Understanding Climate Change through Gender Relations

Susan Buckingham, Virginie Le Masson, Susan Buckingham, Virginie Le Masson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138957671
• eBook ISBN: 9781317340607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book explains how gender, as a power relationship, influences climate change related strategies, and explores the additional pressures that climate change brings to uneven gender relations. It considers the ways in which men and women experience the impacts of these in different economic contexts. The chapters dismantle gender inequality and injustice through a critical appraisal of vulnerability and relative privilege within genders. Part I addresses conceptual frameworks and international themes concerning climate change and gender, and explores emerging ideas concerning the reification of gender relations in climate change policy. Part II offers a wide range of case studies from the Global North and the Global South to illustrate and explain the limitations to gender-blind climate change strategies.

This book will be of interest to students, scholars, practitioners and policymakers interested in climate change, environmental science, geography, politics and gender studies.

1Introduction

Susan Buckingham and Virginie Le Masson

Since the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997, requiring wealthy countries to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to an average of five per cent against 1990 levels, only a handful of these so-called Annex 1 countries have met or exceeded the target.¹ The EU reduced its emission of GHG by a mere 0.89 per cent, despite its much vaunted environmental credentials, although this masks the achievements of some member states which have reduced GHG emissions by up to 13 per cent.² Meanwhile, the USA reduced its GHG emissions by 3.12 per cent and Australia by 0.01 per cent, while Russia increased its emissions by 0.53 per cent, Japan by 3.27 per cent and New Zealand by 3.47 per cent (World Resources Institute Interactive, 2016). This failure on the part of wealthy countries to meet their reduction target, agreed on the basis that they had already benefited from exploiting their own carbon-based resources to achieve global economic advantage, has failed to compensate for rising GHG emissions in fast-growing economies (such as China, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Malaysia). This does not augur well for the less than ambitious targets agreed for the Paris Agreement in December 2015 whereby, as Javier Mazorra and colleagues discuss in more detail, parties agreed to

‘i) hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C while pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels; ii) increase the ability to adapt to climate change, foster climate resilience and lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, without threatening food production and iii) make finance flows consistent with the previous statements.

(UNFCCC, 2015: 2)

The agreement also recognises the need to support developing countries in their mitigation efforts as well as to meet the costs of adaptation (UNFCCC, 2015), however, the terms of implementation and financial support allocated to adaptation is still subject to debate between parties. At the time of writing, 61 out of 197 Parties to the Convention have ratified the agreement, accounting for 47.79 per cent of global GHG emissions.³ The longer the implementation of the policy framework will take, the closer to the threshold of 1.5 degree warming the world will get. The consequences of a global increase of temperatures for ecosystems and human societies are as severe as they are unfair. The impacts of climate change already affect regions and people who have contributed the least to environmental degradation and carbon emissions (Garvey, 2010).

Human induced climate change is a contentious enough topic to research when approaching it with a general social development perspective. To increase the understanding of the production and consequences of climate change with attention to (in)equality, inclusion, marginalisation and rights, inevitably leads to an examination of pathways of unsustainable development. Increasing the evidence base of environmental degradation associated with industrialisation and economic growth, supports people who are primarily affected by changing climate patterns to advocate for climate change mitigation and adaptation and also questions current models of development that exploit and pollute the environment. As a consequence, social research on climate change might not serve the agenda of stakeholders who control dominant and carbon intensive ways of producing and trading energy, food and industrialised goods. To integrate a gender analysis to this research appears to have alienated these stakeholders still further, while organisations who might support social reform are sometimes so immured in what we might arguably call patriarchal systems of power that they are unable to see the need for a critical gender analysis of climate change (Buckingham and Kulcur, 2017).

Two major United Nations conferences in the 1990s – on sustainable development (UNCED in 1992) and on women (the Beijing conference in 1995) – agreed that it was critical for the sake of both that henceforth environmental degradation and women’s inequality be considered in a coordinated way. However, international climate change negotiations and the agreements that have emerged from these remain largely untouched by gender concerns. It has fallen to women to push for gender considerations to inform climate change decision-making, and despite continuous pressure from women’s groups, it was only in 2011 that the annual international climate change meeting – COP (Conference of the Parties) – agreed to do so. However, perhaps because it was women’s groups that had been pressing for this inclusion, and perhaps because of the low level of comprehension of what constitutes gender among decision makers, there is a distinct air of additionality in this broadening of consideration. For example, the COP now includes a ‘Women’s Day’ as part of its annual conference, which may excuse participants from considering women – and gender – in the rest of the conference. If gender, and gender equality, is to be a meaningful policy objective, it must be recognised that it comprises relations between women and men, and between and among different groups of women and men, not to mention between different conceptualisations of masculinity and femininity, which can each be practiced by either, and both, women and men.

The persistent failure to consider gender in all its complexity and subtlety, and the failure of the prevailing social and economic systems to achieve even the modest GHG reductions agreed under the Kyoto Protocol, has led us to conclude that there is room for a book which specifically explains how gender relations produce anthropogenic climate change, and how the world will fail to address climate change and its impacts until it understands and decides to address gender inequality. This inequality, as our chapter authors will argue, is an outcome of distributed power relations which are systematically gendered. All the contributors to this volume agree that understanding gender inequality also requires a simultaneous understanding of social and economic divisions based on class, ethnicity, age, disability, religion, sexuality, parenthood, among others, and how these divisions intersect to compound particular disadvantages and inequalities between and within social groups. There are some ‘basics’ underpinning intersectional gender relations that we will explain in the introduction which the reader who is just beginning to engage with gender will hopefully find helpful in getting the most out of the individual chapters, and which those more familiar with gender debates will probably skim or skip. We also review the literature and action which has pioneered thinking about gender in climate change. This has tended to focus either on women as victims and/or in the ‘front line’ of concern about climate change, or on women as decision makers who lack representation in discussions and policymaking about climate change, from the village council to the United Nations. From this, the reader will realise that the chapter authors are pushing this consideration further. The argument of the book, then, adds to the increasing macro-political-economy discussions towards de-growth and post-growth which are beginning to bring attention to the failure of prevailing political-economic structures and processes to address climate change as both a current and future threat (see e.g. Tim Jackson (2009) and Joseph Stiglitz (2010)). Further, it insists that reimagining existing social structures and processes start with the sine qua non of full and deep gender equality.

This book has two aims. First, to explore why there has been so little focus on understanding gender relations in relation to climate change causes, effects, mitigations and adaptations, and the implications of not adopting gender sensitivity in all these aspects. Second, to examine topical and regional case studies which illustrate and explain the limitations of climate change strategies emerging from a lack of sensitivity to gender relations. These case studies cover a range of geographical settings and scales, both in the Global North and the Global South and in both urban and rural areas in order to diversify the evidence base. The linkages between gender and climate change can be illustrated in many other ways than the typical experience of rural women walking long distance to fetch water in the Sahel. Differences in production and consumption patterns between cities and rural areas and between people according to social categories (class, age, ethnicity and gender) influence their income, their ways of working and travelling, their consumption choices over food and energy and their power over decision-making at every level (Hemmati, 2000). Where possible, examples in this volume suggest what a gendered approach to climate change-related strategies can offer whether in Sweden, Austria, China or Mexico. And in Ellie Perkins’ chapter, she discusses the possibility of sharing information between the Global North and Global South through innovative student projects which reveal common understandings and similarities, as well as differences. This chapter and also Lidewij Tummers’ chapter on co-housing suggest small-scale ways in which gender inequality and climate change can be addressed in synergetic and mutually supporting ways. Reflecting these two aims, the book is organised in two parts. The first part addresses conceptual frameworks and global and/or international themes concerning climate change and gender, while the second presents the cases studies from different global regions experiencing relative wealth and poverty.

Gender relations

Although ‘gender’ implies a relationship between male and female, feminism and masculinism, researchers and writers on gender and environmental issues, including climate change, have been overwhelmingly women. Writers from Carolyn Merchant (1980, 1996) to Joane Nagel (2015) have consistently argued that a particular form of masculinity is responsible for the parallel and related dominance of nature and women, but a more nuanced and plural consideration of masculinities and femininities has only recently been explored in depth. For example, Martin Hultman suggests in this volume that three types of masculinities have different impacts on the environment: industrial masculinity (that which is characterised as the historical dominant masculinity), ecological masculinity (in which men enjoy a sensitive relationship with nature, caring for its long-term sustainability), and a hybrid ‘eco-modern’ masculinity in which the proponent adopts an ecological modernity that provides superficial solutions but no long-term fundamental shifts. The example of eco-modern man which Hultman provides is Arnold Schwarzenegger who, as Governor of California, moderated his ‘Terminator’ SUV driving image with the championing of hydrogen power for motor vehicles (see also Hultman, 2013).

Nagel (2017) writes about how a particular understanding of nature, coupled with a desire to control it, leads to the development and use of science to solve problems which previous iterations of understanding and control have created. Climate change research in the US, Nagel explains, has emerged from a military research programme, and includes attempts to control climate through, for example, the geoengineering of weather systems. Angela Moriggi in Chapter 10 of this volume also describes how the national debate on climate change in China often fails to consider the ‘human face’ of climate change and how social aspects, and localised, small-scale manifestations of the issue, remain largely marginalised in favour of grand technological solutions and financial mechanisms to address climate change. The hyper-masculinity of such science overwhelms the increasing (though still relatively small) numbers of women being recruited so that its culture continues to be reproduced. However, more gender balance in quantity alone, without changes in culture, may not necessarily deliver more gender sensitive planning, as earlier discussion on ‘critical mass’ has suggested they might (see Childs and Krook (2006) for a review). Dymén and Langlais in this volume, note that in the Swedish context the recruitment of both male and female planners from an education system which is imbued with masculinist values appears to ensure their continuation (see also Magnusdottir and Kronsell, 2015). This clearly suggests that something more than an intrinsic ‘maleness’/‘femaleness’ is at work in human/environment relations. The male/female gender binary is disrupted, however, by understanding our identities as multiple (Sandilands, 1999), privileging care work as productive (Merchant, 1996; and Alber, Cahoon and Röhr, in this volume), and adopting subaltern voices as alternative and more powerful ‘standpoints’ from which to appraise the related domination of women and nature (Shiva, 1989).

An attention to alternative standpoints draws attention to how different characteristics intersect to place different groups into more or less disadvantaged relations with nature, and hence climate change. Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) is credited with being the first to write about the concept of intersectionality to explain that inequalities that beleaguer women and people of colour are not independent or mutually exclusive. While race and sex ‘readily intersect’ in the lives of women of colour, she argues, feminist and anti-racist movements tend to ignore that there are particular inequalities that affect women of colour, because of the intersection of their gender and ethnicity. Pertinent to her analysis is how she problematises demands for change as being effective only when the changes reflect the logic of the institutions they are challenging and that ‘“[d]‌emands for change that do not reflect … dominant ideology … will probably be ineffective” Crenshaw, supra note 3, at 1367.’ However, Crenshaw argues that despite these obstacles, using an ‘intersectional sensibility … should be a central theoretical and political objective of both antiracism and feminism’ in order to confront the dominant ideology (Crenshaw, 1991:1243).

Gender analyses need to be more intersectional, in order to recognise that there are different ways in which different women and men are affected by and relate to climate change, mediated by power structures which they experience differently. In some cases this will involve power relations in which privileged women are complicit in the domination of poor women. And while women of colour and first nation/indigenous women are often campaigners for local environmental justice, this involvement is not well represented in the literature (Buckingham and Kulcur, 2009). Exceptions to this include work by Julie Sze (2005) on African American women’s protests about health threatening traffic pollution in New Y...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Structures
• Part II Case studies
• Index