Beyond Nation-State Climate Governance: Cuerpo-Territorio and Decolonial Feminist Pathways to Justice

Abstract

Decolonial feminisms offer a unique lens to understand why current global climate governance arrangements perpetuate the patterns of inequality and cannot address the climate crisis. The modern nation-state, democratic but only in the image of the White masculine subject, who owns but is not part of territory, cannot recognise the violence of separating body from territory, a first step towards climate justice. Through the concept of cuerpo-territorio, understood as the inseparability of bodies from their territory advanced by Latin American communitarian feminisms, we can illuminate how climate governance materialises the colonial separation of bodies from their territories. This severance sanctions activities that continue environmental and social injustices. While human rights approaches appear to offer climate justice pathways, I show how they reproduce the modern/colonial gender system responsible for the crisis. Using decolonial feminist theory and drawing from experiences attending the Conferences of the Parties (COPs) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations, I argue for the restoration of cuerpo-territorio that colonialism severed, transforming the way we think about gender, territory, identity and belonging, fostering a practice of care, essential to justly address the climate crisis.