CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Gonda, Noémi |
|---|---|
| Title | "How to Recaffeinate Climate Change": The Politics of Gender And Climate Change in Post-Neoliberal Nicaragua |
| Summary | In climate change research, there is an important reliance on what are considered scientific facts. The disciplinary divide between environmental and social studies (including feminist studies) has led to insufficient research on the social determinants of climate vulnerability in general, and on gender and climate change in particular. The lack of engagement with climate change from a feminist perspective subsists despite the existence of pertinent theoretical frameworks, and is true even in countries where climate change policies integrate concerns for gender. Consequently, whereas climate vulnerability is increasingly recognized as multidimensional and relational, discussions about necessary social transformations rarely feed into adaptation policies and interventions. Indeed, the latter still too often rely on linear understandings of climate vulnerability and on vulnerability assessments. The Nicaraguan climate change strategy is unique as it is discursively gendered: it assumes that women are especially apt to implement adaptation. Meanwhile, climate change adaptation interventions in this heavily climate change-affected country, integrate gender on the basis of the perception that women are the most vulnerable. These stereotypical representations of women distract attention from the gendered processes that make rural women and men vulnerable to climate change. In order to explore this contradiction, my investigation aims to understand how the gendering of climate change adaptation politics shapes gendered climate vulnerabilities in contemporary rural Nicaragua. Building on a feminist political ecology framework, my study describes the environmental, social and cultural practices related to gender and other potentially oppressive factors such as class, age, ethnicity and geographical location, and climate change adaptation. My research is an engaged feminist ethnography that questions the dominant scientific and masculine framing of climate change research by methodologically mobilizing intersectionality, as well as my own emotions and that of my research participants. My research methods are participant observation, focus group discussions, participatory mapping and interviewing in two Nicaraguan rural communities, as well as document analysis. I show that farmers’ climate change adaptation practices are responses to multidimensional vulnerabilities, determined by stressors that do not only relate to climate change, and that in great part reinforce vulnerabilities that emerge from existing gender, ethnic, class and generational inequalities. Additionally, I highlight that the ambivalent process and the unconvincing results of the discursive gendering of climate change politics in Nicaragua do not engage with the gendered processes that make rural women and men vulnerable to climate change. Rather, this discursive gendering feeds into a post-feminist discourse that renders feminism useless. Moreover, in Nicaragua, the politics of knowledge creation on climate change contribute to constructing smallholder farmers as ignorant and as the culprits of environmental degradation. Finally, I highlight that the subjectivities through which people are brought into relations of power require special attention as climate change adaptation politics have the potential to re(produce) and challenge hegemonic femininities and masculinities. My findings stress the need for shifting the debate from a focus on individual adaptation practices to systems transformation, from the inclusion of women in politics to a feminist response to climate change, from knowledge translation processes to participatory learning on climate change, and from subjugated subjectivities to emancipatory ones. Only then will it be possible to repoliticize the climate change debate. Keywords: Climate change adaptation, vulnerability, gender, feminist political ecology, intersectionality, practices, politics, knowledges, subjectivities, post-neoliberalism, Nicaragua |
| Supervisor | Aistara, Guntra |
| Department | Environment Sciences and Policy PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/gonda_noemi.pdf |
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