Transcript Tufts_BuckinghamPowerPoint

Why Climate Change is a
gendered – and feminist –
issue
Susan Buckingham
www.susanbuckingham.org
[email protected]
About me:
http://www.susanbuckingham.org/
departure points:
Climate change is the biggest problem facing us in
the 21st Century. A product – and an amplifier –
of social inequalities
Gender relations need to be much better
understood in order to understand how CC is
produced, is escalating, is legislated for and
campaigned against
Gender not adequately addressed
(understood?)in environmental justice
Climate change is the
biggest problem facing us
in the 21st Century
‘Climate change is violence … global scale
against places and species’ Rebecca Solnit, 2014:
57,59
How can we expect to resolve it with only 50%
of the population?
Do we respond with negativity and despair or
affirmation and hope?
Climate change is a
product – and an amplifier –
of social inequalities
Floods, deforestation, fuel
poverty, heat waves …
UN recognises this from UNCED ‘92 to the new
SDGs
COP 18 and the Lima Work Programme (2014)
SDG5
Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls:
5.1 End all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere
5.2 Eliminate all forms of violence against all women and girls
5.3 Eliminate all harmful practices, eg child, early and forced marriage and
FGM
5.4 Recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work
5.5 Women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for
leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and
public life
5.6 Universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive
rights
5.A Undertake reforms to give women equal rights to resources
5.B Enabling technology, in particular ICT, to promote the empowerment of
women
5.C Policies and legislation to promote gender equality and female
empowerment
SDG13
Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts
1 Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related
hazards and natural disasters in all countries
2 Integrate CC measures into national policies, strategies and
planning
3 Improve education, awareness-raising and human and
institutional capacity on CC mitigation, adaptation, impact
reduction and early warning
a Implement financial commitments undertaken by developed
countries
b Raise capacity for effective CC-related planning and
management in LDCs and SIDS, including for women, youth,
local & marginalized communities.
Assumption: that there are enough women in
national negotiating and decision making positions to
be able to contribute to gender balance at
international decision making
Are decision making structures
equal to the task?
• Consistent failure of environmental sectors, and government
to appoint, retain, promote and reward women equally to
men
• Dominant machismo
• From research with government environmental departments:
– Lack of opportunities for part time work and job share working
– Lack of formal accountability for equal opportunities and gender
equality
– Culture in which the young and child free are privileged
– Conditions of work do not support the caring responsibilities of staff
Will numerical equality achieve
change?
• UK: ‘Green Deal Women’s Panel’ to advise Government on
promoting energy efficiency to women:
– 2 MPs, Baroness, BBC presenter, head of RIBA, Chair of Ashden Awards for
Sustainable Development; CEOs of energy, electrical, media and loyalty
card organisations.
• Sweden: Numerical equality between men and women in climate
change planning organisations does not necessarily lead to greater
gender sensitivity in decision making. (Magnusdottir and Kronsell, 2014)
• Intersectionality: absence of BME women; carers; disabled women
• Gender Mainstreaming: ‘the integration of the gender perspective
into every stage of policy processes - design, implementation,
monitoring and evaluation - with a view to promoting equality
between women and men’ (European Commission, 2016).
Assumption that
‘gender mainstreaming’
is working
Principle from 1995, UN and 1996, EU
Replaces rather than supports feminism (Angela McRobbie,
2009)
Tenuously institutionalised (Ulrike Roehr et al, 2008)
‘Simultaneously good for business and wider society’
(Grosser & Moon, 2005)
Specialised ‘policy tool’ and ‘feminist strategy that draws on
and can inform feminist theory’ (Sylvia Walby, 2005)
Lack of ‘frame alignment’ (Mieke Verloo, 1999)
Gender relations need to be
much better understood
Need to understand the full range of gender –
beyond male/female binary
From hypermasculinity to hyperfemininity
‘The phallic women’ Braidotti
‘The Making of an Environmental Hero: A
History of Ecomodern Masculinity, Fuel Cells and
Arnold Schwarzenegger’ Hultman
Gender relations need to be
much better understood
‘Anti-essentialist vitalism’ Deleuze/Braidotti
‘Strategic essentialism’ Spivak
Need to think beyond vulnerability
and victims
Intersectionality
Standpoint theory
Gender is not adequately
addressed in
environmental justice
• Originated in discourses of poverty and/or race
• Rooted in understanding inequality in meta and meso understandings
of spaces and places
• Gender and environmental injustice better understood in the global
South
There is no need to take gender into account, and women in the UK are
not differently affected to men by climate change ‘from my
understanding, it is partly just livings, sometimes women’s role in
developing countries, they sometimes do a lot of the work and the kind
of work they have to do is gonna be made more difficult if it is having
to gather water or things like that. I cannot remember, I have just read
something about it. So, that may not be correct’ (female senior external affairs
officer of a large ENGO, whose main responsibility was ‘in the area of managing climate
change issues and keeping the organisation up-to-date with relevant external policy
development and leading the organisation to lobbying on energy and climate change related
policy’)
Indications of hope?
‘This book is a wake up call for the
environmental movement…Under my
leadership, I am determined that Friends of
the Earth will take this issue seriously, build
campaigning alliances with women’s groups
and mainstream gender equality throughout
our work’ Craig Bennett, CEU, FoE UK
Indications of hope…or despair?
‘That is extra terrestrial for us’ (Portuguese ENGO,
2003)
‘…there is a way of working in the environmental
movement that is very male, very macho, and…that’s
not very appealing to women actually. There is, the
maleness of a clubby culture, you know, it is not very
family friendly in terms of having a work life
balance…’ (UK ENGO)
Dorcetta Taylor 2014: Presidents of EOs: 77% male,
99% white; Chairs of EO Boards: 73% male; 94%
white
Selling activism?
The importance of hope
and action
‘Becoming political’ based on ‘joyous acts of
transformation’ Rosi Braidotti
‘Hope is a potential catalyst. And my hope is not
meek or week. It is urgent and raging. It’s a
hope that believes a better world – away from
cyclical war, the annihilation of the earth’s
treasures and the grinding down of the poor –
is possible.’ Caroline Lucas, UK MP