22″ April “2022” https://www.wilsoncenter.org/
Gender issues, climate change, and security problems are interconnected in complex and powerful ways. Unfortunately, some of these connections have not received enough attention from scholars, policy analysts, and policymakers. Many policy responses are consequently flawed. This has serious, real-world implications for the promotion of gender equality, the mitigation of climate change, and the advancement of peace and security.
The linkage that has received the most attention is the connection between climate change and security problems, including armed conflict. Scholars have studied environment-security dynamics for decades and, in recent years, both the climate studies and the security studies communities have explored this linkage: The exploration has been a two-way street.[1] Moreover, this recognition of climate-security linkages has crossed over from the scholarly and analytic worlds to policy communities.” [2]
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Unfortunately
Unfortunately, gender issues have been neglected by many policy experts and policymakers. This is true for both the gender-climate and gender-security connections.
This is not to say that gender issues have been overlooked altogether. Since the mid-1990s, feminists, gender scholars, and women’s rights activists have worked to advance understanding of gender-climate and gender-security issues, and they have established that these linkages are powerful. They have also pushed for policy actions. Their efforts have led, in particular, to the adoption of the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) in 2000 and nine subsequent WPS resolutions in the 2000s and 2010s. Since 2013, gender has been integrated in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In October 2021, the U.S. Government released its the first-ever National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality, which emphasized the importance of elevating gender equality in humanitarian relief and security issues as well as promoting the link between gender equity and climate change responses. Activists have also pushed the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) to make climate change and disaster risk reduction a priority theme at its 66th session in March 2022.[3] This is significant progress.
The problem is that almost all of this effort has come from gender champions—gender scholars, analysts, and activists: It has been a one-way street. Two decades into the 21st century, gender issues are still routinely ignored by the security and climate communities. (See Table 1.) This has profound policy implications because security policies and climate actions tend to be high-priority and relatively well-funded endeavors. This is where the action is, in terms of policy attention and resources.
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The security and climate policy communities tend to be comprised of people, mainly men, who are almost completely lacking in gender expertise or even gender policy awareness. As a result, the gender dimensions of security and climate issues are usually not understood, prioritized, integrated, or even considered in security and climate policy packages. It follows, of course, that gendered risks and dangers—affecting more than 7.8 billion people around the world—are not being adequately addressed and opportunities to more effectively respond are being overlooked.
Gender inequality is strongly associated with instability and conflict, both within and between countries.
The sad irony is that this gender-obliviousness has tremendous implications for stability and security. Gender scholars have established—in one of the most important social science findings of the past two decades—that gender inequality is strongly associated with instability and conflict, both within and between countries.[4]
Gender scholars have also shown that gender factors will be critical to the development of effective adaptation and mitigation policies as climate change progresses.[5] Ignoring gender, therefore, is misguided not just in terms of gender outcomes, but for security and climate outcomes as well.
The security and climate communities should focus much more intently on the gender dimensions of security and climate issues. Until now, analysis of these connections has been hampered by three sets of challenges: (1) simplistic and misguided understandings of gender; (2) siloed policy analysis and policy development; and (3) shady policy implementation including, in particular, the commitment of insufficient resources to gender priorities.
Misguided Understandings of Gender
Most experts in the climate change and security policy communities have failed to integrate gender perspectives into their efforts because, for starters, they have a simplistic, misguided understanding of the core concept—gender. There are five interconnected problems.
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First, most climate and security experts make a common, fundamental error: They conflate “gender” and “women,” and they use the terms interchangeably. With this mindset in place, they define “gender issues” as “women’s issues” and, since women’s issues are usually not prioritized in male-dominated policy circles, these issues are downplayed or disregarded altogether.
Second, this conflation impedes the development of proper gender perspectives on important policy problems. Instead of thinking deeply about the gender dimensions of real-world developments—with everyone participating in the effort—the conflation of “gender” and “women” leads policymakers to conclude that it is sufficient to get “a women’s perspective” on the issues at hand.
This can lead to the inclusion of a few token women in policy discussions—a process that is universally derided by gender scholars as “add women and stir.” Although it is important to include women in policy discussions—ideally, with 50-50 gender balances—developing a true gender perspective on policy problems requires another step: The development of more sophisticated, gender-focused, analytical frameworks.
Third, the prevailing male mindset also conflates “women and girls” and “women and children.” This infantilizes women and treats them as powerless. It reinforces the stereotype that frames women as victims and in passive, protective terms. It is important, of course, for policy communities to consider the impact of climate and security problems on women and girls, but it is misguided to frame women in passive, powerless, protective terms and limit them to this compartment.
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Fourth, conflating “gender” and “women” reinforces a binary and non-intersectional understanding of gender. It leaves out LGBTQ+ people, and it fails to consider the ways that gender intersects with class, race, ethnic background, disability and age. Proper gender perspectives are inclusive, comprehensive, and analytically sophisticated.
Fifth and finally, a focus on “women” conveniently allows male-dominated policy establishments to ignore the fundamental sources of the gender inequalities that are pervasive in human affairs: men themselves, malign masculinities, and the pernicious patriarchies that frame social, economic, and political systems. Ignoring these core problems allows men to circumvent their own responsibilities. As sociologist Bob Pease has argued
“Gender is easily equated with women and thus can readily ignore the wider relationship with men’s domination and power.” With respect to climate issues specifically, Pease has noted, “a focus on women’s vulnerability in the face of climate change may not challenge men to interrogate their complicity in environmental degradation.”[6]
Developing sophisticated gender perspectives is also analytically challenging because it means grappling with complicated, highly contentious issues: Social understandings of masculinity and femininity; the gendered, patriarchal institutions that structure social, economic, and political interactions; and the gendered nature of power, which is fundamental to all of the above. As UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has observed, “Gender equality is a question of power. But power will not redistribute itself equally in a male-dominated world.”
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These gender dynamics are powerful across issue
These gender dynamics are powerful across issue areas, including climate change and security issues. Climate change and security institutions remain overwhelmingly male-dominated, and they frame issues mostly in masculinist terms.
Pease has noted that “the politics of climate change are shaped by masculinist discourses. This is so even as female representation in science is increasing.
Thus, the dominant discourse of climate change is that it is a scientific problem that requires technical and scientific solutions.”[7] The masculinist nature of the climate studies community is manifested in preferences for technical and scientific mitigation projects over projects that focus on vulnerabilities. Similarly, environmental law professor Karen Morrow has concluded that, although there has been some progress on gender in the climate change community, “an economics-driven, technocratic stance toward climate change continues to dominate.”
Similar dynamics play out in military organizations and security institutions. Political scientist Ellen Haring has described national military organizations as “quintessentially masculine constructs that rely on notions of men as warrior-protectors and women as the protected. They are constructed along a patriarchal hierarchy with commanders (‘old men’) leading small to large units (‘bands of brothers’)
Whose mission is to protect the homeland in the name of ‘national defense’.” Security issues are usually framed in terms of national-level threats that require military responses; human security threats and non-military policy responses are downplayed or ignored altogether.
Although security institutions, including defense ministries and military organizations, have been involved in the implementation of the WPS agenda, gender perspectives remain marginal in most national security institutions.
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In sum, narrow and misguided depictions of gender are pervasive and still entrenched in climate and security policy circles. This has led to simplistic, misguided assessments of climate and security problems, including the variable risks and vulnerabilities that groups and individuals face because we are all gendered people.
These flawed analytical frameworks have led, not surprisingly, to flawed policy formulations. Policymakers who have not developed sophisticated gender perspectives are inevitably incapable of integrating gender into climate and security policies. This is bad all around: It is bad not just for gender outcomes, but for climate and security outcomes as well.
Siloed Analysis and Policy
Policy experts and policymakers often emphasize the need for whole-of-government and whole-of-society efforts to deal with multidimensional policy challenges, such as climate change and security problems.[8] This is easier said than done. It is inherently difficult to organize large arrays of semi-autonomous governmental and societal actors into smooth-running policy machines. Instead, policy expertise and policy actions are often siloed:
Policy problems are studied and addressed by issue-specific groups and agencies that do not do a good job of coordinating with others. A compartmentalized approach might be adequate when the problems at hand are small, simple, and self-contained. It is a recipe for failure if policy problems are large, complex, and interconnected.