Climate change and ‘architectures of entitlement’

This chapter examines how women from the Pacific Islands are featured in, and are able to shape debate on their experiences of, and responses to, the impacts of climate change. It describes ‘gendered architecture of entitlement’, showing how the prevailing narratives of virtue and vulnerability that are evident in the debate on sea-level rise in the Pacific influence where and how women may participate in responses to the environmental insecurity that afflicts their communities. The chapter considers how several examples are guided to disrupt a broader gendered architecture of entitlement that is both enabling and potentially constraining for women participants. Jetnil-Kijiner’s adherence to the gendered architecture of entitlement that structures climate change advocacy was something of a shift from the tone of her previous body of work. Ursula Rakova’s response to climate change in the region, subverts rather than accommodates the gendered architecture of entitlement, and she is treated as a kind of dissident, as result.