Climate transformation through feminist ethics of care

Aiming to mitigate negative impacts of climate change, climate adaptation policy and practice increasingly engages with nuanced and differentiated impacts of climate change. Existing adaptation approaches and research informing them largely focus on outcomes of climactic events, but lack consideration of power structures shaping these phenomena and experiences of them. From a feminist peace perspective, I posit that tackling intersectional violences of climate change necessitates greater engagement with underlying knowledge. This paper explores how ways of knowing climate change impact ways of living with it: analyzing the ground on which climate action interventions stand and the paths on which they set us. I theorize 'climate transformation ' as processual shifts in ways of knowing a problem and solution toward norms of a feminist peace. Theory is developed abductively, based on original fieldwork in Puerto Rico and drawing on conflict transformation theory and elaborating knowledge production through feminist ethics of care. The model developed here enables analyzing orientations of current situations and change processes in relation to desirable futures. I find that actors involved in peace work and climate action in Puerto Rico foster transformation based on: caring in current relations and experience; caring through change processes affectively and reciprocally; and caring for a vision of the future through prefigurative and historicized imagination. The framework advances academic study and policy development on transformative climate action for tackling historic and intersectional violences to influence and enact particular visions of peace .