The Practitioner’s Gender Tool on Migration for Adaptation

Gender and climate

Climate change can affect how households choose to cope with its impacts, and has the potential to(re)produce tensions within the household, illuminating power imbalances. Compared to other global dilemmas, climate change is a rather unique phenomenon when we view its nature. For example, in many places, it remains an ostensibly ‘slow’ process (Weber, 2015). In instances of slow-onset changes, such as desertification, decisions to migrate may occur after households have undergone periods of time where they have made various adaptation attempts (Nguyen et al., 2024). However, there are also instances of “rapid onset” processes in the form of environmental catastrophes such as tsunamis, hurricanes, and flooding. In these instances, households may need to relocate immediately due to safety purposes, without any prior planning (Wahyuni et al., 2020). Moreover, perceptions of climate change can be shaped by factors such as: personal experiences, gender, age, socio-economic position, education, environment, political ideology, personality, and daily life. Understanding the way in which gender intersects with other social identities is essential to understand how people are differently affected by (and respond to) climate change impacts given that social, economic, political, and cultural roles and expectations associated to men and women create unequal options and opportunities. These, in turn, create varied lived experiences of men and women, influencing how they perceive and experience climate change (Detraz & Windsor, 2013), including how, where and when people decide to move (or not) in contexts of climate change.

Gender and migration

As weather patterns grow tumultuous, and ecological and agricultural processes are disrupted, such as from drought or flooding, families are forced away from subsistence and commercial farming to derive income from external sources, and some family members move away with immobile family members relying on remittances for livelihood. The roles and responsibilities imposed onto women and men in the household are reflected upon migration dynamics. Due to this, it is important to examine how migration will impact men and women differently. There is limited research on how gender dynamics play out under climate migration. Evidently, there is a degree of understanding about the ways in which women are disadvantaged under climate change and, separately, the ways in which women are disadvantaged under migration, but its intersection remains sparse. Furthermore, dependent on factors such as age, socio-economic position, and education, there are ways that migration could serve to empower women as well. While we can suspect that gender discrimination certainly exists within climate migration, we should investigate upon this further. The Practitioner’s Gender Tool on Migration for Adaptation aims to contribute towards understanding the way gender dynamics are affected by migration and serves as a supplementary document to the “Migration for Adaptation: A Guidebook for Integrating Migration and Translocality into Community-Based Adaptation” guidebook created under the TransRe project (http://www.transre.org/application/files/5715/3296/4247/Migration_for_Adaptation_Guidebook_online_english.pdf) initiated by University of Bonn. There are two tools provided in this toolkit: the “Daily Clock” tool, to assess how men and women’s daily clocks differ between life before and after the migratory process, and the “Household decision-making” tool, which showcases how household decision-making is altered by climate migration – how power dynamics shift, who is advantaged and who is disadvantaged. The “Daily Clock” tool is based on the Daily Clock tool from CARE’s Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis Handbook and the “Household Decision- making” tool is based on FAO’s Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index. Through these, we can discover how climate migration might foster or alleviate existing gender roles and expectations, allowing us to determine which areas should be prioritised for gender-focused mitigation.