The Broker

Where is the gender dimension?

Kathrin Dombrowski | 03 December 2009

Isn’t there something missing? It occurred to me today that although there is lots of talk about vulnerability and justice at the conference, I have not come across any papers that look specifically at issues of gender. In fact, I noticed that the conference programme doesn’t mention the word ‘women’ (or ‘woman’) once. It’s an interesting omission given that women are often singled out as particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. This also makes me wonder more generally about how gender issues are addressed in the earth system governance project. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

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One example from the conference

Thanks for this Kathrin, I think it’s a really valid point. I thought about this myself yesterday when I went to a session on forestry (http://www.thebrokeronline.eu/en/regulars/blogs/Navigating-the-Anthropocene/Architecture-of-forestry-governance) KK Kaushal from the Indian Government talked about joint forest management in Tamil Nadu. This was the first time that I have heard gender discussed at the conference. Kaushal talked about how each of the village councils within the project have a positive discrimination policy where at least one third of the members must be women and the president must also be a woman. I blogged a bit on this yesterday, but the general message from his presentation was that joint forestry management has had much wider impacts on the community than just increasing tree cover. Perhaps women’s involvement and empowerment is one of these. It would be interesting to hear of any other examples people have…
Louise Stoddard | December 04, 2009 | Respond