Description
This paper offers a critical review of literature on gender-responsive climate policy, with a particular focus on how such frameworks conceptualise vulnerability and risk in climate-affected regions. While these policies often aim to address gendered dimensions of climate impact, they are frequently shaped by institutions in the Global North and rely on quantitative approaches that may overlook the complexities of lived experience. As a result, they risk simplifying intersecting forms of harm and reinforcing hierarchies in knowledge production.
Rather than focusing on suffering as a central analytic, this paper foregrounds the agency and resilience of women who resist both environmental degradation and the technocratic interventions designed to manage it. Through an exploration of feminist leadership and collective praxis in the Global South, the paper considers how alternative modes of climate governance - rooted in resistance and situated knowledge - challenge dominant narratives of vulnerability.
Finally, the paper reflects on how this body of literature can inform methodological approaches in sensitive research contexts. It considers how discomfort, reflexivity, and openness to non-traditional methods might offer more ethical and responsive ways of engaging with communities and knowledge systems often marginalised in climate discourse.
