Gendering Resilience: Myths and Stereotypes in the Discourse on Climate‐induced Migration
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12400 |
| Author | Delf Rothe |
| Published date | 01 February 2017 |
| Date | 01 February 2017 |
Gendering Resilience: Myths and Stereotypes in
the Discourse on Climate-induced Migration
Delf Rothe
Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg
Abstract
The research article critically investigates recent European policy proposals that promote migration as an adaptation strategy
to increase the resilience of communities vulnerable to the environmental crisis. Such proposals have been welcomed for
breaking with alarmist discourses that framed climate-induced migration as a threat to national or international security. The
present article seeks to contribute to this ongoing debate by bringing in a fresh perspective that has so far been neglected:
the perspective of gender. Drawing on a poststructuralist perspective on gender the article reveals that policy debates on
climate-induced migration take place within highly gendered discourses. Applying this perspective to recent policy reports on
climate change, migration and resilience, the article helps to paint a more nuanced picture of the highly criticized notion of
resilience. The analysis shows that, on the one hand, resilience thinking helped overcoming a masculinized discourse of security
as control. On the other hand, it reproduces a series of ‘gender myths’about the role of women in the so-called Global South.
The issue of climate change-induced migration is fiercely
debated in academic, political and public media discourses.
These debates have long been dominated by alarmist threat
images and projections of looming waves of hundreds of
millions of climate refugees in the near future. Recently,
such alarmist voices have been replaced by a more modest
discourse, which revolves around the notion of resilience. In
line with resilience thinking this discourse has stressed the
complexity and multi-causality of climate-induced migration.
Most importantly, climate migration has been normatively
reevaluated –from posing a threat to (inter)national security
to being a potential adaptation measure that might reduce
the vulnerability of communities in climate hot-spot regions
(see Scheffran et al., 2012). In the academic literature, there
is a heated normative debate about this discursive shift.
Some have welcomed the rise of resilience for its openness
and departure from a defense-oriented approach to security
(Corry, 2014). Others have condemned resilience as yet
another expression of a neoliberal hegemony, which is shift-
ing the burden of protection from state agencies to the vul-
nerable communities themselves (Bettini, 2014; Methmann
and Oels, 2015).
The present article seeks to contribute to this ongoing
debate by bringing in a fresh perspective on this debate
that has so far been neglected: the perspective of gender
discourse. It asks how we can evaluate the recent shift in
discourses of climate-induced migration, when they are read
through the lens of gender. Drawing on a poststructuralist
understanding of gender, the article seeks to reveal the gen-
dered subject positions and narratives in resilience thinking.
For this, the first section very shortly introduces the post-
structuralist understanding of gender and its operationaliza-
tion. Section 2 distinguishes between two ideal-typical
discourses of climate change, migration and security: a
discourse that focuses on the linkages of climate change,
conflict and migration revolving around a narrow concept of
security, and a discourse of climate change, migration and
adaptation, drawing upon the broader concept of resilience.
Section 3 asks how we can explain the rise of the resilience
concept when we read it through a lens of gender dis-
course. Section 4 uses this perspective to discuss the merits,
problems and pitfalls of a resilience discourse as opposed to
a narrow security discourse.
1 A poststructuralist perspective on gender and
the environment
The discourse theoretical approach to gender applied in this
study is based on three core ideas: anti-essentialism, post-
foundationalism and the intrinsic relation between gender
discourses and political power.
First, a poststructuralist take on gender opposes the idea
that differences between the sexes are naturally given. In
doing so, this perspective poses a challenge to essentialist
feminist approaches including radical- or eco-feminism,
which held that women would generally behave more
peacefully or environmentally sustainable than men (Mies
and Shiva, 1993; Tickner, 1992). A poststructuralist perspec-
tive does not deny that biological and material differences
between the sexes exist but assumes these do not have any
meaning unless they become discursively mediated (Butler,
1990). Following Hajer (1995, p. 44) discourses can be
understood as historically ‘specific ensembles of ideas, con-
cepts and categorisation that are produced, reproduced and
transformed in a particular set of practices and through
which meaning is given to physical and social realities’. Gen-
der discourses produce historically specific gendered subject
positions, related attributions and behavioral norms, that are
©2017 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2017) 8:Suppl.1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12400
Global Policy Volume 8 . Supplement 1 . February 2017
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