ABSTRACT
The chapter emerged from a narrative and a dialogue between a feminist academic and a feminist bureaucrat and recounts the experience of a gender expert in the Swedish Foreign Ministry against reflections from feminist institutional theory. It highlights the institutional challenges that government officials face when promoting gender equality in sustainability and climate issues and how they navigate that space in order to gender mainstream the agenda – e.g. through several types of critical acts. It highlights several institutional obstacles that challenge gender-mainstreaming efforts but also illustrates how action is possible, even when it pushes the comfort zone of gender politics, e.g. when a new gender perspective was launched, that of seeing men and particularly elite male behaviour to be ‘the problem’ to tackle in sustainable development. Finally, it concludes that for gender and intersectionality to gain prominence on the governmental agenda of climate change and sustainability, the work of single-gender experts does not suffice, politics is vital. Politics is imperative in guiding the governmental ministries but requires political mobilisation of broader sections of society as well.
