Critical Feminist Engagements with Green New Deals

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the current context of unprecedented and interconnected ecological and inequalities crises, many in the Global North are hitching their hopes onto Green New Deals (GNDs). This article argues that feminist analysis is crucial for exposing the flaws in GNDs, and that different kinds of feminist questioning lead to different kinds of policy responses, with very different scales of potential transformative impact. In order to transform the structures and root causes underlying the interconnected crises, it is necessary to go beyond feminist demands for the inclusion of diverse women and for gender equality and rely more on feminism as an analytical tool: a way of asking questions that denaturalize received wisdom and that make visible the ways in which gendered meanings play a formative role in shaping the concepts and paradigms that constitute knowledge of our world. HIGHLIGHTS Intersecting global crises impel the question, “what should the goal of economic life be?” Many climate “solutions” embed the same faulty ways of thinking that caused the crisis. Clean energy for the Global North spells toxic tolls for the Global South. GNDs neglect militarism, despite its key role in driving the climate crisis. GNDs remain rooted in a mindset that separates humanity from nature and will thus fail.