Saying all the right things? Gendered discourse in climate-smart agriculture

Abstract

Amidst debates about the role of ‘climate-smart agriculture’ (CSA), the intersection of concerns about climate change and agriculture offer an opportunity to consider how gender is considered in global policymaking. The latest module in the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, World Bank and International Fund for Agricultural Development Gender and Agriculture Sourcebook – ‘Gender and Climate Smart Agriculture’ – offers an opportunity to reassess how gender factors into these global recommendations. This contribution argues that the module makes strides toward more gender-aware policymaking, but the version of CSA discussed in the module sidesteps the market-led and productivity-oriented practices often associated with CSA. As a result, though the module pushes a more feminist agenda in many respects, it does not fully consider the gendered implications of corporate-led and trade-driven CSA.

Keywords:

• agriculture
• climate change
• gender
• FAO
• global governance

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Zoe Brent, Jennifer Clapp and Peter Newell for their comments and feedback on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 It is beyond the scope of this paper to fully engage with the sociological literature on gender performance, but for the purposes of this paper, gender performance – or ‘performativity’ – builds off the work of Judith Butler (1990). Butler (1990) argues that gender is constituted through the performance of acting, speaking and doing.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrea Collins

Andrea M. Collins is an assistant professor in the School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo. Her research examines the role of gender in the governance of food, land and agriculture in both local and global contexts. Most recently, she has focused her attention on the discourses used by global governance actors to describe gender relations in agricultural investment and public–private partnerships. Dr. Collins received her PhD in political studies from Queen’s University, Canada, and previously held a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University.