Gender Day at COP 23
As a woman, I myself have faced too much male ignorance, sexism, entitlement, downplaying women’s competence yet capitalizing on it. And we are all aware of half-baked development aid programs that tokenize women’s issues, often lacking a deeper understanding of gender-related determinants in environmental health, urban/rural development and climate adaptation projects. In my experience, I have seen that the extent of gender sensitive programming varies greatly between different parts of the world and across different states, so I was curious to learn what themes COP 23 speakers will focus on and what common language they will use.
The first sessions I attended in the morning was organized by the Talanoa Pavilion and focused on women leadership in climate agenda. The pavilion was intended to serve as a space to honor Fiji’s talanoa tradition of story-telling and inclusive and transparent sharing as a way to deliberate. Six speakers—all women and three non-white—represented different task force areas. One was a women’s rights activist from Costa Rica, Monica Araya. Monica said, “I had to become one [activist]”. The other one, Noelene Nabulivou, represented Fijian human right organization Diverse Voices and Action (DIVA). Achala C. Abeysinghe works on legal issues in climate change negotiations as an adviser to the chair of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) Group for the UNFCCC (why is it still appropriate to use “developed” countries designation without specifying which area of development is implies, i.e. least economically developed, or lowest income countries?!).
The panel was attended mostly by women—which was really disappointing because it shows lack of understanding of men’s role in mainstreaming gender issues, lack of recognition and willingness to celebrate women’s leadership and success.
Across all spaces and events during the gender day, the speakers emphasized the need to mainstream and integrate gender issues in climate action, highlighting intersections of women’s equality and climate issues. I may have mentioned before, but most side events are disproportionately dominated by representatives from the wealthiest western countries and BRICS. However, here and there we see speakers from the pacific island states of the least economically developed countries. At the gender day, several of these speakers emphasized the importance of understanding local gender dynamics in different communities to “ensure that gender roles and functions are working well”. They pointed that there is a certain donor philosophy regarding gender sensitivity that needs further scrutiny.
Right after, I shifted to a session titled, “The economic case for gender-responsive climate action”. This panel was more technical, but I specifically intended to see how major development players—big donor organizations, national representative and private sector—will talk about factoring gender in their policies and programming. I heard an interesting perspective from a woman entrepreneur, a founder of Lighting a Million Lives initiative that provides solar energy to rural communities in Pakistan, when she shared how her business was engaging women as “agents of change” to speed up smart energy development.
Similar to the business sector, representatives from multilateral organizations, like development banks, and IOs like UNDP, also consistently talk about reframing aid recipients/beneficiaries as clients. This trend has been going on for several years now, and I’ve seen it within humanitarian organizations, healthcare and now in the climate sector. These organizations come to conclusion that return on investment and profitability depend on good client understanding which requires robust and detailed data-base of client profiles. Practically, this means gathering and maintaining disaggregated gender-specific data.
Overall, while I see the importance of building investment cases in development, I have always thought of it as a sneaky technique to channel lower priority or unrecognized agenda through concepts that donors will understand and agree to finance. But I’m also aware that particular framing does affect the nature of implementation—it puts gender dynamics in a particular box that it targets for impact evaluation. So, I’m not convinced that “recognizing that projects and programs can catalyze a better understanding of how women contribute to economic life” should necessarily become commonly agreed upon perspective. My concern also resonated with the moderator when I heard her ask an even more provoking question to the panelists, “Since our economy is built predominantly by men — why do we expect that the same tools and systems will work for women?” They somehow talked around the question without addressing it properly.
Overall, there was a general agreement throughout the day that it is crucial to consider how gender impacts vulnerability and therefore requires differential approaches in mitigation efforts and resilience building. I was pleased to see all events advocating for the importance of creating multi-sectoral management teams, and not just gender, sustainability, labor, etc units, but instead incorporate gender, health, climate experts in all stages of decision-making at every level. However, the hardest things is to operationalize according to the evidence and knowledge. Many parties to COP23 keep brining up the debate around the degree of regulatory detail that is required to ensure the achievement of the Paris goals. While some believe that countries will be able to succeed as long as they are given flexibility to figure out national approaches within the international targets and guidelines establish in the Paris agreement (which is further negotiated during COP23), many argue that additional concrete policy directives need to be promoted and mandated. So one of the most interesting practical ideas was the discussion of gender budgeting—which has not been implemented in any major organizations yet.
On the way back to Cologne, I was reflecting on the gender day and trying to determine what I can take from the gender analysis into the overall governance framework of COP23. And I guess to me this goes back to power distribution I experience when navigating the space of Bula and Bonn zones. As I mentioned before I still feel that the conference is reproducing the paradigm of Western monopoly on expertise and knowledge. Most technical panels center around “best practices” from the western cities, while representatives of Francophone countries, for example, tend to concentrate at the Senegal and Mali pavilions—seemingly discussing their own agenda. This leads me to re-phrase the paradox established by one of the panelists, “If our dominant economic, legal and political frameworks originate in western thought and practice, how do we expect the same tools, instruments and approaches to work for other communities?” I hope that is just my skepticism of today—but I would wish to see more respect for and legitimization of the Talanoa spirit at the conference—and not merely its symbolic appreciation.
Behind Goal 13: Women Leading the Climate Agenda. Pay attention that instead of sitting on individual chairs the audience members are invited to share benches. This intentional design creates more intimate presence and a sense of human interdependence.
Katie—after we successfully managed to get our COP 23 bikes. I believe we were rushing to Bula zone to attend a press conference about International perspectives on German coal and European climate leadership.
I attended a High-Level Dialogue where city mayors from Nicaragua, California, Poland and Japan talked about how their cities are implementing sustainable urban development goals, focusing on housing construction, cement industry and energy mixes.
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