A feminist approach to climate change governance: Everyday and intimate politics

Abstract

Neoliberal climate governance, which focuses on shifting responsibility for mitigating climate change onto individuals through their consumption of techno-scientific solutions, ignores and obscures the experience of differently situated subjects. This paper examines the consequences of both framing climate change as a problem of science, and inducing individual behavior changes as a key point of climate policy. We build on climate governance literature and emerging feminist theorizing about climate change to understand how differently situated bodies become positioned as sites of capital accumulation in climate governance. We use the feminist lens of the ‘everyday’, which directs attention to embodiment, difference and inequality. These insights provide points of leverage for feminist scholars of climate science and policy to use to resist and contest the production of neoliberal climate subjects. We argue that a focus on the ‘everyday’ reveals the mundane decision-making in climate governance that affect individuals in varying, embodied ways, and which allows for climate governance to proceed as an ongoing process of capitalist accumulation.