Towards a climate-friendly turn? Gender, culture and performativity in Danish transport policy

With contributions from a range of expert scholars in the field, this book investigates policy-making in climate institutions from the perspective of power as it relates to gender. It also considers other intersecting social factors at differ-ent levels of governance, from the global to the local level and extending into climate-relevant sectors.

Overall, this book demonstrates how feminist institutionalist theory and intersectional-ity approaches can contribute to an increased understanding of power relations and social differences in climate policy-making and in climate-relevant sectors in industrialised states. In doing so, it highlights the challenges of path dependencies, but also reveals opportunities for advancing gender equality, equity, and social justice. Gender, Intersectionality and Climate Institutions in Industrialised States, 1^st edition, is edited by Gunnhildur Lily Magnusdottir and Annica Kronsell, Routledge 2021.

In collaboration with Postdoc Michala Hvidt Breengaard, Associate Professor Hilda Rømer Christensen has contributed to the book 

The chapter 'Towards a Climate Friendly Turn? Gender, Culture and Performativity in Danish Transport Policy' explores why configurations of environmentally friendly transport and gender are vital in policy-making. The authors demonstrate how such alignments have unfolded in Denmark by examining a range of communicative events related to gender and the enhancement of more climate-friendly transport practices.

Using digital media archives and drawing on a recent network analysis of the Danish political elite, this chapter analyses how the car-centred society have been constantly re-constituted and maintained in both society and in the particular culture of transport policy. The authors show how there appears to be a certain institutional path-dependency in transport policy-making and culture reconstituting existing norms around car-centrism and masculine dominance.

Through the analysis of a paradigmatic case of Danish transport policy, both potentials and limitations of change are considered. The chapter demonstrates how the longstanding alliances of car culture and hegemonic masculine norms were performed at a critical moment in the development of Danish transport policy. The chapter also locates the gendered and cross-political character of these alliances and hegemonies. It shows how gender – various femininities and masculinities – have been shaped and nurtured within these institutional and hegemonic structures and cultures.

Read the chapter (open access): Towards a Climate Friendly Turn? Genter, Culture and Performativity in Danish Transport Policy.

Read the entire book (open access): Gender, Intersectionality and Climate Institutions in Industrialised States.