Rendering Gender Visible in Climate Finance: The Political Economy of Gender Tagging

Women are disproportionately affected by climate change while remaining systematically underrepresented in climate decision-making processes. These inequalities are not inherent to climate risk or climate policy themselves but rather reflect broader social, economic, and political structures that shape vulnerability and access to resources and power. In response, climate finance—defined as financial flows mobilized to support climate mitigation and adaptation—has increasingly incorporated gender equality into its mandate. This, in turn, has given rise to a global push for gender-responsive climate finance, understood as funding for climate action that explicitly integrates gender considerations. A central mechanism for tracking gender responsiveness in climate finance is the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) Gender Equality Policy Marker. As part of their reporting to the OECD Creditor Reporting System, DAC climate finance providers are supposed to apply this marker to assess the extent to which gender equality objectives are integrated into funded activities. The DAC gender markers have been criticized for failing to capture the realities of implemented interventions (Kuusi 2025). However, we argue that they allow us to see how gender considerations are framed, prioritized, and rendered legible within climate finance. Viewed in this way, gender markers matter because they constitute critical sites for understanding the political economy of gender in both historical and current climate action. To date, few systematic studies have examined the conditions under which climate finance — or development finance more broadly — is classified as gender responsive. Recent work finds that gender markers are shaped by political constraints and opportunities on both the contributor and recipient sides (Metinsoy and Minasyan, working paper; Dietrich et al. 2025). Our study contributes to this nascent literature by exploring the drivers of variation in gender-tagged climate finance, focusing on when, where, and under what conditions gender considerations are formally recognized in climate finance. We focus on three drivers: gender references in national climate policies (including the Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs, that all signatories to the Paris Agreement are mandated to prepare and update every five years), the presence of gender focal points in climate ministries in both contributor and recipient countries, and the participation of women delegates in high-level climate negotiations. Preliminary results suggest a correlation between gender references in NDCs and gender-responsive climate finance. Our quantitative analysis will be complemented with semi-structured interviews and document reviews to interrogate the mechanisms through which gender-tagged climate finance manifests. The results of this study have important implications for both research and practice, particularly following commitments made at the most recent UN climate conference in Belém, Brazil, where 92 countries reaffirmed the need to integrate gender equality into climate action. However, concerns have been raised that this ambition has not been matched with financing commitments. Understanding what drives the (reporting of) gender-responsive climate finance is thus critical to assess progress toward the achievement of gender equality in addressing climate change.