Thinking gender in times of crisis: reflecting on gender, turbulence, and global environmental politics

Abstract

There are multiple consequences of growing turbulence for the study and practice of global environmental politics (GEP). Marginalized groups experience global crises earlier and more acutely than dominant groups. Feminist lenses, along with others that focus on how power works within global politics, illustrate the processes that make this so. Reflecting on gender allows us to connect global crises to the social, political, and economic factors that influence them. It necessitates putting equity and justice at the heart of our effort to study and address those phenomena and processes that come to be named “crisis.” This chapter explores various opportunities as well as obstacles to using gender lenses to evaluate crisis in GEP. It is essential that we both critically reflect on how we recognize and study crisis and turbulence, as well as evaluate ways that global turbulence is gendered, raced, and classed, and work towards building justice into our paths forward.