According to recent projections, Spanish traditional pastoral systems are highly threatened by climate change that, in relation to other multiple stressors, i.e. depopulation and land abandonment, agricultural policy changes, cultural changes, may drive them towards an irreversible crisis. Although traditional extensive livestock management practices are widely recognized as powerful adaptive systems to a variable climate, studies on gendered social perceptions of climate hazards and responses to climate change in pastoral systems are almost absent in the literature. Moreover, very few empirical studies on natural resources management look at intersecting power relations in the face of climate change.
In this chapter, we apply three key concepts from the feminist literature in climate change — embodiment, everyday life, and simultaneity/intersectionality– to study how Spanish women engaged in extensive livestock production perceive and feel climate change; how their subjective, diverse, lived and sometimes contradictory experiences are linked to adaptation and mitigation responses to climate change and in general to systemic changes; and how intersecting axes of power, from the individual to the institutional, shape climate change governance. To do it, we adopted a situated ethnography, collecting histories of life of shepherdesses and women livestock operators and discussing with the interviewed women during collective workshops. We interviewed women shepherdesses and livestock operators in three regions in Spain. We adopted a situated ethnography and we collected the histories of life of such women.
From our finding we observed that women pastoralists clearly express their understanding and experience of climate hazards through their bodies, their time, and their emotions as well as express their differential agency in adapting to and mitigating climate hazards in a variety of ways in their daily-life along a subtle thread among conservation of traditions and innovations. Despite more empirical investigations on intersectionality are needed, we also argue from our findings that drawing attention on the simultaneity of causes of marginality and power inequities among individuals and groups depending on their social location, and on the assumptions that privilege certain experiences and knowledges over others, may open a window of opportunity for transforming social relations and collaborating among women and with researchers to build more inclusive solutions to climate hazards.
The paper has been submitted for the book “Feminism and the Social Dimensions of Climate Change: Rural and Resource Contexts of the Global North” edited by Amber J. Fletcher and Maureen G. Reed, Eds. Routledge Series on Women and Environment (ed. Susan Buckingham)
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