Postcolonial ecofeminist responses to the International Labour Organisation’s Just Transition framework

Climate change has been impactful to workers across the globe. To help labour transition into a green economy equitably, workers devised the concept of just transition which includes a gender element. One interpretation of just transition and gender is through the ILO’s Just Transition framework. While a positive move for the organisation, analysis of what this might mean for women in developing countries is absent in scholarship. Thus, this research begins with the query: How are the descriptions of women in previously colonised spaces in the ILO’s Just Transition framework compatible with postcolonial ecofeminist works? The anchoring method is Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) which provides guiding instructions to study power through language. Further, utilising postcolonial ecofeminist scholarship, this research helps to uncover points of tension in the ILO’s Just Transition framework pertaining to women’s agency, which would otherwise be overlooked. This research concludes that the ILO’s Just Transition framework’s gender equity project is faulty due to its misrepresentation of women’s skills and capacities, its incorrect prescription of solutions based on these misrepresentations and the misrepresentation that gender equity is limited to women’s rights issues.