Is climate change the problem? A feminist analysis of climate change discourses in Spain and Catalonia

Abstract

The way climate change is framed and represented matters because it influences the type of actions and strategies promoted by climate-related policies. To understand how policies address climate change in the Spanish context, we performed an analysis of the discourse applying the “What’s the Problem Represented to be” Bacchi’s framework. We apply a feminist political ecology perspective, countering the dominant discourses around mitigation and adaptation to climate change, as well as identifying the silences on public policy at national (Spain) and regional (Catalonia) scales. Our results show that in both cases, the official policy discourse on climate change follows a techno-positivist and market driven narrative, mainly motivated by economic growth, not questioning much of the current economic model and without clearly addressing the responsibilities regarding the climate crisis and the resulting inequities associated to it. This representation presents climate change as a biophysical problem of increased concentration of greenhouse gases, which provides an opportunity for modernization and progress but at the same time, it is a threat to national security and a catalyst for existing vulnerabilities in the country. In contrast, the exploration of the silences of official public policy shows that climate change is represented as the visible consequence of a failed, patriarchal, and colonial system that needs to be solved under a social justice, human right and degrowth perspective. Alternative degrowth and ecofeminist discourses criticize the fallacy of greening the economic growth model and urge us to rethink the productive (and reproductive) current model, focusing on the sustainability of life as the central axis of transformation, “to live a life deserved to be lived”.