Presentation short abstract

To advance more more ‘just’ transitions, our analysis of the intersection of land use, climate change and gender indicates that 4 mechanisms (history, geography, expertise and measurement) are at play when silence is produced and producing inequality across the diverse contexts and policies.

Presentation long abstract

Numerous national and international policies related to development, sustainability and green growth have been produced at the intersection of gender, land use and climate change. This intersection however shares a history of often highly unjust outcomes -and opportunities- for people and nature alike.

Current research provides increasingly insights into these policies and their relation to inequality, asking what these policies say, who is problematised, how they come about through which processes, and to the benefit (and burden) of whom. In this paper we argue that more attention is needed to identify where policies at this section have been silent, what is left unproblematized, who are the marginalized and silenced. When aiming at enabling social-ecological just transitions, we need to understand what are the mechanisms that underly these silences to then be able to break with them.

While silence as resistance has been studied more frequently in the literature, we aim to unpack further how silence is coming about when it is reproducing inequality? We take a comparative perspective and building on five seemingly different cases that however all link land with gender and climate policies from Burkina Faso, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Vietnam, we find surprising congruence in how silence is constituted.

Our analysis indicates that four main mechanisms (history, geography, expertise and measurement) are at play when silence is produced and producing inequality across the diverse contexts and policies. Engaging more systematically with silence and the mechanisms that silence, might allow for more ‘just’ transitions.