ABSTRACT

There have been a number of calls to integrate Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) strategies within international development policy to reduce people’s livelihood risks. However, from a gender perspective this presents a major challenge. While women may be involved in DRR including CCA at the grass roots level, the national and international policy discourses remain largely ungendered and unrelated. This chapter re-visits what Enarson and Morrow (1998) termed the ‘Gendered Terrain of Disasters’, to examine the ways in which gender has been incorporated into DRR and also into CCA (see Bradshaw and Linneker 2014) to explore what this means for a gendered DRR including CCA approach. It begins by addressing the fundamental question of why consider gender. It highlights that, to explain the position and situation of women and men, gender must be understood as intersecting with other sites of oppression. It then explores how gender has been conceptualised within the wider development and environment discourses and how in turn this has influenced policy debates around DRR and CCA. It seeks to problematise the ‘engendering’ of the two discourses, seeing a commonality as being a move toward a ‘feminisation’ of responsibility in policy and practice which needs to be addressed in any DRR including CCA approach.