HABITABLE WP8 Team Workshop: Gender and social equity analysis

On September 4, the WP8 team led an internal gender and social equity analysis workshop was for the full consortium of HABITABLE partners.

This workshop was organized to ensure that the empirical data now becoming available from all countries within the HABITABLE project is analyzed and interpreted in context and in a coherent way across all methods and sites to allow partners to account for intersecting social inequities both within sites and across HABITABLE countries.

During the workshop, gender and social equity were delved with by discussing three key elements (causality, adaptation and policy) which were needed to address three fundamental questions respectively: How do gender and social inequities shape the tipping points that influence migration behavior? How do gender and social inequities redefine adaptation to climate change? What are the impacts and co-benefits of migration and climate policies on gender and social equity?

In order to answer these key interrogatives, researchers from WP8 highlighted the importance of using an intersectional approach focused not much on the “who” but on the “why” question, meaning going beyond a sole focus on individuals and trying to adopt a more nuanced reasoning as this is the only way to get a better sense of  a wide range of compounding, systematized, sociopolitical-economic discriminations, and power imbalances which can be found at multiple scales.

As clearly emerged from the workshop, as well as from case studies on Kenya, Mali and Thailand presented throughout the sessions, such complexity requires scholars to avoid interpreting data without taking into account core underlying elements of analysis and to adopt a so-called “progressive contextualization“, which is to say a “procedure that involve focusing on significant human activities or people-environment interactions and explaining these interactions by placing them within progressively wider or denser contexts.” (Vayda 1983, 265).