Women Farmers’ Voices on Climate Change: A Culture-Centered Approach to Climate Change Adaptation

• In Event: Public Understanding of Climate Change: From Misperceptions to Engagement

Abstract

There is increasingly scholarly work to mainstream gender in climate change adaptation literature, as poor women are disproportionately affected by climate change impacts. Although there are several adaptation studies that call for urgent implementation of adaptation policies, most ignore gender-specific drivers of vulnerability. Moreover, even several feminist research on climate change adpatation, that analyze adaptation through the lens of power, access, and norms, are not grounded in lived experiences of poor women in the Global South. This paper applies culture-centered apporach to climate change by foregrounding the voices of lower-caste women farmers’ from low-income housholds in a semi-arid region in south India. Based on interviews and focus groups, we find that women farmers argue government policies such as promoting genetically modified crops negatively affects the adaptation strategies they already practise, for example, planting a variety of climate resilent food crops to adpat to increasing uncertainity of rainfall patterns. We suggest that adaptation research and policy-making should foreground the voices of marginalized communities such as women farmer’s to frame, implement and assess outcomes of climate change policies, in the absence of which, such policies would most likely perpetuate the gender-gap, and hinder equitable social change.

Authors

• Jagadish J Thaker, National University of Singapore

• Mohan Jyoti Dutta, National U of Singapore