Critical Feminist Engagements with Green New Deals, Feminist Economics - Carol Cohn & Claire Duncanson (2023)
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Claire Duncanson
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This article aims to increase our understanding of Green New Deals (GND), and the ways in which, in their current guises, they will fail to tackle the interconnected ecological and inequalities crises they aim to address. It argues that feminist analysis is crucial for exposing the flaws in GNDs. It also demonstrates that different kinds of feminist questioning lead to different kinds of policy responses, with very different scales of potential transformative impact.
In the current context of unprecedented and interconnected ecological and inequalities crises, many are hitching their hopes onto GNDs, but most GNDs, especially the ones emanating from governments in the Global North, are inadequate and in many cases deeply flawed. Many embed the same faulty ways of thinking that caused the crisis.
In order to transform the structures and root causes underlying the interconnected ecological and inequalities crises, it is necessary to go beyond feminist demands for the inclusion of diverse women and for gender equality. Feminism can and must instead be used to facilitate a transformation of the current economic, social, and political systems, one based on a paradigm shift in our understanding of humanity’s relationship with the rest of nature and a thorough reckoning of the role of colonial histories in creating the current crises.
Governments in the Global North who claim leadership tackling global environmental challenges can learn much from this analysis.