Sessions

Gender sensitivity: Gender mainstreaming and climate change policies in China

While the international norm on gender mainstreaming, UN-backed since 1995, has been widely adopted in national policies, gender inequalities are rarely systematically considered in climate change policies in China. To prove and explain this policy limitation, this paper takes a discourse analytical perspective on national climate change policies in China, including policies translated from the UN, and to examine how climate change policies in China are gender-blind. This is despite the obligations to gender mainstream policy in all areas and despite the intersections between climate change and development policy, the concept of gender is almost completely absent in climate change policy documents and research reports in China. In this paper, my aim is first to consider the themes and shortcomings of the existing policies on climate change and gender. Then Iexamine how dominant and interconnected discourses effectively frame the climate change debate as a gender neutral, scientific problem, obscuring the fact that climate change is deeply gendered.Overall, gender mainstreaming largely stopped at the discursive level, and often depoliticized gender in climate change policies: climate change is to do with markets, technology and security rather than gender.An analysis of how these discourses emerge from and work to perpetuate gender roles and relations in climate change is useful to promote debate and improve policies.