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Gender and Just Transitions

This image shows a stepped rice terrace with mountains in the background. In the foreground, a woman dressed in pink and blue clothing is tending to the rice.

A just transition is a set of principles for addressing the world’s environmental and economic challenges in tandem, helping to ensure that market-based or technologically driven ‘green economy’ solutions do not undermine the pursuit of social justice and inclusion. Without explicit attention to gender, a just transition risks replicating or even exacerbating structural gender inequalities

The IGD is collaborating on this project to understand what a gender-just transition could look like and what frameworks will be useful for policymakers, researchers and practitioners.

About this Project

Through engagement in research and practice with collaborators from around the world, Somali Cerise (Research to Practice Associate, IGD) and Sarah Cook (Research to Practice Associate, IGD and Honorary Adjunct Associate Professor, UNSW) are working on understanding how gender, care and justice can be included in future development practice. This project on Gender and Just Transitions forms part of the IGD's work focussed on 'Equity and Social Justice'. 

This work will explore what justice and gender inclusion looks like from various disciplines with a goal to develop a framework for understanding how we can embed a gender equitable focus in just transitions. It includes a series of events, interviews and research papers that begin to explore what the future of care and economies could look like and how the IGD can contribute to shaping a path forward.

Project Activities

Gender and Just Transitions Interview Series: Perspectives on a Gender Just Transition

Somali Cerise and Sarah Cook (Project Leads - Gender and Just Transitions Project) are currently leading an interview series with practitioners and policymakers worldwide to explore different perspectives on what a gender just transition could look like.

Workshops: Feminist Approaches to a Just Transition

Across two sessions in September 2020, the IGD was delighted to host an extraordinary group of experts from around the world to discuss feminist approaches to a ‘just transition’. The need to redefine the relationship between humans and the environment, and move away from GDP as the widely accepted measure of success.

Read the summary from the workshop here.

Research Leads

The Risk & Resilience Dialogues are video discussions with Australian & International thinkers about their work, ideas, and the challenges they see in ‘risk’ governance, achieving disaster risk reduction & enhancing socio-technical and institutional resilience.  They are intended to explore the contemporary thinking and experiences of individuals from diverse backgrounds.

  • Research to Practice Associate

    Somali is a global human rights and gender equality expert, with experience working across Australia, the UK at the OECD and at the United Nations. Somali currently leads a range of gender equality initiatives and is also an Adjunct Associate Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences at the University of Sydney, and a board member of ACON. She has a BA (UTS) and a Master of Science (Human Rights) (London School of Economics and Political Science).
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  • Research to Practice Associate & Honorary Adjunct Associate Professor

    Sarah Cook is currently an IGD Research to Practice Associate and Honorary Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences at UNSW. She was previously the inaugural Director for the Institute for Global Development at UNSW. Prior to that she spent almost 10 years leading research institutes within the UN - as the Director of UNICEF’s Office of Research / Innocenti Research Centre, in Florence, Italy and from 2009-2015 as Director, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) in Geneva. In these roles, she has led research on transformative social and economic policy, shaping debates in the UN on equity, sustainability and social justice, and engaging at the intersection of research, policy and programming. Her own research has focused primarily on China, following its social and economic transformations over more than 3 decades. Key research interests include social policy/protection, labour markets and migration, and gender. From 1996-2009 Sarah was a Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, and spent 5 years as a Programme Officer with the Ford Foundation in Beijing. She received her PhD in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
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