Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Siera Vercillo, School of Environment, Enterprise and Development, University of Waterloo

; ,

Description:

There is increasing recognition of the importance of conducting gendered analysis within climate change research. Africa features prominently in the literature on climate change as people and governments across the continent are disproportionately vulnerable to its impacts, with limited capacity to mitigate and adapt to increasingly erratic rainfall, heat, drought, flooding and sea level rise. Women and men face unequal vulnerabilities to climate change because of differences in gendered norms, divisions of labour, resource access and power relations. This recognition is reflected in research funding agencies specifying gender as a focus in calls for proposals, such as those by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the CGIAR amongst many others, which have increased scholarly attention to gender in climate change research.

The examination of gender has long been a part of broader environmental scholarship, evolving considerably over time. Ecofeminists argue that women have essential knowledge of ecosystems and environmental protection that differs from men’s knowledge because of their inherent connection to nature (Shiva 1988; Mies and Shiva 1993). Ecological feminists and feminist political ecologists have argued that women tend to rely more on ‘nature’, common property and environmental resources compared to men because of their weaker material rights and disproportionate care responsibilities (Agarwal 1992; Rocheleau et al. 1996; Carney 1996; Schroeder 1996; Hovorka 2006; Bezner Kerr 2014; Nyantakyi-Frimpong 2019). These gendered differences translate to women having a greater interest in using natural resources more sustainably than men. Scholarship has also widely demonstrated how women are denied technologies and other assets provided by governments, markets, donors and NGOs that are needed to adapt to a changing climate, as well as given restricted access to and control over land, water, forests and other environmental resources. Overall, gender and environmental scholarship is shifting from being focused on ‘women in/and environment’ to ‘gender and environment’ and now to a ‘gendering of’ human-nature relations (Jerneck 2015). This evolution of thinking about ecosystems and environmental protection is about power relations and complex socioeconomic structures as opposed to simply individual subordination and agency. Gender is also further theorized as dynamic and negotiated through norms and values, intersecting with other social categories in different ways in different environments, and at varied moments in time (Nightingale 2006).

Feminist critiques have more recently pointed to the tendency in gender and climate change literature to frame women in simplistic or contradictory ways - as either vulnerable victims of discriminatory social norms, or as agents of change, capable of saving the environment, and sometimes both (Leach 2007; Arora-Jonsson 2011). There is the continued danger in scholarship on gender and the environment of reinforcing binary, static, homogenized notions of unpaid female care work and material subordination, or of emphasizing agency and making women ‘responsible’ for environmental improvements, adding to their existing work burdens (Nightingale 2006). There is also a danger that gender and environmental theories, research questions, empirical methods and analysis developed by Western institutions, scholars and funders will also heavily bias studies about the African continent. Decolonial scholarship in gender and environmental justice studies are contesting the status quo of knowledge production. Some of these critiques focus upon the power embedded within systems of knowledge production (e.g. Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018), which have privileged male scholars based in the Euro-West (e.g. Medie and Kang 2018). Given the lessons learned from other disciplines, and the interdisciplinary nature that climate change research demands, we would expect to see the climate change and gender literature in Africa building on these foundations.

We will be presenting a systematic review of the gender and climate change in Africa literature, which is forthcoming in Ambio, and intend to engage with emerging scholarship in this session.

The session is sponsored by the Africa Specialty Group, Feminist Geographies Specialty Group, Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group, Development Geographies Specialty Group, and Geographies of Food and Agriculture Specialty Group.


References
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Non-Presenting Participants Agenda