Mapping a Research Agenda Concerning Gender and Climate Change: A Review of the Literature

Abstract

The collection of papers in this special issue marks the first attempt to bring together feminist philosophical work on the topic of climate change. In this literature review we seek to situate and enlarge upon this work by putting it in conversation with relevant work in climate ethics, in particular, and in feminist philosophy in general. Our goal is to catalyze a robust feminist philosophical research agenda on the pressing and uniquely complex practical problems posed by climate change. In the last decade a body of important empirical work informed by feminist attention to issues of intersectionality has begun to uncover the ways in which the impacts of climate change differentially affect individuals and communities in various locations as a result of gender, racial, and economic inequalities (see Denton 2002; Masika 2002; Dankelman 2010). Although feminist philosophical analyses have not been dominant in this empirical literature, one of our aims in this essay is to illustrate how feminist philosophical approaches can improve the study of the gendered and power-laden causes and differential impacts of climate change. In addition, feminist methods in areas such as moral theory, political theory, ontology, epistemology, philosophy of science, and environmental philosophy provide a much needed lens for analyzing how the moral, political, economic, and scientific frameworks for understanding and responding to climate change might be positively transformed. In this review, we highlight three thematic areas emerging in the feminist philosophical literature on climate change: