How do international organisations (IOs) address intersectional inequalities in their responses to climate disasters? Scholars have increasingly recognised the wide-ranging consequences of climate change and related disasters—including floods, droughts, cyclones and storms—and their varied and often intersectional effects within populations. Intersectionality is a feminist analytical framework to understand multiple dimensions of inequality across social phenomena, such as poverty moderating women’s exposure to institutionalised violence during disaster response efforts. While IOs play a powerful role in shaping, financing and coordinating international disaster response, we have few systemic insights into how they address intersectional vulnerabilities and their potential to reproduce social inequalities. Considering intersectionality in disaster response can affect the capacity of IOs to deliver equitable and legitimate outcomes.
This paper uses a mixed-methods approach to analyse the inclusion of intersectionality in 661 disaster response evaluations published by IOs between 2008-2024. It focuses specifically on intersections with gender, which has been increasingly mainstreamed in IOs since the mid-2000s. Using keyword-assisted topic modelling (keyATM), a semi-supervised approach to natural language processing, the quantitative component considers the construction of topics based on keyword-pairs that overlap concepts such as gender and race, or gender and disability. The qualitative component explores specific keyword-pairs in selected original reports.
Results indicate that while IOs frequently report that they address gendered differences in needs during disaster response, there is minimal consideration of intersectional inequalities. There are marginal considerations of intersections between gender and age, where issues such as pregnancy, reproductive health, displacement, violence, education and the risk of malnutrition are addressed. In many cases where age is addressed, so too is pregnancy, with some geographic variation in the extent to which this is considered. Gendered intersections are scarce with race, class, income, indigeneity and sexuality, primarily due to the lack of inclusion of these social categories even independently. These findings carry implications not only for the capacity of IOs to further social inclusion among disaster-affected populations, but also for the legitimacy of IOs.
