Presented by Markus Ihalainen, from the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) in Nairobi, Kenya, on August 29, 2017.

1. INTERSECTIONALITY
Markus Ihalainen - CIFOR

2. “Women are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change than men” (UN
WomenWatch)

3. “Women are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change than men” (UN
WomenWatch)
“Women and children are 14 times more vulnerable than men in climate
change-related natural disasters, such as the floods and droughts” (Phumzile
Mlambo-Ngcuka, executive director of UN Women)

4. “Women are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change than men” (UN
WomenWatch)
“Women and children are 14 times more vulnerable than men in climate
change-related natural disasters, such as the floods and droughts” (Phumzile
Mlambo-Ngcuka, executive director of UN Women)
“While earlier studies have tended to highlight women’s quasi-universal
vulnerability in the context of climate change … this focus can ignore the
complex, dynamic, and intersecting power relations and other structural and
place-based causes of inequality” (IPCC 2014, 808)

5. INTERSECTIONALITY – WHAT IS IT?

6. INTERSECTIONALITY – WHAT IS IT?
• “We experience life - discrimination and benefits - based
on different identities that we have … intersectionality is
the combination - as opposed to the addition - of race and
gender that creates a specific form of oppression”
(Kimberlé Crenshaw, interview)
• “The interaction between gender, race and other
categories of difference in individual lives, social
practices, institutional arrangements, and cultural
ideologies and the outcomes of these interactions in
terms of power” (Kathy Davis 2008, 68).
• Intersectionality is “the best chance for an effective
diagnosis and ultimately an effective prescription” (Ange-
Marie Hancock 2007, 73)
• “Intersectionality … does not provide written-in-stone
guidelines for doing feminist inquiry … [i]nstead it
encourages each feminist scholar to engage critically with
her own assumptions in the interests of reflexive, critical,
and accountable feminist inquiry” (Davis 2008, 79)
http://miriamdobson.wordpress.com/ 2013/04/24/intersectionality-a-fun-guide/

7. HISTORY OF THE CONCEPT
• ‘Intersectionality theory’ was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, but
many others have advanced similar thoughts before that.
“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and
lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps
me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I
a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and
gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman?”
Sojurner Truth, 1851

8. HISTORY OF THE CONCEPT
• ‘Intersectionality theory’ was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, but
many others have advanced similar thoughts before that.
• DeGraffenreid vs. General Motors (Crenshaw 1989)
– “With Black women as the starting point, it becomes more apparent how
dominant conceptions of discrimination condition us to think about
subordination as disadvantage occurring along a single categorical axis
… in race discrimination cases, discrimination tends to be viewed in
terms of sex- or class-privileged Blacks; in sex discrimination cases, the
focus in on race- and class-privileged women” (1989, 57).
• Intersectionality and domestic violence ( 1991)
– Structural intersectionality
– Political intersectionality
– Representational intersectionality

9. SOME KEY PRINCIPLES
• “There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives”
(Audrey Lorde)
– Social categories interact with and co-constitute one another to create unique social
locations that vary according to time and place
– Important categories and relationships are identified rather than predetermined
• Multi-level analysis
– Linking individual experiences to broader structures and systems (macro – micro)
• Power
– Operates on multiple levels and shapes subject positions and categories (e.g. race,
racialization, racism and anti-racism) – critical examination of categories
– Power is relational – a person can simultaneously experience both privilege and
oppression
• Normative commitment to structural transformation and social justice
– “Through the examination of the intersecting factors and conditions by which power is
not only produced, reproduced but also actively resisted, intersectionality calls for a
more complex approach to address the system that creates power differentials,
rather than the symptoms of it” (Hancock 2007)
• Reflexivity

10. IDENTITY WHEEL

11. EXAMPLE 1.
Adoption of improved farming practices
• Quantitative survey with male and female farmers to examine how factors
such as age, ethnicity, gender and marital status affect the uptake of
improved farming practices.
• Results indicate no significant difference between male and female farmers.
However, ethnicity, age and marital status are found to determine levels of
uptake of improved farming practices:
• Gender – no significant difference between men and women
• Ethnicity – farmers from ethnic group A more likely to adopt than farmers
from group B
• Age – youth less likely to adopt
• Marital status – farmers who are married and live together are more likely to
adopt than unmarried, divorced/widowed

12. EMPIRICAL APPROACHES
• Unitary approach
• Multiplicative approach (Hancock 2007)/intercategorical approach (McCall 2005)
– E.g. how does ethnicity or gender or ethnicity x gender affect employment
opportunities on oil palm plantations?
– Focus on categories to identify patterns of relations between them
– Assumes that each category has a valid, stable social meaning
– Allows for examining how e.g. gender is raced and race is gendered
– Risks obscuring intra-group diversity and reinforcing categories (identity influence)
• Intracategorical approach (McCall 2005)/Inclusion/Voice Models (Castello Jones et al)
– Focus on understanding and amplifying experiences at neglected social locations (e.g.
minority women’s experiences of tenure reform)
– Allows to deal with fluidity of categories, to account for intra-group diversity and can
help break down simplistic notions of status categories
– Risks neglecting broader power structures as well as relations between social
locations (focus on the ‘most vulnerable/marginalized’)
• Anticategorical approach (McCall 2005)
– Rejects the use of categories as they are artificial and exclusionary
– Difficult to operationalize empirically

13. GENDER AND CLIMATE VULNERABILITY IN MALI
DJOUDI & BROCKHAUS 2011
• Objective to understand socially differentiated perceptions of climate change in
northern Mali, which is facing increasing climatic variability, including droughts
• Workshops with different groups stratified by gender, age and ethnicity
• Due to climate change, market shifts and tenure reforms, agriculture has
become less viable
• Men are adopting out-migration for employment purposes as a viable adaptation
strategy
• Women’s vulnerability has increased because of the adaptive strategy chosen
by men, as male activities are being added to women’s already high workload.
• Without secure tenure and command over financial resources, many women are
unable to pursue agriculture in the drying climate.
• Women from lower social classes are defying traditional gender norms barring
women from entering charcoal production. Due to the social stigma associated
with the activity, women from higher social classes are not able to engage in
charcoal production.

14. MIGRATION, GENDER AND COMMUNITY FORESTRY
SIJAPATI BASNETT 2013
• Objective to understand how migration and multi-local livelihoods affect the
social dynamics of local natural resource management.
• Ethnographic field work in two villages in Nepal
• Discourses of equity; increased politicization of ‘gender’, ‘caste’, ‘class’ in Nepali
politics
• Village 2: historical patron-client relationship between high and low castes
• Increasing outmigration by young men (incl. low castes) to Gulf countries
• Conflict over community forestry: esp. low caste women dependent on forest
products, high castes opposed due to practices of untouchability and presence
of sacred sites in the forest.
• Remittance-class (senior low caste men) launched caste-based struggle,
capitalizing on the national Dalit struggle and discourses of ‘equality’ – women
pressured to align themselves with their caste
• Upon gaining control over community forestry, decision-making power was
vested in senior men. To demonstrate that giving them control was the ‘right
thing to do’, focus on protecting forest rather than ensuring secure access
– Women’s concerns increasingly marginalized

15. HOW CAN INTERSECTIONALITY INFORM YOUR
RESEARCH?

16. cifor.org
blog.cifor.org
ForestsTreesAgroforestry.org a.duchelle@cgiar.org