3 Introduction 7 Focusing on Gender 10 Mapping the Intersection of Climate Change Mitigation and Gender: Context and Opportunity 14 A Strategy for Gender Research 20 Political ecology analysis: Shifting power to improve impacts 21 Supporting Local Innovation 30 Evaluating Women’s Contribution to Climate Change Mitigation 35 Approaches to participatory action research and scaling up 42 References 48 Appendix 1: Definitions of Gender, Gender Justice and Low Emissions Development 55 Appendix 2: Facilitating Changes in Agricultural Technologies and, in the Process, in Gender Relations in Upland Honduras 57 Appendix 3: Key Players in the Climate Change Finance World 59 Appendix 4: Placing Climate Change on the National Agenda in Ghana 61 Appendix 5: What a narrative analysis can tell us about climate change mitigation .. 63 Appendix 6: GROOTS, leadership and gender-just climate change mitigation ......... 65 Appendix 7: Climate Airwaves, climate justice and long-term capacity building ...... 66 Appendix 8: What is social learning? 68 Appendix 9: Interviewees 70

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Special Issue: Political Economy of Climate Change

A gender strategy for pro-poor climate change mitigation

This research provides policy-relevant insights into how a mass-scale, equitable transition to the use of Advanced Biomass (cook) Stoves (ABSs) can be achieved in India, with the aim of improving public health, especially for women and children. The research uses socio-technical systems to provide a characterisation of transition processes, and governance to explain issues of power influencing transition. A review of previous government cook-stove programmes in India and China highlights governance shortcomings in the former, in particular a lack of functional links between layers of administration and poor engagement with community institutions and cooks. Primary data from West Bengal and Karnataka highlighted sophisticated, skilful, flexible and culturally context specific cooking practices. Reasons for apparent low demand for improved stoves, characterised as lock-in, are found to include a combination of risk aversion and habits, lack of affordability, low awareness of the health consequences, as well as a mis-match between the normative priorities of policy makers – currently health- and those of cooks. It is found that the majority of polluting emissions within households - as well as greenhouse gases - from cooking derive from poorer households. A sectoral carbon offset strategy is proposed as a means of funding subsidies for ABSs and programme support measures. Several large corporations have invested significant sums in technology development, community outreach and dissemination, resulting in sales of over 600,000 ABSs. Reasons for their involvement appear mixed. Their market-based activities have generally not reached poor households and there are questions about their ability to build viable businesses in this highly dispersed and heterogeneous sector. A fundamental dichotomy is highlighted between large, centralised cooking programmes and the diverse, complex and changing reality of cooking activities, beliefs and behaviours on the ground. The research concludes that functional multi-level and multi-actor governance structures would be required to achieve a mass-scale transition to clean cooking using ABSs, with a lead role for the public sector. A key component of future success will involve building structures that ensure the agency of cooks and account for their socio-cultural cooking practices in the processes of technology and programme design and implementation.

Achieving a mass-scale transition to clean cooking in India to improve public health

http://r4d.dfid.gov.uk/pdf/outputs/CCAFS/CCAFSWorkingPaper36.pdf

Special Issue: Political Economy of Climate Change

Citations

A gender strategy for pro-poor climate change mitigation

Achieving a mass-scale transition to clean cooking in India to improve public health

A gender strategy for pro-poor climate change mitigation. CCAFS Working Paper no. 36.

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