the Pentagon and other [US] government agencies’ in the twentieth century (2007, p. 49). For instance, ‘In the

472 J. Nagel

1950s the Pentagon convened a committee to study the development of a Cold War weather weapon’, and ‘During Operation Popeye in the Vietnam war, the Air Force flew more than 2600 cloud seeding sorties over the Ho Chi Minh Trail to . . .

Make mud, not war’ (2007, p. 56). The so-called ‘geoengineers’, who imagine and design massive projects to

alter the global climate, are the contemporary incarnations of these climate war- riors. These male natural scientists and engineers are described by Fleming (2007, p. 50) as ‘The new titans who see themselves as heroic pioneers, capable of alleviating or averting natural disasters’ by large-scale projects to stop global warming. For instance, physicist Lowell Wood, a protégé of Edward Teller (father of the hydrogen bomb), who worked for 40 years at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has suggested building up the Arctic ice by using large artillery pieces to shoot tons of sulphate aerosols or nanoparticles into the stratosphere to deflect the Sun’s rays and cool the planet or alternatively by hooking a 25-km long ‘sky hose’ to a high-flying military superblimp to pump reflective particles into the atmosphere. Another is chemist Paul Crutzen whose idea is to create a ‘minor nuclear winter’ by shooting or ballooning millions of metric tons of sulphur each year over the tropics to simulate a Mount Pinatubo-scale eruption (Crutzen 2006, Fleming 2007, p. 48). There are a variety of problems with these kinds of schemes: they are likely to be expensive and ineffectual, they relegate to the back burner any plans to mitigate or reduce greenhouse gases; they might actually be dangerous.6

They represent an imperialistic, militaristic bent – large-scale projects undertaken by one country (usually the United States) to dominate the global environmental system, or as Fleming (2007, p. 48) aptly summarises, ‘basically declaring war on the stratosphere’.

The militarisation of climate change studies is evidenced in geoengineering designs. Militarised responses to global climate change can be heard in alarms sounded about ‘national security’ – as in the 2007 report, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change (CNA-Center for Naval Analysis 2007), the 2008 ‘National Intelligence Assessment on the National Security Implications of Global Climate Change to 2030’ (US. House of Representatives 2008) and the 2012 National Council for Science and the Environment conference on ‘Environment and Security’ (2012). The institutionalisation of a militarised mas- culinist mentality into the climate-related policies and operations of government agencies can be seen in plans to protect borders from climate refugees or use rail guns designed during Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) to fire tons of material into space to deflect the Sun’s rays. The implications for climate science and policy of redeploying the resources of US national lab- oratories previously engaged in nuclear weapons production (e.g. Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore) for climate change modelling and geoengineering projects should not be presumed to be purely innocuous. Even when these facil- ities contribute valuable technology and expertise to the research enterprise, they also bring along their budgetary needs, ‘strategic’ goals and militaristic assumptions.

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 473

Conclusions

Sociological studies of organisational culture suggest that organisations impose their own agendas and worldviews on the problem at hand: to a man with a ham- mer, everything looks like a nail. Researchers need to ask: What perspectives and plans will the United States and other national militaries and their organisa- tional apparati bring to the policy table when planning responses to global climate change? (Climate security?) What strategies for addressing the effects of climate change should we expect from national weapons laboratories? (Geoengineering?) It is important to not only ask the question, What is the role of gender in shaping vulnerabilities to climate change? but also to ask the question, What is the role of gendered institutions and ideologies in creating the world that will result from gendered responses to climate change? A major challenge for researchers working on identities and cultures not only is to continue to document inequalities, but also to be willing to examine the identities and cultures of those in positions of power. Exploring the place of dominant group identities and cultures in unlikely topics such as global climate change, allows us to see more easily the opaque workings and interests of privilege and interests. Once exposed, our responsibility is to use this knowledge in policy arenas.

Acknowledgements The author thanks Natalie Parker, University of Kansas, and Monique Laney, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, for their collegial assistance with the research and ideas in this article.

Notes 1. For overviews of ‘gender and climate change’, see Denton (2002, 2004), Fordham

(2003), Byanyima and Martinez-Soliman (2009) and Enarson (2012). 2. For a general discussion of gender and ‘natural disasters’, see Neumayer and Plümper

(2007). Not all of Bangladesh is dominated by or bows to strict patriarchy; Kabeer (2000) outlines the transformation in the lives of Bangladeshi women who partici- pated in Bangladesh’s ‘New Industrial Policy’ in the 1980s which brought many young women to cities to work, challenging traditions of women’s seclusion. In 2011, the Bangladesh government approved the National Women Development Policy, which gives women equal political and economic rights to men; conservative Islamic groups opposed implementation of the policy, first introduced in 1997, then again in 2007 (Islam 2011).

3. Ransby also points out the resiliency of many whose lives were disrupted by Hurricane Katrina, including the support networks and mutual aid responses undertaken by many of New Orleans most vulnerable residents; for a discussion of the ways in which gender shaped the impact of Hurricane Katrina on men and women in New Orleans, see Read (2009).

4. For a list of small island states grappling with sea level rise, see Association of Small Island States (AOSIS) at http://aosis.info/ accessed on 9 January 2012; for a list of Indigenous peoples contending with the warming of the Arctic, see Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) at http://inuitcircumpolar.com/index.php?Lang=En&ID=1, accessed on 9 January 2012.

474 J. Nagel

5. Major contributors to greenhouse gases such as the four biggest emitters – China, the United States, the European Union and Brazil – have not met any previous emissions reduction targets, the first of which was set at the Rio de Janiero ‘Earth Summit’ in 1992 and the most recent in the 2009 ‘Copenhagen Accord’ (United Nations 1997, 2010). Similarly, most of the financial assistance promised by industrial countries to assist poorer nations affected by climate change has not been deliv- ered; see http://www.fedre.org/en/content/developed-world-failing-climate-funds- pledge-says-bangladeshi-minister, accessed on 12 January 2012; http://www.iied. org/climate-change/media/rich-nations-failing-keep-copenhagen-promise-help-poor- nations-adapt-climate-ch, accessed on 12 January 2012.

6. Some of these schemes have been evaluated by natural scientists; for instance, Bala et al. (2008) predict decreased global mean precipitation as a hydrological consequence of geoengineered reductions in solar radiation.

References Bala, G., Duffy, P.B., and Taylor, K.E., 2008. Impact of geoengineering schemes on the

global hydrological cycle. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105, 7664–7669.

Begum, R., 1993. Women in environmental disasters: the 1991 cyclone in Bangladesh. Gender and Development, 1(1), 34–49.

Bulhaug, H., Gleditsch, N.P., and Theisen, O.M., 2008. Implications of climate change for armed conflict [online]. In: Paper presented in workshop on the Social Dimensions of Climate Change, The World Bank, Washington, DC. Available from: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTRANETSOCIALDEVELOPMENT/Resources/ SDCCWorkingPaper_Conflict.pdf [Accessed 1 July 2012].

Byanyima, W. and Martinez-Soliman, M., 2009. Resource guide on gender and cli- mate change [online]. United Nations Development Programme. Available from: http://www.uneca.org/acpc/about_acpc/docs/UNDP-GENDER-CLIMATE-CHANGE- RESOURCE-GUIDE.pdf [Accessed 11 January 2012].

Cannon, T., 2002. Gender and climate hazards in Bangladesh. Gender and Development, 10 (2), 45–50.

Center for Naval Analysis, 2007. National security and the threat of climate change. Alexandria, VA: CNA Corporation.

Choudhury, A.M.R., Bhuyia, A.U., et al., 1993. The Bangladesh cyclone of 1991: why so many people died. Disasters, 18 (4), 291–304.

Crutzen, P.J., 2006. Albedo enhancement by stratospheric sulfur injections: a con- tribution to resolve a policy dilemma? [online]. Climatic Change, 77 (3–4), 211–20. Available from: http://www.cogci.dk/news/Crutzen_albedo%20enhancement_ sulfur%20injections.pdf [Accessed 16 January 2012].

Denton, F., 2002. Climate change vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation: Why does gender matter? Gender and Development, 10, 10–20.

Denton, F., 2004. Gender and climate change: giving the ‘Latecomer’ a head start. IDS Bulletin, 35, 42–49.

Dodds, K., 2006. Post-colonial Antarctica: an emerging engagement. Polar Record, 42 (1), 59–70.

Dodds, K., 2009. Settling and unsettling Antarctica. SIGNS, Spring, 505–509. Enarson, E.P., 2012. Women confronting natural disaster: from vulnerability to resilience.

Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Fleming, J., 2007. The climate engineers. The Wilson Quarterly, 31 (2), 46–60. Fleming, J., 2010. Fixing the sky: the checkered history of weather and climate control.

New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 475

Fordham, M., 2003. Gender, disaster and development: the necessity of integration. In: M. Pelling, ed. Natural disasters and development in a globalising world. London: Routledge, 57–74.

Giroux, H., 2006. Stormy weather: Katrina and the politics of disposability. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Books.

Hoeg-Gulberg, O. and Bruno, J., 2010. The impact of abrupt climate change on the world’s marine ecosystems. Science, 18 (328), 1523–1528.

Islam, N., 2011. Government tries to push women’s equality for a third time, but Islamists object [online]. AsiaNews.it, 25 March. Available from: http://www.asianews.it/news- en/Government-tries-to-push-womens-equality-for-a-third-time,-but-Islamists-object- 21120.html [Accessed 10 January 2012].

Kabeer, N., 2000. The power to choose: Bangladeshi women and labour market decisions in London and Dhaka. London: Verso.

National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE), 2012. Environment and security: 12th national conference on science, policy, and the environment [online]. Available from: http://www.environmentandsecurity.org/ [Accessed 15 January 2012].

National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), 2012. Arctic sea ice news and analy- sis [online]. Available from: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/ [Accessed 24 January 2012].

Neumayer, E. and Plümper, T., 2007. The gendered nature of natural disasters: the impact of catastrophic events on the gender gap in life expectancy, 1981–2002. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97 (3), 551–566.

Nordhaus, W.D., 2011. The economics of tail events with an application to climate change. Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 5 (2), 240–257.

Palsson, G., 2008. Hot bodies in cold zones: Arctic exploration [online]. S&F Online, 7 (1). Available from: http://barnard.columbia.edu/sfonline/ice/index.htm [Accessed 24 January 2012].

Pigeon, N. and Fischoff, B., 2011. The role of social and decision sciences in communicat- ing uncertain climate risks. Nature Climate Change, 1, 35–41.

Ransby, B., 2006. Katrina, black women, and the deadly discourse on black poverty in America. Du Bois Review, 3, 215–222.

Read, C., 2009. ‘His and her Katrina. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society, Des Moines, Iowa.

Rohr, U., 2009. Gender into climate policy [online]. GenderCC – Women for Climate Justice. Available from: http://www.gendercc.net/fileadmin/inhalte/Dokumente/Tools/ toolkit-gender-cc-web.pdf [Accessed 10 January 2012].

Rosenblatt, S. and Rainey, J., 2005. Katrina takes a toll on truth, news accuracy [online]. Los Angeles Times, 27 September. Available from: http://articles.latimes.com/2005/sep/27/ nation/na-rumors27 [Accessed 10 April 2009].

Rosner, V., 2009. Gender and polar studies: mapping the terrain. Signs, 34 (3), 489–494. Roston, E., 2008. The carbon age: how life’s care element has become civilization’s

greatest threat. New York, NY: Walker Publishing Company. Sallenger, A.H., Doran, K.S., and Howd., P.A., 2012. Hotspot of accelerated sea-

level rise on the Atlantic coast of North America [online]. Nature, 2 (7), 1597. Available from: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate 1597.html [Accessed 1 July 2012].

Schmuck, H., 2002. Empowering Women in Bangladesh [online]. International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Available from: http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/ rwb.nsf/AllDocsByUNID/570056eb0ae62524c1256b6b00587224 [Accessed 11 April 2009].

Seager, J., 2006. Noticing gender (or not) in disasters. Geoforum, 37 (1), 2–3.

476 J. Nagel

Spring, U., 28 July 2006. Vulnerability and resilience building of gender confronted with extreme hydro-meterological events [online]. PowerPoint presentation at CRIM- National University of Mexico. Available from: http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache: QpRDmoK9nakJ:www.ehs.unu.edu/file.php%3Fid%3D158+hydrometerological+ disasters+gender&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us [Accessed 10 April 2009].

Stammerjohn, S.E., et al., 2008. Trends in Arctic annual sea ice retreat and advance and their relation to El Nino-southern oscillation and southern annular mode variability. Journal of Geophysical Research, 113 (10), 10–29.

Stern, N., 2007. The economics of climate change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stock, P., 2007. Katrina and anarchy: a content analysis of a new disaster myth. Sociological

Spectrum, 27, 705–726. Thevenot, B. and Russell, G., 2005. Reports of anarchy at Superdome overstated [online].

Seattle Times, 26 September. Available from: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/ nationworld/2002520986_katmyth26.html [Accessed 10 April 2009].

Tierney, K., Bevc, C., and Kuligowski, E., 2006. Metaphors matter: disaster myths, media frames, and their consequences in hurricane Katrina. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 604, 57–81.

United Nations, 1997. Earth summit [online]. Available from: http://www.un.org/geninfo/ bp/enviro.html [Accessed 10 January 2012].

United Nations, 2010. Copenhagen accord [online]. Available from: http://unfccc.int/ meetings/copenhagen_dec_2009/items/5262.php [Accessed 10 January 2012].

United Nations Environmental Programme, 2009. Bridging the gap: gender transforming environmental management [online]. Available from: http://www.unep.org/GC/GC25/ Docs/Women-Concept-Note.pdf [Accessed 12 January 2012].

US House of Representatives, 2008. National intelligence assessment on the national secu- rity implications of global climate change to 2030 [online]. Available from: http://www. dni.gov/testimonies/20080625_testimony.pdf [Accessed 11 April 2009].

Weber, E.U., 2011. Psychology: climate change hits home [online]. Nature Climate Change, 1 (March), 25–26. Available from: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v1/n1/full/ nclimate1070.html [Accessed 15 January 2012].

Webster, P.J., Holland, G.J., et al., 2005. Changes in tropical cyclone number, duration, and intensity in a warming environment [online]. Science, 16 (309), 1844–1846.

JOANE NAGEL is University Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Kansas. She is Director of the National Science Foundation’s C-CHANGE (Climate Change, Humans, and Nature in the Global Environment) Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program at KU. Her recent publications include Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers (Oxford University Press), ‘Deploying race, gender, class, and sexuality in the Iraq war’ (with Lindsey Feitz), in Race, Gender & Class, ‘Climate change, public opinion, and the military-security complex,’ in The Sociological Quarterly. ADDRESS: Department of Sociology, University of Kansas, 1415 Jayhawk Boulevard, Lawrence, KS 66045, USA. Email: [email protected]

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rfjp20

International Feminist Journal of Politics

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfjp20

Women, Peace and Security in a changing climate

Carol Cohn (she/her/hers) & Claire Duncanson (she/her/hers)

To cite this article: Carol Cohn (she/her/hers) & Claire Duncanson (she/her/hers) (2020) Women, Peace and Security in a changing climate, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 22:5, 742-762, DOI: 10.1080/14616742.2020.1843364

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2020.1843364

Published online: 24 Nov 2020.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 650

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Women, Peace and Security in a changing climate Carol Cohn (she/her/hers)a and Claire Duncanson (she/her/hers)b

aConsortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA; bPolitics and International Relations, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

ABSTRACT In this article, we argue that the effort to get the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda implemented in a series of bureaucratic institutions has pulled the agenda quite far from its original motivating intent. Indeed, going down the bureaucratic implementation rabbit hole has made it almost impossible for advocates to stay in touch with the foundational WPS question: how do you get to gender-just sustainable peace? As we approach the twentieth anniversary of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, we argue that WPS advocates need to return to that question, but in doing so, must also acknowledge the changed context. One striking change is that climate breakdown is both more acute and more apparent than in 2000, and any attempt to build gender-just sustainable peace will face serious climate- induced challenges. However, the climate crisis creates not only challenges for the WPS agenda, but also opportunities. The sustainability of peace and of the planet are inextricably linked, and we argue that the realization of the WPS agenda requires transformations to social, political, and, most importantly, economic structures that are precisely the same as the transformations needed to ward off greater climate catastrophe.

KEYWORDS Women, Peace and Security; UNSCR 1325; feminist political economy; climate; peacebuilding

Introduction

The regular anniversaries of the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) – 20 years old this year – are appropriately occasions of both celebration and critical assess- ment. In the first section of this article, we assess progress and make the claim that the effort to get the WPS agenda implemented in a series of bureaucratic institutions has pulled the agenda quite far from its original motivating intent. We query whether WPS advocates have been able to stay in touch with the foundational WPS question: how do you get to gender-just sustain- able peace?

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

CONTACT Claire Duncanson [email protected] Chrystal Macmillan Building, 15a George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9LD, UK

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 2020, VOL. 22, NO. 5, 742–762 https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2020.1843364

We next ask: what happens if we return to ask that original motivating question today? Considering this question anew exposes, we think, two salient, disturbing issues. The first is that many of the structural barriers to achieving gender-just sustainable peace have endured, both unaddressed and untroubled by the WPS agenda. This leads us to revisit the question: was the WPS agenda, even 20 years ago, a sturdy enough vehicle to foster the achievement of gender-just sustainable peace? We argue that from the beginning, there have been critical gaps in the WPS agenda, and in particular we highlight its neglect of transnational economic actors and dynamics as a major impediment to the WPS agenda ever achieving its goals.

The second issue is that, two decades after the inception of the WPS agenda, a clear-eyed assessment of what it will take to achieve those goals must recognize that the world is in some ways strikingly different than in 2000. In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, there has been a global inten- sification of economic inequality (Oxfam 2019), often the driver of war and insecurity (Stewart 2008). We have also witnessed the alarming rise of the populist, authoritarian patriarchal right (Graff, Kapur, and Walters 2019) in almost every corner of the world. These changes are tremendously con- sequential, and are yet to be reckoned with by the WPS agenda. But perhaps the most looming and pervasive change is that climate and ecologi- cal breakdown is both more acute and more apparent than in 2000, and this reshapes the context in which all of our attempts to secure a peace that is gender-just and sustainable will take place. Thus, after looking back at the agenda’s early and enduring neglect of the ways in which transnational econ- omic systems undermine the possibilities for peace, we turn, in the third section, to climate breakdown and its implications for the WPS agenda.

We argue, ultimately, that it is many of the same economic forces under- mining peace that are also leading to environmental and climate breakdown. Consequently, the realization of the WPS agenda requires transformations to social, political, and, most importantly, economic structures that are nearly precisely the same as the transformations needed to ward off greater climate catastrophe.

The WPS agenda: down the rabbit hole

Through the careful strategic thinking and Herculean work of advocates outside and inside the United Nations (UN), UNSCR 1325 has avoided the obscurity into which many Security Council (SC) resolutions fall; it has become instead the foundation of what is commonly known in the inter- national policy community as the “Women, Peace and Security agenda” (or WPS agenda). That agenda, in turn, has shaped (and in part been shaped by), inter alia: institutional policies and procedures in international organiz- ations and national governments; the funding priorities of bilateral donors

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 743

and foundations; the range of activities for which non-governmental organ- izations (NGOs) can – and cannot – access funding; and the research ques- tions of many feminist scholars. Thus, UNSCR 1325, which was revolutionary in its creation of a space to bring women (and, to a lesser degree, gender relations) into public policy discourse on war and security, has also in many ways framed the contents and the limits of the space in which women peace activists and gender equality advocates have been able to address war and peacebuilding.

Although at times it seems as though the terms “1325,” “WPS agenda,” and “WPS architecture” are used fairly interchangeably, we think it is worth dis- tinguishing between the motivating goals of UNSCR 1325, the WPS agenda, WPS architecture, implementation, and the impacts of that implementation. Such distinctions are useful in assessments of feminist strategies for change, but are not often explicit in the scholarship on WPS.

We use motivating goals to refer to the problem that activists were trying to solve: ending the ravages of war and building peace free of oppressive gender relations. Once they identified the SC as a critical leverage point for achieving this goal, and made the tactical decision to try for a SC resolution, it was axiomatic that the scope of the agenda-defining SC resolution would be restricted by the exigencies of the SC as an institution, including both the parameters of its mandate and its internal politics. In other words, with the tactical turn to the SC, it was inevitable that the WPS agenda that emerged would be only a subset of the issues that needed to be addressed to achieve the larger goals (Cohn, Kinsella, and Gibbings 2004; Cockburn 2007; Cohn 2008; Klot 2015).

In bureaucratic institutions, agendas are not translated into actions without architectures to make it happen. In the case of UNSCR 1325, this archi- tecture includes the normative documents (including the nine successor res- olutions)1 and guidance documents (such as plans of action, toolkits, and training manuals), as well as the specialized positions and offices that have come into being over the last two decades. Creating the architecture is a criti- cal step forward; it is also, of necessity, a selective and interpretive process, which ends up emphasizing some parts of the agenda while de facto whit- tling away others. For example, as is well documented, sexual violence is emphasized while prevention of armed conflict has been largely ignored (Meger 2016; Aroussi 2017); “gender perspectives in peacekeeping” is inter- preted as a need to add women into peacekeeping forces and provide gender sensitivity training for soldiers who will be deployed in the field, but not as necessitating in-depth training in gender analysis skills for mission planners at headquarters (Simić 2014; Coomaraswamy 2015, 135, 144; Rupesinghe, Stamnes, and Karlsrud 2019).

If architecture is meant to provide the normative and bureaucratic frame- work that will mandate and enable implementation, it still does not assure it.

744 C. COHN AND C. DUNCANSON

Departmental Plans of Action and National Action Plans, for example, can be left sitting on shelves (George and Shepherd 2016). Resolutions can call for more women to be appointed as heads of peacekeeping operations or as international negotiators, but institutional leaders can fail to recommend or appoint them (UN Women 2012). Gender units in UN missions can be created but left without sufficient, if any, budgets; they can be situated in physically and bureaucratically isolated locations far from the exercise of power; and they can be staffed with people who are themselves untrained or uninterested in gender analysis, and/or too junior to have meaningful influence (Coomaraswamy 2015, 277; Landgren 2019, 116).

Just as architecture is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for implementation, implementation, in and of itself, does not assure the intended impact. Does putting troops through gender trainings actually impact their understandings, attitudes, or behaviors? Do prosecutions for conflict-related sexual violence actually have a deterrent effect that decreases future use of sexual violence as a tactic of war? Does the presence of (just any? how many?) women in a peace negotiation actually lead to a more sus- tainable and gender-just peace? As none of these is a given, and in each case we can enumerate myriad impediments that can and do militate against the intended impact, it is crucial not only to avoid conflating implementation and impact, but also to be aware that there can be a tremendous amount of slip- page between the two, and to assess each of them separately.

Indeed, when looking at the journey from feminist goals, through their translation into the UN’s WPS agenda, their institutionalization as an architec- ture, their patchy implementation, and, finally, any discernible impacts, there is considerable slippage at each point along the way. And while one could analyze the reasons for and consequences of each of those slippages, our concern here is more with the process as a whole, which has resulted in a suc- cessive narrowing from, and sometimes distortion of, the original intent of the WPS agenda.2 That is, the cumulative effect of all of these bureaucratic steps has been to remove us from the goal, from first principles.

This is probably somewhat inevitable; when you invest tremendous amounts of effort in bureaucratic struggles to create an architecture, but still see little impact in what the organization actually does, the natural reac- tion is to push harder down the same path, to invest more energy in repeat- edly struggling for implementation of hard-won mechanisms and/or to put new bits of architecture into place. The focused energy and attention required by that daily struggle can make it extremely difficult to stay in touch with the scope of the motivating goal, as you push against stubborn bureaucratic resistance, or seek to identify and prize open the tiny crevices where one might be able to insert useful new language, and do the compli- cated alliance building that those actions require. That is, as you go deeper down that rabbit hole of pressing for implementation and carving out

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 745

small bureaucratic wins, it becomes more challenging to remain focused on and re-ask the original motivating question: how can we get to gender-just sustainable peace?

We find that when we re-ask that question today, there is much that has changed (as we will discuss below), but much that is depressingly familiar. What remains the same is that the decision to aim for a UNSCR itself created enduring gaps in the agenda (Cohn 2008). Some of these gaps have repeatedly been the focus of feminist critics, including the failure to address causes of war, the omission of attempts to tackle militarism and the global arms trade, and the gaping silence around the role of masculinities in driving insecurity and war (see, for example, Kapur and Rees 2019). But other gaps have been relatively neglected. We have long argued that one of the most critical omissions has been the transnational economic dynamics that can have tremendous impacts on the possibility of realizing gender-just sustainable peace (Cohn 2014; Duncanson 2016); we believe this still to be very much the case 20 years on. We also see those same dynamics as under- lying the newer challenge to WPS: the increasing speed and severity of climate breakdown. Thus, before turning to climate, we outline what we mean by transnational economic dynamics and why we think that the failure to address them so undermines the potential of the WPS agenda.

Enduring barriers to achieving gender-just sustainable peace: transnational economic dynamics

It is in many ways understandable that the WPS agenda and architecture have focused on the protection and participation of women and girls. Beyond the constraints inherent in the SC’s mandate and politics, these were, and still are, painfully salient issues. Gender-based violence in contexts of war had reached new levels of severity in both its nature and prevalence and yet had remained largely unaddressed (Ní Aoláin and Valji 2019). And women from conflict- affected regions around the world were fed up with their exclusion from the processes that can bring wars to an end (Anderlini 2019).

But what this focus obscured was the set of largely economic, trans- national processes and dynamics that are just as, if not more, decisive in whether a gender-just, sustainable peace can be achieved.3 This is because in the aftermath of the formal political settlement of an armed conflict, a raft of predictable processes and dynamics are set in motion (see, for example Berdal and Zaum 2013; Langer and Brown 2016). While the specifics will differ from country to country, physical infrastructure will be rebuilt (at least to some degree and in some form); issues of lack of livelihoods and deficits in health and education will be addressed (in some way); external revenue will be raised for reconstruction and governance (including loans from international financial institutions, and multi-lateral and bi-lateral

746 C. COHN AND C. DUNCANSON

official development assistance (ODA), often associated with various condi- tionalities); there will be greater integration into the global economic system, including pressure from donors to open up national markets to inter- national trade; and private multinational economic actors will take the increased stability as an opportunity to come in to extract resources such oil, gas, timber, and minerals, or to amass large tracts of land for agribusiness. For all of these, a plethora of international actors will play a major role in how these processes do – and do not – occur. And the specific logics of a global capitalist economic system and its key institutions will be shaping, and in many cases determining, the outcomes, often far more than any national democratic process or set of political agreements in a peace settlement.

We need, then, when thinking about peace processes and peacebuilding, to highlight two related disjunctures. The first is between the national or binational scope of most peace agreements and the internationality of the factors contributing to the war and shaping the conditions of the post-war society. That is, no matter how much an armed conflict is framed as a “civil war” or “insurgency,” there are increasingly and almost inevitably cross- border forces feeding the war, from personnel, weapons, and remittances, to the reliance on embeddedness in global political alliances and global econ- omic market relations (both licit and illicit) for funding the fighting (see Kaldor 2012). When national political settlements are made by the immediate “parties to the conflict,” those extra-national forces do not disappear, and additional forces crowd in. So any group hoping to shape social, political, and economic relations in the post-war society, including advocates of the WPS agenda, must take those extra-national forces into account, and analyze how best to engage with them.

The second disjuncture is between formal political agreements and the material conditions in the real world required for their realization. While WPS advocates expect that women’s participation in peace processes and post-war governance will result in the inclusion of women’s human rights and other socially transformative provisions, the realization or enjoyment of human rights requires more than formal political guarantees.4 First, it requires changes in how people think about gendered power relations, and this requires long-term support for transformations in educational and media institutions, as well as for the grassroots women’s civil society organizations that are often active in working to transform patriarchal ideologies.

But, crucially, the enjoyment of rights requires more than a belief in those rights; it requires a set of material conditions. And here, unfortunately, is where many of the international political economic dynamics, processes, and actors referenced above can have the effect of undermining the transfor- mative provisions for which women and other civil society participants have fought in peace agreements. For example, while women participants in peace processes might fight for inclusion of provisions granting women the rights

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 747

to inherit and own land and/or ensuring Indigenous people’s rights to their ancestral territories, these rights can be negated by the actions of trans- national extractive or industrialized agriculture corporations. Examples of this abound, from the Guatemala Nickel Company, a subsidiary of the Cana- dian company Hudbay Minerals, employing rape of Indigenous women in northern Guatemala as a method of dispossessing Indigenous communities of their land (Imai, Maheandiran, and Crystal 2014; Méndez Gutiérrez and Carrera Guerra 2015), to biofuel companies in Sierra Leone negotiating with male village elders to gain access to lands traditionally controlled by women in the community (Millar 2015; Ryan 2018). As competition for access to resources increases, and the demand on land makes it an asset on which investors speculate (de Schutter 2016, 12), the likelihood that women can realize their rights to land recedes further from view. Already, since 2000, over 1,073 “large-scale land deals” have been concluded, covering an estimated total of almost 40 million hectares, and most of these deals have taken place in war-affected countries seen as underexploited sites for indus- trialized agriculture, such as Indonesia, Cambodia, Mozambique, Laos, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (de Schutter 2016, 10).

Or, to choose another of these international political economic dynamics, the post-war economic recovery prescriptions of international lenders and donors, when they include shrinking and/or privatizing state services, have the effects of closing down a key source of women’s employment (since in many countries women’s employment is heavily weighted in the state sector) and of increasing women’s subsistence and care burdens – when, for example, privatization of the local water supply increases the time that women spend walking to access water, or the defunding of nearby health ser- vices means that the care of wounded and disabled relatives becomes wholly women’s responsibility (see Peterson 2009; Jacobson 2013; True et al. 2017). In these and other cases, the sheer time burden that women face makes their social, economic, and political participation in the post-war society far more difficult and less likely (de Alwis, Mertus, and Sajjad 2013) – a direct counter to the WPS agenda’s goals of increasing women’s political participation and empowerment.

It is not that the WPS agenda has ignored economic dynamics entirely. Several WPS UNSCRs reference the need to tackle the socio-economic barriers to women’s participation and to empower women economically, but the WPS agenda tends to conceptualize women’s economic empowerment in a par- ticular way, as individual betterment achieved through inclusion in the labor force or market (Duncanson 2019; Martín de Almagro and Ryan 2019). As feminists have long pointed out, this form of empowerment is rarely a route out of economic insecurity for women; it is a far cry from the original concept of women’s empowerment, which was envisaged as a process involving the collective pursuit of structural change (Batliwala

748 C. COHN AND C. DUNCANSON

2007). In the WPS agenda, socio-economic inequalities appear as local prob- lems, often linked to patriarchal cultures, while the transnational economic dynamics that drive those inequalities are more or less absent. Yet, it will be impossible to realize the goals of the WPS agenda without transforming those dynamics and the political economic assumptions upon which they are based.

New threats: climate breakdown

These transnational economic dynamics have been undermining the WPS agenda from its outset; now, 20 years on, related impediments to achieving gender-just sustainable peace have emerged. A global intensification of economic inequality and the rise of the right are two obvious depressing shifts, but perhaps the most inescapable and alarming threat is the impend- ing breakdown of the climate. Although environmental destruction has been happening for a long time, we are now facing an unprecedented climate, eco- logical, and mass extinction emergency. We argue that it is impossible for WPS advocates to work toward, or even talk about, peace and security without centering this.

The environmental emergency that we face includes a whole range of elements, including climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, pollution, and land degradation. We focus here on climate breakdown because it would be impossible to cover in this short article the many ways in which human activity is pushing Earth’s ecosystems beyond their capacities to support life on this planet. They are all in any case interconnected, and as such we hope to convey something of the importance of biodiversity loss, for example, even while concentrating most directly on climate breakdown. We prefer the terms climate “breakdown,” “disruption,” “crisis,” and “cata- strophe” to “climate change,” because, as an editorial decision by the Guardian newspaper recently noted, the phrase “climate change” “sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a cata- strophe for humanity” (Carrington 2019).

So how and why should the climate crisis be understood as integral to the possibility of ever meeting the goals of the WPS agenda? We highlight three issues. First, if it was the threat that war posed to women’s human security that was at the heart of the WPS agenda, it is now clear that women’s human security – in fact all people’s – will never be attained unless we can also deal with the climate and ecological emergency. Second, even if we stay focused only on traditional conceptions of security – that is, addressing armed conflict and war – we need to address the ways in which climate breakdown can play a role in extending or intensifying violent conflict. Third, climate breakdown has to transform our understanding of peacebuild- ing. It increasingly defines the context in which peacebuilding takes place,

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 749

requiring us to consider not just climate breakdown’s impacts on peacebuild- ing, but also the ways in which peacebuilding will have effects on climate breakdown and citizens’ ability to cope with it.

Climate breakdown as a threat to human security

The climate crisis poses an enormous direct threat to human security, includ- ing women’s human security, making it a fundamental impediment to realiz- ing the goals of the WPS agenda. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)’s Human Development Report 1994 introduced the concept of human security, arguing that to achieve meaningful security for people, it was crucial to include access to such basic rights as food, liveli- hoods, shelter, and some protection from disease and ill-health (UNDP 1994). Climate breakdown directly undermines all of them. A few brief snap- shots of climate breakdown makes clear the futility of talking about women’s security without taking climate into account.

Consider food security. As global warming accelerates, ocean tempera- tures, acidity, and pollution are all rising, damaging not only marine biodiver- sity and ecosystems but the fisheries upon which so many rely. About 97 percent of the world’s fisherfolk live in developing countries, and fishing is their major source of food and income; fish accounts for over 50 percent of animal protein in many least developed countries (World Bank 2012, xi, 30). Ninety percent of the world’s fish stocks are already fully exploited or over- exploited (Kituyi and Thomson 2018). Climate-related disasters, such as heat- waves, droughts, monsoons, and hurricanes harm agricultural productivity and undermine food availability, with knock-on effects causing food price hikes and income losses that further reduce people’s access to food (IPCC 2012; FAO et al. 2019). The number of these climate-related disasters has doubled since the early 1990. An average of 213 of these events occurred every year during the period from 1990 to 2016. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that 124 million people were facing crisis levels of acute food insecurity in 2017 (FAO et al. 2019).

Consider displacement. Climate disruption is intensifying the global water cycle, with wetter regions generally becoming wetter and drier regions becoming even drier. An estimated 3.6 billion people (nearly half the global population) live in areas that are potentially water-scarce at least one month per year, and this population could increase to some 4.8–5.7 billion by 2050 (WWAP/UN-Water 2018). Meanwhile, with sea levels rising, other areas are under threat not from drought but because their land is already or soon to be submerged by water. Sea levels are rising at increasing rates as ice melts and warming seawater expands, while nearly 2.4 billion people (about 40 percent of the world’s population) live within 60 miles of the coast (NASA Science n.d.). As a result of these and other climate-related

750 C. COHN AND C. DUNCANSON

factors, people in many parts of the world are already being forced to leave their homes, livelihoods, and communities on an unprecedented scale, a trend that will only accelerate.

Consider health. Climate breakdown is leading to changes in patterns of prevalence and incidence of infectious disease. According to The Lancet, the climate crisis threatens to undermine the last half-century of gains in development and global health (Watts et al. 2015).

Of course, all of these threats to human security have specifically gendered dimensions that further undermine the aspiration for women’s security embedded in the WPS agenda. Among them, women often bear the brunt of coping with climate-related shocks and stresses because of the roles assigned to them in many areas of the world, including food management, water procurement, and caring for family members (Leach 2015; Kronsell 2019). As alternative sources of food, water, and income need to be found, and the sick need to be cared for, the burden of additional work often falls on women (Habtezion 2012). As well as increasing women’s burdens, the climate-induced threats to human security can exacerbate or entrench pre- existing gendered inequalities. If, as is the case in many cultures, men are pre- sumed to deserve or need to have access to the best food, the most food, and the most protein-rich types of food, women are going to be rendered less able than men to respond to climate breakdown (BRIDGE 2014). Scholars of forced displacement note that women are often “less mobile and less monied” and as such face particular challenges when their homes and liveli- hoods come under threat (Giles 2013). Likewise, health crises can be more lethal for women, for whom health facilities are more often unavailable or unaffordable (UNEP 2016). In short, climate breakdown is a massive, multi- dimensional, gender-differentiated threat to human security.

Climate breakdown as a contributor to war

It is hard to imagine how, in any country subject to the effects outlined above, people’s lives could ever be imagined as “peaceful” or “secure.”5 On those grounds alone, any agenda concerned with women, peace, and security must engage with this threat, which is even more pervasive than armed conflict. But even taking only the narrowest construal of the WPS agenda as centered on war, climate breakdown still needs to be confronted, because of the ways in which it amplifies the well-documented drivers of armed conflict such as poverty, inequalities, and economic shocks.

While climate change does not directly cause violent conflict (see, for example, Buhaug 2015; Selby 2019), evidence suggests that climactic con- ditions in combination and interaction with socio-economic and political factors can intensify it (Koubi 2019). For example, this can occur when: gov- ernments cannot or do not fairly distribute resources that climate breakdown

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 751

has rendered increasingly scarce, such as water, arable lands, pasturing lands, and so on (Brzoska and Fröhlich 2016); when increased migration due to climate disruption leads to additional pressure on stressed humanitarian and governance systems (Koubi et al. 2018; Abel et al. 2019); when govern- ments cannot or do not mitigate the volatility of food prices and provision (Beniston 2010; Calzadilla et al. 2013); and when societies cannot or do not prevent economic opportunities disappearing (Mobjörk 2017).

None of this is to imply that climate breakdown should be conceived of as demanding a militarized response, as if it were a threat to individual states’ national security. To see it principally in those terms is to betray a fundamen- tal misunderstanding of the social and economic causes and impacts of our environmental collapse. It also risks empowering militaries, which are not only embodiments of a regressive worldview that is part of the problem – that of self-interested units in perpetual competition – but are also major pol- luters and producers of greenhouse gases (Duncanson 2017).6 But while we are not sanguine about climate being incorporated into conventional national security discourses, we are arguing that the WPS agenda needs to take climate breakdown and the effects that it has on exacerbating and inten- sifying violent conflict much more seriously.

Climate breakdown is increasingly the context within which peacebuilding takes place

Whatever the degree to which climate change is implicated in intensifying wars, what will be true in all wars is that the attempt to build sustainable peace will take place in, and be made much more challenging by, climate breakdown. Building peace requires the provision of jobs and livelihoods, at the same time as climate breakdown destroys the conditions for maintain- ing traditional livelihoods. Building peace requires addressing issues around land reform and restitution, at the same time as climate breakdown reduces the quality and quantity of land available for sustaining livelihoods, and forces yet more people to leave their homes. Building peace requires dealing with the injuries caused by war as well as the health needs that went unaddressed during war, while climate breakdown puts additional pressure on health services through the rise in infectious diseases. Building peace requires the rebuilding of physical infrastructure – everything from roads and railways to power grids – at the same time as climate breakdown causes an increase in extreme weather events that destroy such infrastructure.

Furthermore, peace agreement implementation and post-war reconstruc- tion require tremendous financial resources, and peace already often foun- ders on the lack of implementation – especially with regard to gender equality provisions (Bell 2015). But the financial, governmental, and human

752 C. COHN AND C. DUNCANSON

resources for peacebuilding, and for implementing the WPS agenda in peace- building, will become yet more scarce as post-war countries simultaneously try to deal with the humanitarian crises provoked by drought, heatwaves, flooding from monsoons and hurricanes; the intensified prevalence and inci- dence of infectious disease; greater food insecurity; and climate-based displacement.

As if climate breakdown’s effects on peacebuilding were not already enough of a challenge to how we imagine doing successful peacebuilding, WPS advocates will also need to consider the effects of peacebuilding on climate disruption, and on citizens’ resources to cope with it. For instance, decisions about post-war economic recovery – jobs, land reform, infrastruc- ture – should not only consider the key peacebuilding question of whether they deepen or transform pre-existing inequalities (for example, are employ- ment schemes inclusive of women?; do land tenure systems and agricultural policy support the multi-cropping of smallholder farmers or the large-scale land acquisition and mono-cropping of agribusiness interests?; do roadbuild- ing plans prioritize local-level feeder roads and access to markets, healthcare, and schools, or only main highways to facilitate large-scale resource extrac- tion?). Now, these policy decisions must also be made in light of their effects on climate disruption, and must assess whether the proposed sol- utions will be sustainable as the climate continues to change (for example, will jobs created be in sectors that are contributing to climate breakdown or combating it?; will roadbuilding materials, labor power, and technologies be responsive to predictable climate-related conditions, such as flooding that is more frequent and severe?; will land and agricultural policy take into account the increasing climate-related vulnerability of mono-crop agricul- ture, as well as the climate costs of petrochemical-heavy forms of farming?).7

The need for a paradigm shift

When we ask the motivating WPS question again, two decades on, it is clear that the challenges facing the WPS agenda are immense. Not only do WPS advocates have to deal with the root cause issues that were originally excluded, including the transnational economic dynamics that undermine gender-just sustainable peace; we also have to reckon with the ever more apparent and acute environmental emergency. Peace now has to be accom- plished in a context in which security of all kinds is being undermined to an unprecedented degree. If women ever do get a seat at the table, the current focus of so much WPS energy, it is going to be in the midst of the worst crisis for humanity in global history.

However, the climate emergency also provides an opportunity. The very severity of the emergency makes it clear that we need radical solutions, a transformation to our approach to living on earth. There is a need for an

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 753

overhaul of the social, political, and – crucially – economic systems that govern human societies. For, as is increasingly acknowledged across the pol- itical spectrum in many countries (see Guardian 2019), climate breakdown is caused by our particular economic system, our current form of extractivist capitalism. Extractivist capitalism relies on the exploitation of natural resources as if they were unlimited, and “externalizes” the environmental costs of production, from pollution to the release of greenhouse gases (Daly 1996; Benería, Berik, and Floro 2015; Leach 2015). Through its depen- dence on fossil fuels for cheap energy and industrial agriculture that over- exploits soil and water supplies, extractivist capitalism destroys the environ- ment as it champions growth at all costs (Daly 1996; Benería, Berik, and Floro 2015; Leach 2015). Its neoliberal insistence on “liberating” free markets and vilifying regulations and collective action has made it impossible for people to act to stop climate breakdown (Klein 2015).

To address and arrest climate change, we need a paradigm shift in how we conceptualize the functioning and purpose of the economy. And as should by now be obvious from what we have written above, we believe that the para- digm shift required to tackle climate breakdown is the very same one that is required to achieve the original goal of the WPS agenda: gender-just sustain- able peace. It is the obsession with growth that guides the transnational economic dynamics that undermine any rights that women might win at the peace table. It is that same obsession that continues to speed us down the road to climate catastrophe, despite ever more visible danger signs and knowledge about where this will lead.

The paradigm shift that we need for gender-just sustainable peace, and the paradigm shift that the planet needs to survive this climate emergency, is a feminist green transformation. In arguing for such a transformation, we are not just making another call for green economies, or green new deals.8

These come in many guises, but too often they are market-based approaches that involve the commodification and enclosure of resources and commons, undermining livelihoods, justifying land- and green-grabs (Borras et al. 2011; Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones 2012; Kari-Oca 2 Declaration 2012; Mehta, Veldwisch, and Franco 2012), and dispossessing local people, especially women food producers. And too often, their attention to gendered power relations and global justice issues is all but non-existent (see, for example, Bauhardt 2014; Harcourt and Nelson 2015; Littig 2017). Instead, we are calling for a feminist green transformation: an entire paradigm shift that restructures production, consumption, and political-economic relations along truly sustainable pathways, with feminist analysis at the core.9 Just as Indigenous communities have long argued (Kari-Oca Declaration 1992; Kari-Oca 2 Declaration 2012), we need an economic system oriented toward human provisioning and ecosystem health and regeneration, rather than exploitation, extraction, and depletion of natural and human resources

754 C. COHN AND C. DUNCANSON

in the service of profit and gross domestic product (GDP) growth. We need to unapologetically claim the mantle of “realism” for an economic system based on an ethics of care – for people and planet – over the short-sighted, destruc- tive ethic of limitless individualistic acquisition and corporate concentration of wealth; that recognizes interdependence – among people and among nations – as the basis for mutual collaborative action, rather than mutual armament; and that recognizes that the goal of sufficiency, of ensuring liveli- hoods and lives of dignity, will never be achieved in a system that deepens, rather than transforms, inequalities.

Conclusion

The WPS story – the invention of the WPS agenda, the creation of an architec- ture meant to actualize it, the fight to get it implemented, and the many inventive ways in which women around the world have found to employ it in their struggles – is in many ways a heroic one. It is also a painfully frustrat- ing one, if you consider the quantities of time, thought, organization, and energy that have been poured into it, in contrast to how little progress there has been in changing the male-dominated war system and the terrible price that women pay for it, and how very far away we are from the goal of gender-just sustainable peace.

But what must be acknowledged, now more than ever, is that this effort has not only been heroic and frustrating, a story in which our goals can be reached if only we can better mobilize to vanquish those who would stand in the way of WPS progress; it is a story that has to change. It is an agenda that has to change, in part because it was, for complex political reasons, limited even in its own time, and in part because it is now utterly inadequate to the time and the crisis in which we live.

Climate breakdown will multiply and intensify the problems that the WPS agenda aims to solve, it will severely deplete the already anemic resources available to deal with them, and it will rob us of the luxury of time to engage in working for small wins through bureaucratic business as usual. The twentieth anniversary of UNSCR 1325, then, must be seized as a vital opportunity – not only to reflect on the WPS agenda, but also on the ways in which it, and we, are uneasily situated in the current historical moment, and on the urgency of devising new approaches to the challenges to come. Imagine what could happen if even half of the feminist thought, energy, and action that has gone into WPS advocacy were now turned loose on envisioning and effecting the paradigm shifts that are now so des- perately needed.

Our own thoughts about the path forward: we have concluded that we need to develop a feminist political economic analysis of the transnational actors and processes that threaten the sustainability of both peace and the

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 755

planet. We need to map routes of intervention in those processes. And we need to articulate policy alternatives based in transformational approaches to our understanding of the nature and purposes of economic activity, and of humans’ relation to the planet. We have been calling this a “Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace” (Cohn 2017; Consortium on Gender, Security & Human Rights n.d.). In this short time we have to envision, promulgate and enact the paradigm shift needed to reverse the current path to climate cata- strophe, it is our hope and belief that the Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace can make an important contribution.

Notes

1. The nine successor UNSCRs are 1820 (2008), 1888 (2009), 1889 (2009), 1960 (2010), 2106 (2013), 2122 (2013), 2242 (2015), 2467 (2019), and 2493 (2019).

2. This slippage between motivating goals, formulation of a policy agenda, the architecture developed to achieve it, implementation, and the desired impacts is not a story that is unique to WPS, of course. For example, note the way in which feminist aspirations were restricted by the formulation of the Millennium Development Goals in ways that have hampered socio-economic justice for women (Cornwall and Rivas 2015). Efforts to work with and within institutions always involve the need to translate goals into a language that can be understood and deemed actionable by colleagues – hence the large scholarship on the potential risks and pitfalls of “insider” feminist strategies (Eisenstein 1996; Hawkesworth 2006; Caglar, Prügl, and Zwingel 2013; Eyben and Turquet 2013). Some of this scholarship claims that despite the risks, small reforms can sometimes lead to more radical transformation (see, for example, Cockburn 1989; Eyben and Turquet 2013).

3. The arguments in this section are largely based on, and laid out in more detail in, Cohn (2014) and Cohn (2017).

4. This is something that Kandiyoti (2007) illustrates so well in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq.

5. Of course, it is important to note that not everyone’s lives will be equally affected – that there will be differential impacts both between countries and within countries. Worldwide, it is the people who have the fewest economic, political, and social resources, as well as those whose livelihoods are tied to specific landscapes and those who live in especially vulnerable areas such as coastal or arid zones, who will be among the most impacted (see, for example, UNFCCC 2018).

6. The US military, for example, is the single largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world (see Crawford 2019).

7. For more on the inextricability of the climate crisis and the WPS agenda, as well as reflections on the ways in which some of the same troubling patterns that we have seen in WPS discourse are already emerging in the policy discourse on women and the climate crisis, see Cohn (2020).

8. It is also absolutely not a call for women to be valued as naturally superior stew- ards of the world’s resources; just as WPS advocates have long been wary of the equation of women with peace, we are advocating for attention to climate breakdown while absolutely resisting any equation of women with nature

756 C. COHN AND C. DUNCANSON

(see, for example, Arora-Jonsson 2011; Resurrección 2013; Leach 2015; Kronsell 2019).

9. Here we draw from and seek to contribute to ideas in Nelson (2012), Wichterich (2012), Benería, Berik, and Floro (2015), Leach (2015), Raworth (2017), and Bauhardt and Harcourt (2018), as well as the Kari-Oca Declarations. See also Cohn and Duncanson (2020).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Carol Cohn is the founding Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security & Human Rights. She works across scholarly, policy, and activist communities to create the multidimensional, feminist gendered analyses that are imperative to finding sustainable and just solutions – not only to wars, but to the structural inequalities and environmental crises that underlie them. Her scholarship has addressed topics such as the gender dimensions of nuclear and national security discourse, gender mainstreaming in international security institutions, gender integration issues in the US military, and the strengths and limitations of the international Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, and she has published a textbook on Women and Wars (Polity Press). Her current focus is on bringing feminist political economic analysis into both the Sustaining Peace and the WPS agendas through a collaborative international knowledge-building project to create a “Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace” (https://genderandsecurity.org/feminist-roadmap-sustainable- peace). Recent work in that project, co-authored with Claire Duncanson, includes a report, “What Kind of Growth? Economies that Work for Women in Post-War Settings,” and “Whose Recovery? IFI Prescriptions for Postwar States” in the Review of International Political Economy. In honor of the US presidential election, she has published “‘Cocked and Loaded’: Trump and the Gendered Discourse of National Security,” in Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, edited by Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton (Cambridge University Press).

Claire Duncanson is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. She has published widely on issues relating to gender, peace, and security, and teaches on these subjects to undergraduate and postgraduate students. Her current work aims to bring a feminist analysis to the political economy of building peace, and she works with Carol Cohn on the “Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace” project. Recent publications include Gender and Peacebuilding (Polity Press), “Beyond Liberal vs Liberating: Women’s Economic Empowerment in the United Nations’ Women, Peace and Security Agenda” in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, and (co-authored with Carol Cohn) “Whose Recovery? IFI Prescriptions for Post-War States” in the Review of International Political Economy. She is also an active member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and has co-authored with fellow WILPF member Vanessa Farr on the Women, Peace and Security agenda in Afghanistan for Sara Davies and Jacqui True’s Oxford Handbook on Women, Peace, and Security.

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 757

References

Abel, Guy J., Michael Brottrager, Jesus Crespo Cuaresma, and Raya Muttarak. 2019. “Climate, Conflict and Forced Migration.” Global Environmental Change 54 (January): 239–249.

Anderlini, Sanam Naraghi. 2019. “Civil Society’s Leadership in Adopting 1325.” In The Oxford Handbook of Women, Peace, and Security, edited by Sara E. Davies and Jacqui True, 38–52. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Arora-Jonsson, Seema. 2011. “Virtue and Vulnerability: Discourses on Women, Gender and Climate Change.” Global Environmental Change 21 (2): 744–751.

Aroussi, Sahla. 2017. “Women, Peace, and Security and the DRC: Time to Rethink Wartime Sexual Violence as Gender-Based Violence?” Politics & Gender 13 (3): 488–515.

Batliwala, Srilatha. 2007. “Taking the Power out of Empowerment: An Experiential Account.” Development in Practice 17 (4/5): 557–565.

Bauhardt, Christine. 2014. “Solutions to the Crisis? The Green New Deal, Degrowth, and the Solidarity Economy: Alternatives to the Capitalist Growth Economy from an Ecofeminist Economics Perspective.” Ecological Economics 102: 60–68.

Bauhardt, Christine, and Wendy Harcourt, eds. 2018. Feminist Political Ecology and the Economics of Care: In Search of Economic Alternatives. London: Routledge.

Bell, Christine. 2015. Text and Context: Evaluating Peace Agreements for Their “Gender Perspective”. Research Paper. New York: UN Women. Accessed October 22, 2020. https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2017/8/evaluating- peace-agreements-for-their-gender-perspective.

Benería, Lourdes, Günseli Berik, and Maria Floro. 2015. Gender, Development and Globalization: Economics as if all People Mattered. London: Routledge.

Beniston, Martin. 2010. “Climate Change and Its Impacts: Growing Stress Factors for Human Societies.” International Review of the Red Cross 92 (879): 557–568.

Berdal, Mats, and Dominik Zaum. 2013. Political Economy of Statebuilding: Power After Peace. London: Routledge.

Borras, Saturnino M., Jr, Ruth Hall, Ian Scoones, Ben White, and Wendy Wolford. 2011. “Towards a Better Understanding of Global Land Grabbing: An Editorial Introduction.” Journal of Peasant Studies 38 (2): 209–216.

BRIDGE. 2014. Gender and Food Security: Towards Gender-Just Food and Nutritional Security. Overview Report. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies.

Brzoska, Michael, and Christiane Fröhlich. 2016. “Climate Change, Migration and Violent Conflict: Vulnerabilities, Pathways and Adaptation Strategies.” Migration and Development 5 (2): 190–210.

Buhaug, Halvard. 2015. “Climate–Conflict Research: Some Reflections on the Way Forward.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 6 (3): 269–275.

Caglar, Gülay, Elisabeth Prügl, and Susanne Zwingel. 2013. Feminist Strategies in International Governance. London: Routledge.

Calzadilla, Alvaro, Katrin Rehdanz, Richard Betts, Pete Falloon, Andy Wiltshire, and Richard S. J. Tol. 2013. “Climate Change Impacts on Global Agriculture.” Climatic Change 120 (1–2): 357–374.

Carrington, Damian. 2019. “Why the Guardian Is Changing the Language It Uses about the Environment.” Guardian, May 17. Accessed October 22, 2020. https://www. theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/17/why-the-guardian-is-changing-the- language-it-uses-about-the-environment.

758 C. COHN AND C. DUNCANSON

Cockburn, Cynthia. 1989. “Equal Opportunities: The Short and Long Agenda.” Industrial Relations Journal 20 (3): 213–225.

Cockburn, Cynthia. 2007. From Where We Stand: War, Women’s Activism and Feminist Analysis. London: Zed Books.

Cohn, Carol. 2008. “Mainstreaming Gender in UN Security Policy: A Path to Political Transformation?” In Global Governance: Feminist Perspectives, edited by Shirin M. Rai and Georgina Waylen, 185–206. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Cohn, Carol. 2014. “Why Is It So Hard to Get Women to the Peace Table? And Why Is That Not Even the Right Question?” Keynote Address Presented at “Addressing the Persistence of Gender Inequalities in Conflict Prevention and Peace Processes” Conference, University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland, April 4.

Cohn, Carol. 2017. “Beyond the ‘Women, Peace and Security Agenda’: Why We Need a Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace.” Background Paper, “Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace” Project, Consortium on Gender, Security & Human Rights, Boston.

Cohn, Carol. 2020. “The Women, Peace and Security Agenda and the Climate Crisis: Inextricable Links.” Presentation at the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden, March 9, 2020.

Cohn, Carol, and Claire Duncanson. 2020. “Whose Recovery? IFI Prescriptions for Post- War States.” Review of International Political Economy, April, 1–21. Accessed October 26, 2020. doi:10.1080/09692290.2019.1677743.

Cohn, Carol, Helen Kinsella, and Sheri Gibbings. 2004. “Women, Peace and Security Resolution 1325.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 6 (1): 130–140.

Consortium on Gender, Security & Human Rights. n.d. “The Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace Project.” Accessed October 26, 2020. https:// genderandsecurity.org/feminist-roadmap-sustainable-peace.

Coomaraswamy, Radhika. 2015. Preventing Conflict, Transforming Justice, Securing the Peace: A Global Study on the Implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325. New York: UN Women.

Cornwall, Andrea, and Althea-Maria Rivas. 2015. “From ‘Gender Equality’ and ‘Women’s Empowerment’ to Global Justice: Reclaiming a Transformative Agenda for Gender and Development.” Third World Quarterly 36 (2): 396–415.

Crawford, Neta C. 2019. Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War. Providence, RI: Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Accessed October 22, 2020. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/ 2019/Pentagon%20Fuel%20Use,%20Climate%20Change%20and%20the%20Costs %20of%20War%20Final.pdf.

Daly, Herman. 1996. Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

de Alwis, Malathi, Julie Mertus, and Tazreena Sajjad. 2013. “Women and Peace Processes.” In Women and Wars, edited by Carol Cohn, 169–193. Cambridge: Polity Press.

de Schutter, Olivier (with Global Witness and International Corporate Accountability Roundtable (ICAR)). 2016. Tainted Lands: Corruption in Large-Scale Land Deals. Washington, DC: ICAR and Global Witness. Accessed October 22, 2020. https:// icar.ngo/publications-2017-5-9-tainted-lands-corruption-in-large-scale-land-deals/.

Duncanson, Claire. 2016. Gender and Peacebuilding. Cambridge: Polity Press. Duncanson, Claire. 2017. “Anti-Militarist Feminist Approaches to Researching Gender

and the Military.” In The Palgrave International Handbook of Gender and the Military, edited by Rachel Woodward and Claire Duncanson, 39–58. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 759

Duncanson, Claire. 2019. “Beyond Liberal vs Liberating: Women’s Economic Empowerment in the United Nations’ Women, Peace and Security Agenda.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 21 (1): 111–130.

Eisenstein, Hester. 1996. Inside Agitators: Australian Femocrats and the State. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Eyben, Rosalind, and Laura Turquet. 2013. Feminists in Development Organizations: Change from the Margins. Rugby: Practical Action Publishing.

Fairhead, James, Melissa Leach, and Ian Scoones. 2012. “Green Grabbing: A New Appropriation of Nature?” Journal of Peasant Studies 39 (2): 237–261.

FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, and WHO. 2019. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2019: Safeguarding Against Economic Slowdowns and Downturns. Rome: FAO.

George, Nicole, and Laura J. Shepherd. 2016. “Women, Peace and Security: Exploring the Implementation and Integration of UNSCR 1325.” International Political Science Review 37 (3): 297–306.

Giles, Wenona. 2013. “Women Forced to Flee: Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons.” In Women and Wars, edited by Carol Cohn, 80–101. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Graff, Agnieszka, Ratna Kapur, and Suzanna Danuta Walters. 2019. “Introduction: Gender and the Rise of the Global Right.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 44 (3): 541–560.

Guardian. 2019. “Editorial: The Guardian View on a Green New Deal: We Need It Now.” Guardian, May 12. Accessed October 22, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2019/may/12/the-guardian-view-on-a-green-new-deal-we-need-it- now.

Habtezion, Senay. 2012. Gender, Agriculture and Food Security. Gender and Climate Change Capacity Development Series Africa. Training Module 4. New York: UNDP.

Harcourt, Wendy, and Ingrid L. Nelson, eds. 2015. Practising Feminist Political Ecologies: Moving Beyond the “Green Economy”. London: Zed Books.

Hawkesworth, Mary E. 2006. Globalization and Feminist Activism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Imai, Shin, Bernadette Maheandiran, and Valerie Crystal. 2014. “Access to Justice and Corporate Accountability: A Legal Case Study of HudBay in Guatemala.” Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue Canadienne d’Études du Développement 35 (2): 285–303.

IPCC. 2012. Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jacobson, Ruth. 2013. “Women ‘after’ Wars.” In Women and Wars, edited by Carol Cohn, 215–241. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Kaldor, Mary. 2012. New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Kandiyoti, Deniz. 2007. “Between the Hammer and the Anvil: Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Islam and Women’s Rights.” Third World Quarterly 28 (3): 503–517.

Kapur, Bela, and Madeleine Rees. 2019. “WPS and Conflict Prevention.” In The Oxford Handbook of Women, Peace, and Security, edited by Sara E. Davies and Jacqui True, 135–147. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kari-Oca Declaration. 1992. World Conference of Indigenous Peoples on Territory, Environment and Development, Kari-Oca and Rio de Janeiro. Accessed October 22, 2020. https://www.cwis.org/wp-content/uploads/documents/kari-oca.txt.

Kari-Oca 2 Declaration. 2012. Declaration Presented at the World Indigenous Peoples Conference on Territories, Rights and Sustainable Development and United Nations

760 C. COHN AND C. DUNCANSON

Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio +20), Kari-Oca, Brazil. Accessed October 22, 2020. https://www.ienearth.org/kari-oca-2-declaration/.

Kituyi, Mukhisa, and Peter Thomson. 2018. “90% of Fish Stocks are Used Up – Fish Subsidies Must Stop.” United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, July 13. Accessed October 22, 2020. https://unctad.org/en/pages/newsdetails.aspx? OriginalVersionID=1812.

Klein, Naomi. 2015. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Klot, Jennifer F. 2015. “UN Security Council Resolution 1325: A Feminist Transformative Agenda?” In The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Feminist Movements, edited by Wendy Harcourt and Rawwida Baksh, 723–745. New York: Oxford University Press.

Koubi, Vally. 2019. “Climate Change and Conflict.” Annual Review of Political Science 22: 343–360.

Koubi, Vally, Tobias Böhmelt, Gabriele Spilker, and Lena Schaffer. 2018. “The Determinants of Environmental Migrants’ Conflict Perception.” International Organization 72 (4): 905–936.

Kronsell, Annica. 2019. “WPS and Climate Change.” In The Oxford Handbook on Women, Peace, and Security, edited by Sara E. Davies and Jacqui True, 726–736. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Landgren, Karin. 2019. “WPS and Gender Mainstreaming.” In The Oxford Handbook of Women, Peace, and Security, edited by Sara E. Davies and Jacqui True, 110–121. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Langer, Arnim, and Graham K. Brown, eds. 2016. Building Sustainable Peace: Timing and Sequencing of Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Peacebuilding. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Leach, Melissa, ed. 2015. Gender Equality and Sustainable Development. London: Routledge.

Littig, Beate. 2017. “Good Green Jobs for Whom? A Feminist Critique of the Green Economy.” In Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment, edited by Sherilyn MacGregor, 318–330. London: Routledge.

Martín de Almagro, María, and Caitlin Ryan. 2019. “Subverting Economic Empowerment: Towards a Postcolonial-Feminist Framework on Gender (In)Securities in Post-War Settings.” European Journal of International Relations 25 (4): 1059–1079.

Meger, Sara. 2016. “The Fetishization of Sexual Violence in International Security.” International Studies Quarterly 60 (1): 149–159.

Mehta, Lyla, Gert Jan Veldwisch, and Jennifer Franco. 2012. “An Introduction to the Special Issue: Water Grabbing? Focus on the (Re)Appropriation of Finite Water Resource.” Water Alternatives 5 (2): 193–207.

Méndez Gutiérrez, Luz, and Amanda Carrera Guerra. 2015. Clamor for Justice: Sexual Violence, Armed Conflict and Violent Land Dispossession. Guatemala: Equipo de Estudios Comunitarios y Acción Psicosocial (ECAP).

Millar, Gearoid. 2015. “‘We Have No Voice for That’: Land Rights, Power, and Gender in Rural Sierra Leone.” Journal of Human Rights 14 (4): 445–462.

Mobjörk, Malin. 2017. “Exploring the Links Between Climate Change and Violent Conflict.” In SIPRI Yearbook 2017: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security, SIPRI, 287–299. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

NASA Science. n.d. “Living Ocean.” NASA Science. Accessed October 23, 2020. https:// science.nasa.gov/earth-science/oceanography/living-ocean.

Nelson, Julie. 2012. Economics for Humans. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 761

Ní Aoláin, Fionnuala, and Nahla Valji. 2019. “Scholarly Debates and Contested Meanings of WPS.” In The Oxford Handbook of Women, Peace, and Security, edited by Sara E. Davies and Jacqui True, 53–66. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Oxfam. 2019. Public Good or Private Wealth? Oxfam Briefing Paper. Oxford: Oxfam GB. Peterson, V. Spike. 2009. “Gendering Informal Economies in Iraq.” InWomen andWar in

the Middle East: Transnational Perspectives, edited by Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt, 35–64. London: Zed Books.

Raworth, Kate. 2017. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.

Resurrección, Bernadette P. 2013. “Persistent Women and Environment Linkages in Climate Change and Sustainable Development Agendas.” Women’s Studies International Forum 40 (September–October): 33–43.

Rupesinghe, Natasja, Eli Stamnes, and John Karlsrud. 2019. “WPS and Female Peacekeepers.” In The Oxford Handbook of Women, Peace, and Security, edited by Sara E. Davies and Jacqui True, 206–221. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ryan, Caitlin. 2018. “Large-Scale Land Deals in Sierra Leone at the Intersection of Gender and Lineage.” Third World Quarterly 39 (1): 189–206.

Selby, Jan. 2019. “Climate Change and the Syrian Civil War, Part II: The Jazira’s Agrarian Crisis.” Geoforum: Journal of Physical, Human, and Regional Geosciences 101 (May): 260–274.

Simić, Olivera. 2014. “Increasing Women’s Presence in Peacekeeping Operations: The Rationales and Realities of ‘Gender Balance’.” In Rethinking Peacekeeping, Gender Equality and Collective Security, edited by Gina Heathcote and Dianne Otto, 185– 199. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Stewart, Frances, ed. 2008. Horizontal Inequalities and Conflict: Understanding Group Violence in Multiethnic Societies. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

True, Jacqui, Christine Chinkin, Madeleine Rees, Nela Porobić Isaković, Gorona Mlinarević, and Barbro Svedberg. 2017. A Feminist Perspective on Post-Conflict Restructuring and Recovery: The Study of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Sarajevo: Women Organizing for Change in Bosnia and Herzegovina of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

UNDP. 1994. Human Development Report 1994. New York: Oxford University Press. UNEP. 2016. Global Gender and Environment Outlook. Nairobi: UN Environment. UNFCCC. 2018. Considerations Regarding Vulnerable Groups, Communities and

Ecosystems in the Context of the National Adaptation Plans. Bonn: United Nations Climate Change Secretariat.

UN Women. 2012. Women’s Participation in Peace Negotiations: Connections Between Presence and Influence. New York: UN Women.

Watts, Nick, W. Neil Adger, Paolo Agnolucci, Jason Blackstock, Peter Byass, Wenjia Cai, Sarah Chaytor et al. 2015. “Health and Climate Change: Policy Responses to Protect Public Health.” The Lancet 386 (10006): 1861–1914.

Wichterich, Christa. 2012. The Future We Want: A Feminist Perspective. Publication Series on Ecology Volume 21. Berlin: Heinrich Böll Foundation.

World Bank. 2012. Hidden Harvest: The Global Contribution of Capture Fisheries. Washington, DC: The World Bank.

WWAP (United Nations World Water Assessment Programme)/UN-Water. 2018. The United Nations World Water Development Report 2018: Nature-Based Solutions for Water. Paris: UNESCO.

762 C. COHN AND C. DUNCANSON

Rapid #: -17537121 CROSS REF ID: 84663

LENDER: BOS :: Main Library

BORROWER: BUF :: Main Library TYPE: Article CC:CCL

JOURNAL TITLE: Global environmental change

USER JOURNAL TITLE: Global Environmental Change

ARTICLE TITLE: “Virtue and Vulnerability: Discourses on Women, Gender and Climate Change.”

ARTICLE AUTHOR: Arora-Jonsson, Seema.

VOLUME: 21

ISSUE: 2

MONTH:

YEAR: 2011

PAGES: 744–51

ISSN: 0959-3780

OCLC #:

Processed by RapidX: 5/5/2021 7:45:48 AM

This material may be protected by copyright law (Title 17 U.S. Code)

Virtue and vulnerability: Discourses on women, gender and climate change

Seema Arora-Jonsson *

Department of Urban and Rural Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Box 7005, 750 07 Uppsala, Sweden

1. Introduction

Where does gender figure in the debates on climate change? Dual themes recur throughout the existing though limited literature on gender and climate change – women as vulnerable or women as virtuous in relation to the environment. This imagery makes two viewpoints seemingly obvious: women in the global South will be affected more adversely by climate change than men in those countries and that men in the global North pollute more than their female counterparts. Common to both places is that women are not part of decision making bodies as are the men in their societies and that is to the detriment of women. In other words, women in the South are extremely vulnerable to climate change while women in the North are much more conscientious when it comes to dealing with climate change, possessing virtues of environmentalism which their male counterparts with their propensity for long distance travels and meat eating habits do not.

Policy statements and government documents in many countries echo these assumptions. In the United States, where the idea of long term changes in climate were contested until recently (and still is in some quarters), the House of Representa- tives issued a declaration on April 1, 2009 that recognized the disproportionate impacts of climate change on women and the efforts of women globally to address climate change. The

resolution, among other things, encourages the use of gender sensitive frameworks in developing policies to address climate change which account for the specific impacts of climate change on women (Lee et al., 2009). In this article I focus specifically on Sweden and India. Sweden has long been regarded to be in the forefront of progressive policy and action on gender equality as well as climate change legislation. Climate change has brought environmentalism to the mainstream political debates in India like never before. India has pushed for the need to link mitigation of the effects of climate change to development and the need for continued growth. Although equity and social justice are not always on the agenda, the promise of development holds an underlying hope that these issues will be addressed.

Women, as the particularly vulnerable subjects of climate change, is the only mention made to gender in the Indian Government’s National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC). In that one place, the NAPCC (2008:14) states that, ‘‘The impacts of climate change could prove particularly severe for women. With climate change there would be increasing scarcity of water, reductions in yields of forest biomass, and increased risks to human health with children, women and the elderly in a household becoming the most vulnerable. . . .special attention should be paid to the aspects of gender.’’ The Swedish Bill on climate and energy policy (Regeringens Proposition, 2008:220) echoes sentiments voiced above but with its own perspective: ‘‘Many developing countries are especially vulnerable to climate effects because of poverty, conflicts, lack of gender and social equality, environmental degradation and lack of food’’ (my emphasis). The Bill regards

Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 744–751

A R T I C L E I N F O

Article history: Received 12 May 2010 Received in revised form 6 January 2011 Accepted 9 January 2011 Available online 12 February 2011

Keywords: Climate change Gender Vulnerability Environmental virtuousness North South Development

A B S T R A C T

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.

! 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

* Tel.: +46 18 6170000. E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected].

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Global Environmental Change

journa l homepage: www.e lsev ier .com/ locate /g loenvcha

0959-3780/$ – see front matter ! 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.01.005

gender equality and women’s role in development as having an important bearing on work with climate change in the South; in a Swedish context gender is seen as relevant only with respect to the transport sector.

These ideas are reminiscent of debates on women and development in the 1980s when women’s work and involvement in environmental management began to gain attention. The recent gender and climate change literature also reiterates ideas about women’s poverty, vulnerability and virtuousness. There are three main arguments in relation to women and climate change. Firstly, that women need special attention because they are the poorest of the poor; secondly, because they have a higher mortality rate during natural calamities caused by climate change and thirdly because women are more environmentally conscious. While the first two refer mainly to the women in the South, the last is especially apparent in the literature on gender and climate change in the North.

Some of these arguments that seem evident in a commonsen- sical way, have not always proven to be empirically rigorous, although many have taken on the stature of truth or fact. In the next section, I examine the premises on which these claims are based, that is, on arguments about women’s poverty and vulnerability. Following that, I unpack these arguments by examining recent research on poverty, on the gendered effects of natural calamities and on women’s purportedly pro-environ- mental behaviour. This leads me to question why, despite unconvincing and inadequate research, assertions about women’s poverty and mortality are so prevalent in relation to climate change and gender. I analyse the consequences of these arguments for future research and alternatively, where we could go from here. In doing so, I highlight how a focus on women and their vulnerability or virtuousness can deflect attention from power relations and inequalities reproduced in institutions at all levels and in discourses on climate change. This focus can lead to an increase in women’s responsibility without corresponding rewards. I end with a discussion on the need for contextualising the debate on climate change in order to be able to take action and respond effectively to the adverse effects of climatic changes.

2. Vulnerable and virtuous

It has been recognized that the effects of climate change will be harshest in tropical countries in the South and will affect the poor the most. This insight has led some to claim that women are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change for a number of reasons. According to Hemmati and Röhr (2007), women represent a disproportionate share of the poor and are likely to be dispropor- tionately vulnerable to the effects of climate change (2007:7). Others note that 70% of the 1.3 billion people in the developing world living below the threshold of poverty are women (Denton, 2002; Röhr, 2006). Johnsson-Latham points to a World Bank study that claims that gender differences are greatest among the poorest families. Women also eat last and least in poor families (2007:42). The Swedish Defence Agency’s base data report professes to present the major gender issues in climate adaptation from a Swedish perspective, ‘Since climate adaptation has a high degree of international interdependence, if gender inequity aggravates climate problems in other countries, this can have significant indirect effects in Sweden’ (Hansson, 2007:9). Similarly Oldrup and Breengaard write, ‘In developing countries, women’s needs are often not taken into consideration, and their participation in the climate change processes and debates is not sufficient at the national level’ (2009:47).

It is also believed that women and children are 14 times more likely to die than men during disasters (e.g. Brody et al., 2008:6). Women’s vulnerability is ascribed to cultural and gender mores in

many texts. One example is the Asian Tsunami where the largest numbers of fatalities were said to be women and children under the age of 15. It has been documented that women in Bangladesh did not leave their houses during floods due to cultural constraints on female mobility and those who did were unable to swim in flood waters (e.g. Demetriades and Esplen, 2008 citing Röhr).

A counterpart to women’s vulnerability is their virtuousness. Women are considered more sensitive to risk, more prepared for behavioural change and more likely to support drastic policies and measures on climate change (Brody et al., 2009:15 drawing on Hemmati’s work). Women’s willingness for attitudinal change is a recurring theme in the literature on countries in the North. According to Johnsson-Latham (whose report commissioned by the Swedish government has been cited extensively by those working on climate change and gender), one must start by asking, who are the polluters? The unequivocal answer there, she believes, is ‘men’ and that men need to start paying for the pollution. In her view, gender specific patterns show in general that the polluter is a man, whether poor or rich (2007:34). She writes that instead of recognizing this, the focus of attention when it comes to dealing with climate change is on technology and technicians as a professional group. This group consists mostly of men – and they are portrayed as the solution to the problem (2007:26). Based on research on transportation in Europe, Johnsson-Latham points out that men own more cars and travel longer distances to work, thus emitting much more carbon into the atmosphere. She writes that women on the other hand, tend to travel shorter distances and most often by public transport, use cheaper alternatives like the bicycle or walk and tend to make socially rational choices. ‘Whereas women represent a more human perspective by more consideration to road safety etc. it is men who dominate decision- making’ (2007:44–60). Similarly, another piece of research found that although women in Sweden did not differ from men in cognitive risk judgments related to climate change, they tended to worry more about the environment (Sundblad et al., 2007). Danish researchers have pointed out that men’s meat consumption surpasses that of women and since livestock rearing accounts for 18% of all greenhouse gas consumption, men tend to be more polluting. They also point to studies that show that women’s consumption is more sustainable than that of men (Oldrup and Breengaard, 2009:21–23 drawing on the work of Fagt et al., 2006 on Scadinavian eating habits and the Danish consumer report 2008). In her work, Johnsson-Latham concludes by saying that women globally live in a more sustainable way than men, leave a smaller ecological footprint and cause less climate change. However, she mentions that well educated and better paid women travel further (2007). So it would appear that it is in fact women, but mainly poor women, who are most virtuous and conscientious in relation to the environment.

These arguments about women’s vulnerability or virtuousness and their predisposition to being more environmentally friendly resonate with the women and development (WAD) or women, environment and development (WED) debates. Women were portrayed as closer to nature and more environmentally conscious than their male counterparts, a notion that held powerful sway in some development circles since the 1980s. Some of the present research on gender and climate change echoes those notions. But a large part of it also builds on assumptions about women’s poverty and vulnerability to natural hazards.

3. Poverty, natural calamities and women’s behaviour

In this section I examine research on the ‘feminisation of poverty,’ on the linkages between vulnerability and poverty as well on adaptation in face of environmental change. I go on to examine work done on gender and natural calamities, followed by research

S. Arora-Jonsson / Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 744–751 745

on women’s attitudes towards the environment. The section ends by exploring the implications of this body of scholarship for understanding gender and climate change.

3.1. Poverty and its ‘feminisation’

According to Chant, the assertion that women make up 70% of the poor is anecdotal rather than empirically or statistically rigorous. It is usually coupled with what she considers as the deeply problematic assertion about the ‘feminisation of poverty’ a concept that has been contested by several scholars (Chant, 2010:1). The feminisation of poverty has been used to explain differences between male and female poverty in a given context as well as changes in male and female poverty over time. Typically, this approach has fed the perception that female headed house- holds, however defined, tend to be poorer than other households. Empirical work has however cast doubt on this generalization and shown it to be inaccurate (Medeiros and Costa, 2008; Sen, 2008:6).

No scientific study is ever cited to document percentages such as the assertion that 70% of all poor people are women. Examining data from 1995, Marcoux writes that the 70/30 ratio of poor women to men is implausible given the age distribution of the global population and its household characteristics (1998). There is in fact little gender disaggregated data to support the feminisation of poverty thesis though more would be needed to study the differentiated impacts of poverty on men and women. Apart from that, people participate not necessarily as individuals but as family breadwinners in the labour market or otherwise. It is difficult to generalize about poverty without taking account of the existence and extent of all contributions to household income (Kabeer, 2008).

Chant points out that while on the one hand, the assertion about the feminisation of poverty has been useful in garnering resources for women, on the other, it simplifies the concepts of poverty and gender (2010:1). The unfortunate term ‘feminisation of poverty’, writes Jackson, has come to mean not (as gender analysis would suggest) that poverty is a gendered experience, but that the poor are mostly women leading to the fallacy that poverty alleviation would automatically lead to gender equality (1996:491). Others have also shown that poverty and gender discrimination do not necessarily go hand in hand. Rising incomes have not eradicated discrimination against women. While in no way a universal phenomena, excess girl child mortality in Tamil Nadu in India seems to have appeared most strikingly among upwardly mobile households (Harriss-White, 1999). The 2001 census in India makes it clear that the most adverse sex ratios among children are reported by some of its fastest growing, economically well developed and literate states (Premi, 2001). Sex determination tests have led to female foeticide for those who can afford new reproductive technologies (Patel, 2007).

Gender and poverty are two distinct forms of disadvantage. In her article ‘Gender and the Poverty Trap’ Jackson shows the inconsistencies in the assumption that all women-headed house- holds are poor. Citing the work of Ahmad and Chalk from 1994, she points to the invalidity of the time-series data (due to high intra- group variations) on which assumptions about the poverty of women headed households are based (e.g. World Bank, 1989 and IFAD report). She draws on the work of several scholars (for example, Gillespie and McNeill, 1992; Lipton and Payne, 1994) who have seriously questioned arguments about food bias. She also shows that increases in mortality during famines affect men more than women, that women tend to have a greater life expectancy though they may not have better health, that violence has to do with other things than poverty and points to empirical evidence that shows that gender relations are in fact more equitable in many poor Indian households than in wealthier ones

(1996:491–498). The scepticism about the poverty of women headed households has led to the questioning of the thesis of the feminisation of poverty by several scholars (Kabeer, 2008; Davids and van Driel, 2010). The rising number of female headed households in many regions of the world partly reflects the unwillingness of women to continue accepting the injustice of their situation in conjugal homes. Women headed households have given rise to claims about the ‘feminisation of poverty’ but there is no necessary association between female headship and poverty (Kabeer, 2008:5).

There is a need to separate being poor from being women or the generalization that one often glides into – that all women are poor and that the poor are always more vulnerable. Poverty appears to have a self-evident relationship to vulnerability, since poverty tends to lead to greater vulnerability and vulnerability to climate change often leads to outcomes that perpetuate poverty. But there is no universal and does not have to be, a direct correlation between poverty and vulnerability (c.f. Eriksen and O’Brien, 2007). Vulnerability is generated by multiple processes and different situations as empirical research from different countries suggests (e.g. Eriksen et al., 2005; O’Brien et al., 2007). Eriksen and O’Brien point out that vulnerability varies among groups and individuals as well as over time. They cite examples from South Africa and Mexico where relatively higher-income farmers practising irrigat- ed agriculture are vulnerable to climate and market risks because they are constrained from diversifying their livelihoods. They point out that there is no one to one mapping between poverty and climate change vulnerability and make a case for the need to look at poverty and vulnerability linkages (2007).

Carr’s research on adaptation decision-making through a diversified livelihoods strategy in villages in Ghana’s central region, found that the persistence of certain adaptations have little to do with material outcomes but in fact subsist on and reinforce unequal gender relations. It was clear to the author but also to the village women that access to a little more land would have enabled them to maximize personal incomes that they normally put to the use of the household to address the stresses and shocks endemic to these villages. Yet, the adaptation adopted by the household continued to balance women’s farm size near a threshold of production that allowed them very little surplus that could be used for personal incomes. Women appeared to be complicit in a system that heightened existing inequalities and led to less than optimal adaptations (2008:698).

3.2. Women’s mortality during calamities

The second argument for women’s greater vulnerability is that more women die in natural calamities as for example in the 1991 cyclone in Bangladesh, the 2003 European heat-wave, and in Indonesia and Sri Lanka during the 2006 tsunami (see Araujo et al., 2008). Neumayer and Plumper’s analyses of a sample of up to 141 countries between 1981 and 2002 indicated that the adverse impact of disasters on females compared to male life expectancy is clearly contingent on the extent of socially constructed vulnera- bility. They show that women died more where they were socio- economically disadvantaged. A systematic effect on the gender gap is plausible when disasters exacerbate existing patterns of discrimination (2007). Years of gender research and empirical examples from around the world have shown that discrimination can take many forms. These are often the result of intersecting axes such as socio-economic status or class, caste, ethnicity, type of employment and can vary in time in the same place. As researchers we need to examine the specific form of vulnerability and discrimination that people face in order to respond to it effectively. For example, research on women’s vulnerability to flooding in Orissa, India showed that it is difficult to speak of gender effects

S. Arora-Jonsson / Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 744–751746

without at the same time speaking of caste and class that play a major role in defining women’s vulnerability. Lower caste and lower class households were more vulnerable to the cyclones and flooding in the state due to their unfavorable location by the river. But that vulnerability was also dependent on the particular context. In the floods of 2001 and 2003 poor lower caste women were less vulnerable as they had been able to access government grants to build concrete houses that protected them from the flooding that women from some of the other castes were unable to avoid. Gendered effects were obvious however in ideals of women’s behaviour and their need to maintain caste and honor attributes which were put under stress in such times (Ray-Bennett, 2009).

An exception to the contentions about women’s higher mortality is the case of Hurricane Mitch where more men were said to have died than women. It has been suggested that this was due to existing gender norms in which ideas about masculinity encouraged risky, ‘heroic’ action in a disaster situation (Röhr, 2006). According to Bradshaw, who conducted research in the areas affected by Hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua, ‘the idea of being able to say with certainty who is the most affected by disasters is interesting given that the impact of any event will be time, place and person specific or depend on a mix of location, event and vulnerability.’ She argues that while poverty is a key component of vulnerability, it is not the only, nor necessarily the best, component in terms of predicting impact. Responses are subjective and will be framed by individual understandings of appropriate behaviour which, in turn, are shaped by cultural norms, including gender norms. Within Latino cultures, for example, the cult of ‘machismo’ may make men not women more likely to suffer loss of life during an event, whatever their relative poverty, due to their socially constructed roles and associated riskier behaviour patterns in face of danger. On the other hand, women’s social conditioning may make them so risk-averse that this becomes a risk in itself as they remain in their homes despite rising water levels, waiting for a male authority figure to arrive to grant them permission and/or assist them in leaving. Such behaviour will affect middle income women who are ‘housewives’ as much, if not more so, than low- income women workers. She writes further, that, ‘there were no reliable data to suggest that women more than men suffered physical damage or injury from hurricane Mitch, nor that more men than women were killed’ (2010:3/5).

The assertion that women are 14 times more likely to die in natural calamities also has an uncertain history. It has been cited in innumerable texts, among them in a U.S. Congress resolution. Several authors cite these numbers as a statement of fact without referencing it while most others refer to an IUCN/WEDO document from 2004. When I wrote to IUCN to ask for the original research for this assertion, I was referred to a report by another author as being the correct source for this statement. On contacting the author, it appeared that the statement was made at a presentation at a natural hazards workshop that took place sometime between 1994 and 1996, with the author subsequently including it in a report. This statement has since then been picked up and presented as a fact in several documents on natural disasters.1

3.3. Women as pro-environmental

The third argument concerns women tending to be more environmentally conscious than their male counterparts. The assumption is especially evident in the research on gender and climate change from Europe, though it has its roots in the gender and development debates as well as some eco-feminist literature. This argument about women’s virtuousness tends to make

assumptions about women’s needs and interests. Although much of the research in Europe is based on quantitative surveys on transport preferences and consumption, the arguments ignore differences between women and tend to club their motivations, perspectives and actions into a homogenous whole. According to Reed, considerable feminist research on women and environmen- tal activism has generated a dualism wherein some women’s activism is considered progressive and pro-environmental, while other activism is considered materialistic and virtually ignored. Consequently, she notes that there is a tendency to predetermine women as economically and/or socially marginal. . .to overdeter- mine women’s identities as pro-environmental and exclude their other identities from consideration. In her research in northern Vancouver, she studies some of these ‘other’ women, the ones who do not normally find space in the literature on women and environment. These women were vociferous supporters of conventional forestry and certainly could not be categorised as pro-environmental. Reed emphasises the importance of examining the embeddedness of women’s responses and shows that women’s identities and agendas are shaped by their circumstances. They do not always ‘play’ their subjectivities and choice of activism but may also be ‘dealt’ them within the confines of households, workplaces, communities, policy debates (such as environmental- ism) and research agendas (2000:365–6/382).

According to Leach, ideas about women’s closeness to nature or their virtuousness in taking care of it were picked up by policy because they served strategic interests in the 1980s. She writes that when translated into development practice, these women-environment links tended to come to mean two things; acknowledging women’s environmental roles so that they could be brought into broader project activities such as tree planting, soil conservation and so on, mobilizing the extra resources of women’s labour, skill and knowledge; or justifying environ- mental interventions which targeted women exclusively, usually through women’s groups. ‘Success’ in the projects was secured at the expense of women while new environmental chores were added to their already long list of caring roles. In addition, it obscured the interests of women not represented in the women’s groups or targeted by the projects and further ignored issues concerning property and power. Fundamentally, Leach argues that programmes ran the risk of giving women responsibility for ‘saving the environment’ without addressing whether they actually had the resources or capacity to do so (2007:72).

Arguments about women’s inherent vulnerability or virtuous- ness are in large part driven by the desire to put women and unequal gender relations on the map in relation to discussions on climate change. After a period of attention to gender issues in the 1970s and 1980s, the 1990s were characterised by a focus on poverty, and gender did not figure much in these debates. Similarly, there are hardly any references to gender in the increasingly expert oriented and technical literature on climate change. The policy literature reflects the same trend. In that context it would be reasonable to assume that some gender activists and researchers tend to overemphasise the poverty of women as a way of getting them onto the agenda. According to Röhr, this is what politicians respond to, ‘‘The notion that women are most vulnerable victims of climate change and its impacts is what makes many negotiators receptive to women and gender aspects’’ (2009:59).

My intention here is not to thwart the aim of highlighting questions of women’s vulnerability or virtuousness that are valid arguments in many contexts. The ways in which feminists push for policy change has a lot to do with the pressures they experience in their encounters with development and policy: pressures to simplify, sloganise and create narratives with the ‘power to move’

1 I would like to thank Asli Tepecik Dis for her assistance in tracking down the origins of this quote.

S. Arora-Jonsson / Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 744–751 747

come to depend on gender myths and give rise to feminist fables (Cornwall et al., 2007:12–13). But, if evidence is vague and inconsistent, it is also easily ignored or even ridiculed. When policy makers do believe in women’s vulnerability, do policy prescrip- tions or programmes based on women’s vulnerability translate into the lived realities of the women they talk about? In the following section, I examine the dangers of presenting arguments on unsubstantiated research, the importance of context and embeddedness in the analysis as well as the unintentional reproduction of dichotomies, whether it is about men and women or South and North.

4. Gender and climate change

The literature about climate change and gender has so far been written mainly to lobby for a gender perspective within international politics. It has been marred by a lack of data and evidence. Arguments about women’s poverty and mortality are used to back up claims about the unequal effects of climate change on men and women. Arguments are built on dubious statistical claims which are taken as building blocks for future research or quoted as facts. Many reports and papers frequently do not cite their sources or tend to cite each other. As a result of this, the credibility of gender research is undermined and met with scepticism within the larger research community.

Vulnerable or virtuous women in relation to the environment present a static conception of women’s roles. Women tend to get represented as a homogenous group, suffering because of their marginal social position vis a vis men. As the cites from the policy documents on the first page make obvious, the major problem is considered to be that women are vulnerable, more susceptible to climate change and that this is mainly a problem in the developing world. Addressing power imbalances are not necessarily on the agenda. This insistence on women’s universal vulnerability (at least as far as the developing world is concerned) can have an opposite effect, that is, gender is made invisible in the debates on climate change since it is assumed that we know what the problem is – the vulnerability of women. It also denies them agency while constructing women’s vulnerability as their specific problem. In doing so, it reinforces differences between women and men as given and unchangeable, as for example in the generalization that poor women are always more vulnerable and more likely to die in catastrophes while the major polluters are men. Women are vulnerable in a multitude of situations. However generalizing about it tells us little about the configuration of social relations of power in particular contexts or how the vulnerability is produced for other groups such as certain groups of men. Powerlessness can leave men vulnerable to climate change, albeit in different ways. The spate of farmer suicides in India in recent years, mainly men, shows the stresses that men face in times of food insecurity where they are meant to provide for the family. Generalizations make it impossible to meet the highly specific needs of particular groups of women or men and to take advantage of the potential for climate change mitigation in different contexts.

Research has shown that the transfer of resources to women which comes about as a result of the focus on women as poor and vulnerable do not necessarily benefit specifically women. One of the main policy responses to date – which has been to feminise anti-poverty programmes – seem to have contributed to the problem they are supposedly attempting to solve, that is, to push more of the burden of dealing with poverty onto the shoulders of women (Chant, 2010). It is the terms and forms of participation in programmes and other policy prescriptions that are important. Citing reconstruction efforts after hurricane Mitch, Bradshaw writes that while assumptions about women household heads’ relative poverty may have informed the distribution of resources,

lack of understanding of what informs their gendered experience of poverty meant the resources provided did not tackle the causes of that poverty. While over half the women in the study felt it was women who were participating most in reconstruction, only one- quarter felt women benefited most and few saw any personal benefits, practical or strategic, from their involvement (2010:6). In effect, Bradshaw and several other scholars make the argument that although policy and resources are directed at women they often have an unintended negative impact where greater responsibility for overall poverty is put on women. Poverty reduction measures become a ‘feminisation of responsibility.’ As Chant puts it, a more apposite way of describing the situation might be ‘directing resources through women’ (2010:2).

The transfers of funds often involve the miraculous change of women from ‘victims into heroines’ as they become assigned the role of getting rid of poverty (Davids and van Driel, 2010:221). This transformation from the victim to heroine rings a familiar bell in relation to the North–South discussions on gender and climate change. It reflects not only attempts to put gender and women on the map but also reveals North–South biases while reinforcing them. The corollary to the vulnerable woman in the South is the virtuous woman of the North, environmentally conscious and environmental trailblazer. Due to the relative lack of tangible material poverty, gender is not considered as important or relevant in the Swedish environmental context. This is evident in the Swedish Bill on climate and energy policy that regards gender and social inequalities as a problem in developing countries. The Swedish Defence Agency’s assertion that this inequality in developing countries can aggravate problems in other countries and have indirect effects in Sweden is another reflection of this thinking.2 It is further reinforced by the constant and often unsubstantiated reports on the vulnerability of third world women. It appears that in such thinking there is a need to picture undeveloped and poor third world men and oppressed women to assuage doubts about inequalities in the developed world and the need for strong action in these countries (Arora-Jonsson, forth- coming).

Justifiably, in many countries in the South, natural resources are a question of livelihoods in a more direct way. But the distance of the resource from a direct source of livelihoods should not blind us to the fact that gender in environmental matters is as important in for example Sweden as it is in India. In research carried out with women’s groups in India and in Sweden, the importance of gender- equality and of the relation of third world women to the environment was self evident to development workers, research- ers and others. ‘Development’ and a certain standard of welfare made these issues appear to be less urgent in a wealthier country like Sweden. However, research showed otherwise; first, that questions of gender and power in environmental management are extremely relevant in a poorer country like India but also very much so in a richer country like Sweden. In the latter, power relations can take forms that make gendered discrimination more difficult to contest. Second, development discourses about equality and empowerment of oppressed third world women bear not only on how gender equality is conceptualised and practiced in the South but also shape the space for gender equality in the North.

The rhetoric and discourse of being far ahead in terms of gender equality (in comparison to the rest of the world) that was ubiquitous in policy but also in everyday village life in Sweden came in the way of women organizing in a women’s group. The idea of a women’s group was considered to be irrelevant in a gender equal/neutral society. In India, on the other hand, the discourse of gender discrimination was used by some of women to temporarily garner resources and to build a women’s collective

2 It could provide yet another reason for tightening national borders.

S. Arora-Jonsson / Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 744–751748

that could challenge mainstream institutions for environmental management.3 Understanding these incongruities brings into question the category of development both in a Southern but especially so in a Northern context where the North and especially Sweden is taken as referent for questions of development and gender equality (Arora-Jonsson, 2009:213–214).

According to Jackson, it is easier to make gender an issue of poverty than to view gender disadvantage as crossing boundaries of class and ethnicity. Moreover, it is much simpler than directing attention to the gendered character of governments or development agencies themselves (1996:501). This is apparent in a recent report that compares men’s and women’s responses to climate variability in conditions of draught in villages in Andhra Pradesh in India. There were differences between men and women depending on roles and activities but those varied in different contexts. Most striking in the report is the gendered difference in relation to institutional bodies and government support. Women were shown to be consistently disadvantaged on several fronts such as extension services, being paid less than men for their work in the National Rural Employment Guarantee projects, information being directed mainly at men with larger farms or more services available to men than women. In other words, the main disadvantage for women appeared to be in relation to institutional support which had major implications for building resilience to long-term climate change (Lambrou and Nelson, 2010). Further, vulnerability for farmers is not only climate related but is very much a condition and response to wider markets and economic instruments that need to be examined (O’Brien et al., 2004). Such institutional disadvantages for different groups of men and women and the unequal connections need to be at the centre of our inquiries.

5. Contextualising vulnerability and virtue

The relegation of gender mainly to vulnerability and partly to virtuousness detracts attention from the problem that afflicts both the North and the South, and that is gender and power inequalities in decision-making in environmental management. Not unsurprising- ly, in discourses around climate change that have hardly any attention to gender, the few mentions that policymakers have chosen to take up are about vulnerability or virtuousness. That helps to put the problem out there, mainly with poor and geographically distant vulnerable woman. The crux of the matter that marginaliza- tion or vulnerability is due to inequalities in power is ignored.

Scholars have shown that efficiency of environmental manage- ment increases with the involvement of women, from recycling plants in Europe (Buckingham, 2010) to community forestry committees in Nepal (Agarwal, 2010). Feminists and others have argued for more women in environmental decision-making, both for reasons of efficiency and equality. However, the inclusion of women and other marginalized groups can be double-edged. The inclusion of women in forestry organizations in India and Sweden was a way of maintaining the status quo rather than questioning inequalities. The women who were to be included were expected to abide by rules and laws over which they felt that they did not have much say. They preferred to participate through their own groups in which they felt stronger and more confident. This was rejected by male-dominated village/forest organizations who regarded the women’s agency and the forming of their groups as a challenge to their organizations (Arora-Jonsson, 2010). A gender analysis thus involves understand- ing, how unequal practices are perpetuated in environmental

decision-making or as in the case from Ghana, understanding the mechanisms that make it possible for men in the households to shape women’s decision-making in their interests. As Carr writes, it is imperative to understand the persistence of current, unjust adaptations that persist in local settings (2008). In Ghana, one could speculate that the acceptance of the unjust adaptation on the part of the women was an exercise in self-preservation in the given circumstances. By not owning and cultivating extra land they may have tried to maintain a measure of control over their labour and time that they would otherwise have had to put at the disposal of the household. It was clear from the studies that men had a great deal of authority over women’s incomes and in times of stress it was women who spent their incomes on the household while men could withhold incomes. Taken for granted assumptions about women’s vulnerability detracts attention from what women are already doing in relation to environmental management or intra-household decision-making.

The examples from Sweden and India earlier demonstrate that the entry of women into existing institutions did not change unequal relations. Institutional change and flexibility in institu- tional forms is needed so that groups can participate in decision- making. Otherwise, insistence on women’s inclusion in existing institutions might just rubber stamp prevalent inequalities (Arora- Jonsson, 2010). Neither does channelling funds to women necessarily change unjust paradigms of environmental manage- ment or adaptation. What would flexible and equitable climate change policies and programmes look like? Scholars have argued for polycentric approaches to policy making (Ostrom, 2010)4 and for democratising policy (Charlesworth and Okereke, 2010). ‘‘Democratisation of policy could mean that decisions take more time, although lack of action to address climate change over the last 20 years suggests that economic methods are little better at achieving action’’ (Ibid:127). Providing for diversity within international policies and programmes is difficult and costly. On the other hand programme failure is also costly.5 The inevitable consequence might be the writing off of gender equality measures when development workers meet the messy realities and incomprehensible choices taken by men and women. Democratic policy-making presupposes that open and reasoned debate is possible. Recent climate debates show how the new media can enable participation but also allow vested interests to destabilize environmental debates and generate confusion and mistrust (Berkhout, 2010).

We need to know how and in what contexts women find themselves to be able to deal reliably with the unequal effects of climate change. Gender is important but needs to be seen in its particular context. For example, on the question of energy, Skutsch writes, ‘‘Basically it is very difficult to make a strong case for a real gender difference, not least because income factors may have a much more important and confounding influence on energy use than gender’’ (2002:33). Gender is thus so much more than poverty and women are not a homogenous category. Women can be rich or poor, urban or rural, from different ethnicities, nationalities, households and families all of which produce specific results. A poor man in India is unlikely to be as polluting as a woman in Sweden or for that matter as much a polluter as a rich woman in India.

It is clear that more context specific case studies are needed to understand the linkages of gender and climate change – comparative case studies that examine not only relationships and adaptations on the ground but also ask new questions from

3 In this particular case resources to finance income generation activities and micro-credit (for poverty alleviation) were used by the women in some villages for other purposes such as strengthening their self help groups and in many instances challenging gender discrimination. However, since this was outside the purview of the original micro credit programme, it eventually became impossible for the donors to continue supporting the groups (Arora-Jonsson, 2009).

4 The thesis of polycentric approaches to address environmental changes is based on extensive empirical work and has the potential to facilitate benefits at multiple scales. The examples presented in the article with regard to climate change however have not proven to be democratic or successful as yet.

5 Thanks to one of the reviewers for pointing this out.

S. Arora-Jonsson / Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 744–751 749

different vantage points. Examining environmental management from the vantage point of women’s groups rather than the existing institutions offered radically new insights (e.g. Arora-Jonsson, 2009). Attention to rural–urban linkages in the examination of an agricultural context, suggested adaptation possibilities outside of the agricultural framework (Eriksen and O’Brien, 2007). We need to direct our attention to connections to the larger political economy and use of discourses that exacerbate and cause vulnerability and inequalities (O’Brien et al., 2004; Arora-Jonsson, 2009). What are the mechanisms that make women make choices that are so obviously discriminatory? What are the alternatives? What would different groups of women or men themselves want? Importantly, we need to study the role of the gendered institutions that men and women have to relate to. Many progressive gender equality policies have foundered on the rocks of gender biased patterns in public decision making or a resistant bureaucracy where profound gender biases are embedded in the justice and public administration systems (Goetz, 2009:5). Attention also needs to be directed to recognizing and understanding the new institutions that have grown up around the paradigm of global environmental change (c.f. Hulme, 2010), to further understand in what way they may reinforce or challenge gender inequalities and how sensitive they are to geographical sensibility.

Marginality needs be viewed through the power relations that produce the vulnerability in the first place. Different power relations are privileged in different situations and class, gender, ethnicity or nationality assume importance depending on the context. The specificity of vulnerability may differ. A generalized belief in women’s vulnerability silences contextual differences. Gender gets treated not as a set of complex and intersecting power relations but as a binary phenomena carrying certain disadvan- tages for women and women alone. The local forms of climate change need to be understood not only as effects but men and women’s actions also as constitutive ingredients of climate changes. We need to be able to see women like men being responsible for as well capable agents in mitigating climate change without losing track of power relations involved, without having to categorise women as vulnerable or virtuous.

A feminist response to global climate change must not only challenge masculine technical and expert knowledge about climate change but also the tendency to reinforce gendered polarities as well as North–South divides that tend to slot women, as vulnerable or virtuous. Unequal gender relations do not cause or aggravate climate change. But gender relations do determine how the environment is managed. Arguments about women’s vulnera- bility in the South and their virtuousness in the North are an effort to keep women and gender on the climate change map from where their presence is all too easily erased. However, it also works to maintain the status-quo and can inhibit substantive change. It is dangerous to attribute responsibility by gender (c.f. Skutsch, 2002:34). It is easy to discredit such assumptions and more importantly we ignore the interrelated factors and axes of power that would help us understand how best to deal with the problems of climate change and its unequal effects.

References

Agarwal, B., 2010. Gender and Green Governance: The Political Economy of Women’s Presence: Within and Beyond Community Forestry. OUP, Oxford.

Araujo, A., Quesada-Aguilar, A., Aguilar, L., Pearl, R., 2008. Gender Equality and Adaptation. Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO)/ World Conservation Union (IUCN).

Arora-Jonsson, S., 2009. Discordant connections: discourses on gender and grass- roots activism in two forest communities in India and Sweden. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 35 (1), 213–240.

Arora-Jonsson, S., 2010. Particular and wider interests in natural resource manage- ment. Scandinavian Journal of Forest Research 25 (9), 33–44.

Arora-Jonsson, forthcoming. Gender, Development and Environmental Manage- ment. Routledge. London.

Berkhout, F., 2010. Reconstructing boundaries and reason in the climate debate. Global Environmental Change 20, 565–569.

Bradshaw, S., 2010. Women, poverty and disasters: exploring the links through hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua. In: Chant, S. (Ed.), International Handbook of Gender and Poverty. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham.

Brody, A., Demetriades, J., Esplen, E., 2008. Gender and Climate Change: Mapping the Linkages. A Scoping Study on Knowledge and Gaps. BRIDGE, Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Brighton.

Buckingham, S., 2010. Call in the women. Nature 468, 502. Carr, E.R., 2008. Between structure and agency: livelihoods and adaptation in

Ghana’s Central Region. Global Environmental Change 18, 689–699. Chant, S., 2010. Gendered poverty across space and time: introduction and over-

view. In: Chant, S. (Ed.), The International Handbook of Gender and Poverty: Concepts, Research, Policy. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham.

Charlesworth, M., Okereke, C., 2010. Policy responses to rapid climate change: an epistemological critique of dominant approaches. Global Environmental Change 20, 121–129.

Cornwall, A., Harrison, E., Whitehead, A., 2007. Gender myths and feminist fables: the struggle for interpretive power in gender and development. Development and Change 38 (1), 1–20.

Davids, T., van Driel, F., 2010. Globalisation and the need for a gender lens: A discussion of dichotomies and orthodoxies with particular reference to the ‘feminisation of poverty’. In: Chant, S. (Ed.), The International Handbook of Gender and Poverty: Concepts, Research, Policy. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, pp. 219–230.

Demetriades, J., Esplen, E., 2008. The Gender Dimensions of Poverty and Climate Change Adaptation. IDS Bulletin, Institute of Development Studies.

Denton, F., 2002. Climate change vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation: why does gender matter? Gender and Development 10, 10–20.

Eriksen, S.H., O’Brien, K., 2007. Vulnerability, poverty and the need for sustainable adaptation measures. Climate Policy 7, 337–352.

Eriksen, S., Brown, K., Kelly, P.M., 2005. The dynamics of vulnerability: locating coping strategies in Kenya and Tanzania. The Geographical Journal 171 (4), 287–305.

Goetz, A.-M. (Ed.), 2009. Governing Women: Will New Public Space for Some Women Make a Difference for All Women? Routledge, New York.

Government of India, 2008. National Action Plan on Climate Change. Prime Min- ister’s Council on Climate Change.

Hansson, S.O., 2007. Gender Issues in Climate Adaptation. Swedish Defence Re- search Agency, Stockholm.

Harriss-White, B., 1999. Gender-cleansing: the paradox of development and dete- riorating female life chances in Tamil Nadu. In: Sundar Rajan, R. (Ed.),Signposts. Kali for Women, New Delhi.

Hemmati, M., Röhr, U., 2007. A Huge Challenge and a Narrow Discourse. Women and Environments. Women and Gender Studies Institute, New College, Univer- sity of Toronto, Toronto.

Hulme, M., 2010. Problems with making and governing global kinds of knowledge. Global Environmental Change 20, 558–564.

Jackson, C., 1996. Rescuing gender from the poverty trap. World Development 24 (3), 489–504.

Johnsson-Latham, G., 2007. A Study on Gender Equality as a Prerequisite for Sustainable Development (What we know about the extent to which women globally live in a more sustainable way than men, leave a smaller ecological footprint and cause less climate change). Environment Advisory Council, Stock- holm, Sweden.

Kabeer, N., 2008. Gender, labour markets and poverty. In: Ehrenpries, D. (Ed.), Poverty in Focus. International Poverty Centre, Brasilia.

Lambrou, Y., Nelson, S., 2010. Farmers in a Changing Climate Does Gender Matter: Food Security in Andhra Pradesh, India. FAO, Rome.

Leach, M., 2007. Earth mother myths and other ecofeminist fables: how a strategic notion rose and fell. Development and Change 38 (1), 67–85.

Lee, B., McCollum, B., Eschoo, A., 2009. Recognizing the Disparate Impact of Climate Change on Women and the Efforts of Women Globally to Address Climate Change. House of Representatives, Resolution 98.

Marcoux, A., 1998. The feminization of poverty: claims, facts and data needs. Population and Development Review 24 (1), 131–139.

Medeiros, M., Costa, J., 2008. Is there really a ‘feminisation of poverty’? In: Ehrenpries, D. (Ed.), Poverty in Focus. International Poverty Centre, Brasilia.

Neumayer, E., Plumper, T., 2007. The gendered nature of natural disasters: the impact of catastrophic events on the gender gap in life expectancy, 1981–2002. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97 (3), 551–566.

O’Brien, K., Leichenko, R., Kelkar, U., Venema, H., Aandahl, G., Tompkins, H., Javed, A., Bhadwal, S., Barg, S., Nygaard, L., West, J., 2004. Mapping vulnerability to multiple stressors: climate change and globalization in India. Global Environ- mental Change 14, 303–313.

O’Brien, K., Eriksen, S., Nygaard, L.P., Schjolden, A., 2007. Why different interpretations of vulnerability matter in climate change discourses. Climate Policy 773–788.

Oldrup, H., Breengaard, M.H., 2009. Desk Study on Gender, Gender Equality, and Climate Change. Nordic Council of Ministers.

Ostrom, E., 2010. Polycentric systems for coping with collective action and global environmental change. Global Environmental Change 20, 550–557.

Patel, T. (Ed.), 2007. Sex-selective abortion in India. Sage Publications, New Delhi/ Thousand Oaks/London.

Premi, M.K., 2001. The Missing Girl Child. Economic and Political Weekly 36, 1875– 1880.

S. Arora-Jonsson / Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 744–751750

Ray-Bennett, N.S., 2009. The influence of caste, class and gender in surviving multiple disasters: a case study from Orissa, India. Environmental Hazards 8 (1), 5–22.

Reed, M.G., 2000. Taking stands: a feminist perspective on ‘other’ women’s activism in forestry communities of northern Vancouver Island. Gender, Place and Culture 7 (4), 363–387.

Regeringens Proposition, 2008. En Sammanhållen Klimat – Och Energipolitik – Klimat. Regeringskansliet, Stockholm.

Röhr, U., 2006. Gender and Climate Change. Tiempo: A bulletin on climate and development, http://www.tiempocyberclimate.org.

Sen, G., 2008. Poverty as a gendered experience: the policy implications. In: Ehrenpries, D. (Ed.), Poverty in Focus. International Poverty Centre, Brasilia.

Skutsch, M.M., 2002. Protocols, treaties and action: the ‘climate change process’ viewed through gender spectacles. Gender and Development 10 (2), 30–39.

Sundblad, E.-L., Biel, A., Gärling, T., 2007. Cognitive and affective risk judgments related to climate change. Journal of Environmental Psychology 2797–2806.

S. Arora-Jonsson / Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 744–751 751