A Feminist Vision Statement for the Transition Away from Fossil Fuels Conference

Our current fossil-fueled economic model has led to the climate crisis, extreme violations of human rights, women’s rights, and Indigenous rights. It is clear that transforming this entrenched, extractive economic model is the main barrier facing us globally. This prevailing economic system is built on the exploitation of gendered and racialized labor, particularly of the unpaid and unrecognized care and domestic work led by migrants, women, and gender-diverse people. It is built on an unequal transfer of value, including raw materials and labor,  from the Global South to the Global North, enriching and enabling an energy transition for the benefit of some to the detriment of many.  The imperial violence of the Global North is one of the most significant barriers facing a transition away from fossil fuels, with the perpetuation of militarized domination to sustain fossil fuel dominance and access to critical minerals severely degrading the environment and threatening communities. This fossil-fueled militarization demands accountability and alternative forms of international solidarity that value cooperation over competition, extraction, and death. 

In parallel with the violence of war, racism, and xenophobia, growing geopolitical barriers reflect the increasing pushback against gender equality and women’s and gender-nonconforming people’s rights. The rollbacks of hard-won rights from leaders embracing “petromasculinity” — leadership characterized by fossil-fueled domination, patriarchy, and imperialism — represent an extreme geopolitical barrier to democracy and civil society movements. This leadership is about colonial domination over bodies and territories, and the imposition of military power for the purpose of plunder. These structural threats severely limit the ability of communities to exercise their human, social, political, and economic rights and access health, housing, land, education, work, social security, food sovereignty, and political representation — all of which hinder their ability to adapt, transition, and live dignified lives. These entrenched political interests are preventing a phaseout of fossil fuels while fueling gender backlash. Petromasculinity, militarism, and extractivism — by being rooted in a political culture that legitimizes violence as a form of governance — pose a direct threat to women, gender-diverse people, and nature.

Addressing the climate crisis demands a shift away from all extractivist, colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems — interlocking barriers to a potential transition that could actually act as a transformative vehicle for racial, gender, and economic justice. Any just and equitable transition requires systemic change that prioritizes the needs and experiences of fossil-fuel-impacted people and communities: women and girls in all their diversity, youth, trade unions and care workers, Indigenous Peoples, Afrodescendants, people with disabilities, migrants and displaced people, and local communities. It must uphold social justice, feminist economies centered on care, collective human and labor rights, poverty eradication, and decent work. We must do this work together, smashing these harmful barriers and building something new in their place.

Read the PDF to see what feminists want to see in Santa Marta. Encuentra la versión en español dentro del PDF.