Photo UNDP. Village: Raypur, Panchayat: Sukala Block: Stayabadi District: Puri, State: Odhisa , India

In November of 2016 the Conference of Parties, COP22, took place in Marrakech, Morrocco. Although both the media and international policy makers gave it less attention than the COP21 in Paris, the Marrakech event was significant for its inclusion of gender as a critical climate change topic. The success in including gender as a relevant subject was partly due to the renewal of the Lima Work Program, a gender-focused initiative developed two years prior in Peru. Although at COP22 the joint discussion of gender and climate change became common practice, there remains significant challenges in defining what gender inclusion means.

The inclusion of “gender” within COP has largely and predominantly been focused on the inclusion of women, speaking within the frame of the gender binary. This year, three main lines of argumentation for this inclusion were clear; one based on a more “neoliberal” discourse, another that could be considered as more “ecofeminist”, and a third which focuses on the vulnerability of women.

The neoliberal frame is one focused predominantly on the monetary value of the inclusion of women. The idea that “investing in women causes a higher return on investment” is one couched in ideas of women as being more responsible, an argument most commonly seen in discussions on micro credit and micro finance. Though there may be truth in the findings that women tend to repay loans more often than men, this discourse is problematic in two ways. The first being that this can lead to a misleading generalization of women as being more responsible purely because they are women or mothers. It also implies that men are therefore irresponsible and not able to appreciate needs of the family or of children.

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