Cooled Prospects for Gender Justice from COP29

Anmol Irfan is a Muslim-Pakistani freelance journalist and editor. Her work aims at exploring marginalized narratives in the Global South with a key focus on gender, climate and tech. She tweets @anmolirfan22

For years, gender activists have been trying to draw attention to the disproportionate ways in which the climate crisis has been affecting women and girls. Studies show that by 2050, climate change may push 158 million more women and girls into poverty, which is 16 million more women and girls at risk than men and boys at the same level. For gender activists, there were small victories at this year’s United Nations COP29 climate change conference, held in Baku, Azerbaijan, but overall morale seems low as many find progress within this arena slow and tiring.

COP 29 participants described the  discussions as slow in many ways – and the intersection of gender and climate has been one of them. Following the conclusion of the conference, some of the victories recognized with the gender justice space have included the extension of the Enhanced Lima Work Programme on Gender, for 10 years which will help hold governments accountable as they implement their climate policies. There was also an acknowledgement of gender within climate finance goals and an increase in participation of women at the conference, though it was late in the conference. With COP29 wrapped up in Baku this year, gender activists leave Azerbaijan fatigued and unsure about the future of their work. 

“I’ve been to so many COPs and this was one of the hardest ones” says Elise Buckle, founder of Climate Bridges and SHE builds bridges, when talking about what it was like to be in the room when gender just policies and solutions to climate change were being discussed and proposed at this years COP29 in Baku. “ We thought we wouldn’t have any texts, and then at the last minute we got it [extension of the Lima Work Programme ] so it gives me hope that this can be a floor not a ceiling”, she adds. 

Despite pushing for gender just solutions for decades, many have called this COP a “disappointment” and questions remain about whose responsibility it really is to accommodate the needs of women and girls within climate justice. 

What Went Wrong?

Lorena Aguilar, Executive Director at the Kaschak Institute for Social Justice for Women and Girls, describes the conversation around gender justice as constantly being in motion between success and failure. “When you talk about women rights and when you talk about gender equality , it’s like a pendulum, sometimes they [leaders] ignore, sometimes they accept and that’s what is happening with the UNFCCC,” she says. 

At Baku, it seems the pendulum swung the wrong way. As one of the nine stakeholder groups of the United Nations Framework Convention For Climate Change (UNFCCC) the Women and Gender Constituency was one of the main groups leading the call for more focus on gender-just initiatives during the conference. Environmental lawyer, researcher and activist Claudia Rubio Giraldo, who was one of the co-coordinators of the Gender Working Groups and the WGC’s representative in the room for many of the gender related negotiations, expected parties to move onto negotiations that built on red lines set by previous discussions.The Women and Gender Constituency typically divides areas around which red lines are often established into three groups: finance and implementation, language, and praxis. Rather than start from this point, Rubio says that backtracking on many previous discussions [by many countries who had an issue with the language around gender] made it tough to be in the room. She points out that despite parameters being set in forums before COP, many parties wanted to re-negotiate boundaries which meant actual action plans didn’t go forward till much later.

“There was a backtracking of previously agreed human rights language,” Rubio says. She’s talking about how the use of the term “women in all their diversity” became an issue at this year’s conference, as many other gender advocates also pointed out. 

Much of the contention came from conservative countries, led by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Russia and the Vatican, who felt that the use of the word ‘diversity’ within gender related language meant supporting LGBTQ communities, which is a topic many of those governments still have issues with. But while it’s sometimes easier to pass the burden of this thinking onto more ‘conservative’ countries, Imali Ngusale, founder of the African Center for Health, Climate and Gender Justice Alliance, also adds that there had been speculation that the US was supporting Saudi Arabia, which many believe was for personal gain. 

“In the past 2 weeks we saw how parties stepped forward to accommodate women “women in all their diversity”, and other countries opposed this. There’s significant language that remains bracketed around diversity. There’s a war around narratives and that’s how we’re coming to see how different countries and different parties receive lang around it,” says Natalie Sifuma, founder of Sisters in Climate.

Another barrier that gender justice groups faced was the lack of women within decision making and leadership positions.In terms of the lack of women representation at the highest level of leadership, that’s the same, that hasn’t improved. Only 8% women were represented in the world leaders summit,” Buckle says, adding “ So in a way Cop29 is a mirror of the world. And it’s true there is a backlash on women’s rights in many countries around the world, like the issue of abortion rights in the US, or the more serious situation in Afghanistan.” 

She connects the overall backlash against women’s rights in many places across the world – including the US, as many feel has been demonstrated by the recent election – to the backtracking of gender justice in the climate space. 

Ngusale also further points out that the lack of gender diversity in leadership is amplified by the fact that women are burdened with unpaid care work across the world, making it difficult for them to also take up leadership positions because they “ cannot be in two places at one time.”

Not A Monolith

But even as we talk about women’s rights across the globe, Aguilar points out that the “women of the world” as it’s often termed, are not all the same. “They try to put all women in the same bag, we need to understand the knots of gender inequality, which can be very different for different women, such as the way that our countries allow us to have control, or how we can have agency,” she says. 

This is also what makes it far more complicated for groups like the WGC to advocate for the different needs of women and girls across the world, because they already find themselves fighting for space in these discussions which can make advocating for all the diversity in a nuanced way very difficult.

One example is how cultural norms manifest into gender restrictions differently across the world in ways other cultures or countries may not understand. Mobility restrictions on women due to religious and cultural norms in Kyengeza, Uganda, mean that men are twice as likely as women to travel to purchase improved seeds or visit markets, both of which are crucial factors to agricultural productivity and climate adaptation. This means if the solution international platforms are implementing is something like drought-resilient seeds, women on ground are probably not benefiting from it even if documents say that they should be. 

With gender and climate often being an afterthought in policy drafts and papers, it doesn’t leave a lot of room to go into further “knots” around class, access, ethnicity and much more. Aguilar also shares one instance of how a group of low-income women on the coast of Honduras were affected by disaster. 

“There were women in Honduras who were told winds of 260 km comings but they didn’t know what that meant, whether that was fast or slow, and so they continued to be on the coast and one of them lost two of her kids,” she says adding that when an NGO came to help them rebuild their house which had also been destroyed, they asked them for land property rights papers which these women didn’t have. 

“That’s a group of women that need to be supported,” Aguilar says. 

Implementing the Policies

But agreeing that women should be supported is one thing and actually implementing policies that work in the aftermath of discussions at spaces like COP becomes a whole other hurdle. 

Some of the biggest barriers within implementation are a lack of accountability and climate financing. 

“We want funds that are more liberating. Most of the funds given are not even sufficient to reach the grassroots, so there needs to be a scaling up of global finance in climate action,” Ngusale says, adding that it is crucial that these funds are scaled up in a way that directly funds locally led grassroots level action so the most vulnerable groups of women and girls can be affected. 

Unfortunately a big area of contention at this year’s COP – and previous conferences – has been that receiving countries have thought the finance pledges were too low and givers thought it was too high. 

But what many activists like Aguilar and Sifuma point out in different ways is that until countries like the US, and international bodies that have undeniable influence over global action – and in this case are also being called to account with regards to climate financing – don’t design implementable policies that take gender into account, nothing will change on ground. 

Aguilar shares that many countries being called on for climate finance keep sidelining gender because “they have bigger fish to fry.” 

“To which I always ask which fish and how are you frying them,” she says. She adds “You can’t leave half of the population behind. Disregarding the potential of half the world’s population is not logical, it’s absurd.”

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Awarding Right Wing Nationalists Undermines Democracy

Rula Jebreal is an award-winning journalist, author, scholar, and foreign policy expert and is a board member of the Center for International Policy

Last Tuesday, the Atlantic Council gave its “Global Citizen” award to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. In her acceptance speech, Meloni stressed the importance of patriotism, Western Civilization and remembering one’s roots. Let’s be clear about this: Her conception of patriotism is ultra-nationalist. Last year, Meloni hailed Spain’s neo-fascist Vox Party as patriots when she endorsed them. This at least is consistent. Meloni hails from the tradition of the neo-fascist Movement and has tried to rehabilitate Italy’s fascist past – a bloody history she never totally disavowed. 

The Atlantic Council presents itself as a champion of liberal values, freedom of expression, and the “rules-based international order”. It is putatively opposed to far-right extremism and authoritarianism abroad. Its decision to bestow an award, and its own imprimatur, on someone whose rule and associations are increasingly authoritarian is therefore baffling. 

Since she was elected two years ago, Meloni has been waging a war on journalists, historians and critics, weaponizing defamation lawsuits to intimidate and silence them. I was the first journalist to be sued over a tweet exposing Meloni’s espousal of the Great Replacement Theory, which casts migrants and asylum seekers as criminals and invaders. The Great Replacement Theory has become a staple of neo-fascist ideology, and has motivated racist violence from the Christchurch mosque massacre in New Zealand to theTree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh.

As if this was not enough, now Meloni’s pro-Putin deputy Matteo Salvini is also suing me for calling him an extremist. In 2018, Salvini’s own party pick as candidate, Luca Traini, was convicted for terrorism because of his attempt to murder six people of color. Traini was cited in the manifesto of Christchurch murderer, who was inspired by Traini’s terrorism. 

Venerating Meloni simply because she has taken the correct position on Ukraine is to miss the forest for the trees.

The environment of fear and persecution that Meloni is fostering in Italy goes beyond attacking professional critics. Meloni is also dismantling LGBTQ rights. Italy is removing gay mothers from children’s birth certificates, as part of the right-wing government’s crackdown on same-sex parenting.

In her award acceptance speech, Meloni defended her brand of nationalism and warned about the creeping infiltration of the West’s enemies, declaring “patriotism is the best response to declinism [sic].” Given her record, one wonders if she was referring to migrants and minorities or the opposition at home that she has often criminalized and incited against. 

Three years ago when Meloni participated in the congress of Spain’s neo-fascist Vox party, she emphasized their shared values: “no to the LGBT lobby, yes to the natural family, no to gender ideology, no to the violence of Islam, no to big international finance, no to the bureaucrats of Brussels.”Meloni’s affinity for Vox is understandable. The party’s charter violates Article 25 of Spain’s Constitution and includes a call to repeal democratic parties, oppose gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights and abortion.

Meloni also engaged in self-praise about her achievements in the field of anti-migrant dehumanization and brutalization, going so far as to present her bankrolling of brutal Arab dictators and warlords in Libya and Egypt (to block migration to Europe) as akin to the fight against slavery.

It’s clear that the Atlantic Council’s decision to give Meloni this award was driven by her support for Ukraine, for which the Council has been one of Washington’s most outspoken institutional advocates (It is also worth noting that, apparently at Meloni’s request, the award was given by right-wing oligarch Elon Musk, under whose control Twitter/X has become a sewer of conspiracy theories, misinformation, and harassment). The Center for International Policy, on whose board I serve, also supports the defense of Ukraine against Russia’s war of aggression. We believe fundamental principles of international law and democratic values are at stake there.

But venerating Meloni simply because she has taken the correct position on Ukraine is to miss the forest for the trees.  Legitimizing far-right leaders –who are actively undermining press freedom, inflaming hatred and xenophobia, weakening LGBTQ rights in their own countries in the mode of Vladimir Putin–  does not uphold democratic values, it betrays them.

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Q&A: How Would Harris Shape U.S.-Latin America Relations?

As Kamala Harris prepares to formally accept her party’s nomination at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, CIP senior non-resident fellow María José Espinosa Carillo discussed what a Harris presidency would mean for Latin America in a Q&A with Latin America Advisor (a daily publication of The Dialogue) explaining:

A Harris presidency could bring a renewed, forward-looking vision for U.S. relations with the Americas, focusing on contemporary issues critical to the region. Her track record as vice president, senator and California’s attorney general, particularly her commitment to justice and human rights, aligns closely with the challenges facing Latin America and the Caribbean—a region deeply intertwined with U.S. interests.

In migration policy, the focus will likely be on promoting regional cooperation, as demonstrated by the Biden-Harris administration through the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection. This framework has already facilitated regional collaboration on migration management. Given the strain on resources and infrastructure caused by unprecedented migration flows in the Americas, a Harris presidency will need to capitalize on and expand these efforts to strengthen stabilization and integration of migrants and asylum seekers across the continent.

Harris’ approach to U.S. leadership emphasizes close collaboration with allies and partners, actively listening to their needs and working together on solutions. This is evident in her unprecedented work with Caribbean nations, particularly on climate action. Her commitment to addressing the climate crisis aligns with the region’s pressing needs, where climate change threatens agriculture, infrastructure and coastal communities. Her leadership, including historic investments in climate initiatives, could drive collaboration on renewable energy, conservation and sustainable development, aligning U.S. policies with regional efforts.

As women’s rights become central to policy and female politicians break the mold in Latin America, a Harris presidency would continue to advocate for these rights, including access to abortion, health care, combating gender-based violence and promoting women’s economic empowerment.

Read the original article here.

Lawmakers, Progressive Leaders Urge Reorientation of Foreign Policy as a 2024 Imperative

On February 6, Members of Congress and progressive movement leaders gathered at a conference hosted by the Center for International Policy (CIP), demanding changes to US foreign policy decisions as a necessity in a consequential year that will determine the trajectory of the US both at home and globally.

In a keynote address seen by over 60,000 people, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) argued that the concentration of wealth and power foments war, violence and mass insecurity for everyday people globally, benefiting billionaires at the expense of whole families, nations, peoples and regions and declared that, “For many decades we have seen a ‘bipartisan consensus’ on foreign policy—a consensus which, sadly, has almost always been wrong.”

Pointing to the distorting influence of moneyed forces ranging from AIPAC, super PACs, big defense contractors, fossil fuel companies, pharmaceutical companies, oligarchs supporting Putin, Trump and other autocrats, and other multi-billionaires and multinational corporations; as well as the growth of right-wing extremism, tax havens and economic inequality, Senator Sanders declared, “It’s hard to overstate just how fundamentally this broken global financial system undermines faith in democracy and saps our ability to deal with the pressing crises we face today.”

“​​We live in a world where a small number of multi-billionaires and multinational corporations exert enormous economic and political power over virtually every country on earth,” added Sanders. “That reality has a huge impact on all aspects of our foreign policy and whether or not we will be able to effectively address the major crises we face.”

In a “Congress and Progressive Foreign Policy” session, Members of Congress discussed their personal pathways to foreign policy and outlined key challenges and opportunities for a “people-centered national security” that delivers for people in the US and the Global South, recognizes the interdependence of domestic and foreign policy on issues like migration and climate change, and allows the outside world to interact with the US in positive ways like refugee resettlement rather than negative, militarized interactions.

“Nowadays, most people are interacting with the United States through drones, through weapons that are made in the US that are in the hands of dictators, police or their military, or they’re interacting with us in regards to sanctions that are making it hard for them to have necessary medication and food. And that creates a national security problem for us,” said Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN).

“We’ve spent more on border security since 2013 than was in the immigration reform bill of 2013. And we’ve seen no improvement in anything because we haven’t fundamentally shifted the system. So we have to think about, how do we invest in other countries? Our foreign policy is directly tied to this,” added Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA).

“What I would like to see is a people-centered security, where the United States can actually engage with people of a nation, and help empower them, help them pursue freedom and dignity on their terms, not necessarily our terms,” concluded Representative Jason Crow (D-CO).

In “Prioritizing a Progressive Foreign Policy Agenda,” regional experts discussed strategies for the US to reorient its relations to better serve the people and address the realities and needs on the ground. Speaking to the pitfalls of Great Power Competition and the Cold War as frameworks for US-China relations, China expert Ali Wyne declared, “Diplomacy is not something that you do out of kindness to competitors. It’s something that you do to advance your own national interest.” “We can’t support a progressive movement in Ukraine if they’re dead,” emphasized Terrell Jermaine Starr. Speaking on Latin America, María José Espinosa Carillo stressed, “We have deep connections with the region, not only through our borders, but also through funding and economic ties. But what’s more important, there is a renewed vision of the region.”

In “The Political Necessity of a New Foreign Policy,” movement leaders from MoveOn, Center for American Progress, AFL-CIO and Win Without War explored the intersection of domestic and foreign affairs, offering their analysis of policy tradeoffs and highlighting how they see these issues moving the progressive base.

“That [progressive foreign policy] actually is not just a morally and ethical position, but it is an electorally salient one, one that is a winning position in elections,” declared MoveOn executive director Rahna Epting. “With Biden, he campaigned in 2020 promising to end endless wars, and that helped him win. That was one of the reasons I believe helped him win in that election cycle. And now we see Donald Trump poised to exploit the current situation in Israel Gaza and how that’s going to show up in November.” 

Center for American Progress president and CEO Patrick Gaspard described the threat of antidemocratic forces at home and abroad, and said, “We’re now in a place of the world where you win votes by arguing that you build a moat around yourselves and pull up the drawbridge, our progressive transnationalism, internationalism is not actually ascendant. We should recognize that and we should fight fiercely.”

This fight for democracy at home and abroad takes place not just at the ballot box but in workplaces too. Cathy Feingold, International Director for the AFL-CIO, argued we must recast our priorities in favor of “ worker-centered security,” explaining, “It sends a very specific message to people in this country and around the world who are working day in and day out and want to make sure that they can live with dignity. I have found that workers here and workers around the world are interconnected.”

Win Without War executive director Sara Haghdoosti added, “We talk about foreign policy like there are not people in this country who have family connections, and deep commitment to what happens around the world. And it’s just not okay. That’s not how people work.”

View all the key moments from the conference on YouTube here and read opening remarks from CIP president and CEO Nancy Okail here.