{"id":2703,"date":"2021-08-31T16:45:02","date_gmt":"2021-08-31T15:45:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/habitableproject.org\/?post_type=news&p=2703"},"modified":"2022-02-22T14:01:52","modified_gmt":"2022-02-22T14:01:52","slug":"feminist-political-ecology-and-habitability","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"https:\/\/habitableproject.org\/news\/feminist-political-ecology-and-habitability\/","title":{"rendered":"Feminist Political Ecology and Habitability"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Climate change and migration represent two of the most powerful symbols of global inequality. During the last decades, studies of the \u2018climate-migration nexus\u2019 have greatly evolved from environmental deterministic explanations to more sophisticated accounts of human (im)mobility in the context of climate change. These findings have shown the multi-causality and complexity of migration drivers in the context of climate change as well as the differentiated impacts that climate change has on migration. However, and despite increasing calls for the integration of gender and social equity considerations, studies have often sidestepped gender or underestimated the gendered causes, processes, and impacts of migration in the context of climate change. More importantly, they often overlook the underlying power relations which turn hazards into disasters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Centered on the notion of habitability, and based on a socio-ecological systems approach, the HABITABLE project seeks to formulate a broad and interdisciplinary conceptualization of \u2018social tipping points\u2019 as a means to understand how climate and environmental changes can trigger migration. Inherent to the concept of social tipping point is the notion of \u2018perceptions\u2019 which introduces a subjective element to how people perceive<\/em> the habitability or \u2018the capacity\/capability of a socio-ecological system to sustain and support the lives and livelihoods of its constituent population(s)\u2019 (Gemenne et al. 2021).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gender and social relations are key in shaping social tipping points as well as the perceptions of socio-environmental risks. On the one hand, they influence who migrates and why, and how decisions about migration in the context of climate change are made. On the other hand, migration itself shapes pre-existing socio-ecological inequities, either to further entrench traditional values and norms or by challenging and transforming them. In this way, gender and social inequities become key explanatory factors influencing both the objective and subjective dimensions around the climate-migration nexus that the HABITABLE project aims to analyze.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) emerged as a sub-field of political ecology in the 1990s by bringing feminist theory and objectives into political ecology (Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter, and Wangari 1996). Power and politics are central to feminist political ecology analyses which seek to unpack how combined socio-ecological relations produce unequal outcomes. Instead of treating women and men as homogeneous groups, FPE\u2019s analyses of migration call for an intersectional approach that pays attention to how gender intersects with other social identities, and with peoples position in society (i.e., age, class, education, ability, race, migratory status, location, etc.). This analytical angle can help not only illuminate social differentiation in migration patterns, but also how perceptions ofenvironmental risks vary depending on how people are situated within power structures according to dynamic social categorizations (Vigil 2021).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on systems thinking, socio-ecological systems (SES) developed to emphasize the synergies, interdependencies, and dynamics between human and environmental sub-systems (Berkes, Folke, and Colding 2000). Instead of focusing on multiple (social) outcomes from a singular (\u2018natural\u2019) event \u2013 such as the linear impacts of climate change on migration \u2013 SES aims to understand the elements of vulnerability (exposure, sensitivity and resilience) of a bounded system at a particular scale and to make explicit its links to other scales (Adger 2006). In so doing, SES underlines essential feedback loops and acknowledges how people are a part of,<\/em> rather than apart from<\/em> nature. Despite great advances in socio-ecological systems thinking, and its usefulness for climate related migration research, the power analytic has tended to be progressively sidelined (see Tschakert et al. 2013; Stone-Jovicich 2015 for a critique). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Critiques of socio-ecological systems stem from their under theorization of social change (Stojanovic et al. 2016) and from their scarce attention to \u2018the social\u2019 (Cote and Nightingale 2012, 476). Although gender and other markers of social inequalities have been introduced, these have tended to be interpreted as additional variables for which new data must be collected (Kawarazuka et al. 2017). However, there is an essential difference between including measures of biological sex as dichotomous variables \u2013 also called the \u2018add women and stir approach\u2019 <\/em>\u2013 and integrating a more complex theoretical gender and social equity analysis into our work (Nawyn 2010). To this end, the integration of Feminist Political Ecology within SES \u2013 that underlines gender and social equity across HABITABLE \u2013 seeks to unpack the power structures that shape social inequities by not only advancing our understanding on who<\/em> is vulnerable, but on why <\/em>they are vulnerable, and what<\/em> policy makers can do to redress these imbalances (Vigil 2021).<\/p>\n\n\n\n FPE helps to address the power analytic by framing migration in its historical and political context, emphasizing underlying structural explanations over who wins, who loses<\/em> and why<\/em> as well as considering the outcomes of migration from a social justice vantage point (Radel et al. 2018). It also pushes academic and policy circles to examine the gendered and social dimension of climate and migration research by unmasking \u2018discourses of power \u2026 to address [individual\u2019s] uneven access to resources to assuage their daily livelihood struggles\u2019 (Resurreccion and Sajor 2015, 22). By paying attention to the relational nature of \u2018gendered geographies of power\u2019 across multiple scales (i.e. the body, the family, the state), feminist researchers highlight how gender relations are reaffirmed and reconstructed through relations of domination and oppression (Mahler and Pessar 2001). This includes through the gendering, racialization and discrimination embedded in migration laws and labor markets and the gendered division of labor within and beyond households (Silvey 2004).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The \u2018power geometries\u2019 embedded in migration processes are evident at all stages of the migration cycle (B\u00e9langer and Silvey 2020). A close look at social inequalities can also help unpack what has been referred to as the \u2018immobility paradox\u2019 where some are highly mobile and others highly immobile due to inequities that force some to stay put in the face of disasters (Chatterji 2017). Moreover, and importantly for migration research, the social identities or structures that make people privileged or oppressed in one place, may not do so in another (and vice-versa). For example, an individual or family that enjoys a privileged position in their origin community may become marginalized at destination (Mahler, Chaudhuri, and Patil 2015). Therefore, a trans-local or \u2018transnational intersectional approach\u2019 (Mahler, Chaudhuri, and Patil 2015, 101) can help analyze how perceptions of both environmental risks and migration opportunities are (re)shaped across time and space. This approach has implications for understanding migration decisions as well as for unpacking the transformational capacity of migration in the context of climate change.<\/p>\n\n\n\nFeminist political ecology and habitability<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n