ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on feminist political ecology and intersectionality approaches to examine efforts to address climate and gender injustices in the Philippines. Existing scholarship often depicts women in the Global South as the most vulnerable to climate change due to social norms and greater poverty, but this feminisation of vulnerability, we demonstrate, does little to enable intersectional approaches that address the gender inequalities, patterns of socio-economic marginalisation and power relations. Instead, we highlight through our examination of Filipino women’s involvement in climate adaptation strategies, the importance of adopting a more nuanced understanding of vulnerability to facilitate sustainable climate adaptation. Although the Filipino government and development agencies have adopted measures designed to enhance gender equality and reduce the impacts of climate change, our study highlights that such policies and initiatives are not translated into observable effects on the ground. In particular, efforts focused on the inclusion of women in market-based activities and the failure to consider how gender roles in Filipino society result in women and men being exposed to and perceive climate-related risks differently, which mean that adaptation strategies hold the potential to compound existing or create new injustices.
