The document discusses intersectionality and how considering multiple social factors provides a more nuanced understanding of vulnerability to climate change impacts than only looking at gender. It provides examples from various contexts of how gender intersects with other attributes like class, caste, ethnicity, age, and location to differently structure vulnerabilities for different groups of women. The document advocates applying an intersectional lens in research to more accurately diagnose problems and design effective solutions by collecting disaggregated data and critically examining how social power relations construct and manifest in various categories and institutions.

1. Currently a growing concern that gender cannot be viewed in isolation from other intersecting social variables becoming more
and more mainstream, intersecting vulnerabilities recognized by IPCC in its 5th AR
However, recent reviews of gender and climate change research and policy - for instance - show that gender remains approached
as men/women –binaries
And perhaps this is not so surprising, as the contemporary literature on intersectionality is mostly very complex, abstract and
written in language most policy makers, practitioners and applied scientist feel they cannot understand or translate into practice.
So what we hope to do is to bridge the gap between feminist literature on intersectionality and applied research and action on
forestry and natural resource management, and offer some examples and insights to how intersectionality can enrich and
enhance our work.
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2. To begin with, I want to share with you a statement we have all heard before: “women are more vulnerable to climate change” -
why? one reason to this is:
according one often quoted figure: women are 14 times more likely to die from natural disasters than men - really? all women
everywhere 14 times more likely to die?
It’s been showed that when you include variables like class and caste, that pattern is more nuanced:
in India, in some instances poor women’s vulnerability was a function of class/caste, which meant that they resided in
unfavorable locations, e.g. next to a river, and gender, meaning that they were likely to spend more time around the homestead
In other instances, upper-caste women’s vulnerability was heightened by their need to maintain caste-related honorable
behaviour even at a time of stress Hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua: men more vulnerable due to macho-ideals encouraging risky
‘heroic’ behavior
So gender certainly structures vulnerabilities, but it often intersects with other social factors. if we understand gender as just
men vs women, we risk ignoring these important nuances and drawing wrong or inaccurate conclusions
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3. So what is intersectionality?
Increasingly popular term that was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989:
American civil rights activist, scholar in the fields of gender studies and critical race theory
in her essay from 1989, she talks about court case
5 african-american women sued GM on the basis of employment discrimination specifically against black women
However, court weighed gender and race discrimination separately - because GM hired black men, no case for race
discrimination etc.
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4. intersection-metaphor: person standing in the middle of an intersection with different forms of oppression coming at them. So
premising legal relief to these women based on their ability to identify one single form of discrimination was to Crenshaw like
premising medical aid on the victim’s ability to identify one driver responsible for the crash.
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5. in a paper two years later, Crenshaw studies women of color’s experiences of domestic violence and introduces two concepts to
put some meat around intersectionality:
Structural intersectionality:
Working-class women of color’s experience of domestic violence is often qualitatively different from that of middle-class
white women’s. One reason for this was the fact that many women of color’s ability to leave an abusive relationship was
restricted by multiple inequalities, including poverty (class), child-care responsibilities (gender) and racial discrimination
on labor- and housing markets (race)
Political intersectionality
Women of color’s experiences were marginalized politically, as the dominant feminist agenda was dominated by white
women’s experiences of sexism, while antiracist discourses were dominated by men of color’s experiences of racism. In
some instances, she found that the political agendas of these movements were even at odds with each other.
To give another example: Victoria Tauli Corpus (UN special rapporteur on indigenous peoples’ rights): recently spoke
about a degradation of women’s rights in some indigenous communities whose land rights came under threat, because
women’s rights “have been considered ‘external values’ or ‘Western values’ and therefore divisive to the indigenous
struggle”.
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6. Intersectionality is about intersecting power relations. But what does that mean?
can the particular forms of oppression and injustice experienced by a poor or working-class minority woman be explained by
adding together the independent effects of class-, race- and gender oppression?
Well, just thinking about myself, it’s very difficult to isolate my experience of being young from the fact that I am male, white,
middle-class, heterosexual etc.
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7. intersectionality holds that social power relations - like gender, ethnicity and class - influence and co-construct each
other:
In Zambia, we see that the way gender influences women’s participation in the charcoal value chain intersects with age -
social stigma associated with women’s involvement in charcoal was particularly penalizing for young women, restricting
their engagement in the sector
In Mali, Houria Djoudi and Maria Brockhaus found that norms regarding femininity and women’s honor restricted
particularly upper-class women from adopting charcoal production as an adaptive strategy
So the way gender works isn’t constant, but it takes on a different shapes across spectrums of e.g. age, class and ethnicity.
This can look different in different situations and contexts
Bottom line: to really understand gender, we often also need to understand the ways in which other social power
relations work and interact with it.
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8. How do we go about that? Well it needs to be stated that even 28 years since Crenshaw coined the term, this field continues to
be subject to heated debates.
How do we conceptualize power relations, how do we understand their interactions, what are the relevant categories to include
etc?
Depending on your theoretical inclinations, you might have different empirical approaches, which all come with different
strengths and weaknesses. These are discussed more in the paper.
Importantly, as a field researcher, you will also need to consider trade-offs between empirical feasibility:
For instance, to guide intersectional analysis, Helma Lutz formulated 14 ‘basic dualisms’: These include binary variables such as
gender, sexuality, ability, age, north-south etc - basically all categories that make common sense. But a list of 14 binary categories
also yields 16,384 unique analytical locations, which limits the level of detail one can go into.
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9. So in the CGIAR context, where we have colleagues with a wide range of different disciplinary backgrounds and where our
research topics and methods differ widely, we don’t propose that we look to intersectionality for a set methodology or a testable
hypothesis. Rather, it would be more useful to think of it as a normative and conceptual framework that encourages us to do
better:
“Intersectionality … does not provide written-in-stone guidelines for doing feminist inquiry … [i]nstead it encourages each
feminist scholar to engage critically with her own assumptions in the interests of reflexive, critical, and accountable feminist
inquiry”
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10. So how can intersectionality inform our work?
by collecting and analyzing more disaggregated data, our diagnoses and prescriptions will be more accurate and effective
not just more disaggregation, but also more critical engagement with power
Social power relations are at the core of intersectionality: instead of using gender, race, class etc just as empirical categories
(which is of course also very useful), we’d also want to understand how different power relations are expressed in the very
construction of those categories and the relations between them (man/woman; ethnicities, youth and elderly etc); how these
categories and relations are manifested in different institutions and in the ways people use, manage and benefit from natural
resources, and how unequal power relations are being resisted and renegotiated by various groups
in practical terms, this of course also reiterates the importance of interdisciplinary research teams and mixed method
approaches:
the attention to power also urges us to reflect on our own position as researchers, and how our own identities, backgrounds,
assumptions and biases can play a part in shaping the research process and outcomes
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11. Finally, it’s important to remember that while a more intersectional approach can allow us to more accurately describe e.g. levels
of vulnerability of different groups of people, intersectionality is fundamentally a normative framework with the aim of
challenging and transforming the power structures behind those differentiated vulnerabilities.
Good thing to keep in mind when we think of what processes to align our work with, what partners and forums to work with etc.
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