Of Climate and Gender: An Ecofeminist Hegemony Analysis of the Indian and EU Climate Policy Discourses and Identities

What significance do gendered discourse structures have for the state identity of India and the EU when it comes to their respective climate policies? This question is the focus of the study, which offers a comprehensive analysis of the climate discourse of the emerging power India and the EU, often described as a leader of climate change governance. Following the assumption that, although a wide variety of solutions to the greatest challenge of our time - the climate crisis - have been formulated, politicians of various states and regional organisations opt almost exclusively for technological responses, this study explores one possible cause: firmly anchored gender structures within both the Indian and EU climate discourses. Anja Zürn employs the ecofeminist hegemony analysis she developed for this study, first reconstructing the climate policy identities of India and the EU, and then subjecting them to an ecofeminist critique.

Anja Zürn is a climate mitigation manager. Previously she was a researcher and member of faculty at the Institute of Political Science and Sociology at the University of Würzburg. In her research on Indian and EU climate governance and policy, she focuses on the overarching questions of how the respective climate policies are shaped by gender structures and what significance these structures have in combating the global climate crisis.