The Asia Pacific is predicted to have the greatest proportion of people already exposed and vulnerable to concurrent extreme weather events and the intensification of climate change-related security risks.

 

What can we learn from Asia Pacific women’s regional networks in ensuring existing risk mapping and analyses are ‘fit for purpose’ as simultaneous catastrophes become endemic globally?

 

Drawing on feminist and postcolonial approaches, this research seeks to examine how and why women’s regional networks in the Asia Pacific develop distinct perspectives and practices in responding to a multiplicity of crises.

 

In bringing women’s regional networks to bear on the existing scholarship and policy agenda on climate change, this research situates their significance within 1) a longer history of conceptualising women’s insecurity within a matrix of oppressions fuelled by capitalism, colonialism/imperialism, and nationalism; and 2) genealogy of political thought as ‘Third World’ women who have distinctly experienced, interpreted, resisted and theorised the global order.

 

Dr Maria Tanyag is a Research Fellow / Lecturer at the Department of International Relations at the ANU Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, and a Resident Women, Peace and Security Fellow at Pacific Forum. Her most recent publications are Sexual Health and World Peace in the Routledge Handbook of Feminist Peace Research, and A Feminist Call to Be Radical: Linking Women’s Health and Planetary Health in the journal Politics & Gender. In 2020, Dr Tanyag was one of the contributing authors to the global report entitled Gender, Climate and Security: Sustaining Inclusive Peace on the Frontlines of Climate Change published by UNEP, UN Women, UN DPPA, and UNDP.