Gendering Resilience: Myths and Stereotypes in the Discourse on Climate-induced Migration

Abstract

The research article critically investigates recent European policy proposals that promote migration as an adaptation strategy to increase the resilience of communities vulnerable to the environmental crisis. Such proposals have been welcomed for breaking with alarmist discourses that framed climate-induced migration as a threat to national or international security. The present article seeks to contribute to this ongoing debate by bringing in a fresh perspective that has so far been neglected: the perspective of gender. Drawing on a poststructuralist perspective on gender the article reveals that policy debates on climate-induced migration take place within highly gendered discourses. Applying this perspective to recent policy reports on climate change, migration and resilience, the article helps to paint a more nuanced picture of the highly criticized notion of resilience. The analysis shows that, on the one hand, resilience thinking helped overcoming a masculinized discourse of security as control. On the other hand, it reproduces a series of ‘gender myths’ about the role of women in the so-called Global South.