The Climate Crisis: Gendered Impacts, Women’s Agency, and Feminist Analyses Bibliography with Abstracts

This bibliography was created as part of the Consortium's Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace and Planet (FRSPP) project. Given that climate disruption’s effects are being felt all over the world, it inevitably shapes the context in which any attempt to build sustainable peace takes place, and so any theorizing about how to build and sustain peace must take it into account.

This bibliography is meant to serve as an introduction to the academic literature on several key aspects of the relationship between gender and the climate crisis. It is the first of a series of more highly specialized Consortium bibliographies related to climate and environment issues. Others in the series include: “Feminist Engagements with Green New Deals,” “Food Security, Gender and the Climate Crisis,” “Masculinities, the Environment, and Technological ‘Solutions’ to the Climate Crisis,” “Migration, Gender and the Climate Crisis,” “Ecofeminism,” “Environmental Disasters: Gendered Impacts and Responses,” and “Feminist Political Ecology and Feminist Ecological Economics.”

The academic resources in this bibliography are divided into four main themes: the gendered impacts of the climate crisis; women’s agency in the face of the climate crisis (including their adaptive capacity and their roles in decision-making processes); the representation of women and the incorporation of gender concerns into research, policymaking and the delivery of climate services; and explicitly feminist analyses of the drivers of the climate crisis and visions for a more sustainable path forwards. Additionally, the bibliography includes a short final section of selected literature published by NGOs, think tanks and policy institutions.

Research on the gendered dimensions of the climate crisis commonly seeks to understand the ways in which gendered power relations both shape individuals’ experience of and ability to adapt to the climate crisis, and also reinforce the structures that drive environmental degradation and climate breakdown. This includes analyses of how patriarchal, neoliberal and colonial structures determine access to and control over resources, marginalize the knowledge and agency of certain groups, and exacerbate or perpetuate existing inequalities. But it also includes analysis of the ways the climate crisis creates new openings to disrupt existing hierarchies and reimagine the relationship between humans and the environment.

This bibliography was created by the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, as part of our Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace and Planet (FRSPP) project. The FRSPP focuses on the transnational economic actors and processes that tend to deepen the inequalities that underlie armed conflicts and to undermine the prospects for peace that is both politically and environmentally sustainable. Its goal is to provide: forward-looking expert knowledge of those processes; analyses of their impacts on gender relations and other structural inequalities underlying armed conflicts; and recommendations for how to engage and modify those processes to be more supportive of the societal transformations critical to building gender-equitable, sustainable peace. Topics addressed in the FRSPP include, inter alia: the economic recovery policy prescriptions of international financial institutions; extractive industries and natural resource policy; land rights, large scale land acquisition and land grabbing; infrastructure reconstruction; and climate disruption.