Climate change and gender in Colombia: Exploring female led struggle in the flower industry

The chapter explores tensions between economic development understood as growth, its benefits for a country and its devastating consequences for the environment. Feminist academics have explored the differential effects of growth on women since the 1960s and provided diverse avenues for analysis, as well as possible solutions. Despite a robust literature, it is unclear how activists use and relate to academic insights. The chapter’s starting point is the tension between growth and the environment, its gendered effects and the interaction between activists and academics. It uses the example of activists from Colombia’s flower industry to illustrate how different feminist perspectives hit the ground. This shows how academic and policy makers’ approaches to gender and environment are at times insufficient, at other times instrumentalized or deemed irrelevant by activists. In sum, the particularities of women’s struggles in the outskirts of Bogotá demonstrate the need for more grounded approaches to the gender-climate nexus.