Multiple injustices of Climate Change Governance: Ecological Feminist Perspectives
The proposed project Multiple injustices of Climate Change Governance: Ecological Feminist Perspectives synthesizes and builds on my previous research on the relevance of thinking feminism in climate change governance. It will be conducted through a book project, a monograph which allows for an in-depth, reflexive elaboration on how feminist scholarship can further understandings of equity, equality and justice dimensions of climate change governance. It responds to questions raised previously in my work on climate change governance and on the green state. The overarching questions for the book are: Why is it important to apply feminist theory in studying climate change governance? What kind of feminist theoretical frameworks are relevant and how can they be used to provide useful knowledge to further efficient and democratic climate change governance? The sabbatical project will be supported by international collaboration organized through two longer visits, to the University of Manchester in the UK and to the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. The purpose of the visits is to share research in a for me new international context and get valuable input to move it forward. The visits will also build new networks deemed beneficial for my research group well beyond the sabbatical.
Final report
The aim of the Sabbatical Project was to write a monograph on: Multiple injustices of Climate Change Governance: Ecological Feminist Perspectives and spending research time at three academic institutions during my work on the project. During the project time I have close to a complete manuscript of the book (see outline below). I completed the book proposal and currently have three different publishers with an interest in publishing the book: Stanford UP, Oxford UP and MIT Press, I have not yet settled on one.
As set out in the application, I spent January and February at the Department of Law, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zeeland where I presented the book at a cross-departmental seminar and networked with Elizabeth MacPehrson and Annick Masselot, with whom I since the visit have written a common research initiation application. I spent the fall semester at the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen where I was engaged in the environmental research group headed by Michelle Betsil where I also presented my work and also gave a lecture in a course on Gender and Environment. I also presented at a Symposium: Feminist Climate Policy in Industrial States organized by Hilda Römer Christensen at the Sociology Department, Copenhagen University in December. During the year I also visited the Consumption Institute at Manchester University. I was there three weeks in September-October, particularly to work with Matthew Patterson and Sherilyn MacGregor. I gave a lecture presenting the book, met with researchers with similar interests and attended a workshop. After the end of my sabbatical, I have had several invitations to present my book. I was invited by Johanna Kantola to European Studies at the University of Helsinki on February 4 and I held an online presentation and discussion on the book in the Politics Department at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence; Italy on February 10, on March 16 I gave a talk on the book at Stockholm University. The visits have generated many useful reflections on aspects of the book, new contacts and different project ideas.
Below follow some details on the book, including a time line for estimated publishing dates.
Proposed Title
An Ecological Feminist Approach to Climate Change Governance
Climate change is not only a ‘super wicked problem’ (Levin et al., 2012) it is also a problem of multiple injustices. Its causes are deeply embedded in social and economic systems, its consequences unfold across social groups, locations and generations, and the very actors charged with solving it are often those most invested in maintaining the status quo. Action is urgent yet delayed; governance institutions are tasked with managing transformations of an unprecedented scale yet constrained by path dependencies. The book contributes by showing how feminist analysis can deepen understandings of climate governance, and then importantly, show how climate governance and climate institutions can, in turn, learn from feminist theorizing.
The book speaks to, first, climate governance research where feminist perspectives have not been systematically integrated. Gender has appeared but piecemeal, in single case studies or narrow justice framings, but not as here, as a sustained analytical lens. The book thus, advances an ecological feminist approach providing an interdisciplinary innovation to climate governance. Second, despite rich debates on power, subjectivity, and justice, climate governance has seldom been treated as a central site of feminist inquiry, the central focus of this book.
The book is guided by three overarching questions:
• How can ecological feminist frameworks reveal and challenge the multiple injustices embedded in climate governance?
• In what ways can feminist scholarship enrich our understanding of both the limits and possibilities of governance institutions?
• What alternative visions of governance emerge from ecofeminist ethics, and how might these inform more democratic, inclusive, and caring futures?
The contributions are three-fold: Theoretically, by developing an ecological feminist framework for climate governance that integrates ecofeminism and feminist institutionalism and elaborates key concepts such as dualistic power practices, climate governance subjects, path dependence, sticky androcentric norms, ecofeminist inside activism, and empathic governance rationality. Analytically, it provides new readings of empirical phenomena such as climate subjects, European and Nordic climate institutions, the EU Green Deal, decarbonization in industry and transport.
Chapters 1–4 does this work by addressing the first two questions. It develops an ecological feminist framework to reveal multiple injustices and institutional limits in climate governance.
Chapters 5–6 respond to the third research question by developing normative alternatives around eco-care ethics and empathic governance rationality. The book articulates a vision of climate governance and proposes empathic rationality for policy making grounded in eco-care ethics. It is illustrated with governance principles like precaution, circularity, urban planning. Finally, it articulates a vision of a caring eco-social welfare state, with arguments on what is expected of public institutions, politics, political representation, citizenship and economic reasoning.
This book stands out because it brings eco-feminist theory into direct conversation with climate governance, an intersection that has rarely been addressed in a sustained way. While feminist perspectives on environment and climate exist, few works develop an integrated framework that critiques dominant governance rationalities and proposes constructive alternatives. By introducing the concept of empathic governance rationality, rooted in eco-care ethics, this book moves beyond critique to outline what climate governance could look like if equity, care, and ecological integrity were taken seriously as guiding principles. Unlike volumes that focus narrowly on gender mainstreaming in policy or on technical aspects of decarbonization, this book shows how power, subjectivity, and institutional norms shape climate action at every level. Its originality lies in linking theoretical innovation (eco-feminist governance rationality, climate subjects, critique of ecological modernization) using illustrations (from EU climate strategies to Swedish electrification and local governance), and because it does not stop at critique. It proposes alternatives, empathic rationality for governance and the caring eco-social state. The result is a book that is both conceptually ambitious, empirically grounded, yet providing a politics of hope with the articulation of alternative governance forms. It is a resource for students, scholars, policymakers, and advocates seeking to imagine governance beyond the limits of ‘green growth’ and technocratic solutions.
Annotated Table of Contents
Preface
Positionality, Background to book
Introduction
This chapter sets out the book’s central claim that climate governance cannot be understood, nor transformed, without feminist analysis. It begins from the diagnosis of climate change as a problem marked by multiple injustices: between Global North and South, across class, race, gender and age, between generations, and between humans and non-human beings and then, conceptualizes climate governance as centered in public institutions at multiple levels, all have difficulties in taking on these injustices. Against this backdrop, the chapter identifies two main gaps: the marginal presence of feminist perspectives in climate governance research, and the limited engagement with governance institutions within feminist theory.
It proposes an ecological feminist approach anchored in ecofeminism that foregrounds dualistic power, gendered subjectivities, social reproduction and the absent-presence of nature in climate governance. The chapter formulates three guiding research questions concerning injustice, institutional power and alternative visions, and outlines the book’s theoretical, analytical and normative contributions: developing an ecological feminist framework, applying it to empirical cases in European and Nordic climate governance, and advancing eco-care ethics and empathic governance rationalities as pathways toward more democratic, caring and ecologically just climate futures.
Chapter One: Multiple Inequities and Climate Change Subjects
This chapter investigates how climate change governance produces distinct subjects, and with what implications for power, equity, and agency. Drawing on ecofeminist theory, intersectional scholarship and post-structural feminisms, it treats modern Western notions of the autonomous, rational subject as historically contingent and implicated in patriarchal, capitalist, and colonial domination. Through discourse and institutional analysis, the chapter develops a typology of four climate subjects: the Earth Masters (epistemic elites in earth system science), Nature as Absent-Presence (non-human nature as exploited backdrop), the Vulnerable Woman Victim (gendered, racialized vulnerability in the Global South), and the Rich Male Carbon Subject (affluent, high-emitting elites). The analysis shows how these governance subjects are constituted through ecofeminist notions of dualistic power practices that background, exclude, incorporate, and objectify. Furthermore, it argues that climate governance cannot be understood, or made more just, without interrogating the subject positions it presupposes and reproduces.
Chapter Two: Rethinking Gendered Power in Climate Governance: From Path Dependence to Androcentric Norms
This chapter develops an ecofeminist institutional account of climate governance, asking how public institutions structure climate action and with what implications for power, equity and equality. It argues that climate governance is shaped not only by formal rules and administrative templates, but by gendered path dependencies and ‘sticky’ informal norms that fuse masculine baselines with human-centered assumptions into androcentric norms. Using feminist institutionalism, the gendered logic of appropriateness and Prügl’s rules of entitlement, labor and identity, the chapter shows how these norms define what counts as appropriate expertise, legitimate authority and acceptable policy solutions.
Two sectoral illustrations, industrial decarbonization and municipal transport planning, demonstrate how industrial, ecomodern and technical masculinities, and their complementary femininities, are embedded in climate institutions. These gendered identities organize knowledge hierarchies, normalize growth-oriented, technocratic rationalities and background nature as a political subject. The chapter concludes that transformative climate policy requires not only new targets and instruments, but a confrontation with the sticky androcentric norms that structure climate institutions from within.
Chapter Three: Ecological Modernization as Path Dependence: Sticky Norms in European Climate Governance
The chapter shows how ecological modernization has become a path-dependent paradigm in European climate governance. Administrative steering and economic instrumentality combine to stabilize a win–win norm that decouples emissions from growth, privileges techno-economic fixes and sidelines social reproduction and living ecologies. Through three illustrations: European climate institutions; the EU Green Deal; and Sweden’s climate policy, the chapter traces how EM’s grammar normalizes how climate portfolios are bundled, under-integrates biodiversity, positions nature within carbon accounting, and marginalizes care-intensive sectors. It identifies an epistemic path dependence sustained by Western dualisms and technical, masculine knowledge hierarchies that pre-sort what counts as evidence and solution. The chapter concludes that EM is not merely incomplete; it constrains the political imagination required for just transitions. It points forward to a reorientation toward redistribution, ecological restoration, and democratic re-politicization developed in later chapters.
Chapter Four: Agency in Climate Change Governance
This chapter explores agency in climate governance through three interlinked lenses: representation, governance rationalities and inside activism. It first examines ‘agency as presence’, showing how women’s growing representation in climate institutions has not, on its own, produced more gender-just or socially transformative policies, revealing a ‘parity paradox.’ Then it analyzes how administrative and economic rationalities associated with ecological modernization, structure what is seen as appropriate action, agency and legitimate knowledge, while marginalizing care, social reproduction and justice concerns. Finally, it turns to ‘inside activism’, developing the figure of the ecofeminist inside activist: civil servants who use their positional authority, networks and epistemic dissent to challenge dominant technocratic and productivist logics from within. In doing so, this chapter links questions of who is present, how they can act, and whose knowledge counts in climate governance.
Chapter Five. Imagining and Enacting Eco-Empathic Governance Rationality
This chapter deepens understanding of the conceptual innovation: empathic governance rationality, an alternative to the administrative and economic rationalities that dominate the way public institutions approach climate governance. It combines elements from political ecology with ethics of care, and outlines a governance approach that emphasizes attentiveness, responsibility, and reciprocity, moving beyond market- or technocratic-driven approaches to governance. It exemplifies empathic rationality by discussing policies and approaches that have been selected because of their potential to develop in the direction of empathic rationality. These are: precautionary principles, civic training for nature identification, circular economy and personhood of nature.
Chapter Six. Climate Governance in a Caring, Eco-Social State
This chapter outlines the contours of a State capable of pursuing climate politics and policy that are inclusive, caring and attentive to ecological and social dimensions of governance. Taking the welfare state–here understood as a State with responsibility for care and social protection–as its starting point, the chapter argues that the democratic State remains a crucial climate governance actor because of its authority and legitimacy. For it to become an eco-social state with genuinely caring and inclusive capacities, several reforms are needed: of the economy, where growth must be reconsidered to incorporate social reproduction; of politics, where representation must be extended beyond human subjects, present time and national borders; of citizenship, which must be reoriented around care and responsibility; and of bureaucracy, which must be redirected toward reflexivity. Elaborating these four reforms, the chapter sketches an alternative state form, the caring eco-social state, and illustrates how such a state might approach climate governance in practice, with examples from industry, urban planning, education and consumption.
Book Status and Components
The introduction and chapter 2, 3 and 4 are in the form of final drafts. Chapter 5 will be finished shortly and chapter 6 is the least finished, while the ideas for it are clear this chapter still needs to be written, so does the preface and conclusion. I estimate the whole manuscript to be complete by the end of May 2026.
I estimate that the book will total around 84 000 words excluding, references, footnotes and index. It will be published open access.
As set out in the application, I spent January and February at the Department of Law, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zeeland where I presented the book at a cross-departmental seminar and networked with Elizabeth MacPehrson and Annick Masselot, with whom I since the visit have written a common research initiation application. I spent the fall semester at the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen where I was engaged in the environmental research group headed by Michelle Betsil where I also presented my work and also gave a lecture in a course on Gender and Environment. I also presented at a Symposium: Feminist Climate Policy in Industrial States organized by Hilda Römer Christensen at the Sociology Department, Copenhagen University in December. During the year I also visited the Consumption Institute at Manchester University. I was there three weeks in September-October, particularly to work with Matthew Patterson and Sherilyn MacGregor. I gave a lecture presenting the book, met with researchers with similar interests and attended a workshop. After the end of my sabbatical, I have had several invitations to present my book. I was invited by Johanna Kantola to European Studies at the University of Helsinki on February 4 and I held an online presentation and discussion on the book in the Politics Department at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence; Italy on February 10, on March 16 I gave a talk on the book at Stockholm University. The visits have generated many useful reflections on aspects of the book, new contacts and different project ideas.
Below follow some details on the book, including a time line for estimated publishing dates.
Proposed Title
An Ecological Feminist Approach to Climate Change Governance
Climate change is not only a ‘super wicked problem’ (Levin et al., 2012) it is also a problem of multiple injustices. Its causes are deeply embedded in social and economic systems, its consequences unfold across social groups, locations and generations, and the very actors charged with solving it are often those most invested in maintaining the status quo. Action is urgent yet delayed; governance institutions are tasked with managing transformations of an unprecedented scale yet constrained by path dependencies. The book contributes by showing how feminist analysis can deepen understandings of climate governance, and then importantly, show how climate governance and climate institutions can, in turn, learn from feminist theorizing.
The book speaks to, first, climate governance research where feminist perspectives have not been systematically integrated. Gender has appeared but piecemeal, in single case studies or narrow justice framings, but not as here, as a sustained analytical lens. The book thus, advances an ecological feminist approach providing an interdisciplinary innovation to climate governance. Second, despite rich debates on power, subjectivity, and justice, climate governance has seldom been treated as a central site of feminist inquiry, the central focus of this book.
The book is guided by three overarching questions:
• How can ecological feminist frameworks reveal and challenge the multiple injustices embedded in climate governance?
• In what ways can feminist scholarship enrich our understanding of both the limits and possibilities of governance institutions?
• What alternative visions of governance emerge from ecofeminist ethics, and how might these inform more democratic, inclusive, and caring futures?
The contributions are three-fold: Theoretically, by developing an ecological feminist framework for climate governance that integrates ecofeminism and feminist institutionalism and elaborates key concepts such as dualistic power practices, climate governance subjects, path dependence, sticky androcentric norms, ecofeminist inside activism, and empathic governance rationality. Analytically, it provides new readings of empirical phenomena such as climate subjects, European and Nordic climate institutions, the EU Green Deal, decarbonization in industry and transport.
Chapters 1–4 does this work by addressing the first two questions. It develops an ecological feminist framework to reveal multiple injustices and institutional limits in climate governance.
Chapters 5–6 respond to the third research question by developing normative alternatives around eco-care ethics and empathic governance rationality. The book articulates a vision of climate governance and proposes empathic rationality for policy making grounded in eco-care ethics. It is illustrated with governance principles like precaution, circularity, urban planning. Finally, it articulates a vision of a caring eco-social welfare state, with arguments on what is expected of public institutions, politics, political representation, citizenship and economic reasoning.
This book stands out because it brings eco-feminist theory into direct conversation with climate governance, an intersection that has rarely been addressed in a sustained way. While feminist perspectives on environment and climate exist, few works develop an integrated framework that critiques dominant governance rationalities and proposes constructive alternatives. By introducing the concept of empathic governance rationality, rooted in eco-care ethics, this book moves beyond critique to outline what climate governance could look like if equity, care, and ecological integrity were taken seriously as guiding principles. Unlike volumes that focus narrowly on gender mainstreaming in policy or on technical aspects of decarbonization, this book shows how power, subjectivity, and institutional norms shape climate action at every level. Its originality lies in linking theoretical innovation (eco-feminist governance rationality, climate subjects, critique of ecological modernization) using illustrations (from EU climate strategies to Swedish electrification and local governance), and because it does not stop at critique. It proposes alternatives, empathic rationality for governance and the caring eco-social state. The result is a book that is both conceptually ambitious, empirically grounded, yet providing a politics of hope with the articulation of alternative governance forms. It is a resource for students, scholars, policymakers, and advocates seeking to imagine governance beyond the limits of ‘green growth’ and technocratic solutions.
Annotated Table of Contents
Preface
Positionality, Background to book
Introduction
This chapter sets out the book’s central claim that climate governance cannot be understood, nor transformed, without feminist analysis. It begins from the diagnosis of climate change as a problem marked by multiple injustices: between Global North and South, across class, race, gender and age, between generations, and between humans and non-human beings and then, conceptualizes climate governance as centered in public institutions at multiple levels, all have difficulties in taking on these injustices. Against this backdrop, the chapter identifies two main gaps: the marginal presence of feminist perspectives in climate governance research, and the limited engagement with governance institutions within feminist theory.
It proposes an ecological feminist approach anchored in ecofeminism that foregrounds dualistic power, gendered subjectivities, social reproduction and the absent-presence of nature in climate governance. The chapter formulates three guiding research questions concerning injustice, institutional power and alternative visions, and outlines the book’s theoretical, analytical and normative contributions: developing an ecological feminist framework, applying it to empirical cases in European and Nordic climate governance, and advancing eco-care ethics and empathic governance rationalities as pathways toward more democratic, caring and ecologically just climate futures.
Chapter One: Multiple Inequities and Climate Change Subjects
This chapter investigates how climate change governance produces distinct subjects, and with what implications for power, equity, and agency. Drawing on ecofeminist theory, intersectional scholarship and post-structural feminisms, it treats modern Western notions of the autonomous, rational subject as historically contingent and implicated in patriarchal, capitalist, and colonial domination. Through discourse and institutional analysis, the chapter develops a typology of four climate subjects: the Earth Masters (epistemic elites in earth system science), Nature as Absent-Presence (non-human nature as exploited backdrop), the Vulnerable Woman Victim (gendered, racialized vulnerability in the Global South), and the Rich Male Carbon Subject (affluent, high-emitting elites). The analysis shows how these governance subjects are constituted through ecofeminist notions of dualistic power practices that background, exclude, incorporate, and objectify. Furthermore, it argues that climate governance cannot be understood, or made more just, without interrogating the subject positions it presupposes and reproduces.
Chapter Two: Rethinking Gendered Power in Climate Governance: From Path Dependence to Androcentric Norms
This chapter develops an ecofeminist institutional account of climate governance, asking how public institutions structure climate action and with what implications for power, equity and equality. It argues that climate governance is shaped not only by formal rules and administrative templates, but by gendered path dependencies and ‘sticky’ informal norms that fuse masculine baselines with human-centered assumptions into androcentric norms. Using feminist institutionalism, the gendered logic of appropriateness and Prügl’s rules of entitlement, labor and identity, the chapter shows how these norms define what counts as appropriate expertise, legitimate authority and acceptable policy solutions.
Two sectoral illustrations, industrial decarbonization and municipal transport planning, demonstrate how industrial, ecomodern and technical masculinities, and their complementary femininities, are embedded in climate institutions. These gendered identities organize knowledge hierarchies, normalize growth-oriented, technocratic rationalities and background nature as a political subject. The chapter concludes that transformative climate policy requires not only new targets and instruments, but a confrontation with the sticky androcentric norms that structure climate institutions from within.
Chapter Three: Ecological Modernization as Path Dependence: Sticky Norms in European Climate Governance
The chapter shows how ecological modernization has become a path-dependent paradigm in European climate governance. Administrative steering and economic instrumentality combine to stabilize a win–win norm that decouples emissions from growth, privileges techno-economic fixes and sidelines social reproduction and living ecologies. Through three illustrations: European climate institutions; the EU Green Deal; and Sweden’s climate policy, the chapter traces how EM’s grammar normalizes how climate portfolios are bundled, under-integrates biodiversity, positions nature within carbon accounting, and marginalizes care-intensive sectors. It identifies an epistemic path dependence sustained by Western dualisms and technical, masculine knowledge hierarchies that pre-sort what counts as evidence and solution. The chapter concludes that EM is not merely incomplete; it constrains the political imagination required for just transitions. It points forward to a reorientation toward redistribution, ecological restoration, and democratic re-politicization developed in later chapters.
Chapter Four: Agency in Climate Change Governance
This chapter explores agency in climate governance through three interlinked lenses: representation, governance rationalities and inside activism. It first examines ‘agency as presence’, showing how women’s growing representation in climate institutions has not, on its own, produced more gender-just or socially transformative policies, revealing a ‘parity paradox.’ Then it analyzes how administrative and economic rationalities associated with ecological modernization, structure what is seen as appropriate action, agency and legitimate knowledge, while marginalizing care, social reproduction and justice concerns. Finally, it turns to ‘inside activism’, developing the figure of the ecofeminist inside activist: civil servants who use their positional authority, networks and epistemic dissent to challenge dominant technocratic and productivist logics from within. In doing so, this chapter links questions of who is present, how they can act, and whose knowledge counts in climate governance.
Chapter Five. Imagining and Enacting Eco-Empathic Governance Rationality
This chapter deepens understanding of the conceptual innovation: empathic governance rationality, an alternative to the administrative and economic rationalities that dominate the way public institutions approach climate governance. It combines elements from political ecology with ethics of care, and outlines a governance approach that emphasizes attentiveness, responsibility, and reciprocity, moving beyond market- or technocratic-driven approaches to governance. It exemplifies empathic rationality by discussing policies and approaches that have been selected because of their potential to develop in the direction of empathic rationality. These are: precautionary principles, civic training for nature identification, circular economy and personhood of nature.
Chapter Six. Climate Governance in a Caring, Eco-Social State
This chapter outlines the contours of a State capable of pursuing climate politics and policy that are inclusive, caring and attentive to ecological and social dimensions of governance. Taking the welfare state–here understood as a State with responsibility for care and social protection–as its starting point, the chapter argues that the democratic State remains a crucial climate governance actor because of its authority and legitimacy. For it to become an eco-social state with genuinely caring and inclusive capacities, several reforms are needed: of the economy, where growth must be reconsidered to incorporate social reproduction; of politics, where representation must be extended beyond human subjects, present time and national borders; of citizenship, which must be reoriented around care and responsibility; and of bureaucracy, which must be redirected toward reflexivity. Elaborating these four reforms, the chapter sketches an alternative state form, the caring eco-social state, and illustrates how such a state might approach climate governance in practice, with examples from industry, urban planning, education and consumption.
Book Status and Components
The introduction and chapter 2, 3 and 4 are in the form of final drafts. Chapter 5 will be finished shortly and chapter 6 is the least finished, while the ideas for it are clear this chapter still needs to be written, so does the preface and conclusion. I estimate the whole manuscript to be complete by the end of May 2026.
I estimate that the book will total around 84 000 words excluding, references, footnotes and index. It will be published open access.