Gender, Activst Citizenship and Climate Change

Critical and feminist scholars and activists have linked global political challenges posed by the environmental and climate crises to contemporary social problems with gender, inequality, marginalization, and poverty. A growing number of scholar-activists argue that the social and climate collapse requires transformative changes to be addressed simultaneously at the local and global level. They often point to the special political responsibilities the Global North due to colonialism and imperialism to engage in the global struggle for social, reproductive, and environmental justice. Feminist scholar-activists emphasize the need for combining bottom-up activism with transformative social and political changes. The chapter explores the relations between gender, activist citizenship, and the climate movement. It first analyses how intersectionality and transnational feminist approaches can contribute to the understanding of the climate crisis. And how the application of a political ecological framework can enrich the feminist framework. Scholar activist emphasize the need to add an inter-generational perspective to save the planet premised onour ecological, environmental and social responsibilites towards future generations, an interspatial transnational perspective premised on social, political and economic responsibility of the Global North to limit the growth economy and create solidarities between the Glonal North and the Global South and an inter-species aspect premised on the political responsibilities towards both humans and non-humans. Critical scholar-activist emphasize women’s active role in the local-global climate movement, often linked to their historical responsibilities for social reproduction. Secondly, it explores the feminist-researcher activists’ frameworks and discusses the strategies for acting together across the social and climate movement. The focus is on the challenges as well as the potentials for scholar-activists to engage in transformative local-global struggles for social, reproductive, and environmental justice.