By Bernadette P. Resurrección
Efforts to integrate gender equality into climate change solutions have gained momentum in recent years. However, despite this progress, many of these initiatives are missing a crucial element—colonialism. This glaring oversight leaves today’s climate policies struggling to deliver truly feminist, just, and transformative results.
Colonialism, often discussed in academic circles as “coloniality,” remains a political blind spot in creating climate action. Despite its role as a key driver of climate change through centuries of extractivist activities, economic expansion, and the dominance of Western ways of knowing, coloniality is frequently overlooked in mainstream environmental debates. The effects of this omission are profound, affecting not just the effectiveness of climate solutions but also their ability to create lasting, equitable change.
For those seeking a path forward, confronting coloniality in climate solutions is essential. Without this, efforts to address climate change risk reproducing the very systems of exploitation and inequality that have caused the crisis in the first place.
Colonialism in climate policy
Colonialism is not just a historical fact—it’s an ongoing system of power relations that continues to shape our world today. Its influence can be seen in the globalized economy’s drive for endless growth, the relentless extraction of natural resources, the dependence on unequal relations, and the prioritization of Western scientific and technological approaches to solving global problems. These dynamics are central to the climate crisis, yet they are often ignored when crafting policies to address it.
The climate movement has made important strides in linking gender and climate issues, with increasing awareness of how climate impacts women disproportionately, and how empowering women can enhance environmental stewardship. However, even these gender-focused climate solutions tend to fall short of addressing the colonial underpinnings that still shape global systems. They often fail to engage with the deeper historical and structural forces driving the environmental destruction that disproportionately affects marginalized communities.
Undercurrents in climate solutions
If we are to move toward a truly transformative approach to climate action, we need to begin by identifying and addressing the colonial dynamics that still permeate mainstream climate strategies. These can be broadly categorized into three areas:
Gender binary thinking
Many climate policies focus on the role of women in environmental stewardship. While this is a crucial step, these approaches often reinforce rigid gender binaries, reducing complex identities and experiences into a simplistic “women vs. men” narrative. Post/decolonial feminist scholarship traces the framing of the gender binary to colonialism, which reinvented and universalized the concept of “women” to reflect European gender hierarchies and overlooked gender-fluid identities. A “women-only” (in opposition to men) approach to climate solutions erases the intersectional nature of the climate crisis, which inherently affects racialized communities that are often considered disposable.
Climate solutions, particularly those that incorporate gender perspectives, are frequently shaped by Western feminist thought. They position women as vulnerable and poor “under Western eyes .” They attribute women’s low status almost exclusively to local patriarchal practices and norms, associating them with so-called backwardness of non-western societies, while portraying women from the Global North as liberated from patriarchy. This is a reminder of the epistemic privilege of white Western feminism, mirroring former “civilizing missions” that aim to rescue women from patriarchy, however failing to historicize and foreground inequalities and climate change vulnerabilities as intertwined outcomes of patriarchy and capitalist development.
The reliance on techno-managerial solutions
One of the most significant ways in which colonial thinking persists in climate policy is through the continued reliance on technological and managerial “fixes.” This approach, rooted in Enlightenment thinking that sees nature as something to be controlled and mastered, reduces complex environmental and social issues to problems that can be solved with the right tools or management strategies. These types of solutions often overlook the deeper social, historical, and political dimensions of the climate crisis, particularly its links to colonialism, capitalism, and exploitation of both people and natural systems. It also sidesteps the need for more systemic changes, like rethinking the global economy’s drive toward endless growth and extraction. Feminist political ecology and feminist critiques of science emphasize that knowledge is socially situated and emerges from socially embodied locations, attributing epistemic value to affect, intimacy, and corporeal experience.
Reimagining climate action through a post/decolonial feminist lens
To create climate solutions that are genuinely transformative, we need to rethink the entire narrative surrounding climate change. Instead of viewing it as a purely environmental issue, we must understand it as deeply intertwined with histories of colonialism, extractivism, and capitalist exploitation. This requires a shift in perspective—one that moves away from technical fixes and piecemeal reforms toward a more holistic understanding of the crisis.
One of the key insights of a post/decolonial feminist approach is the recognition of the interdependence between nature and society. The modern, Western view of nature as separate from human society has led to policies that treat environmental problems as isolated issues, detached from the social and historical contexts in which they arise. Instead, this view advocates for solutions that are rooted in justice, inclusion, and respect for the diverse ways in which people interact with the environment.
Another crucial aspect of a post/decolonial feminist climate approach is the need to embrace epistemic diversity—the recognition that there are many different ways of knowing and understanding the world. Western scientific and technological knowledge is not the only valid form of knowledge. Indigenous, Black, and other marginalized communities have valuable insights into how to live sustainably in balance with the earth, yet these perspectives are often sidelined in climate discussions.
Finally, a post/decolonial feminist approach calls for intersectional justice—a recognition that the systems of oppression driving climate change are interconnected. Coloniality, capitalism, racism, and heteropatriarchy all overlap and reinforce one another, creating a web of exploitation that affects both people and the planet. Addressing the climate crisis, therefore, requires tackling these systems together, rather than in isolation.
Intersectional justice means centering the experiences and voices of those most affected by climate change—often Indigenous peoples, people of color, and women from the Global South—and ensuring that climate solutions address the root causes of inequality and exploitation.
This blog post is based on the paper “Colonial erasures in gender and climate change solutions” published in WIREs Climate Change in May 2024.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of the EADI Debating Development Blog or the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes.
Bernadette P. Resurrección is Professor in the Department of Global Development Studies at Queens University, Canada
Image: Takver from Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons