Grounding climate governance through women's stories in Oaxaca, Mexico

Abstract

Constructions of women in the Global South, as poor and rural, portray them as most vulnerable and passive to the effects of environmental degradation. This conception has been informing institutional responses to environmental change that incorporate a gender component. It is in this context that climate change interventions increasingly target women in the Global South, so it is important to evaluate their impact. This paper sets out to question why a gender agenda is being pushed alongside a climate agenda, what these projects look like in the communities and households where they are implemented, and the impacts of these projects on the lives of people that encounter them in Oaxaca, Mexico. Through reflexive storytelling, this paper aims to ground environmental governance around gender and climate change using feminist geography by calling attention to the everyday lives of people in Mexico involved in gender and climate change interventions. Using postcolonial insights and reflexive approaches, this paper highlights the agency of actors and fights against tendencies in climate and development work that homogenize gender, erasing the agency and autonomy of people outside of western spaces. Through reflexive research, I call attention to the ways that concepts operating in global contexts do not merely operate on ‘third world women’ but are imbricated in the performance of their every-day lives as they manage and negotiate global discourses around gender and climate change while transforming them so that they become meaningful to their every-day lives.