Gender, power, and tokenism in nature-based solutions to climate change

Nature-based Climate Solutions (NbCS) are widely promoted for climate change adaptation and mitigation. While a growing body of literature has examined the prospects and challenges of NbCS, less attention has been paid to issues of gendered participation and equity. Using an intersectional feminist political ecology lens and qualitative data from Ghana, this paper addresses this knowledge gap. The findings demonstrate that participation in NbCS is shaped by intersecting power dynamics, including land tenure, wealth, and leadership status, rather than gender alone. Furthermore, while implementing organizations often claim to take gender equity seriously, the approaches taken are highly tokenistic. They prioritize quantitative counts in women's enrollment over targeting and addressing the root causes of gender inequality. These findings contribute to the climate and development literature by showing the need to take gender justice and intersectional inequalities seriously in the rollout of NbCS. We argue that advancing gender-transformative NbCS requires sustained engagement with intersectional power relations across all stages of project design, implementation, monitoring, and adaptive management.