Sherilyn MacGregor, PSA 2010. Not for citation 1 Gender and Climate Change: From Impacts to Discourses Sherilyn MacGregor School of Politics, International Relations & Philosophy Research Centre for the Study of Politics, International Relations & Environment Keele University, UK s.macgregor@pol.keele.ac.uk Even climate change cannot escape the gender wars. (New Scientist 2007) Introduction ‘Are men to blame for global warming?’ an article in the New Scientist asks before moving on to report, with thinly veiled scorn, that a Swedish Ministry of Environment study has claimed that men are more responsible than women for the current crisis. The author’s incredulity is telling: it reflects the popular understandings that a) climate change is a scientific problem that affects all humans equally and b) gender politics is an enduring yet increasingly irrelevant battle between men and women. His comment provides an apt starting point for a critical feminist interrogation of the contemporary climate change debate and the gendered discourses through which it has been framed. It is a good illustration that even in the face of potentially catastrophic socio-environmental change, the gender stereotypes, assumptions and lacunae that feminists have been analysing for decades remain much the same. Climate change presents serious challenges for politics: there will be a need to restructure institutions at all levels, to rearrange social, economic and spatial relations, and to devote resources towards regulation, mitigation and adaptation. What climate change presents for the politics of gender is less certain and much less discussed. The concept of gender is almost completely absent in policy documents and research reports on climate change at all levels. This comes as no surprise, since there is persistent blindness to gender within the broad field of environmental politics. However what is both surprising and problematic is that academic feminist too have largely ignored the issue of climate change. The work that has been done so far has focused almost exclusively on the material impacts of climate change on women in the Global South. In this paper, my aim is first to consider (very briefly) the themes and shortcomings of the existing research on gender and climate change. I then look beyond the narrow focus on material impacts to the dominant institutional and societal discourses which articulate and configure those impacts and formulate the agenda for their mitigation. I am interested in gender not as a synonym for women but in terms of hegemonic constructions of masculinity and femininity. I examine how dominant and interconnected discourses effectively frame the climate change debate as a gender neutral, scientific problem, obscuring the fact that it is, as I aim to show, deeply gendered. An analysis of how these discourses emerge from and work to perpetuate prevailing gender roles and relations is useful in exposing the sets of unquestioned assumptions that inform the climate change debate. Research on gender and climate change: silences, themes, shortcomings A good place to start this discussion is to explain that there is a lack of research on gender and climate change. This is not surprising, since there is a well documented case of gender blindness in the environmental social sciences in general (cf. Banerjee and Bell 2007). There has also been an almost total avoidance of environmental issues by feminist academics in recent years. If conference themes and journal articles are anything to go on, climate change is not on the academic feminist agenda. In 2008 I conducted a CSA Illumina citation search of twenty feminist journals from 1990 to the present, using the keywords ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ (in the ‘words anywhere’ box). Surprisingly, my search Copyright PSA 2010