Oakbridge Gendering Climate Futures Power Finance Justice in a Warming World by Kalyani Shukla & Sandra V Kurian Edition 2026

Gendering Climate Futures by Kalyani Shukla & Sandra V Kurian Edition 2026

Gendering Climate Futures by Kalyani Shukla & Sandra V Kurian Edition 2026

Description

Across South Asia, women stand at the centre of a warming world — tilling land they seldom own, absorbing the shocks of flood and drought long before anyone else notices, and now, increasingly, building the solar parks, seed banks, and clean enterprises reshaping the region’s future. And yet, in the rooms where climate finance is allocated, policy is drafted, and international agreements are signed, they remain strikingly absent. Gendering Climate Futures argues that this is no accident of oversight. It is the entirely predictable outcome of a climate agenda that has treated gender as a footnote rather than a foundation. Weaving together feminist political ecology, political economy, grassroots testimony, and rigorous diplomatic data, this volume moves fluidly across scale: from the quiet politics of land, water, and unpaid labour that shape everyday survival, to the vast and often opaque architecture of global climate finance; from the self-help groups powering India’s renewable energy transition from the ground up, to the still largely empty chairs held by South Asian women at the international negotiating table. Seven distinct chapters, seven distinct lenses — and one shared, urgent question: what would it actually take for women to move from inclusion to genuine influence? Grounded in South Asia, one of the regions most exposed to climate catastrophe, this book refuses easy answers and comfortable slogans alike. It insists, instead, that gender equity is not a side conversation to the climate agenda — it is the agenda’s unfinished centre, the place where power, finance, and justice must finally meet. Rigorously researched, elegantly argued, and consistently alive to the human stakes beneath the policy language, Gendering Climate Futures is essential reading for policymakers, scholars, and practitioners — and for anyone who has ever asked why climate action so rarely reaches the women already shaping its possibilities.

About the Author

Kalyani Shukla is a researcher whose work engages with the intersections of gender, climate governance, and inclusive development within broader socio-political and historical contexts. Her research interests encompass gender inequalities, energy transitions, geopolitics, and development economics. Drawing on experience across research, consulting, and teaching, she has contributed to empirical and archival studies, policy analysis, stakeholder engagement, and programme evaluation, always with an eye toward translating research into actionable insight. Her work is guided by an interest in how structural inequalities and governance frameworks shape developmental outcomes. She is committed to advancing interdisciplinary scholarship that informs equitable and sustainable policy design through critical inquiry and participatory approaches.

Sandra V Kurian is a Program & Research Associate at the President’s Office at Chintan Research Foundation, New Delhi, where she facilitates high-level engagements and strategic initiatives. She is also associated with the Centre for Climate Change and Energy Transition at CRF, contributing to research on decarbonisation and sustainable transitions. Her research experience includes the political economy of climate change, gender, energy transition, green skilling, and urban mobility. She holds a Master’s in Development Studies from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati and a Bachelor’s in Economics from Mahatma Gandhi University. Previously, she worked with the Swaniti Initiative, advancing a project on just transition in the textile sector, alongside undertaking parliamentary research, advocacy initiatives, and supporting multi-stakeholder policy dialogues across government, industry, and civil society.