Climate-related Discourses

In this section, I consider the relationships between gender and climate-related dis-courses, and how discourses can be viewed as feminine or masculine. I use the term

“climate-related discourses” to capture public discourses on topics in which climate change is at center stage and discourses in which economic development or security is at the forefront, but climate concerns are included as subthemes (or not included, yet the policy decisions produced by those public discourses can greatly affect either emissions or the capacity to adapt to climatic changes).

Examining public discourses is one approach to the study of power. Exploring how discourses enact, confirm, legitimate, reproduce, or challenge relations of power and dominance in society can provide valuable insights into the values and norms that guide policy making. Not every citizen has equal access to or control over public discourses.

As Van Dijk notes, most ordinary people tend to be passive receivers of text or talk of their bosses, teachers, or public authorities who tell them what to believe or what to do.

Members of more powerful social groups, however, have much easier access to public discourses and can influence and control certain types of public discourses, depending on their status. Professors control academic discourses, for example; journalists are in the best position to influence the discourse in media; and political leaders are in control of policy discourses (van Dijk, 2001).

In light of the various linkages between climate change and gender, discussed in the previous section, I am particularly interested in how dominant discourses consist-ently frame the climate change issue as a scientific, gender-neutral problem. Sherilyn MacGregor addressed this topic in an article wherein she argues for the need for deeper gender analysis of climate change by examining the discursive constructions and categories that shape climate politics. She suggests that the study of gender relations should involve the analysis of power relations between men and women and social constructions of hegemonic masculinities and femininities that shape the way we interpret, debate, articulate, and respond to phenomena like war, economic crisis, and climate change (MacGregor, 2010). She asks the question: What are the implications of gendered assumptions about men and women for the climate debate?

MacGregor identifies several discourses related to climate change that she catego-rizes as masculine and feminine, based on the underlying values and associations with feminine or masculine characteristics. The two discourses she labels as masculine are the ecological modernization discourse and the discourse on environmental security.

The ecological modernization discourse emphasizes how science and economics can work together for win-win solutions. This approach favors technological solutions and calls for the partnering of techno-innovators and brave capitalists. This discourse tends to be dominated by men, and the associated image is one of clever men solving complex problems. The environmental security discourse, according to MacGregor, is the other dominant discourse used to frame climate politics. This discourse stresses the danger of climate change resulting in conflicts over scarce resources between and within states, calling for militaristic approaches to address the consequences of climate change. By securitizing and militarizing the climate crisis, it becomes a problem

re-quiring technical and military solutions, harmonizing directly with traditional ideas about hegemonic masculinity. Both the ecological modernization discourse and the environmental security discourse favor top-down approaches and the use of powerful institutions to implement policies. Both are mostly silent on the importance of coop-eration, sustainable lifestyles, ethical consumption, and the precautionary principle as necessary elements of solutions to the climate crisis.

The two other discourses MacGregor identifies are closely linked to our ideas about femininity and come from the opposite direction, emphasizing bottom-up solutions whereby the importance of the behavior of individuals is highlighted. This includes the green duty discourse and the discourse on neo-Matlthusian population control.

Whereas the masculine discourses focus on technical solutions, there are parallel femi-nine discourses placing the responsibility on individuals as caretakers and consumers.

Because women still bear the main burden of domestic activities within households, the call for individuals to tackle climate change by conserving energy, recycling waste and moving toward a low-carbon lifestyle is not gender neutral, but aimed at women more than at men (MacGregor, 2010).

MacGregor uses her analysis to demonstrate how the social constructions of mascu-linity and femininity emerge and are reproduced through these dominant discourses on the different dimensions of climate change. These discourses continue to keep men and women in separate worlds. On one hand is the world of highly valued science, economics, and defense (the masculine world), and on the other hand is the world of devalued social reproduction and private domestic duty (the feminine world). One consequence, she argues, is that women are excluded from positions of leadership and citizenship, and given the choice of the much less attractive roles of victims, saviors, or culprits.

I borrow MacGregor’s categorization of masculine and feminine discourses when analyzing my own data in the following chapters. I use her model as a starting point for analyzing public climate discourses. Yet my analysis also reveals a weakness in her approach, given that her framework captures only discourses directly focused on cli-mate, but overlook the important discourses that can be categorized as being climate related, even though climate change is not at the center of these discourse – discourses related to security and economic development, for example.

One interesting aspect of the broader climate-related discourses is the way dominant discourses on security and/or economic development are sometimes completely silent on the subject of climate change, even when discussing policies that will have a clear impact on greenhouse gas emissions or influence the capacity of the state to adapt to climate change. The silence about climate change is especially noticeable in dominant discourses about oil and gas developments in the Arctic, as discussed in some of the following chapters. Because MacGregor’s categorization captures only discourses di-rectly related to climate policies, I rely on insights from Tickner and Nelson about the

masculine values underpinning our shared understanding of political and economic systems, to help explain the absence of climate considerations in those discourses.