‘Las mujeres son las guardianas de la Pachamama”: Displacing mainstream narratives of gender and multiculturality in Peruvian climate change adaptation planning through Indigenous women’s landed politics

Abstract

Peru is undergoing an active moment for critical studies of gender and Indigeneity in climate change adaptation planning, having recently approved a National Adaptation Plan (NAP), established an Indigenous Peoples Climate Platform, and created a formal gender action plan for climate change. Leaders of Indigenous women’s organizations have harnessed this critical juncture to re-orient the discourse of the national adaptation planning process, which is strongly focused on increasing the participation of vulnerable and marginalized communities like Indigenous women, towards territorial sovereignty and Indigenous life worlds. Based on an analysis of Indigenous women’s organizations’ speeches, interviews, policy briefs, and organizing strategies—as well as national adaptation planning webinars and documents from the Peruvian state and multilaterals—this paper examines gender mainstreaming, expertise, and race in national adaptation planning in Peru. The results unveil two types of expertise and imaginary processes that are interconnected in surprising ways: landed and multilateral expertise. I argue that Indigenous women leverage their landed expertise as an often-ignored node of intersectional identity to call out and rectify the failures of gender mainstreaming in adaptation planning. By drawing on multilateral expertise in accords like UNDRIP and ILO 169, as well as their own landed expertise, Indigenous women assert that land, Indigeneity, and gender intersect to facilitate radically different environmental futures than those imagined by the state and multilateral organizations alone. Indigenous women therefore claim expertise over their own lives, territories, and futures, but also create space for other marginalized groups to exercise their own adaptation imaginaries.