By Svea Horn, MSc International Conflict and Cooperation
In the past three decades, the international community has been striving to tackle climate change, with climate finance becoming a core dimension of those efforts. Climate finance is defined as finance that seeks to support local, national and international climate change adaptation and mitigation activities which have been agreed upon by the international community in the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change. The aim is to transfer money to ‘developing countries’ who have struggled more to adapt to and mitigate climate change due to their historically disadvantaged position caused by imperialism and colonialism, as well as more recent neoliberal policies. Additionally, research has shown that climate change affects people of different genders and social groups asymmetrically due to biased socio-economic structures in our societies.
I understand gender as a social construct. This means that people will have a different understanding of what it means to be ‘male’ or ‘female’, depending on where they live or when they were born. Unfortunately, there is a bias against people who are perceived as feminine or female in our society which is equally prominent within the global climate change discourse, and the distribution of climate finance. Gender is particularly discriminating in relation to climate change, as climate change “reinforces existing gender inequalities in the key dimensions that are most crucial for coping with climate-related change” such as access to information, resources and power.
Inclusion of Gender into Climate Finance
In my own research I have explored how global climate finance institutions, such as the Green Climate Fund, the World Bank and UN-REDD are including gender and women’s concerns into their policies and institutional structures. It has quickly become apparent that climate finance providers only appear to attempt to include gender throughout the whole project cycle and their institutional structures. Moreover, I found that climate finance stakeholders – while clearly having substantial knowledge of women’s disadvantaged position in society, especially women in the Global South – do not fully design their climate finance programmes in an appropriate way (i.e. the AFAWA Project in Ghana).
In Ghana, similarly to other countries in the ‘Global South’, the inclusion of gender and women within climate finance is additionally impeded by the internal funding structures for local governments. There is a the lack of specific budget to include gender within governmental and climate change organisations, and gendered landownership which is a great disadvantage for women especially in relation to climate finance benefit sharing.
Obstacles Preventing a Successful Inclusion of Gender into Climate Finance
It is important to highlight that no international organisation and no society around the globe is gender neutral. There is no policy area that is gender neutral, including climate finance and science, as gender permeates all aspects of society. However, the lack of inclusion of gender and women’s concerns within climate finance makes me question whether the idea of a systematic inclusion of gender in all areas of politics and society – and specifically into climate finance – is too radical to be implemented. While international organisations and governments around the world have been keen to showcase their technical expertise and approaches to include gender, they seem to have stubbornly avoided bringing about actual institutional change which could speed up this process. By ignoring the political aspect of the issue of gender inequality within climate finance by merely employing gender checklists and quotas, they successfully avert the need to question “power relations, privilege and marginalisation” within their organisations and the societies they operate in.
Also identified during my research, is the essentialisation of women and the gender stereotypes that are being employed by climate finance organisations within their institutional and project policies and documents. For example, women are included in dispute mechanisms in programmes based on their ‘natural talent’ as peacemakers and negotiators’. Another example is the use of micro-credit schemes that specifically target women based on gender stereotypes that see women as more community-oriented and further victimise them. As long as international climate finance and development organisations do not move past an image of women and men in ‘developing’ countries which is based on Western and, in some cases, colonial assumptions (often made without taking the local context into account), achieving gender equality in climate finance will not go beyond the superficial level. Without an intersectional analysis, which takes into account the social categories, such as class, race, gender identity, sexual orientation and ethnicity, and the disadvantages that come with them and intersect with, gender equality will not become a reality within climate finance.
People as partners
As my research has shown, ‘gender’, as well as women and their needs, has so far not been included into global climate finance. This can primarily be traced back to the lack of political (and social) will power of both the institutions and organisations which implement the United Nations Framework Convention’s climate finance plans and promises to include women and a gender perspective into their policies and projects. Additionally, the superficial nature of these efforts to make climate finance more equal in relation to gender have hindered a successful inclusion, which is not aided by the stereotyping and essentialisation of both men and women.
If climate finance organisations are to truly move beyond superficial attempts to include gender, they must start to rethink not only their institutional structures, but also their stereotypical assumptions of the people they are working with in the Global South. Only if people, and particularly women, in ‘developing countries’ are seen as partners and equals and not victims in the fight against climate change, will the inclusion of gender within climate finance become a much more likely reality.
About the Author: Svea Horn is a Masters student at the University of Stirling, and has recently submitted her dissertation for her MSc International Conflict and Cooperation. Svea has a strong interest in gender studies, especially in relation to peace studies and climate change and sustainability . For her undergraduate dissertation on the implementation of the UNSCR 1325, Svea won the University of Stirling’s Murray Learmonth prize for best Single or Combined Honours in Politics dissertation at the University of Stirling. Svea plans to continue researching in these areas.