Environmental Justice, Gender & Inequality

Abstract

This panel explores how environmental governance intersects with enduring and emerging forms of inequality, with particular attention to gender, race, and global power asymmetries. The papers examine how environmental harms, benefits, and responsibilities are unevenly distributed, and how dominant governance frameworks often obscure or reproduce these inequities. Several contributions centre on climate and environmental justice, analysing how gendered and racialised dynamics shape access to resources, representation, and decision-making power in environmental policy arenas. A key focus of the panel is the visibility—or invisibility—of inequality in environmental governance. Papers investigate how financial instruments, digital technologies, and knowledge systems frame environmental problems in ways that may marginalise certain groups while privileging others. Others examine resource extraction and geopolitical competition in environmentally sensitive regions, revealing how global economic and political pressures exacerbate local vulnerabilities and injustices. Across cases, the panel highlights the co-constitution of environmental crises with broader social hierarchies, showing that environmental degradation cannot be separated from histories of exploitation and exclusion. Methodologically, the panel combines qualitative, critical, and comparative approaches to uncover the social and political dimensions of inequality embedded in environmental governance. Together, the papers challenge technocratic and depoliticised approaches to sustainability, arguing instead for justice-oriented frameworks that foreground power, voice, and lived experience. The panel contributes to environmental politics scholarship by advancing more inclusive and reflexive ways of analysing—and addressing—the unequal burdens of environmental change.

Title	Details
Confronting the Dangers of Disciplinarity: A Care-Based Approach to Climate Justice	View Paper Details
Negotiating Co-Constitutive Crises: Racism and the Climate Crisis as Experienced by Black, Indigenous, and PoC Climate Negotiators and Experts	View Paper Details
Rendering Gender Visible in Climate Finance: The Political Economy of Gender Tagging	View Paper Details
Hydrocarbon Competition in a Climate Hotspot: Climate Justice and Energy Governance in Cyprus	View Paper Details
Visualising Inequality: Cross‑National Differences in Digital Climate‑Justice Communication	View Paper Details