GENDERING CLIMATE FUTURES - Power, Finance, and Justice in a Warming World

Across South Asia, women stand at the centre of a warming world — tilling land they seldom own, absorbing the shocks of flood and drought long before anyone else notices, and now, increasingly, building the solar parks, seed banks, and clean enterprises reshaping the region's future. And yet, in the rooms where climate finance is allocated, policy is drafted, and international agreements are signed, they remain strikingly absent. Gendering Climate Futures argues that this is no accident of oversight. It is the entirely predictable outcome of a climate agenda that has treated gender as a footnote rather than a foundation. Weaving together feminist political ecology, political economy, grassroots testimony, and rigorous diplomatic data, this volume moves fluidly across scale: from the quiet politics of land, water, and unpaid labour that shape everyday survival, to the vast and often opaque architecture of global climate finance; from the self-help groups powering India's renewable energy transition from the ground up, to the still largely empty chairs held by South Asian women at the international negotiating table. Seven distinct chapters, seven distinct lenses — and one shared, urgent question: what would it actually take for women to move from inclusion to genuine influence? Grounded in South Asia, one of the regions most exposed to climate catastrophe, this book refuses easy answers and comfortable slogans alike. It insists, instead, that gender equity is not a side conversation to the climate agenda — it is the agenda's unfinished centre, the place where power, finance, and justice must finally meet. Rigorously researched, elegantly argued, and consistently alive to the human stakes beneath the policy language, Gendering Climate Futures is essential reading for policymakers, scholars, and practitioners — and for anyone who has ever asked why climate action so rarely reaches the women already shaping its possibilities.