Where Commitment Dissipates: An Attenuation Cascade Theory of Gender in Climate Resilience Policy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63539/isrn.2026024Keywords:
Gender-Transformative Adaptation, Climate Resilience Policy, Policy Evaporation, Intersectionality, Climate Finance, AccountabilityAbstract
Climate policy increasingly recognises that unequal social relations shape climate risk, yet this recognition has not consistently changed budgets, eligibility rules, or outcomes. This article examines where near-universal gender commitments weaken and what determines the scale of that loss. Using theory-building thematic synthesis, it integrates feminist political ecology, intersectionality, social vulnerability theory, the capabilities approach, and transformative resilience with research on policy evaporation and gradual institutional change. It develops attenuation cascade theory, which proposes that gender commitments carry integration depth through six institutional conversions: framing, mandate, budget, eligibility, distribution, and outcome. Transmission is multiplicative, making realised depth dependent on the weakest conversion rather than the initial strength of commitment. Five propositions address the ordering of integration across analytical domains, concentration of loss at two critical conversions, distributive selectivity of formally neutral rules, differential survivability of policy instruments, and the role of independent verification in detecting attenuation. Evidence shows that gender is referenced in 95.0 per cent of national adaptation plans and by 81.5 per cent of Parties in their latest nationally determined contributions, yet fewer than one third of assessed contributions provide comprehensive treatment. Only 0.04 to about 3 per cent of climate-related development finance identifies gender equality as a principal objective. Application of a five-domain rubric to five policy systems produces the predicted ordering, although cross-case concordance is weak. The article identifies stage-specific instruments and conditions under which the theory would fail.
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