Learning Lab: Conceptualizing Climate Justice from a Feminist Economic Perspective
On 29 June, GI-ESCR jointly with Equidad de Género: Ciudadanía, Trabajo y Familia, and the Campaigns of Campaigns hosted an interactive session at the 30th Annual Conference of the International Association for Feminist Economics held at the Graduate Institute Geneva from 29 June to 1 July.
The learning lab convened a small group of experts and civil society organizations currently working on the climate, gender equality and feminist economics nexus to identify the key understandings and main components of “climate justice”. The event was an opportunity to create a space for mutual learning, experience and knowledge sharing between panellists and participants. It furthermore contributed to breakdown silos between feminist, economists and environmental academics, experts, and civil society organizations to jointly develop a common narrative on climate justice that will inform and ground further research and advocacy to advance a gender-just transition to sustainable economies and societies.
As the contemporary world climate emergency forces us to see the structural political and economic dimensions at play, the notion of climate justice is key to today's feminist movement. The recently adopted IPCC AR6 2022 report contains for the first time an attempt to define climate justice. However, to unpack this concept and to define its key elements it is necessary to generate a plural dialogue from a feminist economics and decolonial perspective, with diverse groups and communities that are impacted by climate injustice and that are at the frontlines struggling for a just transition to a sustainable world. The learning lab thus detonated a collective bottom-up analysis to contribute to an enriching framework to understand, with a dynamic and participatory approach, the key elements of climate justice. This includes going beyond pursuing the inclusion of women in a green economy to analyse the transformation of fundamental socio-economic structures that underpin unsustainability and uneven gender power imbalances.
In this light, panellists and participants jointly reflected on how justice in climate action could be achieved from a feminist perspective, What alternative economic models do we need to drive the shift to a sustainable and gender-just society? What role can the international human rights and institutions play to develop alternative narratives and be used as key advocacy spaces and pressure points to advance climate justice? And how can we drive a gender-just transition to sustainable and just economies and societies?
The outcomes of the event contributed to break the silos between feminist and environmental protection theory and practice and develop a collective understanding that can help ground some of the key components of climate justice.
Some of which were:
Climate Justice goes beyond its technical aspects. It centers on social justice and human rights, such as gender, racial and intergenerational justice. As current systems normalise structural discrimination, there is an urgent need to recognise these structural causes.
Countries and people at the frontlines are paying for the climate crisis, with a disproportionate impact on women and girls. Not providing climate reparations is a failure to comply with extra-territorial obligations.
We need to focus on macrostructures that are causing climate change. Both at the corporation and production level, but also in the dynamics of the economic and financial sectors.
Women’s ESCR are at the center of the global economy. They cannot be separated from financial structures.
Creditors have become consolidated and powerful and coordinated in their actions. Must look at them as a coherent body and as a force to be reckoned with.
