Chapter 5. Embodied Perceptions, Everydayness, and Simultaneity in Climate Governance by Spanish Women Pastoralists

Abstract

According to recent projections, Spanish traditional pastoralism and extensive livestock management are highly threatened by climate change. Multiple stressors, such as depopulation and land abandonment, agricultural policy changes, and cultural changes, may combine with climate change to drive such systems towards an irreversible crisis. Although pastoral and extensive livestock management practices are widely recognized as powerful adaptive systems to a variable climate, studies on gendered social perceptions of climate hazards and responses to climate change in pastoralism are almost absent in the literature. Moreover, very few empirical studies on natural resources management look at intersecting power relations in the face of climate change.

In this chapter, the authors apply three key concepts from the feminist literature in climate change—embodiment, everyday life, and simultaneity/intersectionality—to study how Spanish women, engaged in extensive livestock production, perceive and feel climate change; how their subjective, diverse, lived, and sometimes contradictory experiences are linked to adaptation and mitigation responses to climate change and in general to systemic changes; and how intersecting axes of power, from the individual to the institutional, shape climate change governance. The researchers adopted a situated ethnography approach, collecting life histories of shepherdesses and women livestock operators and discussing key issues emerging from the histories with the interviewed women during collective workshops.

The authors observed that women pastoralists clearly express their understanding and experience of climate hazards through their bodies, their time, and their emotions. The women also express their differential agency in adapting to and mitigating climate hazards in a variety of ways in their daily life and the responses move between conserving traditions and innovating. Although more empirical investigations on intersectionality are needed, this chapter draws attention to the simultaneity of causes of marginality and power inequities among individuals and groups, which depend on their social locations, and the assumptions that privilege certain experiences and knowledges over others. It opens a window of opportunity for collaboration among women pastoralists and with researchers to transform social relations and build more inclusive solutions to climate hazards