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12218

A Feminist Approach to Climate Change Governance:

Everyday and Intimate Politics
Beth A. Bee1*, Jennifer Rice2 and Amy Trauger2
1
Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, USA
2
Department of Geography, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

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.

1. Introduction
The range of political mechanisms intended to shape society’s ability to prevent, mitigate or,
adapt to the risks posed by climate change has widened in recent decades ( Jagers and Stripple
2003). Also known as climate governance, regulation relating to climate change now happens
at a variety of scales and through multiple state and market mechanisms (e.g., regional
cap-and-trade schemes, urban climate change programs, and green consumerism) rather than
through international negotiations alone. This diversity of actions has drawn much attention
from scholars interested in better understanding policy design and effectiveness
(Gainza-Carmenates et al. 2010; Kuik et al. 2008). Yet, these analyses often fail to question
the implications for framing climate change as primarily a scientific problem, and the ways
climate governance often prioritizes market-oriented behavioral change as the solution
(Macgregor 2014; Swyngedouw 2010). While much of the literature on environmental
governance interrogates the assumptions underlying climate governance mechanisms (and the
depoliticized nature of these interventions), we suggest that more can be done to investigate
the ways in which climate governance is disconnected from the ways it is experienced, enacted,
and contested. Specifically, we argue that scholars can gain a more politically potent
understanding of neoliberal climate governance by engaging more directly with feminist
theoretical interventions regarding the techno-scientific framing of climate change as a problem
and the embodied subjects whom are now framed as responsible for the solutions.
To do this, we start with a brief overview of the literature on neoliberal natures, which
provides a well-established critique of climate governance from which to begin. We then
review the feminist literature to show how a closer articulation with two aspects of feminist

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A Feminist Approach to Climate Change Governance

theory—feminist understandings of the production of knowledge and feminist attention to

everyday practice—can further push the critique of climate governance in two important ways.
First, an engagement with feminist theory shows that dominant approaches to climate change
policy often construct knowledge of the problem through narrowly defined scientific and
technocratic means, rendering the issue as both universal and distant, instead of differentiated
and embodied. Here, we include a brief review of feminist literature that deals directly with
climate science and policy. Second, a focus on the everyday and intimate spaces of
decision-making shows how climate policy actually work to fix capitalist logics onto differently
situated bodies, which individualizes the responsibility for mitigating climate change and also
serves to erode more collective forms of action. Here, we draw specifically on the rich body
of feminist scholarship that highlights how attention to differently situated bodies, embodied
experience, and the ways that global processes and the intimacy of embodied social relations
constitute one another (e.g., Kobayashi and Peake 1994; Pratt and Rosner 2012). We suggest
that turning the feminist lens of the “everyday” towards the subjects of climate governance
reveals the troubling contradictions and contraindications inherent in the contemporary framing
of climate change problems and policy interventions. We hope to demonstrate that the insights
offered by a feminist framework sharpens the critique of neoliberal climate governance to more
carefully identify the forms of knowledge and the actual spaces through which mainstream
climate governance reproduces uneven power relations.

2. The Neoliberal Nature of Climate Governance

It has been more than a decade since McCarthy and Prudham (2004) argued that neoliberalism
should be understood as a coherent, yet polyvalent, set of “ideologies, discourses, and material
practices…[that is] a distinctly environmental project” (2004:276). Put simply, neoliberalism is
the dominant political philosophy of the past thirty years that “argues for the desirability of a
society organized around self-regulating markets, and free, to the extent possible, from social
and political interventions” (Glassman 2009, 497). Bound up in forms of market deregulation,
and state reregulation to facilitate open markets, neoliberalism has facilitated a massive expansion
in privatized and marketized social relations, of which nature is now prominently understood as
central to the neoliberal project (Heynen et al. 2007). Castree (2010, 1743) summarizes this shift
when he states: “The biophysical world becomes increasingly commodified – creating profits
and jobs…The successful interpolation of people as ‘individuals’ allows them to exercise
producer and consumer choice over how they relate, through the market, to the biophysical
world.” It is the viewpoint of critical scholars, therefore, that the primary goal of neoliberal
environmental governance is the continued facilitation of capitalist expansion, favoring
economic elites, as opposed to more just or effective forms of environmental protection.
The infusion of neoliberal logics into climate change has received significant attention during
the past several years. This requires, first, a shift in focus from climate policy to climate governance
to ref lect the inf luence of neoliberalism, where action on climate change extends far beyond
the state to include a variety of non-state actors (e.g., corporations) and market-based
regulations (e.g., carbon trading) (Rabe 2007). In their examination of carbon control as a
key feature of eco-state restructuring under neoliberalism, for example, While et al.
(2010: 82) write that “governance responsibilities are passed to markets and non-state actors
(McCarthy and Prudham 2004)…with an overriding emphasis on efficiency, cost-effectiveness
and transference at the expense of ecological integrity (Bailey 2007: 416).” Similarly, in their
examination of the European Union emissions trading scheme, Bailey et al. (2011: 700) state
that market-based forms of carbon governance “focus on [market] efficacy and efficiency but
have little to say on issues of social justice.” This intensely market-oriented logic of

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neoliberalism, aimed at achieving emissions reductions in the most economically efficient

(i.e., inexpensive) means possible, has resulted in the creation of several new market-based
instruments of climate policy (Boyd et al. 2011; Lansing 2011; Robertson 2011).
It becomes apparent from this analysis that “business as usual” approaches to climate
governance include an emphasis on technocratic ways of knowing climate change, as well as
individual action and behavioral change as a viable and primary solution to the problem (Lahsen
2005; Rice 2014). With respect to the first, technocratic regimes of climate governance
emphasize expert (i.e. scientific and technical) understandings of climate change, with a focus
on instruments/methods of analysis capable of measuring and modeling the climate change
problem in its generalizable forms and processes. Hulme (2008: 6) argues that, “Climate is
defined in purely physical terms, constructed from meteorological observations, predicted
inside the software of Earth system science models…wholly disembodied from its multiple
and contradictory cultural meanings.” Erik Swyngedouw (2010) has argued that the
technocratic underpinning of neoliberal climate policy is characteristic of a wider “post-political”
condition where, “scientific expertise [is] the foundation and guarantee for properly
constituted politics/policies” (2010: 217).
Scholars have further noted the ways that neoliberal approaches to climate governance
encourage individual action and behavioral change, often at the expense of more centralized,
collective, or state-based forms of action. The idea that individual choices—such as purchasing
a hybrid vehicle, washing your clothes in cold water, or drinking from a reusable water bottle—
can solve the problem of climate change has become a familiar and believable notion for many.
Elizabeth Shove (2010) has identified this as the “ABC” approach to climate governance—
attitude, behavior, and choice. Shove is quite critical of this approach, writing that “The
popularity of the ABC framework is an indication of the extent to which responsibility for
responding to climate change is thought to lie with individuals whose behavioral choices will
make the difference….[Yet], it obscures the extent to which governments sustain unsustainable
economic institutions and ways of life” (2010: 1274). Rice (2014), through her examination of
urban climate programs, has argued that this is an essential feature of neoliberal climate
governance, where personal choices and behavioral change become the centerpiece of many
climate policy initiatives, seriously limiting the degree to which larger, more structural changes
to the carbon intensive economy can be realized.
This discussion of neoliberal climate governance is meant to highlight particular aspects of its
logic with which we (and feminist scholars more broadly) are concerned. Using the scholarship
on neoliberalism summarized here as our starting point, we will show next that feminist theory
can push this critique further by revealing how climate governance constructs particular kinds of
subjects and subjectivities. The ways of being and knowing that are produced through
contemporary climate governance, in our view, produce a profound dismissal of non-science
based forms of knowledge and a failure to consider the everyday spaces in which action and
responsibility are negotiated and enacted under highly uneven power relations. This feminist
critique shows that climate governance, while framed in terms of climate protection, actually
works to extend capitalist free-market economies onto individual bodies and deemphasize
collective forms of action.

3. Feminist Analyses of Climate Science and Technocratic Knowledge (Re)production

Feminist scholarship increasingly challenges the disembodied and masculinist science behind
climate change discourse and policy-making at broad scales and illuminates the implications
of climate change in local places. Much of this work is inf luenced by feminist philosophies of
science, which challenge the masculinist underpinnings of positivist science that frame scientific

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knowledge as valid only if it is produced through objective and value-free research (e.g. Barad
2007; Code 2006; Haraway 1988; Harding 1986). Feminist geographers have long asserted that
knowledge in the academy is a product and function of male dominance, beginning with Rose’s
(1993) identification of masculinism as a foundational epistemological position from which
claims to knowledge relating to teaching, research, and career advancement are asserted.
Feminist analyses of climate change politics, therefore, challenge the discursive framing of climate
change policy and science, which masks how power is reproduced though such discursive
political and economic tropes (e.g. Arora-Jonsson 2011; Bee et al. 2013; MacGregor 2010;
Manzo 2010; Nelson 2008; Sultana 2013).
For example, in her analysis of the 2-degree Celsius warming target established by the G8 in
2009, Joni Seager (2009) argues that a 2-degree benchmark, or any benchmark for that matter,
as an acceptable level of harm, refracts “through a prism of privilege, power, and geography”
(2009:14). In particular, she suggests that the notion that the warming of the globe can be
stopped at a certain point is based in masculinist notions of controlling or dominating the
environment (Keller 1982; Merchant 1980; Plumwood 1993). Building upon Seager’s critique,
Israel and Sachs (2013) explore the techno-scientific framing of climate change and the resulting
emphasis on managing the climate though environmental and social engineering. They call for
feminist research and political projects that value the materiality and partiality of climate science
but also oppose and intervene in the production of logics of domination and control so
commonplace in climate change discourse and policy (Israel and Sachs 2013).
Several scholars also draw on feminist philosophies of science to explore the implications of
decoupling situated experience from the “impersonal, apolitical, and universal imaginary of
climate change, projected and endorsed by science” ( Jasanoff 2010: 235). Rachel Slocum, for
example, suggests that the framing of climate change as a global problem in Western scientific
terms has simultaneously served to portray the issue as both spatially and temporally distant
while reproducing a false dichotomy between nature/culture. (Slocum 2004). The false
nature/culture binary has a variety of implications for climate change science and governance.
The first is that it facilitates a notion of control of nature by humans that is bolstered by
masculinist narratives of control and dominance. Second, the notion of separate spheres in
nature and society perpetuate a problem that has its roots in this false dichotomy, and it draws
our attention to the ways in which climate change and its governance is a thoroughly embodied
experience.
Other feminist scholarship has recently turned its attention towards reconceiving the
nature-culture binary by locating global climate change on the body and the space of the
intimate. Drawing on recent work by feminist post-humanist and new-materialist scholars such
as Stacy Alaimo (2008, 2009), Rosi Braidotti (2002) and Elizabeth Grosz (1994), Neimanis and
Loewen Walker (2014) investigate the corporeal and embodied implications of climate change.
The authors suggest that a trans-corporality of climate change—or the contact space between
human bodies and their environment—ruptures the ontological myth that human bodies are
discreet in time, space, and nature. Climate change thus becomes an embodied “social-nature”
(Haraway 1991, 1992). Thus, the notion of trans-corporeality in the context of climate change
highlights how climate and bodies are mutually produced and co-constituted, which resists the
masculinist discursive abstraction of climate change as a spatially and temporally disembodied
scientific project to be mastered. Instead, trans-corporeal climate change places the problem,
and thereby its solutions, within and on our bodies; it recognizes its existence as an extension
of our bodies and reimagines climate change as something visceral, material, embodied, and part
of the everyday (Neimanis and Walker 2014).
Through a critique of the universal, masculinist ways in which knowledge production is
typically understood and valued, we can see that climate change is only partially knowable,

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and our understanding of climate change is constructed through various subjectivities known to
different subjects. At the same time, pluralistic forms of knowledge and ways of being in the face
of a changing climate are not incorporated into epistemological, ontological, or political
understandings of climate change. As Sandra Harding (1997) writes, focusing on the “kinds of
daily life activities socially assigned to different genders or classes or races within local systems
can provide illuminating possibilities for observing and explaining systemic relations between
“what one does” and “what one can know” (1997: 384). In other words, paying attention to
everyday routine and often mundane activities provide different opportunities for “seeing”
how social relations are shaped by power, and how responsibility and action are placed on
differently and unequally situated bodies. Feminist theorizing about knowledge production
and nature-society relations are therefore useful for drawing attention to the embodied
consequences of such narrow framings and interpretations of climate policy and science.
In the next section, we elaborate on the key points of feminist insights on the “everyday” to
illustrate how a feminist lens can be used to inform a research agenda attentive to locating the
subjects of climate governance, re-locating the implications of climate governance towards
the embodied spaces of the everyday, and shifting responsibility for climate governance back
to collective forms of action. We use the notion of the “everyday” to draw attention to issues
of embodiment, difference, and inequality in the lived experience of differently located subjects.
To locate the social and spatially differentiated subjects of climate governance in everyday sites
and spaces is to reveal the fiction of the individual who bears responsibility for action in the
neoliberal logic of climate governance. In so doing, we refocus the gaze away from individual
responsibility and towards the role of capitalism in producing and perpetuating climate change
in and through climate governance.

4. Everyday Climate Governance: Locating the Limits of Individual Action

Employing a feminist epistemological lens to explore climate governance emphasizes the
importance of more closely considering the mundane, everyday spaces, and practices of climate
governance that produce and regulate subjects and subjectivities, and affect people’s daily lives.
Feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith (1987) theorized the “everyday” as a fundamental site of
experience, organized and determined by broader relations of power. Smith’s articulation
pointed scholars away from abstracted processes of social life towards the “problematic of the
everyday world” that arises from “our ignorance of how our everyday worlds are shaped and
determined by relations and forces external to them” (Smith 1987: 110). The everyday,
therefore, is the time-place where knowledge, action, and experience come to matter.
Drawing on Smith’s work, feminist geographers explore the mundane, taken-for-granted
activity of everyday life in homes, neighborhoods, and communities as a means to explain
how global processes and relations of power structure daily life and the social relations of
intimacy (Dyck 2005; Gibson-Graham 2002; Wright 2009). Mundane practices and everyday
experiences are often overlooked as unspectacular, when in fact, they are the actual stuff of
power and politics. Gillian Rose (1993) writes, “For feminists, the everyday routines traced
by women are never unimportant, because the seemingly banal and trivial events of the
everyday are bound into the power structures which limit and confine women…The everyday
is the arena through which patriarchy is (re)created—and contested” (1993: 17). For example,
Bee (2014, 2013) illustrates the importance of examining women’s everyday spaces and
experiences as a means of understanding how gendered relations of power shape women’s
capacity to adapt to climate change. Cracking open the neoliberal logic of climate change
therefore requires careful consideration of how power works through everyday spaces and
practices—in homes where individuals negotiate living practices, in markets where people make

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routine decisions, or in city council chambers where the daily rhythms of urban life are often
spatially structured. Furthermore, it requires a more careful consideration of the fiction of the
generic individual as one who is fully willing and able to make choices that will solve the global
climate problem, rather than socially situated and differentiated.
Bringing the feminist lens of the everyday to bear on climate governance allows us to identify
three points of leverage for feminist scholars of climate science and policy to use to resist and
contest the production of neoliberal climate subjects. First, by locating power in the everyday
decision-making of the state-capital nexus, we demonstrate how climate policy is not a grand,
global narrative but rather a series of small-scale decisions made at varying scales that affect
individuals in disparate ways. Following from this, we assert that a focus on the everyday reveals
a wide field of uneven power relations that differently positions individual’s vis-à-vis climate
policy and the mandates to consume or modify consumption practices. Lastly, we suggest that
solutions to climate change that over-determine behavior change allow climate governance to
proceed as business as usual and ultimately make climate governance “safe for capitalism”
(Guthman 1998:150). In what follows, we elaborate on these three key points of intervention.

4.1. EVERYDAY STATES

A feminist approach to climate governance emphasizes the ways that political power is exercised
not only through international summits and negotiations that receive widespread attention but
also in the everyday decisions made by elected officials, state workers, and community
members. In this vein, scholars have called for increasing engagement with “how the
techniques, discourses, and everyday practices of environmental governance actually operate”
(McCarthy 2007: 188). Mitchell (2002) argues that the state is actually an “effect” of everyday
practices of planning, information exchange, and expertise. This “prosaic” understanding of
politics requires a close examination of the “mundane, but frequently hidden, everyday world
of state officials, bureaucratic procedures, meetings, committees, report writing, decision
making, procrastination, and filing” (Painter 2006: 770). City managers, for example, choose
between various alternative transportation projects based on available funding and constituent
demands, and university officials determine whether they will reduce their greenhouse gas
emissions using carbon offsets or energy efficiency upgrades based on the recommendations
of faculty and students.
Feminist scholar Aihwa Ong (2006) suggests that governments selectively use “overlapping
or variegated sovereignties” (2006: 19) in which sovereign state power is used to produce value
for capital. In other words, the state’s presumed role as a regulator of modes and means of the
economy often overlaps with or obscures the way in which regulation is often used to facilitate
capital accumulation (Trauger 2014). Similarly, environmental governance scholarship illustrate
how the meaning of neoliberalism emerges through its facilitation of the development of
markets, often through appropriating commonly held resources for private gain, rather than
as a mode of governance that favors an absence of regulation (McCarthy and Prudham 2004).
Neoliberalism, according to Ong, then allows for the creation of “sites of transformation where
market-driven calculations are being introduced in the management of populations” for capital
(Ong 2006:4).
With respect to climate governance, many urban climate programs emphasize changing
individual behaviors by promoting, for example, riding a bike to work, changing out
incandescent light bulbs to compact f lorescent light bulbs, insulating single family homes, or
setting thermostats at particular levels (Rice 2014). Such policies emphasize the individual,
market-based choices that are endemic to neoliberal governance, which do little more than
facilitate the f low of capital. Thus, the construction of a rational, “green” individual facilitates

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the growth of capital accumulation in the buying of hybrids, solar panels, and LED light bulbs.
Through this process, well-meaning individuals who believe they are acting in the interest of
combating climate change end up reproducing the market-based logic that produced it in the
first place—that is, the engagement with consumerism as a solution continues to facilitate capital
accumulation and expansion.

4.2. RESPONSE-ABLE BODIES

When viewed through the feminist lens of the everyday, neoliberal climate policies have
substantially uneven effects on different people. Over the past decade, local city governments,
primarily in the global north, have begun to design and implement their own climate change
policies, engaging new spaces of climate governance that are closely linked to people’s everyday
lives (While and Whitehead 2013). The primary mechanisms of action utilized by local city and
regional governments are typically land use and transportation planning, energy efficiency and
green building ordinances or codes, and educational outreach campaigns to promote low
carbon lifestyles (Bassett and Shandas 2010; Bulkeley and Betsill 2003). These programs and
policies lie in close proximity to people’s everyday lives, as they seek to inf luence and regulate
mobility, the way people live in their homes. As such, offsetting carbon emissions become the
responsibility of individuals, thereby relocating responsibility from the state to the body.
A feminist analysis of these processes draws attention to the implications of such processes for
power relations, differently situated social positions, and the everyday. The emphasis on
individual choice regarding energy efficiency, for example, is predicated upon the assumption
of socio-economic privilege that ignores the already low-carbon livelihoods of numerous
individuals and households, not by choice but by necessity. Questions of urban mobility,
furthermore, fail to acknowledge the role of social differences such as gender, race, and class
in accessing available and preferable transportation options. For example, campaigns to promote
public transportation ignore the differences between those who are able to choose to take the
bus versus individuals who are solely dependent upon public transportation and whose carbon
footprint is already low (Rice 2014). Thinking through the “everyday” in this way suggests that
urban interventions in climate change, aimed at these types of behavioral changes, are already
enmeshed in a matrix of difference and power relations, in much the same way as other forms
of production of capital in the world system.
Perhaps the most problematic contradiction of neoliberal climate governance is that the focus
on individual action in neoliberal climate governance deemphasizes the wider political
economic context under which climate change is produced. An extensive body of feminist
scholarship has focused on the identities and mythologies that are produced by and for the
interests of global capital (Bee 2011; Brickell 2012; Kelly 1999; Ong 2010; Wright 2006).
Yet as Mountz and Hyndman (2006) illustrate, such intimacy in the interest of global capital
is not only encapsulated by thinking about how the body, as part of the economic milieu,
becomes a material part of the political economy of capital f low and in the case of climate
governance, part of the climate apparatus.

4.3. ACCUMULATION AS USUAL

Capitalism as we know it is only possible through the interventions of the state in the form of
subsidies and patents, military interventions, and taxes and tariffs, which facilitate the
accumulation of capital for a powerful minority (Harvey 2003; Ong 2006; Barkan 2013;
Trauger 2014). Thus, regulatory frameworks that seek to implement individualized behavior
changes, particularly those marked by consumption or capital investment, should always be

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viewed as site of capital accumulation. For particular individuals, being enrolled, through
climate governance mechanisms, in a circuit of capital in the interest of mitigating climate
change is a form of accumulation by dispossession. The “business-as-usual” forms of climate
governance that do not critique or identify capitalism as a cause of climate change miss a key
point of intervention, as well as a profound source of injustice when responsibility for climate
mitigation is assumed by the dispossessed.
Feminist theorizing calls attention to the way the body is enrolled as an instrument of climate
governance, and it also directs our attention to the way bodies become enrolled in circuits of
capital. Locating the subjects and sites of climate governance (whether it is being produced,
enacted, negotiated, contested, or rejected) requires seeing these processes as part of the global
f low of capital, which then become implemented and take form in locally specific places and on
bodies ( global-intimate). Cindy Katz (2001) asserts that situated practices and processes of global
capital f lows cross geographies through what she calls “contour lines”, enabling the formation
of new political imaginaries or “counter-topographies”, which transcend place, scale, and space.
Situating these processes allows us to trace the contour lines and counter-topographies of
climate change, which move across places, scales, and space. This is part of the feminist project
of situating the global within the intimate space of the body and the everyday, which shifts the
universal, depoliticized discourse to one of the particular and the political-economic.
Harvey (2003) asserts that accumulation through dispossession is an ongoing process of the
expansion of the capitalist global economy; however, feminist scholar, Hartsock (2006), argues
that most Marxist accounts of contemporary capitalist accumulation do not account for gender
as a central organizing principle in the everyday circulation of capital (see also Whatmore 1991).
She argues: “Primitive accumulation is very clearly and perhaps at its very core a gendered set of
processes, a moment which cannot be understood without central attention to the differential
situations of women and men” (2006: 183). Keating et al. (2010) extend this analysis to look
at “contemporary globalization as a moment of capitalist accumulation profoundly marked by
gender” (2010:154), which draws our attention to the various ways dispossession works to
concentrate capital in the hands of a very few, extracting it from differently and unequally
situated individuals. This work by feminist scholars disrupts the notion of a universalized
individual who reacts to capital accumulation in undifferentiated ways, as well as provokes a
wider insight into how capital accumulation is always experienced in intersectional ways.
In sum, by shifting the focus to forms of power located in everyday and mundane spaces of
neighborhoods, homes, and more localized forms of social organization, the often routine
and mundane aspects of decision making around climate change are made visible. This visibility
enables us to re-imagine how climate governance is conceived, embodied, enacted, and/or
resisted at scales often made insignificant or invisible by neoliberal approaches to climate change.
This also shows how climate politics affects our everyday lives and works to demystify power
and politics in ways that reveal both the limitations and potentialities of particular approaches
to climate governance. Lastly, it exposes how the shifting of responsibility for climate
governance from the state onto differently situated bodies through various consumption politics
and transportation “choices” absolves the state of its presumed responsibility for regulating
corporations. Climate governance, as “business as usual,” facilitates the accumulation of capital
and dispossesses those who do not or cannot “choose” to consume or invest capital under the
guise of addressing or mitigating climate change.

5. Conclusion
In this paper, we have argued that research on neoliberal climate governance has much to gain
from an integration with several aspects of feminist theory. First, feminist theory critiques

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universalizing and totalizing narratives that erase important aspects of social and spatial
difference, which is useful to bring to bear on the totalizing nature of much climate change
discourse. The neoliberal logics of climate governance, particularly when based solely in
technical and scientific ways of knowing, downplay experiential, embodied, and non-scientific
forms of knowledge. Feminist scholars demonstrate the importance of a pluralistic politics of
knowledge for effective climate governance.
Secondly, more needs to be understood about the everyday and more mundane decisions,
encounters, and activities that actually make up climate governance. A feminist approach
provides a more nuanced, multi-scalar accounting of how the practices of power actually work
while also calling attention to a more diverse, heterogeneous, and intimate landscape of climate
governance than may be evident from large public displays at international climate meetings.
While feminist critiques of technocratic knowledge in climate science and policy are emergent
(Israel and Sachs 2013; Jasanoff 2010; Slocum 2004), feminist engagements with policy that
individualizes and marketizes actions and inactions have yet to be fully developed (MacGregor
2014). We further this nascent critique by integrating feminist scholarship on climate change
with the climate governance literature to understand how differently situated bodies become
positioned as sites of capital accumulation in climate governance.
Lastly, the detachment of neoliberal climate governance from everyday spaces and
subjectivities ignores and obscures the lived experiences, knowledges, access, responsibilities,
and roles that make up the actual subjects and subject positions that are gendered, classed, raced,
and otherwise differently situated. This detachment simultaneously permits the construction of
the ideal neoliberal citizen, the citizen-consumer, whose individual actions in the private spaces
of the home and the market become appropriate solutions to climate change (Macgregor 2014).
As MacGregor (2014) argues, a consideration of the ways in which the neoliberal enclosure of
the public sphere has displaced any engagement with climate change into the private sphere is
appropriate for a feminist analysis. Consequently, the apolitical fictitious actor, devoid of
actually existing subjectivity, whose actions within the market and the household are assumed
to offset carbon emissions, becomes little more than sites of capital accumulation. We argue that
a feminist epistemology is useful for understanding why individual action and behavior change is
not sufficient to combat global climate change and, in fact, may actually reinforce the unequal
power relations and logics that underlie the problem in the first place.
In terms of the implications for actually existing climate governance, we feel the importance
is twofold. One, it deemphasizes the need to be narrowly concerned with climate science
controversies—scientific expertise is only one piece of the knowledge and action puzzle
necessary to understand the problem and address it. Secondly, we believe it can relieve
individuals of their self-doubt and constant evaluation if they are “doing their part” to fight
climate change. Instead, individuals should direct their concern back towards engendering
collective forms of action that acknowledge and deal with the deeply entrenched inequalities
of climate change.

Short Biographies

Beth Bee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, Panning and Environment
at East Carolina University. Beth’s work explores the theoretical and empirical intersections
between climate change, feminist theory, and rural livelihoods in Mexico. Her previous work
explored how the production of knowledge and gendered relations of power shape adaptation
and decision-making adverse economic and ecological changes, such as El Niño induced
droughts, increased male migration, and neoliberal agricultural policies. Her current research
investigates the multi-scalar politics of land use change, subjectivity, and expertise in forestry

© 2015 The Author(s) Geography Compass (2015): 1–12, 10.1111/gec3.12218

Geography Compass © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
A Feminist Approach to Climate Change Governance

projects that comprise Mexico’s reducing emissions, deforestation, and degradation (REDD+)
early-action activities. Prior to coming to East Carolina, she taught at the University of Denver
and held a postdoctoral fellowship with the Universidad Autónoma Nacional de México
(UNAM). She holds a Ph.D. in Geography and Women’s Studies from Pennsylvania State
University.
Jennifer L. Rice is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of
Georgia. She is also an Executive Committee member for UGA’s Center for Integrative
Conservation Research (CICR) and an affiliated faculty member in the Integrative Conserva-
tion Ph.D. program. Jennifer’s research interests are in the areas of political ecology, climate and
carbon governance, and science-policy studies. She has ongoing research projects examining
urban climate change mitigation and adaptation programs in the United States, as well projects
on the changing forms of environmental governance and activism in the rapidly exurbanizing
region of southern Appalachia. Dr. Rice also works on the democratization of climate change
knowledge through incorporation of experiential and non-science ways of knowing into
political practice. She received her Ph.D. in Geography with a minor in Global Change form
from the University of Arizona in 2009 and a Master’s in Geography form The Ohio State
University in 2005.
Amy Trauger is an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Georgia in Athens.
Her work has focused on women farmers, sustainable agriculture, and the alternativeness of
alternative agriculture. She is now currently working on the political economy of food
sovereignty and has a contract to publish ‘We Want Land to Live’: Space, Territory and the
Politics of Food Sovereignty with UGA Press in the Geographies of Justice and Social Transfor-
mation Series. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography and Women’s Studies from the Pennsylvania
State University. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Georgia, she worked as a
post-doctoral scholar for the Pennsylvania Women’s Agricultural Network in the Department
of Rural Sociology and Agricutlural Economics at the Pennsylvania State University.
Note

* Correspondence address: Beth A. Bee, Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment, East Carolina University.
E-mail: [email protected]

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© 2015 The Author(s) Geography Compass (2015): 1–12, 10.1111/gec3.12218

Geography Compass © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd