Description

How do gender, environment and sustainable development interconnect? Why does this matter for environmental researchers, policymakers, scientists, academics, and practitioners? How do people from different class, ethnicity, age groups, civil status and gender face and cope with environmental and climate challenges? How can we better understand and integrate gender dimensions and gender equality in our research and development projects?

Gender is considered a key variable of power inequality. A specific focus on gender usually attends to how societies culturally assign differences to women and men from different class, ethnic, age groups, civil status, religion, and education. These differences define how they will experience and be affected by the changes in their environments.

About this course

This course consists of three content modules. Firstly, the Introduction module will provide an explanation of the key issues and concepts about the gender and environment relationship with an explanation of the Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) framework. The second module, Gender in Agriculture and Water, will explore gender inequalities in agriculture and water management, and use an illustrative case study from the Mekong Region. Lastly, the module on Gender in Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) will use the FPE perspective to explain the connections between gender, climate change and DRR along with a gender analysis of climate change adaptation and mitigation governance and a case study of the Nepal earthquake of April 2015.

What you will learn

1. How gender, in its intersection with other social and economic identities, shapes control of women and men, and their access to natural resources, and mediates their experiences to the impacts of environmental and climate change
2. The relationship between gender and the environment in key sectors of natural resources management
3. How to address gender inequality in political decisions over natural resources
4. How to implement gender-transformative approaches in climate change adaptation and mitigation governance