Women and climate change: examining discourses from the global north

Nicole Detraz opens ‘Women and Climate Change: Examining Discourses from the Global North’ by inviting the reader to ‘close your eyes and think of the phrase “climate change”’ (p. 1). This invitation is to make the point that, depending on what image of ‘climate change’ comes to mind, the people in those images will look different depending on the reader’s assumptions on roles and characteristics associated with different groups of people. It is representations of one particular category of people that this book is concerned with: women. Detraz has interviewed women working ‘on the ground’ in climate spaces, particularly in fields of climate science and in environmental and developmental NGOs (or ‘non-profits’) with the purpose of gaining a fuller, and perhaps more varied, picture of what people (or more specifically women working in climate change) understand to be the connections between gender and climate change.

At the heart of the expansive empirical material of this book are four distinct discourses relating to some of the qualities, tasks and positions associated with women in/and climate change. The first of these is what Detraz sees as the most visible storyline associated with women and climate change: vulnerability and victimhood. This is a discourse that has been well covered in academic literature on ‘gender and climate change’ (see Denton 2002) and has been widely critiqued by feminist scholars warning about the dangers of positioning women as more vulnerable to the effects of climate change as the only story about ‘gender and climate change’ (see Arora-Jonsson 2011, ;, MacGregor 2017). The second discourse uncovered by Detraz highlights the connections between women, care-giving and climate change. The third discourse is concerned with women as knowledgeable about climate change either as leaders or diplomats or climate researchers. The final discourse examines the range of roles that women are assumed to play in the realm of climate change, both positive and negative.

It is important to stress that this is not a book on ‘gender and climate change’, which is a rapidly growing area of academic scholarship and activist activity within climate spaces (see Flavell 2023). Rather, it is very specifically, and unashamedly, a book about ‘women and climate change’. Detraz has drawn on an impressive seventy-six interviews with women who work in spaces of climate change, but on the whole are not actively thinking about the issue of gender and climate change. It is not entirely clear who these women are due to the decision to anonymise interviewees, but it is clear that the women interviewed are not women who have any specific expertise on the issue of gender and climate change, either from an academic or an activist or NGO background. This endeavour of examining the ways that gender and climate change is viewed, either consciously or unconsciously, is, I think, an important one in thinking through the implications for work on gender and climate change. However, I am not convinced that knowing the views of women (as women) who have no expertise on gender and climate change is of much use to people who study or are interested in the field.

Detraz acknowledges that there are scholars who have spent decades working in this field but stresses that the goal in this book is not necessarily to tell these scholars something radically new about gender and climate change. Rather, Detraz states that the goal is to illustrate how people in climate spaces already use discourses of women and climate change. It is to reflect on how these discourses at times complement existing scholarship as well as often contain storylines at odds with much of the literature (p. 10). Yet, the presentation of discourses and storylines relating to gender and climate change as presented in this way might, I think, serve to reify discourses that have been problematised by feminist scholars and does so in a way that offers insufficient critical discussion of the theoretical debates present in gender and climate change literature. As an example, the participant with the pseudonym ‘Allison’ ‘draws a link between social vulnerability (i.e. lack of support networks) and physical vulnerability (i.e. risk of human trafficking or rape)’ (p. 37). Without further context, we can only presume that what Allison means by social vulnerability is in some way related to poverty. What remains unclear is whether readers are being invited to find what the interviewees say as simplistic and uninformed, or if we are meant to take what they are saying as confirming what the literature says. As such, it serves to reproduce simplistic and problematic framings of connecting women and gender to climate change without much critical intervention to guide the readers thinking. Ultimately, I do not feel that there is enough critical reflection on how gender norms are (re)produced or contested in light of the interviewees’ views.

As a scholar who is actively engaged in the feminist gender and climate change field, I am supportive of Detraz’s aim in this book to gather women’s opinions and experiences to contribute new insights into the gender and climate change field. I agree that there is a lack of empirical evidence supporting arguments about issues of gender and climate change. As such, this book has the potential to offer an important contribution to this field, but ultimately lacks enough engagement with the theoretical issues raised by those already working and thinking about the issue of ‘gender and climate change’. That said, in the concluding chapter, Detraz states that ‘over the course of seventy-six interviews (and twenty survey responses), I found myself feeling hopeful’ (p. 204). This hope stemmed from the fact that there are dedicated people working on climate change who are confident that ‘although we have a huge amount of work to do on both climate change and gender equity, there are bright spots and points of progress’ (p. 204). In a field that can so often feel hopeless I fully welcome any glimmer of hope for a future that is both climate- and gender-just.