JET and Feminism Publication: If It’s Not Feminist, It’s Not Just.

In the last decade, the Just Transition rhetoric has become part of the global discussion around addressing climate change, but yet again the 'Just' in Just Transition has been failing to address the systemic interlinked injustices that are integral to the current fossil energy system, including patriarchal oppression.

In late 2020, 100 activists from the Friends of the Earth federation around the globe came together with allied organisations in a series of three international webinars to analyse what a Just Energy Transition means from a feminist perspective1.

Women for decades have been on the forefront of resistance and alternatives to fossil fuel industries, as well as bearing the brunt of its social, economic, health and political impacts. The patriarchal extractivist system that exploits nature, territories and people, is fundamental to neoliberal capitalist accumulation and has led to the climate and nature crises. Without a feminist perspective integrated in the system change we are working towards and struggling for, there will be no justice in the Just Energy Transition. There also will not be a transition.

Months into the Covid-19 pandemic, we were witnessing and experiencing the gender impacts of yet another global crisis, which has laid bare the multiple, interlinking systemic injustices and vulnerabilities in our global world. We see women operating in solidarity on the Covid-19 frontlines to keep people alive and their communities going, but at the same time bearing the brunt of the pandemic socially, politically and economically, particularly black and indigenous women, women of colour and LBTQ women, and peasant and working class women.

Women as political subjects are central to the real lasting solutions we need to create.

This paper highlights our collective vision of the Just Energy Transition, as expressed and discussed by the participants of the 2020 FoEI international webinars, and founded on the experiences and perspectives of women across the globe and their fierce feminist demands for a system change that will be inclusive and just for us all.