Toward gender sensitivity: women and climate change policies in China

ABSTRACT

Climate change and environmental protection have become increasingly important in China. The country has formulated and strictly enforced a series of policies to address climate change directly. This article argues for the importance of studying China’s climate change policies from a gender perspective, particularly given the speed and import of action. It does so in three steps. First, it examines gendered differences in perceptions of climate change and in the impacts of climate change policies. Second, it examines the environment-related content in China’s gender policies and the gender-related content in its climate change policies. Through the comparison between these two, we argue that it is easier to include climate change in gender policies in China than to include gender in climate change policies and that the integration of these two is anything but robust. Third, we analyze the multiple and varied roles played by women in climate change policy making, as well as women’s conspicuous absence from some key high-level political conversations. The article concludes that gender awareness in Chinese climate change policy needs to be supplemented by gender sensitivity and we suggest some measures to move toward this goal.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• China
• gender sensitivity
• climate change
• environment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Yuan Zhou is Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Foreign Languages at North China Electric Power University. She researches and writes about gender and international relations, environmental governance, and emergency management. She has published in journals concerning international relations, gender studies, and environmental management.

Xiaoyan Sun is Lecturer in the School of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Beijing Normal University. She has taught in the fields of gender and comparative cultural studies. In her research she applies feminist theory to study peace and security, and environmental and cultural issues.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities from Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China (2018MS138).