Climate change and women’s voice & agency beyond the household insights from India
Women’s Voice & Agency beyond the household (VABH) has increasingly been recognized as critical to strengthening resilience, increasing women’s access to important resources, improving women’s decision-making power, and facilitating broader social networks (Njuki et al. 2022). Despite rapidly intensifying climate change in recent years, a knowledge gap persists as to how climate change may affect women’s VABH in developing countries. This has been particularly challenging in countries like India, which host one of the largest numbers of the poor and has been increasingly plagued by droughts, floods, cyclones, rising temperatures, and increasing rainfall fluctuations. This study provides a conceptual discussion on the linkages between climate change and VABH and analyzes their empirical relationship using multiple rounds of nationwide household data from India (India Human Development Survey 2005, 2012; World Values Survey 2001, 2006, 2012); climate data; and data on women’s political representation at the district level.
