Introduced: Naila Kabeer

What do you work on as a Fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy?

The abiding concerns in my research over the years has been with gender and its intersection with other forms of inequality as it structures access to livelihoods opportunities, features in the policy domain, and influences efforts to engage in collective action for social justice. I want to carry these concerns into the field of climate change, which is becoming the defining challenge of our era. A central assumption underpinning my work is that a growth paradigm based on unregulated market forces (free market fundamentalism) has been a major driver of illbeing across the world and it is a primary driving force behind climate-related injustices.

As with all major challenges in the real world, the challenge of climate change does not lend itself to easy solution. Each solution contains tensions and trade-offs – between countries and across different social groups. I want to use my time at the Robert Bosch Academy to familiarize myself with how different constituencies (researchers, policy makers, activists) are defining the problem of climate change. I want to know whether they share my critique of unregulated market forces, what they see as possible solutions, how concerns with gender justice features in these solutions, and what overlap there is between these perspectives.

What are the biggest challenges in your field?

While inequalities of various kinds have long been with us, they have been rising in recent decades. Research on this phenomenon traces it to the dominance of a market-led growth paradigm since the late 1970s and the downgrading of a role for state and civil society in addressing injustices inherited from the past, as well as the new forms of inequalities thrown up by forces of the free market. What is frequently missing in this analysis is an appreciation of how gender is a central dimension of these inequalities.

Gender inequalities are partly a product of social norms and practices of different countries. But they also reflect the failure of the growth-based paradigm to recognize and support the unpaid care and reproductive work done largely by women and children across the world. This  is a major constraint on their ability to participate in the economy and in public life. Gender inequality is more pervasive than any other form of inequality, cutting across countries, class, and social groups, yet it is frequently overlooked because it is so naturalized.  There is a very real danger that the same tendency is occurring in current efforts to diagnose the harms associated with climate change and in the solutions on offer. The challenge for feminists is to demonstrate that gender injustice is a central part of the problem and hence must constitute a central part of any solution.

What has been your largest lesson learned in climate diplomacy in recent years?

Climate change is a new field for me, but my past work on the adverse consequences of market-led growth on many aspects of gender inequality provides a very relevant entry point into climate diplomacy. Many of the tensions that we see in the current economic order between rich and poor countries, between rich and poor people, and between men and women experiencing different kinds of oppression are likely to be replayed in some form in climate diplomacy, since it is dominated by those who hold power. But it is also evident to me that there may be great willingness to find common solutions among those civil society actors and movements who are less invested in the status quo and more willing to think about solutions that go outside its parameters.

What insights for your work are you expecting to gain during your fellowship?

I would like to use my fellowship to understand better how three key constituencies – policy makers, academics, and civil society actors – understand the main drivers of climate change and what they perceive to be key priorities in the coming years. I would like to understand what might explain diverging views among them and where points of overlap lie.

What makes Berlin and Germany relevant for your work?

My time in Germany will allow me to engage in a first-hand way with the views of the constituencies I outlined earlier.  I know that there are many climate activists in Berlin, some from countries in the global South. This will allow me to explore north-south tensions and overlaps as they play out in a European context. The OECD has taken a lead in advocating for a wellbeing economy to replace the current growth-based paradigm and I would like to explore how they see this in relation to Europe and in relation to countries in the global South. German development aid has been very active in the South Asia region where my research is focused. I am interested in how it is “greening” its aid and the place it assigns to gender in these efforts.