Colonial erasures in gender and climate change

Keywords: gender, climate change, coloniality, development in practice
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, gender integration in climate change policy discourses drew attention to the unjust effects of climate change on specific groups intersected by gender, race, ethnicity, disability, and age. Well-funded programs that aimed to build gender-responsive climate adaptive capacities and inclusion in mitigation projects have multiplied globally. Despite the growing interest in integrating gender with climate change analyses and responses, these efforts do not go far enough to account for coloniality, thus falling short of achieving feminist transformative ends. Coloniality is a political blind spot and a systematic amnesia in climate policies and actions, despite being a key driver of climate change manifested through various forms of extractivism, modernity, and hegemonic Eurocentric knowledge production.

As a corrective to this amnesia, in this paper, I will draw from the received wisdoms of decolonial feminism, postcolonial feminist science studies, and feminist political ecology to explain some coloniality-driven gender and climate change discourses and practices such as (i) a persistent women-centered approach; (ii) the epistemic privileging of white feminism and colonial othering; (iii) acquiescing to efforts to discipline nature through masculine Enlightenment-inspired techno-managerialism; (iv) analytical disjunctions between historical, political economic, socio-natural multi-scalar drivers of gender/social inequalities and the one-dimensional causality of gender inequality usually tied to ‘Third World’ ahistorical patriarchies and cultural backwardness.