Maher Sattar
The role of women in society is at a precarious crossroads.
Women have made major strides in recent years, from the pro-abortion rights Green Wave in Latin America to the rise of female political leaders such as Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum. But the U.S. election was a different story — here, the winning candidate was accused of campaigning on a relentlessly misogynistic platform, and his victory threatens to impose U.S. anti-abortion rights restrictions on the rest of the world.
There has been no shortage of post-mortems examining the role that sexism may have played in Kamala Harris’s defeat. But on the ground, the work goes on. In Baku, Azerbaijan, feminist activists from around the world descended on COP29, the annual United Nations climate conference, to demand that the UN and national governments come up with a response to climate change that puts women at the center.
“For so long, feminists have been categorical in demanding the feminist future — the future free from oppression, free from exploitation, the future where everyone can live a life of dignity, the future where the well-being of people and the planet is guaranteed,” Mwanahamisi Singano, the director of policy at the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), said at a press conference setting out their agenda. “That future will not come from the air. We need to build.”
Singano and her companions face an uphill battle. They complain that COP, which runs this year from Nov. 11-22, has been captured by the fossil fuel lobby — the conference has been held two years in a row now in countries that are widely described as petrostates.
But uphill battles are not new for this cohort. When the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) came into force in 1994, it did not even mention gender — it took decades of activism before the convention started to integrate gender. Today, the Women and Gender Constituency (WGC) that Singano helped organize is one of nine stakeholder groups of the UNFCCC.
And, as suggested by Singano’s statement of intent, their vision for feminist future goes far beyond identity politics. WGC’s list of demands of states and corporations would require a radical re-imagining of business as usual.
The WGC call for countries to demilitarize and companies to divest from fossil fuel, and redirect that money into ambitious climate action. They want to abolish carbon-trading — instead, they want large-scale, long-term climate financing for the world’s poorest countries. They want women to be integral to the development and sharing of future technologies. And they call on feminist climate activists to branch out and work with human rights bodies, such as the UN’s Human Rights Council and its Special Rapporteur experts.
For WGC’s organizers, this is entirely consistent with their goal of breaking gender out of its silo. While they’re proud of getting discussions of gender on the table in the first place, feminist climate activists have complained for years that the topic gets discussed in isolation, instead of as a key element of every major discussion at COP.
“This is the year for gender,” Rebecca Heuvelmans, Advocacy and Campaigning officer of WEDO, said at a panel titled ‘What’s at Stake: Gender on the Agenda at COP29’. “Don’t let gender get sidetracked in these discussions. And make sure you bring it to the different spaces and discussions that you’ll be following.”
