For the first time in its history, the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) set climate change as its primary theme for its sixty-sixth session. The Commission’s acknowledegment of the climate crisis is long-awaited fruition of feminist and social movement mobilizations before and during the Beijing+25 review process in 2020, during which the agenda for the multi-year program of work (2021-2024) was set. This also comes after decades of erroneous compartmentalization of viewing climate change as a technical issue to be tackled in other designated platforms, such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP).
Due to the institutionalization of our movements, these thematic classifications shape how we, as feminists, work and strategize. These have contributed to detaching our interconnected struggles, such as dissociating bodily integrity and autonomy from social, economic, ecological, and climate justice.
As feminists, we should work to threaten the status quo and its exclusionary mechanisms, particularly with regard to climate change. This analysis offers reflections from CSW’s 66th session from a Global South feminist perspective, a snapshot of feminist organizing and the North-South dynamics in spaces such as these as well as political asks and suggestions for the way forward.
South-based feminist news, events, analysis and reflections.
