Climate action from a gender perspective: A systematic review of the impact of climate policies on inequality

Abstract

In 1992 the United Nations committed to promoting a gender perspective in all environmental and development programs and to establishing mechanisms for assessing the impact of environmental policies on women. However, 30 years later most countries acknowledge that they have not integrated that perspective into policy assessments. This paper provides the first systematic literature review (based on the PRISMA approach) of the impacts of climate policies on inequality from a gender perspective. The results show that although this is an emerging research area, the number of works is still very low: we find only 29 papers, most of them written in the last 4 years. There is also a clear lack of quantitative analysis; and only 5 studies provide an ex ante impact assessment. A more in depth-analysis shows that the existing analyses often use gender merely as an additional explanatory variable, but key aspects for a real gender-oriented analysis such as power relations, intersectionality and gender mainstreaming are missing. The gender perspective is typically more absent in studies led by men. If science wants to contribute to the generation of knowledge that is useful for tackling some of the greatest challenges of the 21st century, such as the transition to a socioeconomic model that is more respectful with the ecological limits of the planet and gender equality, it is important to expand knowledge in this area but also to reconnect with feminist theory.