Gender and India’s climate policy: Bridging the disconnects

Gender has been central to India’s development planning. However, an overtly development-centric climate policy seems to have ignored concerns of gender equality. This chapter unpacks the various dimensions of this disconnect between development planning and climate policy by contrasting the progression in policy discourse on women empowerment with the framing and evolution of climate policy as a new development discourse. It is argued that the policymaking on gender in India has corresponded very well to the advancements in the academic discourse and social movements for gender equality. Over the years, starting from the First Five-Year Plan in 1951, the underlying understanding of policy provisions has evolved and reflects a better appreciation of the idea of gender equality as integral to development planning. However, this understanding has not permeated into the administrative and analytical apparatus of broader development policy of which climate policy is a part. The idea of social and economic development in climate policy debates is invariably reduced to a pursuit of cost-effective technological upgradation, oblivious to a vast body of scholarship arguing the social embeddedness of technological choices. Not only the climate policies remain detached from the advancements in the policymaking for gender justice, but the academic literature also feeding into climate policy too has taken an ad-hoc approach towards centrality of gender equality to development. The chapter suggests that the provisions in existing gender policies offer a ready reference for better integration of gender justice into climate policies. However, this would require a political determination to keep gender justice at the centre of development policymaking as well as efforts by climate policy researchers to expand the horizon.