Whose Agenda? Gender, Climate Change and Cooperation Policies in Tunisia

Abstract Tunisia has made an explicit commitment to climate action from a gendered perspective with the adoption of an Action Plan on Gender and Climate Change in 2022. The plan adds to an array of existing strategies that are challenging to implement. The country is among those in the MENA region most at risk from the impact of climate projections on socio-economic factors. This paper draws on a review of the literature and legal and policy framework on climate change, along with an analysis of existing quantitative data on the Tunisian case. This is combined with qualitative empirical field research, conducted from April to August 2024 through in-depth interviews with national institutions (6), civil society (3), and key informants (4) and focus groups (6) with rightsholders of international cooperation programmes. Using an intersectional feminist policy analysis framework combined with a socio- economic analysis, the paper provides an overview of Tunisia’s climate policies from a gender perspective. It addresses three specific areas of inquiry: first, the evolution of national strategies on climate over time and key inflection points in Tunisia’s political history and how they shaped climate policies; second, the scope for complementarity and trade-offs between international actors and domestic agency in Tunisia’s climate strategies; third, the paper analyses crucial elements of Tunisia’s gender climate governance and policies and highlights some critical issues for future research.