Let's see
I'm the director of Women and Gender in International Development at the Center for
International Research Education and Development here at Virginia Tech. Lumbini Barua is my
graduate assistant, she's supporting the discussion series and she's a Ph.D. student at
the School of education. So welcome to our Virtual Women and Gender in International Development
Discussion Series. This is our final event of the fall semester and we're very happy that you
could join us for Dr. Siera's presentation and discussion. So as of this morning,
Lumbini last checked about an hour and a half ago we had 68 people registered for today's event
and in addition to many diverse folks in the United States we had people who said
they would be joining us from 11 countries including Canada, Germany, the UK, Korea,
Lao People's Republic Democratic Republic, and uh I'm gonna stress the names of the African
country since her presentation has on Africa so Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, Togo,
Uganda, and South Africa. So welcome to everybody!
So please note as you just got a message like I did that our event will be recorded and that is
so it can be available on our website afterwards and so if you're staying on keeping your camera on
your consent into being recorded you can turn your camera off if you don't want your image recorded.
um okay so the full calendar and any updates of this discussion series for
the rest of the year will be on our website. Now before I introduce our speaker I want to
um read Virginia Tech's land and labor recognition and invite you to reflect on it.
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So brief uh housekeeping notes the discussion will last in total approximately 45 minutes the
presentation will be 20 to 25 and then we'll have about 30 minutes of discussion and Q/A.
All the participants will be muted to enable the speaker to present without interruption
and you're welcome to post questions through the chat at any time and I'll read them to our speaker
at the end of the presentation so we keep track of those and we'll we'll ask them in the order
that they were posted in the chat but if there's more questions after those in the chat people
can raise their hands and unmute themselves and ask the questions directly or make it comment.
In order for our discussion to be as rich as it can be we need everyone to be respectful
and treat our participants with kindness and consideration without discriminatory division.
So again we're being recorded and we will have access to it in our website.
um in advance I'd like to ask you to please be there for the survey that we'll ask at the end
and you can see this by tagging us at wgd_vt. Okay finally introduce our speaker um the reason you're
here. Siera Vercillo is an Adjunct Professor and the Canadian social sciences and Humanities
research Council Post Doctoral fellow at the School of Environment Enterprise and Development
at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. Her research interests are broadly located in
the fields of feminist geography, political ecology, and critical development study with
focus on agrarian and nutrition transition, smallholder rural livelihoods, food systems,
and household food security in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly northern Ghana.
She holds a Ph.D. in Geography from Western University and other degrees from the Institute
of Development Studies (UK) and the University of Toronto. She's published in multiple journals
such as Ambio, the Journal of rural studies, Gender, place and culture, and Third world quarterly. As well
as in Al Jazeera and the conversation Africa and has been working mainly in Agricultural
Extension with smallholders in West Africa for the past decade. So the time of our talk today
is the gendering of climate change scholarship in Africa please welcome Dr Sierra Vercillo.
Hello everyone uh thank you for having me today. I'm just
going to share my screen because I have a PowerPoint presentation.
Okay hopefully you can all see that um so thank you uh to Maria Elisa and your team for inviting
me to speak today. I'm going to speak for about 20 or 25 minutes and then I'm really looking forward
to a discussion of the literature more broadly. I should note that I am an Adjunct professor
at the University of Waterloo as mentioned but I've just switched to the University of Toronto
at Scarborough, I'm working on a new research cluster which is sustainable farming and food
futures cluster uh and it's linking agroecology, plant biology with food sovereignty, food Systems,
food Markets, infrastructure uh it's a new cluster. So that's something I'm working on as well.
uh and this uh presentation today is built off of a series of talks that we gave last year
at the uh American Association for Geographers Annual Meeting um and we had further discussion
of this. So it's great to see that there is gaining interest on this topic now this is part of a study
I'll present today is a study that we published last year in Ambio and it was a systematic review
of the gender and climate change research related to the African continent. So we read
pretty much everything published on this topic uh and with our own lens analyzed where there
are gaps and trends. So we think that this paper is particularly useful for those researchers or
students who are trying to figure out what are the trends in the literature and then what are
the potential gaps, how can we feel that what are new projects new questions new methodologies.
So you're welcome to read this study uh and what I'll present today is just broadly our
interpretation or where our position is in our analysis of this literature the actual systematic
search and review process that we took a summary of that review where we see the gaps and biases
and then uh proposed further investigations which many of you I'm sure are also experts in
your own right and I look forward to discussing um where you think we could take this research.
So broadly uh speaking gender and environmental scholarship uh
is well established as being you know the environment is socially constructed
and a political thing as opposed to just the neutral objective natural phenomenon.
um and what this scholarship does very well is looks at the interactions between humans and
the environment uh and throughout the evolution of this scholarship we know that or it's been
well established, well proven and demonstrated how women's knowledge of all the biophysical environment
differs from men's um because they experience the world differently. So through gender norms
and socializations their values, roles, and responsibilities uh differentiation and access
to different kinds of environmental resources and rights means that they have different interests,
different knowledge and experiences of the environment and therefore different values
and how to conserve and interact with it or not than meant. So any scholarship that doesn't look at
things from a socially differentiated or gendered lens of the environment um is taking tends to take
more of a biased look. So we need to look at things from a social look at the environment from the
social perspective and so how gender uh this gender differentiation impacts the environment, how
equality and women's empowerment is related to this, and then how it affects sustainability goals?
and there are some of the major scholars that have certainly influenced me as well
as the literature I've listed below if you're interested in reading more about that topic.
Now from our position as the three authors of this paper we tend to be critical feminist
scholars. So looking more at gender relations uh and critical feminist lens as opposed to liberal
feminist lens and so what critical feminist uh perspectives claim is that in this scholarship
generally even the ones that focus on uh women and women's knowledge and women's rights is that
it tends to portray women either as victims of environmental change or environmental systems
or in contrast as saviors of the environment so they're they have the potential the knowledge
the roles uh to conserve and save from human damage. Now the problem with this lens
are the critique uh is that it fits this is a notion that's fitting within the patriarchal and
capitalist systems and not transforming it and so what ends up happening when this research or
knowledge gets translated to policy and practice is that it's using women's knowledge and labor
for sustainability efforts without addressing the causes of that vulnerability and that ends
up deepening their development. So it's not a matter it's not enough to just focus on women
um but looking at power dynamics structures uh that is where we as authors in interpreting
this research and analyzing the scholarship where we're what we're looking at it as. So
gender to us is a situated dynamic and negotiated um identity or positionality
through norms and values that intersects with other positionalities. So not all women and not
a women and not all men are the same and their interactions uh are diverse.
So the systematic search and review process that we took is briefly outlined here uh and although
this is technically replicable uh so you if you follow these steps you might come to the same
list of articles that we analyzed but because of our positionality and our theoretical lens our
interpretation our qualitative review of the types of sectors and theories might differ. so what we
did is we searched for gender, climate change, and Africa in the web of science. So these three key
words and quotes and came up with 276 articles that were published between 2004 and 2019 and
we ended the study at 2019 when we which was the the complete year of when we were able to finish
reading all this literature and we scanned for initially what we did is we scanned for abstracts
for false positives so sometimes in the search process there'll be articles that come up that
maybe they have the word gender once or Africa once listed in their study but it's actually
not relevant at all to the study and based on that we removed 16 articles and analyzed 260 articles
as part of this study and our initial analysis was coming up with aggregates of when these studies
were published, who is funding them, whether they were open access or not, and what the research
methodologies were and then conducted a more qualitative review on the all the sectors that
were analyzed and the theories. So I'm going to present what those aggregates and reviews are now.
So um our analysis uh initially after the review of abstracts came up with all the
types of sectors that were analyzed mainly in the studies and came up with this list
and so after this list then we developing this list we went through each article and
categorized the articles under various themes to help summarize the literature. So this is a
multi-stage analysis that's grounded in the theories that we used and was iterative. So
as we were analyzing we would adjust as we went on and as you can see here there are many
um vectors or themes covered. There are some obvious ones that are missing.
The further summarize this um the first study that we came across was published in 2004 but
it wasn't until the 2010s where this literature focused on gender and climate change in Africa
really took off, particularly after 2013 and then we can talk and try to think about why that might
have been in terms of what was happening in the world or what was happening in academia.
um and what's relevant towards this is less than half of the publications are available
Open Access so uh even though a lot of the scholarship is produced uh for certain places
or uh about send places is not necessarily accessible for certain people in those places.
uh further we noticed that there was quite a bias or a predominance of studies conducted
in certain African countries as opposed to others. So the top research countries that have
the green dots located on this map here of the continent that includes Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia,
Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, and South Africa where there were many many studies focused in
those places and what's interesting to us is that there were countries that are very populous on
the African continent that are missing from this literature are there very very few studies uh such
as and some of these countries could be explained by the fact that we were looking at English-based
studies and not French or Arabic studies so countries like Egypt, Algeria, Sudan, Morocco uh that
might be a cause we don't know but it could be. um and then what was interesting is that uh based on
the index that there are countries that are most vulnerable to climate change with the
least capacity to respond uh those countries are not really featured at all in this research. So
countries like Chad, Somalia, Central African Republic, Eritrea, DR Congo, Guinea Bissau. So
if you're looking to contribute to this literature one major area right off the
bat is to to pursue studies in these areas and I'm sure there's many reasons as to why there
are enough studies in this area but it's it's part of the politics of publishing and research
and it's really about the power of priorities in this research. So thinking further about what are
the trends in the methodologies of this research we see that the majority take place at a local
level. So many many studies did comparative cases are usually within local communities comparing
between each other. They were the most common and uh less frequently they featured on the
global, continental, regional, and national scales. So studies of climate change that focus very very
close at the village level and not necessarily what's happening at wider scales is a problem
because climate change is a broad phenomenon as well. uh and then the actual methodology itself
uh we saw some trends and and biases. Many many studies about 25% focus on surveys so structured
surveys uh 18% were individual interviews uh almost 16% were focus groups uh and other types
of methodologies like mixing these methods uh a ethnography or participant observation and
then that there were much fewer studies that use these methodologies uh as well as studies
that used sort of climate science or satellite imaging, mapping these things were fewer as well.
And so what we recommend just based on these aggregates uh is that we need to grant funds
perhaps to different kinds of agencies to conduct research like national, regional agencies to
do more that might reflect diverse methodologies, diverse types of studies and the level of analysis
further summarizing based on on where the funding for this was coming was really striking and that
is the fact that over a hundred of these 131 articles 80 was funded by Global North agencies
particularly research funders um coming from North America and Europe and these tended to
be federal or national level agencies. So something like USAID uh German Federal Ministry of Education
Research, the NSF, uh the ESRC in the UK and then International Development related research uh
and Aid or donor-driven research like DIFID, the IDRC, and it there was only one intergovernmental
international agency that really featured prominently in the funding and that was IFAD.
So that lent itself to thinking through the kinds of questions being asked the purposes
of the research who the audience is uh and and that would shape the methodologies uh and so on
which I'm happy to discuss further. So in terms of getting into the themes uh that
were covered in the literature um about 20% focused on agriculture which is quite
striking uh when you think just broadly about gender and climate change uh related to Africa
uh and 22% were focused on adaptation many linking it to so what is adoptive agriculture look like
and what are women's roles and responsibilities in this so uh all the images I should add in this
presentation come from the internet they come from our searches and trying to understand uh different
places where this research might be funding or coming from and what it might be used for
in the funders. So this image for example helps to explain the links in the literature between gender,
climate change, and agriculture where looking at gender differentiated impacts of climate change,
the way climate change impacts agriculture, and how gendered roles impacts these two things
and one trend or a limitation that we saw in this analysis uh from around
25% or more of these studies is that they tend to be very descriptive with very little analysis.
Uh so they identify the problem and that's it. So they use surveys to develop a list of adaptation
strategies so this is what women do this is what men do um to adapt to climate change through their
rural livelihoods or agriculture in particular. And and that's it. uh even so far many studies
would call themselves doing a qualitative study but really what they did is they used multiple
focus groups and did a quantifiable exercise. So they asked women in a women's only group what
are your attitude, what are your livelihoods, what are your adaptation strategies on the
farm and then they ask men the same thing and they called that a qualitative analysis.
um sometimes they combined uh these adaptation strategies with people's perceptions of a changing
climate, so erratic rainfall, soil changes, heat stress but they really embed what these strategies,
these adaptation strategies, these perceptions, these risks with roles uh understanding of gender
differentiated roles or responsibilities, the relations between women and men the access to and
control over resources, and other dimensions of the way policy and interventions shape and or shaped by
these things. So it's it's not really addressing the power structures, it's very descriptive
and it's part of this literature there's actually very little on social differentiation uh really
it's just a comparison of women and men. So only 15 studies about six percent had a social
differentiation as a primary focus of their study uh and these studies had a primary engagement with
gender as a socially constructed power lead and identity. So they were doing so these studies that
focused explicitly on social differentiation did do a very good job at demonstrating how gender
roles, responsibilities and negotiations with between women and men but also other structures
and other groups uh in other institutions different types of households in relation to
a changing climate including the intersectional dimensions of identity. So looking at gender
for example with ethnicity or generation there was some work on HIV status comparing those for
a single and married divorce and widowed. So very very good but limited number of studies that do
that intersectional analysis. So that points the need for further studies that do this sort
of social differentiation analysis. The themes that were strikingly absent in this literature
when I think of climate change scholarship these are some of the themes that also come to mind
um so work on coastal areas on conflict we talk about uh migrants and climate crises and
the move of people and the cause of conflict, uh education, outreach, energy, and urban areas and urban
planning, water. The focus on water and climate change and flooding and and other things related
to water- these were absent in this literature or very very few studies focused in this area.
So in the literature on gender climate change related to the African continent these things
were not really covered that much and so if you're looking to further research on this there's a
dramatic need in this area in these areas. So just to conclude so conclude or discuss some
of uh our summaries and aggregates based on our interpretation in our critical feminist lens is
that we see a private prevalence particularly of individual individual or household level
analyzes so these structured surveys for example that or even even discussions of
focus groups uh that really just do a sex to disaggregated analysis comparing women and
men's perceptions and adaptation strategies uh and they use those that aggregate disaggregated
uh summaries to then make judgments about whether someone is vulnerable or resilient which um in our
from our perspective jump jumps too many steps in terms of trying to explain uh what's going on.
So the conceptualization of gender as socially constructed as as play space or nuanced uh and
intimately associated with climate change in the environment is uh is not really there.
um and what what those those jumps and steps do is they base their analysis on their analysis to call
some something vulnerable or something resilient or someone or a household or community is based
on stereotypical narratives of norms of roles of resource access and control to explain or just
to just to explain the descriptions that they're they're seeing and not without actually doing that
explanatory work and that's also because of the types of methodologies that they're pursuing. So
I include this image here this cartoon I found on the internet which uh struck me as sort of
representing the consequences of this kind of research is when you're you're sort of doing
a tokenism or a quota of doing this research on women and men in climate change research on the
continent and so you end up just using including women but not meaningfully uh including them
and that has a number of negative repercussions uh reinforcement to
stereotypes and therefore of structures that are that do make people vulnerable.
So the lack of justice-oriented and intersectional studies uh there's an absence of investigations as
well into the responsibility of wider institutions beyond communities, beyond the household, beyond
um individuals to make that causes their vulnerability in the wider structure. So
what is the responsibility of the state, what are the responsibilities of the corporations, what are
the roles in all of this uh and and what therefore are there roles in working towards gender equality
or equity and environmental protection um and and I think this is really indicative
of the focus on individuals and households as a tenant of neoliberalism which is a focus uh
in in this scholarship to resolve the issues of climate change for their own communities and
households and not the wider structures at play. And so we would recommend knowing to sort of shift
the blame and shift the research questions as well uh two questions more broadly to wider scales also
to the Global North and unless just on uh research on the African continent uh or or specific
individuals to relate to wider scales and wider phenomenon. So more of an Institutional lens as well.
uh and rearrange research on gendered perceptions, uh the questions, the values of two also those in
the global South. So while you're doing wider scale analysis not just focusing on uh questions that
might be useful to development institutions or donors or to also communities as well and
look at what their knowledge uh what kinds of questions they would want to redefine their
human nature interactions as opposed to focusing on sort of the ends of the development industry
and I'd like to include this image here of the uh of the cuckoo clock because I think what's
discussed a lot in what I saw as a trend in this research and I see it more broadly
in gender and climate change scholarship and policy and practice is this focus on uh women's
empowerment or individual empowerment. um one of my biggest pet peeves is when a practitioners
or policy maker even a scholar will say we need to empower women to do this but that's actually
theoretically impossible because empowerment is something that comes from within and and
you cannot empower someone else. They can only empower themselves. I think if we we use that
term correctly, if we did research uh in a more accurate way, resolve the structures that constrain
someone, but also shaped their agency to be able to move in these structures that would lead to
uh research that reflects the reality and and more accurately and therefore lead to
solutions that would address the root causes. So that's the end of the presentation um if you're
interested in learning about the details of this please I urge you to read the paper
um and if you would like to discuss more you're welcome to email me or reach out to me via my blog
and Twitter and I would like to say that if you're a researcher in this area and you have a chapter
or paper that you're looking to find a place for or would like uh like to to gain more reflection
on we are thinking of developing an edited volume in this space several publishers have approached
me interested in its topic because there's such little uh published at that book level uh and
especially articles that address some of what I've been talking about. So do reach out to me and
I look forward to this discussion. Thank you! Thank you so much uh and I and I have to say
um I I'm sorry I called you "Sierra" that's that's my head there's no two "r" and it's just I just
came back from Spain and I love to say things uh in Spanish but of course anyway to get going with
your questions we already have five questions and I'm sure we'll get more as we get going. So
uh the first one is from Rebecca Gianotti and the question is regarding the scale of studies.
It seems locally based studies would be incredibly valuable given how much local context matters but
it sounds like this research paper didn't value the local studies as much. How would that between
needing to understand local context and larger scales that more closely reflect climate change?
Thank you. Yeah Rebecca great set of questions. It was striking to us as well and I will
admit you know my research also does this local context-based community comparative studies uh and
so I'm reading this going oh I'm just contributing to the same sort of biases in the research and I
think uh it's not to say that we don't need these studies because context matters. I think uh what
we're implying is that it's not the only thing we need and also how you relate that place-based
research, that context onto wider scales. So looking at how communities engage with wider
political and economic systems that you know the sort of thinking of the feminist political ecology
lens or approach of of uh fitting the politics of the environment with the politics of gender and
and relating on how those communities and individuals interact a wider scale. So that's what
I would say about the value of context context um specific studies or community comparative
studies but more than that too I think um there are a need for other wider scale scalar analysis
but even those studies that do compare community level they're not actually engaging uh
with the place itself so it's not enough to just ask individuals about what they do or how
they perceive their environments uh their need then there needs to be actual more qualitative
analysis qualitative analysis and perspective descriptions to understand and explain why they
do what they do and that requires going to wider scales as well so that's how I would
um address this seemingly contradiction or bias in the literature
oh um
sorry okay Anne Oberhauser. Her question is about how the UN and other International
bodies such as COP27 include gender and climate change analysis and policy? Do you
see these efforts having an impact in the literature and if so, how?
So I on the one hand I'm tough to say uh they do not because these the level
of analysis that we're seeing is at a local state scale and they're not
um looking at the wider relating that local scale onto the wider politics uh happening. So the kinds
of conversations happening at COP for example or for example even the UN's food system the
food reports that were just launched how the rates of hunger had skyrocketed aren't necessarily
not necessarily reflected in the studies based on the themes covered in those reports
but that isn't really accurate. Because we see a lot of the funding for this research coming
from not necessarily the United Nations agencies but development institutions. So federal agencies,
USAID, bilateral-multilateral agencies I guess. Um so I want so I'm actually tempted to say they have a
huge influence on military and as a result they they may not adjust the the broader politics. So
questions of what's the responsibility of these institutions or the institutions in the Global
South and how they relate to the Global to the global North and how they relate to the global
South uh and vice versa. Um but they are perhaps doing research for informing their programs and
their interventions uh that would be my assumption. Because the that would be my assumption and
also my interpretation of explaining why there is such a focus in the scholarship
of certain kinds of questions, certain levels of analysis, and certain methodologies.
Thank you. Now from Suchitra Samantha. She asked
"Could you give us some examples of adaptation strategies by gender?" Yes um if I can remember
the ones that come from the top of my head there were a lot of studies uh that had these as I was
mentioning focus groups and they would ask women farmers how do you adapt your farms without
without considering the differences between crops, the differences between soils or the
differences between women? All of these things. And so common strategies included things like
um using certain kinds of seed um certain other certain aggregate inputs growing certain crops
instead of others. Um so a lot of on the farm adaptation strategies. Sometimes there were
more broader Community adaptation strategies. So uh they would adapt to changing climate
through relying on community oriented um structures that would help them in times of
need us sometimes they were relied on state services for these things yeah so a lot of
the adaptation strategies are on on the farm level itself or maybe the community level but
uh very much focused on the individual farmer or the individual woman on her lots of land or on her
husband's plot of land, her family farms. So that's I mean broadly the the list and and they were very
um repetitive. So a lot of studies saying the same adaptation strategies and it was
almost like a counting exercise. So this women's group did 10 adaptation strategies.
We consider that quite resilient, I mean it's just it's my a little bit mind-boggling uh
to me or they'd say you know these adaptation strategies that these women are doing are not
they're not good enough and they're forming this makes them vulnerable. I mean yeah that that's the
extent of the analysis. So these seeds aren't good enough, these crops aren't good enough, is
the level of income and profit that they're making isn't good enough. Some of the um studies did focus
on a more climate smart uh level of adaptation so they would see how many farmers were using
a number of techniques. So inter-cropping, uh creating bonds to deal, to hold water
for instance in very arid places, planting trees, these kinds of things; so very on the farm as well,
Um but that's it's just focused on the technique level there were a few studies that would measure
yields and and things but but very focused on the pragmatic technical side which I think
maybe gets at the earlier question around who's the purpose the politics, what is this serving
um kinds of of discussion comes to mind. Okay, thank you!
Okay next one um I'm gonna come back to Rebecca because we had a question
from her and I want to ask Everisto Mapdza's question and and uh oh actually okay so I'm going to
combine these two because they're almost same things. Okay so Rebecca asks could you give some examples of
how you would design a study that addresses the deficits that you're describing in the existing
literature and then if Edisto says questions similar to Rebecca's your ideas for Designing
research which addresses your critique of the review studies mm-hmm yeah I've been thinking
about this for a long time because there's a lot of different directions you can go in
um one thing that comes to mind is the speaker that was part of this discussion series last they
look at the politics of publishing the politics of research the politics of mixing scientists with
um yeah doing like agronomists with social scientists and that's a very interesting
place to start uh there is a discussion of that of course uh they were not focusing on climate change
but they were focusing on gender and agriculture and seed development. And so I think that that
might be an interesting place to start just to see what's the gendering and the politics of research
production itself and that would be a different institutional analysis that would be a different
um scalar analysis there's other directions you could take I think as well so
um working at regional scales would automatically lend itself to to different kinds of studies. So
um looking at the the policies of the the region the planning of the region
um and relating it on to to how communities more broadly or leaders within the community
or even institutions across the region are incorporating gender uh gender dimensions as
well. So not just individual women and men but issues pertaining to differentiation.
So one point about this and I'm thinking of political feminist political ecology
scholarship is to ask the questions the classic political ecology questions of
who owns what, who does what, and who benefits from that and those are questions uh on social
differentiation those require questions that get into the politics of use and ownership and power
uh that doesn't just focus on women and men but important questions of class and how uh systems
relate to for example growth and capitalism gets at those sort of debates about whether
we can have green growth, whether these models are working for or exacerbating uh how differentials
between different communities uh different places in the world alongside gender. So it's
not just women and men but certain places certain groups certain classes of people as well. Uh so
thinking of different skills and it's not to say that you don't do research with women and men of
course not. But you could also include research on social movements who are trying to shift rights,
shift laws, shift International agreements to work for those who are more vulnerable. Studies
in that level and I think uh I'm an advocate for based on this research maybe shifting away
from the structured methodologies and maybe towards more open-ended grounded participatory
methodologies starting at that place and so would require a new research process as well to
figure out which intersections of social dimensions matter most in particular contexts.
Gender might not feature at the top perhaps there are others as well. So I I'm sorry if
that's a dissatisfying answer. The truth is that there is there are so many different
ways that you could take this research and the point being is that it needs to happen
at different scales with institutions and not just the individuals or the households
even communities they you know matter as well in this on wider structures.
So um I'm gonna put off my question unless we really don't unless we really actually have time
for it but I'd like to ask people who have not asked the question yet if they would like to raise
their hand. I know a lot of the people who are on here some of them have experience in the areas
that you're talking about and some that I don't know also had experience and are very interested
so um as an Lumbini just put in the chat you can raise your hand, you can unmute yourself and
um if you raise your hand first so we don't have three people talking but right now we don't have
three different problems. So if somebody has question or a comment please raise your hand
oh Larry Vaughn! Please unmute yourself and introduce yourself.
Thank you, I'm Larry Vaughn from the Center of International Research, Education and Development.
I was interested in your characterization of the the 26 studies you reviewed.
Some of them were asking about perceptions by women and uh of of climate change and I
I think in a lot of places there's not a great awareness of what may be coming down down the
road people are facing so that seems to be very important information I was wondering
if you could summarize uh how frequently it was that the populations that were being
surveyed were were unaware or were aware of the issue hmm uh good question so my sense um
is perhaps a little bit different than what you're thinking Larry um and I really appreciate your
question because I think it's worth thinking through a little bit um my sense is that
people communities especially those who are relying directly on their environments for their
livelihoods uh have a very good understanding of their environment um and they may not know
quantifiably what's to come but they have a very good historical sense as well about how their
environments are changing and will could could change in the future so they have a good sense
of when there might be uh extreme climactic events maybe they can't tell you how extreme it will be
um or when precisely will be coming but I think that knowledge does shape their activities.
They're constantly thinking about how people are thinking about how to minimize the risk to these
shocks and stressors I think what's also important is about the politics of the environment because
they're livelihoods or their interactions with the environment are also shaped by what's happening in
politics what's happening in the economy so when they make certain adaptation strategies it's with
all of that in mind um so I am of this I I have the sense that uh women men people in general
especially those who rely on the line have a good sense of what is happening and what's to come
um but when it's a a true shock like what we see with the pandemic or uh with the war on Ukraine
or or extreme droughts like we see across East Africa they may not know to that extent or if
they they do have a sense that something is something they can't do anything about it
um because of the level of constraints that they are under
um that's my sense and then also it's been pretty well established in the literature
broadly on gender and the environment and gender and climate change is that because of
different knowledge uh different kinds of knowledge and values of the environment beyond uh
principles of profit and growth and capitalism is that people can actually do very well to to
conserve and protect and work with the environment as opposed to exploiting it so their knowledge and
values may differ from the kinds of structured observations or structured questions being asked
in these research questionnaires so that's what comes to mind when with
the question you asked but I'm happy to discuss that and debate that a little bit further.
Thank you uh Siera. I wasn't implying that people weren't sensitive keenly aware of their own
environment but the the causes of changes uh not just having perceived change but you you had a
slide there where you were discussing uh sort of where the blame goes and and the blame for
global warming squarely doesn't lie with most of the communities that were being surveyed but the
consequences do and understanding that it is part of a power dynamic as well. Yeah I think you're
exactly right so um you only know what you know based on your own positionality and so people who
um might not have access to information at wider you know what's happening in the wider world for
example and I even see this with a fault of my own research when you're doing research at that
community or individual or household level and you're not necessarily looking at what's happening
at wider scales it's hard to know or get a sense of what the causes are and I think the scholarship
focusing on that one level is reinforcing uh the biases of what the potential cause is and so what
you actually see and I'm thinking of a series of papers for example by Rachel Besner Kerr
um who has quite a bit featured in this broader scholarship you know she talks about how this
kind of scholarship is actually putting the blame on communities and individuals
for their environmental changes uh and and as a result participants are because of the kinds of
questions that are being asked to them they are blaming themselves as well and not necessary and
so it's actually research is actually doing harm in that way. So it brings in quite a questions of
ethics as well because oftentimes communities and households this might be the only interaction with
with wider seen, So or um points of reflections opportunities to reflect I mean so yeah
Thank you. Yeah Larry do you have anybody else here?
okay and that's my question is um
without preamble is how can we get more universities and funders of uh global uh
well Global North organizations that are funding development and climate change research being
the Global South how can we get can we get them to provide funding for and require Open
Access publication because I mean I just did a climate change paper and
the fee is thirty four hundred dollars and uh I'm still looking and of all the publications
I've had I've only been able to have have one of our International projects once fund
fund the publication um and I I think it's outrageous um that that the people in the
areas of the work have very limited access to the ppublications that we write from working with them.
Yes it's mind-boggling um do I have an answer to you no I have no idea but what I do think is
that it is happening in certain places and so certain funders I am thinking of SSHRC,
the social sciences Humanities Research Council of Canada um where I get a lot of my research funding
from and Canadian academics get their social science funding from um they have a requirement
to make sure your funding or your publishing Open Access articles so that is one principle of value
that they have and requirement they have in their research. The IDRC which International Development
research Council Canada is the main fund is a major funder for research in the Global South
and they have a requirement that when you apply for grants that you have to have
uh not just the collaborator or partner in the respective countries where you're working but
that they have to be capable and um and there has to be a plan for them actually
receiving grant funds. I believe that's a requirement or if it's not a precise
requirement it is certainly a major part of their evaluations for um winning proposals
um but as I have discussed with some of the uh project managers directors at the IDRC about
this research and they're really leading on the gender and climate change gender and agriculture
um scholarship in this area at least in Canada is that it's not actually enough to just
give money to Global South institutions or African institutions you actually have to
have capacity building um in the theories and diverse methodologies that exist because a lot
of Scholars a lot of Scholars and universities have been for lack of better term colonized
and so there actually needs to be capacity building in in critical methodologies so
I think one thing that could be done is to have in every research grant a capacity-building dimension
of Institutions whether it's universities or multilateral or whatever a major capacity
building element as opposed to just extracting or getting information and publishing it. You're
actually giving back to researchers and not just communities researchers themselves and educate
and educating them. So I say this because uh there were a lot of these Publications
um a number and I try and cite them in the paper that are by African academics or people's
people with African sounding names because we can't actually track where everyone's coming from
and they are they're doing a lot of this research um and reinfor it's reinforcing the same sort of
limited uh scope of methodology and analysis and so I think there could be room oh there is
a need to to do that and Open Access is is obvious and I think a lot of scholars are sort
of resisting the politics of publishing and the politics of um large journal articles capturing
that knowledge and the profits of that um by publishing their materials where they can on their
personal websites uh grant projects I know so I'm working as part of this research cluster and they
have a whole dimension to their project which are creating Open Access Storage on the University
uh online systems that give all of their Partners access to to the Publications that they're
uh faculty involved faculty are producing and related faculty and they're they're it's not in
con it's not in conflict with the pub publishers um the way that we're doing it. So I think there
is wider structural issues of why Open Access funding is so expensive and so constraining
um but there are also ways that we can adapt and overcome uh as well so how to get universities
to do it maybe to rely on scholars that there are other ways to overcome some of these big
issues while also pushing for Publishers to do different differently. Uh we have two more
questions and we have three minutes so I'm going to say Ann oberhauser and Rebecca. Anne
asked why did you choose to study Africa and these reviews relevant to gender and climate
studies from other regions. um I think that's a question um we I mean it just brought briefly I
will mention so we chose to study the continent of Africa because there seemed to be um very limited
from our initial reading of the literature limited focus on on these places so I've seen
and even when I presented this research to other institutions other places
they will bring up well how come this theme wasn't mentioned what about all the research from the
1990s in this area and it's it's because of place so there's a huge amounts of information coming
out of South Asia coming out of Asia more broadly coming out of Latin America that does tackle
themes at different scales that does ask questions at different uh different kinds of questions
different methodologies leading to different conclusions that are not featured in this
uh literature pointing to gaps between what's happening in the African continent and what's
happening broader in the literature that was my sense of going into this
and is only reinforced by reading the literature and is only reinforced also by publishers
approaching me saying we want to publish this stuff and like who are the other Scholars involved
in this because there doesn't seem to be very much so that's I know I didn't answer your question and
specifically but that's that's my sense uh broadly and then um Rebecca's question. Rebecca asked is if
um she had one more question did the literature you found focused mostly on a binary of man woman
and cisgender man woman but was there any research that looked at non-binary elements of Denver City?
um I think so what you're asking here is about diverse sexualities that could be an
assumption there were very very limited studies on intersectional dimensions and even more broadly
multiple social uh positionalities so what I'm thinking of or referring to are surveys uh where
there is very little overlap and the caustic demographic questions are asked and even in the
qualitative research they were just comparisons between women and men uh cisgender women and men
um and in this context very little on diverse sexualities I don't think I can cross any study
um dealing with diverse sexualities uh and that again it could be uh because of the limited
research types of research methodologies uh and it is possible that if we focused on maybe
research with indigenous knowledge or coming up with questions sort of participatory oriented
research grounded theory that that diverse positionalities, diverse identity identities,
diverse sexualities might come out. It is possible I but I did not read this in any of those studies.
Okay well I hate to bring this to a close um I want to thank everyone for attending and thank
you Doctor Siera, good to see you for your wonderful presentation we're sharing a short survey that Lumbini should be putting in in the chat and we'll also send it to everybody who registered for
who attended and your opinion is very important to us we have some great speakers lined up for spring
we're actually going to do some hybrid things where people a couple people in fact they will all
be here unless something crazy like in the past happens but we're going to try to keep them also
um through Zoom or some way so that we can keep this expanded geographical participation in our
in our in our discussion Series so we're going to have Emily Van Howeling from Regis University
Jessica Spence students here Virginia Tech and Nina Mukerjee Fustenau, a journalist and author.
So see our website for more information and uh we've got lots of thank you Sarah in
the chat so having a chance to see this all. Right, thank you everybody! Thank you everyone!