Presentation short abstract

This paper is a feminist political ecology analysis of the uneven labor burdens resulting from a climate adaptation project implemented among women farmers and home gardeners in Sri Lanka's dry zone.

Presentation long abstract

Over the past two decades, gender mainstreaming has been adopted as a central component of climate change adaptation interventions around the world. Women farmers in Sri Lanka’s North Central dry zone region have been described as particularly vulnerable and in need of climate adaptation interventions due to rainfall variabilities which have had pronounced impact on agrarian communities. This paper draws upon insights from feminist political ecology and literature on the politics of climate change adaptation to develop an approach for understanding uneven adaptation through an intersectional lens. Here, we present findings on how adaptation programs frame ideal adaptation subjects, and how gender mainstreaming efforts produce uneven labor burdens for female farmers participating in the climate adaptation project. We use a combination of methods which includes mental maps and qualitative semi-structured interviews, to de-emphasize the so-called positivist stances which currently govern adaptation interventions. By focusing on a major climate change adaptation project in Sri Lanka’s dry zone, this paper demonstrates feminist political ecology is a useful approach to not only understand how social, economic and ecological differences are produced between farmers but also how pre-existing precarities may contribute to uneven adaptation outcomes.