Futuremaking in a Disaster Zone: Everyday Climate Change Adaptation amongst Quechua Women in the Peruvian Cordillera Blanca
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Date
2024-01-10
Authors
Moulton, Holly
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Indigenous women in Peru are often labeled “triply vulnerable” to climate change due to race, gender, and economic marginalization. Despite Peru’s focus on gender, Indigeneity, and intersectionality in national adaptation planning, this blanket label of women’s vulnerability persists in local ‘disaster zones’ like the Andes, where melting glaciers create flooding and water scarcity hazards. This narrative of vulnerability erases Indigenous women’s lived experiences and adaptions, positioning them as a “harmed and damaged” group bracing for climate disaster. As a result, most adaptation studies and policies in glaciated regions focus first on climate change and second on daily life, and only rarely on the intersections of gender, race, and class that shape adaptation futures.
This dissertation draws on interviews, document analysis, archival research, and participant observation to understand how Indigenous women are adapting to climate change in the Peruvian Cordillera Blanca, and how their diverse experiences are reflected by Indigenous women’s organizations and the Peruvian state in national level adaptation planning. I draw on a case study in the Cordillera Blanca mountain range—as well as an analysis of gender and Indigeneity in national adaptation planning—to show how Indigenous women’s adaptation experiences and demands play out across scales. I conducted fieldwork over the course of five cumulative months between 2017-2019, and I collaborated with a local researcher in the Cordillera Blanca to conduct in-depth interviews between 2020-2022.
The dissertation includes three findings: 1) Quechua women in the Cordillera Blanca engage in futuremaking, a framework that centers a fuller understanding of the everyday needs and desires of women and the communities they support, as opposed to the singular focus on interventions to reduce flood risk; 2) Indigenous women leaders in Peru draw on their territorial claims and resistance to extractive activities to re-make adaptation planning into a space that centers Indigenous sovereignty, and; 3) Quechua women’s labor in home gardens underpins community adaptations, upending regional templates of adaptation as infrastructure and hazard reduction. Ultimately, this research shows how women's futuremaking practices, adaptation labor, and resistance to territorial dispossession identify different risks and adaptation futures compared to most hazard-focused researchers and policymakers.
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Keywords
Andes, climate change, climate justice, feminist adaptations, glaciers, Quechua