Parsing the Concepts and Practices of Gender, Development Disaster, and Climate Change: Visions of Transformation

Abstract

Concepts used to understand and analyze two closely related fields—gender and development and gender, disaster, and climate change—overlap in the ways gender is implicated and women are targeted. This article explores the overlapping conceptual language that characterizes these fields to demonstrate how they emerge from feminist scholarship and converge in the project to promote social change for the realization of human rights for women. Terms like equality, mainstreaming, empowerment, resilience, agency, sustainability, and transformation permeate the research and policy literatures produced by both fields. Each field has moved from a sole focus on women to a broader understanding of the relational systems that bind women’s and men’s fortunes in both development and disaster/climate change with an emphasis on the role of power structures and hierarchies from local to global levels. Both fields increasingly adopt an intersectional approach that analyzes the complexities created by multiple social locations and identities. Gender and development explores the inequalities that disadvantage and marginalize women in the Global South across different social and geographic locations. Gender, disaster, and climate change similarly demonstrates the differential risks, vulnerabilities, and opportunities for recovery from disaster and adaptation and management of climate change that gender creates. Both use feminist epistemology and theory that combine reflexivity and advocacy with situated knowledge in analysis. Recognizing that their overlapping conceptual frameworks converge contributes to relevant research and policy analysis promoting social change and human rights. Examples are drawn from primary and secondary research in Indonesia to illustrate.