Gendered environmental discourses through the food lens: global policymaking at the Conferences of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

This research focuses on the gendered environmental discourses accumulated at the Conferences of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and their impact on the way gender is understood, presented and discussed as a part of the international climate change policymaking. For studying discourses, Fairclough's 3D framework of critical discourse analysis is used, analysing the documents produced at the Conferences of the Parties that speak about gendered effects of climate change. This study demonstrates that women are labelled as climate victims, but at the same time, they are viewed as having special knowledge on how to adequately address climate change challenges. These dominant discourses are typically emphasized when looking into women's involvement with food; women are vulnerable to climate change as they perform most of the food-related work, thus they would need to walk further to get water and spend more time farming or producing food. However, due to the food provisioning role, they are portrayed as having power to adopt sustainable farming techniques or make sustainable choices when buying and preparing food. However, the study points out that these formulations are limiting as in the dominant discourses, the differences between women are disregarded as well as the social inequalities that have placed them in the precarious positions in relation to the changing climate. Therefore, this research concludes that an intersectional approach and a micro level perspective is necessary to understand the gendered effects of climate change, and to secure a just and inclusive climate change policymaking.