Accepted Paper
Paper short abstract
In Colombia and Guinea Bissau, agribusiness entangled with conflict-ridden politics compound global climate change drivers, displacing women farmers into cities. We explore how urban gendered solidarities in cooperative kitchens and gardens sustain nutrition, belonging and climate-just resilience.
Paper long abstract
In Colombia and Guinea-Bissau, a complex nexus of agribusiness, political instability and, in Colombia, paramilitary violence compounds global climate change drivers, intensifying flooding, salinisation, warming and desertification. This forces women farmers into cities, where they organise cooperative restaurants and seasoning gardens that support diverse, nutritious diets, conserve biodiversity and rebuild identity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork by Vargas Arana in Medellín and Pontinta in Bissau, we analyse women’s cooperatives in each site, showing that solidarities form a gendered pathway to climate-just urban resilience.
Guinea-Bissau and Colombia are connected by centuries-old Atlantic crop exchanges that moved African staples such as rice, plantain and yam westwards and American crops including cassava, maize, beans and peanuts into West Africa. Examining how displaced women in Bissau and in Afro-Colombian Medellín rework these circulating foods offers a rare view of related gendered food cultures that foster collective resilience and support nutrition under climatic and political–economic threats.
We advance climate-justice debates from an intersectional perspective. Studies have shown that environmental changes disproportionately affect Black populations. Yet vulnerability is not uniform as gender inequalities mediate exposures and responses. Agribusinesses externalise social-ecological costs, and Black women small-scale farmers bear the heaviest impacts. Through cooperative kitchens and seasoning gardens, these women contest marginalisation by strengthening nutrition, belonging and income. We argue that food cooperatives function as grassroots climate-justice infrastructures that remain voiceless in policy design, suggesting that urban climate adaptation policies will benefit from recognising these women-led systems as resilience assets for more equitable and nutritionally diverse urban futures.
Gender, collective action and climate justice Theme: Climate justice and transformative futures and grassroots agency, solidarity, and alternative visions of progress