Gender, Conflict, and Global Environmental Change
Publisher: Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice
Author(s): Christiane Fröhlich and Giovanna Gioli
Date: 2015
Topics: Climate Change, Dispute Resolution/Mediation, Gender
Gender has long been identified as an important variable in both conflict (de-)escalation processes and vulnerability or adaptive capacity toward global environmental change. We understand gender as the socioculturally and politico-economically constructed roles and responsibilities ascribed to men and women that change over time, are context- and history-specific, and are inseparable from power relations. With increasing scarcity and degradation of land and water, those who are poor in resources, income, and power—many of them women—lose their rights to use these existential resources. The loss of livelihood due to environmental change, regardless of whether it was caused mainly by global warming or more by bad governance, is often the starting point of resource-related conflicts on the micro and meso levels.