Understanding policy and institutional strategies to support the participation of women and women organisations within UNFCCC-led climate change governance

Participation is a very popular topic in climate change governance scholarship, nonetheless, there are still areas that are understudied and not well understood. The research analyses the participation of women and women organisations within the UNFCCC-led governance (and the associated climate finance decision-making), which remains one of the most important climate change governance arenas (Betsill et al., 2015; Dorsch and Flachsland, 2017; Di Gregorio, 2019).
Within climate change governance, women and women organisations present “new governance agents” whose participation is considered in academic literature from two perspectives, i.e rights-based and instrumental perspectives. From the rights-based perspective, women and women organisation participation is necessary to ensure gender equality and inclusiveness of participatory processes. On the other hand, their participation could be instrumental in delivering more just climate policies, fair allocation of climate finance and better gender responsiveness, sustainability and innovativeness of climate policies (Larson, 2002; Alston, 2013; Hebtezion, 2013; Salehi et al., 2013; Williams, 2016).
The research aims at enhancing the knowledge on the role of women and women organisations within the UNFCCC-led decision making, including largely understudied UNFCCC-led climate-finance decision-making. This knowledge is necessary to support more meaningful participation of women and women organisations and the implementation of climate change goals, which requires an unprecedented amount of funding, innovation, and efforts across scales (Pickering et al., 2013; Bird, 2015; Williams, 2016).
The objectives of the research are achieved through describing and analysing the quality of the UNFCCC’s policy and institutional strategies that guide the participation of women and women organisations across the three levels of the UNFCCC-led decision making, i.e. the decision-making by the Conference of the Parties (COP), decision-making by the UNFCCC’s Financial Mechanisms, as well as UNFCCC-led decision-making at the national level.
The research relies on an integrated outlook for studying participation. The term “meaningful” is used in the thesis to describe such participation that considers both the inclusivity of participatory processes that target women and women organizations and the instrumental contribution of women and women organisations to policy making. The analysis of UNFCCC policy strategies attempts to understand both the inclusiveness of policy language and the acknowledgment of various women groups and women organisations in UNFCCC-led decision-making processes as well as anticipated outcomes noted in policies as a result of the participation of women and women organisations. In addition to policy strategies (which describe discursive practices used by the UNFCCC), the research studies institutional strategies for understanding how knowledge produced by policies is transmitted and diffused to practice.
The research offers theoretical, policy and methodological contributions through improving understanding of multi-level UNFCCC-led governance using participation as an entry point, providing recommendations for more meaningful participation through better designed policy and institutional strategies; proposing and testing frameworks for analysing the quality of policy and institutional efforts to support the participation of women and women organisations.