Climate change, women and governance: Exploring linkages for inclusive climate action policies

The paper examines the interrelationships among climate change, gender, and governance. It interrogates whether legal and governance frameworks at the international and national levels possess the capacity to address the structural underpinnings of women’s climate vulnerability. The core argument focuses on assessing the effectiveness of these frameworks and identifying gaps in gender integration, utilising both international and domestic lenses (Sharma et al., 2024). Employing doctrinal legal analysis and governance critique, the study first assesses international climate law through a gendered lens, with reference to post-2015 normative developments and the International Court of Justice’s recent advisory opinion. The paper then appraises India’s national and sub-national climate governance architecture, highlighting institutional and legal gaps in gender integration. It ultimately argues that transforming climate governance into a gender-inclusive system requires moving beyond procedural mainstreaming toward substantive reforms that embed gender equality as a criterion in climate policy design, implementation, and accountability. India is examined as a focal case study due to its demographic scale, developmental trajectory, and democratic governance structure, which together make it a critical site for assessing whether gender-responsive climate governance can be operationalised in practice.