Social dimensions of climate hazards in rural communities of the global North: An intersectionality framework

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Social dimensions of climate hazards in rural communities of the global North: An intersectionality framework Walker Heidi M.a,∗, Angela Culhamb, Amber J. Fletcherb, Maureen G. Reeda a b

School of Environment and Sustainability, University of Saskatchewan, 117 Science Place, Saskatoon, Canada Department of Sociology and Social Studies, University of Regina, 3737 Wascana Parkway, Regina, Canada

A R T I C LE I N FO Keywords: Climate hazards Intersectionality Gender Rural communities Global North

Livelihood, employment, subsistence, and recreational practices of rural and Indigenous communities in the global North are increasingly impacted by climate hazards such as wildfire, floods, and drought. However, communities are often viewed as homogenous entities, with little recognition to how diverse individuals within those communities experience and respond to such hazards. Intersectionality, a concept derived from feminist theory, offers a promising lens for delineating how power relationships and interacting social characteristics such as gender, race, ethnicity, class, location, and age influence context-specific experiences of climate hazards. In this paper, we relate our findings from a rapid literature review identifying how intersectionality is currently being approached in climate hazards research of the global North. With these findings, along with insights from theoretical intersectionality scholarship, we then develop an analytical framework composed of five attributes to guide empirical research on the social dimensions of climate hazards in rural communities of the global North. The framework offers a means for comparative intersectional research, contributing to an enhanced understanding of socially equitable and culturally appropriate adaptive responses, outcomes, and decision-making.

1. Introduction Future climate projections indicate increasing intensity and frequency of hazards such as wildfire, flooding, and drought in many parts of the world (IPCC, 2012; Noble et al., 2014; Trenberth, 2012). In the global North, livelihood, employment, recreational, and subsistence practices of agricultural, forestry, resource-based, and Indigenous communities are particularly impacted by such hazards. To date, however, climate change adaptation research and policy in rural contexts have primarily focused on technical solutions and physical infrastructure (Reed et al., 2014). Research in agriculture, for example, has emphasized the technical aspects of production, such as soil management and drought resistant cropping techniques (e.g., Kang and Banga, 2013), while research in forestry has focused on topics such as assisted migration of tree species (e.g., Gray et al., 2011) and physical infrastructure in forestry-dependent communities (e.g., Furness and Nelson, 2012; Reed et al., 2014). Climate hazards are extreme situations that can expose and intensify existing social inequalities within and between households and communities. Vulnerability and adaptive capacity to climate hazards are influenced by context-specific social and power relationships, which create differential access to resources and opportunities to participate

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in decision-making for adaptation (Cannon and Müller-Mahn, 2010; Eriksen et al., 2015). A growing body of literature demonstrates how preparedness, experience, and response to climate change impacts are shaped by gendered social relationships, though scholars working in the global North observe that much of this work has focused on regions of the global South (Alston, 2017; Alston and Whittenbury, 2013; Cohen, 2017; MacGregor, 2010). As Cohen (2017: 4) points out, in wealthy countries of the global North “there is neither a well-developed body of information about the effects of climate change by gender, nor how public policy that is intended to cope with or mitigate climate change affects people differently, whether by gender or any other form of difference.” She suggests that gender has garnered greater attention in the global South due to the very direct ways in which subsistence and primary sector livelihoods are impacted by climate change and the mainstream integration of gender with sustainable development in international development policy. In contrast, a pervasive perception that gender inequity is less of a problem in the global North may have contributed to the relative absence of gender analysis in climate change research and policy-making. However, despite this relative absence, there is evidence that gender relations do matter to how people experience and respond to climate hazards such as drought (Alston, 2011; Fletcher and Knuttila, 2016),

Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (H.M. Walker).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.09.012 Received 28 August 2018; Received in revised form 12 September 2019; Accepted 22 September 2019 0743-0167/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: Walker Heidi M., et al., Journal of Rural Studies, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.09.012

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of power. Intersectionality emphasizes attention to the relational nature of power and social categories, underscoring that neither is static, but fluctuate across time and space (Hankivsky, 2014). While power is highly contextual, such that individuals can experience both oppression and privilege simultaneously, it tends to stabilize within dominant systems and institutions, so its presence is perceptible within everyday experience (Fletcher, 2018; Walby et al., 2012). Intersectionality also pays explicit attention to power dynamics at multiple levels of analysis, including social structures and organizations (macro and meso levels), lived experience at intersections of identity (micro level), and sociocultural norms and discourses (representation) (Winker and Degele, 2011). While few studies examine phenomena at all levels and lingering questions persist around how they can be simultaneously explored in a practical way, the relational nature of intersectionality demands attention to the complex interconnections and interactions both among and within levels of analysis. Winker and Degele (2011), for example, suggest that these multiple levels and the relationships among them can be brought into view through the empirical examination of individuals' social practices. These practices indicate how individuals construct their own identities and how these constructions are influenced by, and contribute to, social structures and norms. Similarly, Bowleg (2008) cites the need to constantly reflect on the social contexts, including historical and sociocultural structures and norms, that connect to and shape individuals' experiences and identities in the specific context of study. Consistent with its underpinnings in Black feminism, intersectionality is not only an important tool for describing complex, context-specific inequalities across social landscapes, but it also “aims to question dominant logics, to further antisubordination efforts, and to forge collective models for social transformation” (May, 2014:4). Collins and Bilge (2016) similarly emphasize intersectionality as critical inquiry and critical praxis. It is a tool for both understanding the complex underpinnings of social inequality and for fostering action that responds to those understandings and ultimately aims to build more equitable societies. For example, an intersectional lens opens up the possibility to uncover the gendered tendencies that are embedded, often unconsciously, within social and political structures and which emerge in decision-making and practice (Smooth, 2013). Further, an intersectional approach points to the possibility of agency of the individual in a reciprocal relationship with social structures and underscores the necessity to move beyond exclusive focus on the individual or the structure (Hancock, 2007). Since early articulations of intersectionality, the concept has travelled widely, both geographically and intellectually, across a variety of social science and humanities disciplines such as sociology, criminology, gender studies, public policy, and education (Collins, 2015). However, as our findings demonstrate, intersectionality is only just beginning to be considered in the context of climate change. An intersectional lens applied to a climate context can create a more nuanced picture of how social identities and power dynamics interact across levels of analysis to create highly differentiated experiences of, and responses to, climate hazards (Kaijser and Kronsell, 2014). Intersectional explorations of climate impacts and adaptive responses can also illuminate where existing or proposed adaptation strategies and policies reinforce social inequalities, thus encouraging critical consideration around how such inequalities might be contested and overcome.

wildfire (Eriksen, 2014; Tyler and Fairbrother, 2013; Whittaker et al., 2016), and severe storms (Seager, 2006; Vasseur et al., 2015) in the global North. This is particularly true in rural regions where economic reliance on natural resources is typically more direct than in urban places and where climate disasters affect both landscapes and livelihoods. As attention to gendered relationships grows, there is also movement away from a dichotomized view of gender where women and men are juxtaposed, and women portrayed either as uniformly and universally vulnerable to climate impacts or as virtuous environmental caretakers (Arora-Jonsson, 2011; MacGregor, 2010). This shift is occurring in recognition that women and men are not static, homogenous categories of analysis, but that other context-specific social and cultural characteristics intersect to shape peoples' diverse experiences of climate impacts (Cutter et al., 2009; Cohen, 2017; Reed et al., 2014; Tschakert et al., 2013). For example, Joni Seager argued that the “the gender, class, and race dimension of each disaster needs particular explanation” (Seager, 2006:2). We agree that although gender remains a persistent axis of power and social differentiation, it should not be the only axis considered. Intersectionality, a concept derived from anti-racist feminist theory, offers a promising lens for delineating how power relationships and interacting social characteristics such as gender, race, ethnicity, class, location, and age influence differential, context-specific experiences of climate hazards (Kaijser and Kronsell, 2014; Thompson-Hall et al., 2016). Intersectionality also provides a potential pathway for understanding the role of power relationships in constructing both vulnerable and privileged social positions, while also being attuned to expressions of human agency in local responses to climate risks. More nuanced analysis of the social dimensions of climate hazards is an important step in ensuring existing social inequalities are not reinforced or exacerbated as decision-makers determine how to respond to climate hazard risks. Despite its promise, intersectionality remains largely conceptual in climate change research. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to advance an analytical framework for intersectionality to guide empirical climate hazards research in rural contexts of the global North. The framework is based on a rapid review of existing literature on intersectionality and climate hazards, along with insights from key theoretical intersectionality writings. Rapid review is an efficient and critical review of relevant literature to inform framework development. We begin by defining intersectionality before describing the review method and key findings. We then describe the analytical framework with five attributes drawn from the insights and the absences of research revealed by our literature search. We conclude by explaining how this framework will help produce useable knowledge for communities and decision-makers seeking socially equitable and culturally appropriate adaptive responses to locally relevant climate hazards. 2. Intersectionality The origins of intersectionality are rooted in Black feminist theorizing of the 1960s–1980s, which criticized feminist scholars for discounting the unique experiences and subordinations of Black women living at the intersection of sexism, racism, and other systems of oppression (Collins, 2015; Combahee River Collective, 1983; Crenshaw, 1991). The term intersectionality is usually attributed to Kimberlé Crenshaw who, in two formative papers, critiqued mainstream feminism for its implicit portrayal of white, middle-class women as representative of a universal women's experience (Crenshaw, 1991, 1989). While no single accepted definition exists, general agreement is that “intersectionality references the critical insight that race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, and age operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but as reciprocally constructing phenomena that in turn shape complex social inequalities” (Collins, 2015:2). In other words, social inequality is not formed by any single factor alone, but by multiple overlapping social locations and systems

3. Method A rapid literature review is meant to provide an overview of a field of study in a rigorous and transparent but timely manner by abbreviating certain process components of a full systematic literature search (Grant). This includes, for example, narrowing the research question, using less comprehensive sets of search terms, limited use of grey and print materials, and simplified quality assessments and results 2

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synthesis (UK Government, n.d.). A rapid review was suitable to our study as our intention was not to retrieve and assess every piece of available evidence, but to critically review relevant and readily available literature to inform the development of our intersectionality framework for empirical research. Our search strategy followed the rapid review procedure outlined by the National Collaborating Centre for Methods and Tools (Dobbins, 2017). A broad initial literature search using terms related to gender, intersectionality, and climate change was performed using Google Scholar (GS). While a number of the retrieved studies touched on the role and implications of gender and intersecting social identity categories in relation to climate change, we found the results were too broad to effectively inform the development of an intersectionality framework for climate hazards research. Therefore, we decided to narrow our search to literature taking an explicitly intersectional approach to this field of research. We conducted a rapid literature review (June-August, 2019) using the guiding research question: How is intersectionality being conceptualized and applied in climate hazards research in the global North? GS was the designated search database for the rapid review. The database has been shown effective in retrieving both highly cited and lesser known sources, and returns as much as 100 percent of the results retrieved by other scholarly databases (Gehanno et al., 2013; Hitomi and Loring, 2018). However, we recognize that GS is limited in its ability to retrieve grey literature sources. Haddaway et al. (2015) found that the bulk of grey literature sources appear after 20 pages of GS results. Therefore, to mitigate GS's limitations in retrieving relevant grey literature, we scanned a minimum 25 pages of results. Further, review of results continued until we reached three pages (30 sources in total) with no new results meeting our inclusion criteria. During the first phase, two researchers applied key search terms and reviewed titles, abstracts, and key words of the retrieved articles using pre-determined inclusion and exclusion criteria. Key search terms related to two thematic areas – intersectionality and climate hazards (Table 1). Applying a single search term for the former theme ensured that our search focused on studies firmly grounded in intersectionality theory. We included sources that were: 1) peer-reviewed academic articles, grey literature reports, or book chapters with full text available through our university databases or through free online sources (e.g., Google Books); 2) conceptual pieces relevant globally or to regions within the global North, or empirical pieces located in rural areas of the global North; 3) applied intersectionality as a core concept; 4) and written in English. No date parameters were applied. Sources were excluded if they were of primary relevance to the global South or urban contexts, were not directly relevant to the study of climate hazards (including those with a primary focus on climate change mitigation), and if intersectionality was not applied as a core concept (e.g., reliance on sex- or gender-disaggregated data or conceptualized gender in a binary manner). In a second phase, the researchers merged citation lists and removed duplicates, retrieved full text versions of each remaining source, and again evaluated these against the established inclusion and exclusion criteria. In the case of sources for which there was disagreement or uncertainty about inclusion, the third and fourth reviewers served to break ties relating to final decisions on inclusion. Fig. 1 illustrates the number of publications included and excluded at each phase of the rapid review process. Finally, we recorded publication information

Fig. 1. Rapid review process.

(author(s), date, journal, etc.), geographical location of author(s) and studies, publication type (i.e. conceptual, empirical, review), methodological information, definition/conceptualization of intersectionality, acknowledged gaps or limitations, and other information pertinent to the development of an intersectionality framework in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. 4. Overview of the research A total of 25 sources met the inclusion criteria (see supplementary data for citations), all of which were published between 2010 and 2019 (Figs. 1 and 2). A greater number of publications appeared in the latter half of that period, with a peak number occurring in 2016. The small number of sources in 2019 can be attributed, in part, to the timing of our review, which ended in August of that year. While difficult to comment on trends over time due to the relatively small sample size, the observation that publications only began to appear around 2010 indicates that the application of intersectionality to climate hazards research is still an emerging body of work. Geographically, the studies were authored by scholars in North America (USA and Canada), Northern Europe (Sweden and Finland), Germany, Southern Europe (Spain and Portugal), Australia, and regions of the global South (Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Peru) (Fig. 3). The bulk of authorship appears to be emerging from North America, particularly the USA, though this finding may be influenced by population and our sole emphasis on English-language publications. Publication types included peer-reviewed academic articles (n = 19), book chapters (n = 5), and grey literature reports (n = 1). We recognize that our choice to use GS may have limited the amount of grey literature returned by our search, even with a mechanism in place to overcome this barrier. The majority (n = 21) of the publications were considered conceptual since they synthesized existing published literature. Among these, one presented findings from a systematic literature review that used an intersectionality lens to examine how gender is framed in climate change studies across the globe (Djoudi et al., 2016). The articles included discussions pertaining, for example, to attributes of intersectionality such as intersecting categories of identity, the importance of analysis across societal scales, power relationships, and the need for recognition of individual and community agency. These findings are further synthesized in section 5. Interestingly, only four of the total publications provided empirical applications of intersectionality to climate hazards research (see Fig. 3 for geographical locations). This limited number may be, in part, due to the relative newness of the term ‘intersectionality’ and our restriction to articles that specifically employed it. Each of the of the four empirical

Table 1 Google Scholar search themes and terms. Search Themes

Key search terms

Intersectionality Climate hazards

Intersectional* “climate change” AND (hazard OR disaster OR flood OR wildfire OR bushfire OR drought OR storm OR hurricane)

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Fig. 2. Publication years of included sources.

examples dealt with a specific hazard event, including a flood (Vickery, 2018), hurricane (Weber and Messias, 2012), and wildfires (Eriksen and Simon, 2017; Olofsson et al., 2016). We classified one of these as both conceptual and empirical because it built an intersectional risk theoretical framework and then applied it to a case study example (Olofsson et al., 2016). The empirical studies employed qualitative methods including in-depth interviews ranging from 16 to 45 participants (n = 3), focus groups (n = 1), document review (n = 1), and a media discourse analysis (n = 1). By using insights from these 25 articles and reflecting on the gaps remaining in the body of work and by seeking out explanatory examples from broader applied feminist scholarship, we created an analytical framework composed of five attributes to inform future empirical research.

5. A proposed intersectionality framework for climate hazards research Our framework offers five key intersectionality attributes that can form the basis for an analytical framework for empirical research: intersecting social categories; multi-level analysis; power relationships; learning, action and social change; and, reflexivity (Table 2). Below, we describe each attribute and provide associated guiding questions to support data collection and analysis. We also provide concrete examples to demonstrate the type of information our framework seeks to identify. Some of the examples derive from publications outside of the rapid review results as they did not take an explicit intersectional approach, but are relevant to the attribute being discussed. We recognize that not all the guiding questions presented in our framework will be relevant in all cases; rather, their application is context-dependent and should be adjusted accordingly.

Fig. 3. Geographic location of authors and empirical case studies. Author location is highlighted as most publications (n = 21) were conceptual and had no specific geographical connection. Two studies of global relevance were co-authored by scholars in the global North and the global South, and thus authors from both regions are included in the figure. Four scholars each co-authored two separate included publications and were counted only once each here. 4

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Table 2 An intersectionality framework for understanding the social dimensions of climate hazards in the rural global North. Intersectionality Attribute

Description

Guiding Questions

Intersecting social categories

Social identity categories (e.g., gender, class, race, ethnicity, age, etc.) do not operate distinctly from one another, but intersect and coconstitute one another to produce context-specific experiences of and responses to climate hazards, policies, and practices.

Multi-level analysis

Differential experiences of and responses to climate hazards, policies, and practices shape and are shaped by social structures and representation.

Power relationships

Multiple systems of power (e.g., sexism, racism) operate together across levels of society to influence the exclusion or inclusion of certain knowledges, experiences, and access to material resources in response to climate hazards. These inequalities can be reinforced or challenged through institutional, political, and sociocultural practices, discourses, and norms.

● Which social categories are present in our research context? ● Which social categories most significantly shape people's experiences in this context? ● How do these social categories interact to mitigate and/or exacerbate their respective effects? ● Which categories might we have missed? ● What do experiences of research participants tell us about the enduring relationships and neglected intersections producing inequality or vulnerability? ● How do experiences across intersecting identities interact with social structures, norms, ideologies, and discourses to influence differential access to resources and decision-making for immediate response and long-term adaptation planning? ● How do generally vulnerable societal groups experience the climate hazard? Generally privileged groups? What is the relationship between these? ● What types of environmental and social knowledge are recognized and privileged in immediate responses and adaptation planning? ● Which experiences and knowledge are not reflected in immediate responses and adaptation planning? What are the underlying assumptions that result in these exclusions? How do immediate responses and adaptation planning either reinforce or challenge social inequalities? In the context of the study, how has power stabilized to form general vulnerabilities or privileges at specific intersections of identity? ● How do diverse groups actively respond to climate hazards and participate in adaptation planning? ● What did individuals learn through their experiences of hazards and/or adaptation planning that enhances their awareness of needed social changes or their capacity to act for social change? ● Are there any concrete examples of how experiences of a climate hazard and/or adaptation planning facilitated action to transform unequitable relationships, structures, or norms? ● What are the historical, institutional, and cultural contexts in which the research communities are embedded? ● What are the researchers' own assumptions about which experiences and knowledges are valuable for immediate response to climate hazards and long-term adaptation planning? ● How do the researchers' social locations shape the information shared by participants? ● How do differences in power and privilege shape research relationships? How can/did the researcher facilitate power sharing?

• •

Learning, action, social change

Learning processes can facilitate individual and collective action for overcoming social barriers and creating transformative social change where existing structures, systems, sociocultural norms, and dominant discourses contribute to the root causes of vulnerability to climate hazards.

Reflexivity

Critical reflection on researchers' own social positioning and assumptions within broader systems of power and historical, institutional, and cultural contexts facilitates research that avoids reinforcing existing social inequalities within the context of study.

recovery workers. Others choose to explore the experiences of specific groups (e.g., Prior et al., 2013; Prior and Heinämäki, 2017), or take a blended approach where a single identity attribute, such as affluence or homelessness, is chosen a priori and allow its intersections with other attributes to emerge during fieldwork (Eriksen and Simon, 2017; Osborne, 2015; Vickery, 2018). For example, Vickery (2018) chose homelessness as a primary identity category and determined through interviews with homeless individuals that their experiences of flooding varied based on intersections with mental illness, gender, physical disability, and immigration status. Regardless of the approach chosen, Kaijser and Kronsell (2014) stress that the purpose of intersectional analysis is not to include as many categories as possible, but to identify those that are most relevant to the specific context of the study. Importantly, intersectionality recognizes that categories do not operate distinctly from one another, but intersect to produce contextspecific social identities and experiences (Smooth, 2013). This was illustrated by Margaret Alston's (2011) study relating differential experiences of drought in Australia along the lines of gender and rurality. She found that as the frequency and intensity of drought increases, so do the rates of social isolation, depression, and suicide among rural men as compared with those among urban men or rural women. Alston attributes these higher rates, in part, to the gendered norms and expectations within agricultural households and communities, where men are most likely to carry out the physical tasks of farming, and women are more likely to work off-farm or in supporting farm roles.

5.1. Intersecting social categories Unique mixtures of multiple social characteristics shape individuals' identities and experiences of the world. Not surprisingly—as is typical in intersectionality literature more broadly—gender, race, and class were the most common categories considered in the publications identified through our rapid review. The majority of the rapid review publications (n = 23) cited at least two of these as central to intersectional analysis. Other categories such as age, affluence, Indigeneity, physical and mental disability, education, homelessness, sexual orientation, location, and immigration status were also relevant to the study of climate change and the experiences of climate hazards (Cohen, 2017; Eriksen and Simon, 2017; Gaard, 2015; Prior et al., 2013; Reid, 2013; Rochette, 2016; Ryder, 2017; Vickery, 2018). A virtually endless number of social categories comprise these individual identities, making it impractical to broach them all in empirical research. A key methodological challenge of empirical intersectionality research is deciding which and how many social characteristics to include in the analysis (Osborne, 2015; Rodriguez, 2010; Vickery, 2018). Some scholars suggest that the most relevant categories should emerge during fieldwork (e.g., Hackfort and Burchardt, 2018; Hankivsky, 2014). For example, Weber and Messias (2012) found through interviews that gender, race, class, and ethnicity – as relationships of power – emerged as the most important categories that influenced health and well-being outcomes for post-disaster 5

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publicly attributed the challenges associated with hurricane response in Louisiana to overpopulation. This representation of the issue led to a policy response offering women (primarily low-income and women of colour) monetary incentive to undergo sterilization procedures, thus reinforcing the systemic inequalities that had very real consequences in the everyday lives of these individuals. Olofsson et al. (2016) provided another astute example of the ways in which responses to climate risks can (re)produce inequalities across levels of analysis. They found that during an intense wildfire occurrence in rural Sweden, mainstream media outlets framed the event as a failure of national climate adaptation planning. In shifting attention away from local impacts towards vulnerabilities at the national level, this discourse subtly reinforced power imbalances between the national center and rural periphery, and potentially nudged policy in a direction that further entrenched those imbalances. Furthermore, reporters tended to frame local responses to wildfire in a manner that reinforced hegemonic rural masculinities and emphasized femininities, with men stereotyped as valiant heroes and women as virtuous support providers. This representation occurred within a broader construction of hegemonic rurality, where the rural periphery is perceived as inferior to the sophisticated national center, contributing to a narrative that determined which social locations (in this instance characterized by intersections between gender and geographical location) possess knowledge and experience of value (or not) in shaping future climate-related policy and practice. The study by Olofsson et al. (2016) thus demonstrated the need to analyze relationships between societal levels and how an intersectional lens can reveal hidden power dynamics that shape complex inequalities and exclusions. To elucidate these issues in empirical climate research, our guiding question asks how social identity factors operate within and among social structures, lived experiences, and representation to affect differential access to resources and decisionmaking for immediate responses to climate hazards and long-term adaptation planning (Table 2).

Intertwined with those tasks are ideas and expectations about the appropriate roles and behaviors of rural women and men, the relative isolation of male farmers, and the lack of social supports for men who are facing psychological or social trauma. Thus, declining agricultural productivity associated with drought can acutely affect farming men's perceptions of their own masculinities and identities as farmers. As intersectional scholars point out, experience is not the additive sum of identity categories where each factor can be assessed and ranked for its contribution to privilege, oppression, or vulnerability (Bowleg, 2008; Hancock, 2007; Smooth, 2013). In Alston's example, neither gender nor rurality hold more explanatory power in understanding the social impacts of drought. Rather, these categories operate together to create unique experiences of a climate hazard. This more nuanced analysis of how multiple identity categories combine to produce structures of “power, oppression, and vulnerability” (Osborne, 2015:132) also helps to avoid the universalization of experience (e.g., all women or all farmers are vulnerable in similar ways). Instead, it recognizes the dynamic relationships between and within identity categories and how social location significantly influences diverse individuals' perceptions and experiences of shifting social and environmental conditions (Kaijser and Kronsell, 2014). Also important is to look past identity categories explicit in empirical data to search for categories that do not appear and to account for their absence. McCall (2005) suggests that researchers should analyze the lived experiences expressed in their empirical data to uncover relationships of power and inequality that are relatively enduring, as well as those at intersections that are less often the subject of analysis. To address these aspects of intersecting identities, guiding questions in our framework draw attention to the social identity categories that most significantly shape experience in one's study, as well as categories that may be missed, and how these categories together influence social inequality (Table 2). 5.2. Multi-level analysis

5.3. Power relationships One critique of intersectionality is that by focusing on individual social attributes or identities, studies are limited to micro (individual) levels of analysis (Hackfort and Burchardt, 2018). Fletcher (2018: 17) agrees that “a major challenge for future research will be to ‘scale up’ the insights of intersectionality to examine macro-level phenomena and systems.” A number of the studies identified through the rapid review, particularly those emerging from a feminist political ecology lens, respond to this challenge by drawing attention to the relationships between individual lives at the micro level and the systems of power in macro-scale social structures, ideologies, and norms (e.g., Hackfort and Burchardt, 2018; Gaard, 2015; Iniesta-Arandia et al., 2016; Eriksen and Simon, 2017; Weber and Messias, 2012). An intersectional lens draws attention to complex interactions and power relations within and across various societal levels, including the macro level (broad social structures, including economic, political, and cultural trends), the micro level (identity construction and lived experience, including work roles, relationships, and needs of individuals), and the level of representation (sociocultural norms, stereotypes, discourse, etc.) (Kaijser and Kronsell, 2014; Winker and Degele, 2011). Critical awareness of these interactions can reveal how phenomena and processes at one level feed back to either reinforce or contest inequalities at another (Fletcher, 2018). For example, the sociocultural norms and dominant discourses associated with representation are both generated by, and have the potential to reinforce, structural forms of inequality (Winker and Degele, 2011). These representations also shape identity construction, the outcomes of which return to reproduce or challenge dominant norms or ideologies. The level of representation, along with its interaction with other levels of analysis, is least often examined, including in the publications from our rapid review, and are perhaps the most difficult to assess empirically. de Onís (2012) related one example where a policy analysis study found that a politician

Intersectionality moves away from the prioritization of single systems of power (e.g., racism or sexism) to explain complex social inequalities, resulting in analyses of how multiple systems of power interact and co-constitute one another to shape lived experiences (e.g., Fletcher, 2018; Jacobs, 2019; Olofsson et al., 2016; Prior et al., 2013). In other words, intersectionality is fundamentally relational—it does not focus on the differences between categories of identity or systems of power, but on their interconnections (Collins and Bilge, 2016). From this perspective, power relationships are dynamic and context-specific, meaning that people can simultaneously experience varying degrees of power and oppression depending on the time and place. However, a completely fluid conceptualization of social categories and power relationships makes meaningful analysis challenging. Inequalities are historically constructed and become at least somewhat stabilized in social relationships and institutions, creating groups that are generally marginalized or generally privileged within society, although this is subject to change over time (Walby et al., 2012). We incorporate this perspective of relative stability into our framework, as reflected in our associated questions in Table 2. Recognizing these relatively stabilized systems of power in can help make sense of diverse experiences of a phenomenon. Bowleg (2008), for example, encourages researchers to develop awareness of the broader social and historical contexts present in their specific location of study. Doing so allows the researcher to identify patterns of experience that relate the implications of complex social inequalities, especially when those connections are not always explicit in the data. As with intersecting identity categories in section 5.1, Osborne (2015) suggests engaging in ‘strategic essentialism,’ – foregrounding those power relations that are most pertinent to the study context (e.g., colonialism or heterosexism, for example). In section 5.4, we suggest that a more structural perspective should be 6

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accompanied by a discussion of how “bottom-up” forms of power and agency can challenge historically constructed and relatively stabilized forms of power. Intersecting power relationships are present across societal levels and are expressed in a variety of ways, both materially and discursively, and often most visibly through the exclusion or inclusion of certain knowledges, experiences, and material resources (e.g., access to and control over natural resources and decision-making). This is exemplified through a study on a major wildfire event near a remote Indigenous (Dene) community in rural Saskatchewan, Canada (Scharbach and Waldram, 2016). During the wildfire, emergency management agencies employed standard evacuation protocols, which were modelled on non-Indigenous cultural logic and overlooked Dene cultural understandings of family, such as the need to keep extended families together. This ultimately resulted in a ‘second disaster’ when individuals found themselves separated, often by hundreds of kilometers, from their extended families. In this case, there was no evidence that emergency managers drew upon diverse local Indigenous knowledges, indicating that Western assumptions and knowledge underpinning emergency protocols were taken-for-granted norms. Such assumptions resulted in distinct impacts and implications for Indigenous women, men, youth, and elders of the community, pointing to needed changes for inclusive emergency management practice. Power can also be expressed discursively, a process by which material inequalities are naturalized through institutional, political, and sociocultural practices and norms (Fletcher, 2018; Kaijser and Kronsell, 2014). For example, Olofsson and colleagues' (2016) Swedish wildfire study (see section 5.2) demonstrated that public discourse through mainstream media can shape how climate hazard risk is framed, as well as whose knowledge is important in the search for solutions. Therefore, attention to discourse can illuminate the underlying assumptions and the inclusions and exclusions of social groups in decision-making and access to resources. Some scholars, particularly those working from the ecofeminist perspective, argue that intersectional studies of environment and climate hazards also require consideration of the power relationships between humans and nature and its implications at multiple levels (Gaard, 2015; Godfrey and Torres, 2016; Olofsson et al., 2016). For example, with consideration to climate change research, Gaard (2015: 30) cited the need to examine the “exclusions of species and ecosystems from intersectional identities, addressing the ways that even the most marginalized of humans may participate in the Master Model process of instrumentalization when it comes to nonhuman nature and earth others.” Similarly, Olofsson et al. (2016:352) noted, “constructions of the environment, including those that embrace the nature/human divide, cannot be understood independently of their intersections with risk, gender, ethnicity, class and other systems of power.” The dominant perspective that climate risks can be controlled or reduced through technology and infrastructure is a reflection of complex, interacting systems of power that prioritize certain types of knowledge, especially Western scientific knowledge, in the development of climate adaptation strategies and policies across scales. Such technical responses often result in policies and research that “focus more on the capacities of the poor than on the practices through which one group impoverishes another” (Li, 2007:7). An intersectional approach can challenge this perspective by revealing not only the ways in which certain individuals and groups are excluded from accessing resources and decision-making, but also the positions of privilege and dominance that are normalized, often rendered invisible in formal and informal institutions, and contribute to these exclusions. Such analysis provides a starting point for processes of institutional change (Kaijser and Kronsell, 2014; Olofsson et al., 2016; Osborne, 2015). Relational forms of power shape differential experiences of privilege, oppression, and vulnerability within and between social groups, highlighting the need to move beyond empirical studies that focus only

on the most vulnerable segments of society. To understand some of the complex aspects of power outlined in this section, our framework's guiding questions focus on how generally privileged and marginalized groups experience climate hazards, which experiences and knowledges are included and excluded from decision-making for immediate response and long-term adaptation planning, and how these either reinforce or challenge existing inequalities (Table 2). 5.4. Learning, action, and social change Dominant climate discourses have had the tendency to portray certain social groups, such as women and Indigenous communities for example, as homogenous and uniformly vulnerable to the impacts of climate hazards. These victimizing discourses may contribute to a lack of attention to diverse local knowledges and experiences, as well as individual and collective agency—the capacity to act in order to effect change (Arora-Jonsson, 2011; Haalboom and Natcher, 2012; Jacobs, 2019; Ravera et al., 2016). A number of the rapid review articles explicitly cited the need to recognize individual and collective agency to counter these vulnerability discourses (e.g., Djoudi et al., 2016; Fletcher, 2018; Hackfort and Burchardt, 2018; Moosa and Tuana, 2014; Vickery, 2018). Others acknowledge agency in less explicit ways, for example by citing the need to center ‘situated’ or ‘community’ knowledges (Jacobs, 2019; Godfrey and Torres, 2016) or by providing examples of grassroots actions that facilitated disaster recovery (Eriksen and Simon, 2017; Pyles and Lewis, 2010). These articles agree that an intersectionality lens provides the opportunity not only to consider how vulnerability to climate hazards is shaped by intersecting identities across scales, but also how people and communities are already responding and how intersecting identities contribute to capacities to respond effectively. Consideration of agency, learning, and social action within our framework safeguards against the inadvertent reproduction of victimizing discourses arising through overly structural approaches. In the context of climate vulnerability and adaptation, action for social change might mean overcoming inequalities in access and rights to natural resources and information, and working to remove barriers to inclusive decision-making (e.g., challenging the prioritization of Western science over Indigenous knowledge) (Djoudi et al., 2016; Eriksen et al., 2015). Attention to social change can also help avoid an essentialist representation of agency by bringing into view the structural barriers that were overcome to facilitate the inclusion of certain groups in climate hazards response and planning. At the same time, it is important not to lose sight of the social structures and inequalities that may continue to hinder various groups' capacities to respond and their participation in adaptation decision-making, or limit such participation to the local/grassroots scale only (Gaard, 2015; Prior and Heinämäki, 2017). An apt example of collective action for social change relates to the response of Indigenous (Anishanaabe) women to climate-associated water degradation in Ontario, Canada (MacGregor, 2012; Moosa and Tuana, 2014; Whyte, 2014). In Anishinaabe culture, women have a unique connection and responsibility towards water due to their shared role in creating life. Therefore, Anishinaabe women are differently affected by water-related climate impacts than Anishinaabe men or nonIndigenous people. Due to their responsibility to “speak for the water,” Anishinaabe women established the Mother Earth Water Walks, where women, led by Grandmothers, hold ceremonies, lead celebrations, and walk around the Great Lakes to raise awareness of the importance of healthy water systems (MacGregor, 2012:12). Over time, the Walks have expanded across North America, engaging people from a variety of social contexts (Whyte, 2014). The Walks, along with the Women's Water Commission developed to bring Indigenous women's voices into the Ontario water planning process, are creating outlets for bridging and learning from a plurality of knowledges, while also creating social and policy change. Intersectionality gives as much weight to action for overcoming 7

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enhance the overall credibility of the research. A researcher's critical awareness of differential power, privilege, and assumptions within the research context can also provide a segue for the establishment of power sharing strategies, which aim for more equitable research collaborations (Creese and Frisby, 2011). According to Davis (2008:77), “intersectionality offers endless opportunities for interrogating one's own blind spots and transforming them into analytic resources for further critical analysis.” Hence, within our intersectional framework, our guiding questions draw explicit attention to such blind spots by encouraging researchers to reflect on the historical, institutional, and cultural contexts in which the study is embedded, how these shape researchers' own assumptions of the relevant phenomena, how researchers' own social locations influence how participants relate to them, and what can be done to balance power relationships throughout the study (Table 2).

inequalities as it does to understanding complex inequalities; however, including in the sources identified through our rapid review, “few studies document the complex reactions and mechanisms that challenge and push social barriers in an attempt to create space for emancipatory pathways” (Djoudi et al., 2016:S250). We suggest iterative learning processes as possible mechanisms that facilitate collective action for overcoming these social barriers and creating transformative social change and more equitable, sustainable adaptation processes (e.g., Armitage et al., 2011; Feola, 2015; Pelling, 2011; Tschakert et al., 2013). Our framework attends to the possible links between learning and social change by asking about learning, individual and collective action, and social change arising through the experiences and responses to climate hazards in the context of study (Table 2). We anticipate that the use of participatory action methods for intersectional research can further foster reflective thinking on learning outcomes and build further capacity for enacting change.

6. In closing 5.5. Reflexivity Intersectionality is far from a complete, ready-to-use framework for applied empirical research. It is constantly evolving and continues to be applied to a wide variety of phenomena and social contexts (Collins and Bilge, 2016). Despite the promise of intersectionality to contribute to more nuanced understandings of the social dimensions of climate hazards, there are still relatively few examples of empirical intersectional studies of climate hazards in rural contexts of the global North, as the findings from our rapid literature review illustrate. This may be, in part, due to methodological challenges associated with intersectional research, such as determining which and how many social characteristics to include in the analysis (Osborne, 2015; Rodriguez, 2010; Vickery, 2018), identifying individual indicators for applied research due to the complexity of the intersectionality concept (Boeckmann and Zeeb, 2016; Godfrey and Torres, 2016; Hackfort and Burchardt, 2018), and the lack of consensus about appropriate methodologies for intersectional analysis (Vickery, 2018; Iniesta-Arandia et al., 2016). Such challenges have seemingly resulted in valuation of theory over applied research in feminist scholarship, leading to a disconnect between the theoretical framings of gender and the development of practical strategies for their integration into policy and practice challenges (Reed et al., 2014). By developing this framework, we promote further opportunities for the integration of feminist intersectional scholarship into empirical climate hazards research. Our framework emphasizes the ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions related to differential climate vulnerability by drawing attention to the relationship between generally privileged and generally marginalized experiences and knowledges and to the assumptions that underpin the prioritization of certain experiences and knowledges over others. It does this without losing sight of bottom-up flows of power that represent local agency and learning, which can reveal opportunities to build on existing local action. In drawing attention to multiple levels of analysis, intersecting categories of identity, the relational nature of power dynamics, learning processes for social action and change, and reflexivity, our framework facilitates the growth of empirical research that will provide a more nuanced portrait of the social dimensions of climate hazards within rural communities of the global North. This is urgently required because, as the above examples show, assumptions that climate hazards and responses uniformly affect entire rural communities are erroneous and ultimately risk reinforcing or exacerbating existing social inequalities. Our framework does not necessarily eliminate the challenges associated with empirical intersectional research, as we do not provide prescriptive approaches or methodologies for this type of analysis. It does, however, provide guidance for climate hazards research and planning, as well as for collecting and analyzing empirical data, which can help make the relevance of gender and other intersecting identity categories to the study of climate hazards more visible in the global North where gender equality is often assumed. Although we developed

Surprisingly, only three publications from the rapid review mentioned the need for critical reflection on researchers' own social locations. Yet, we recognize that reflexivity is a key goal within feminist scholarship and is especially relevant to applications of intersectionality, where the researcher's own social positioning within complex constellations of power dynamics can either challenge or unwittingly reinforce existing social inequalities. Reflexivity involves the critical examination of differential privileges and power between ourselves and others, both at the individual level and with broader societal structures, as we plan, conduct and disseminate research (Hankivsky, 2014; Iniesta-Arandia et al., 2016). Strong understandings of the specific historical, institutional, and cultural contexts in which communities are embedded is an important first step in fostering equitable research processes and mutual learning (Creese and Frisby, 2011). For example, in the Canadian context, assessing individual links to colonization is vital, as a lack of consideration for such systems can ultimately create research and policy outcomes that only serve to further entrench colonial relations and exacerbate existing social inequalities that were fundamentally shaped by such histories (Hankivsky, 2014). In a concrete example, Cameron (2012) argues that within climate change vulnerability assessments in the Arctic, researchers and policy makers frequently frame indigenous knowledge as narrowly ‘local’ and ‘traditional,’ considering other ways of knowing only as far as they apply to traditional practices like fishing and hunting, while disregarding knowledge related to ‘modern’ activities and global processes such as oil, gas, and mining development. Rooted in colonial assumptions and practices, this framing excludes “the broader colonial and political-economic context within which northern Indigenous peoples struggle to respond to climate change” (Cameron, 2012:111). This observation highlights the critical need for profound awareness of the broader contexts in which our research occurs and how these influence researchers' own assumptions of the types of experiences and knowledges that are valuable in responses to climate hazards. May (2014) advocates a ‘bracketing’ approach to intersectional analysis, in which researchers consciously think against the grain of dominant logics and mindsets to more fully understand, genuinely account for, and open the possibility of integrating other ways of knowing and perceiving environmental and social phenomena. Moreover, a reflexive approach not only includes a critical examination of one's social location in relation to research findings, but is also attentive to, and reflective of, the ways in which the researcher is positioned by participants and how this may influence what participants might share or not share (Pini, 2004). Feminist research recognizes that knowledge is co-produced among individuals, and how individuals view themselves and others shapes how knowledge is created. Explicitly examining and acknowledging how one's own social position may influence the information that participants share can 8

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this framework from research focused on rural regions of the global North, we invite the testing of the framework in various contexts using a variety of qualitative and participatory action research methodological tools. Despite its challenges, intersectionality highlights the need not only to understand how individuals at various social locations experience certain phenomena, but also how social identity factors function within and across multiple societal levels (Kaijser and Kronsell, 2014; Winker and Degele, 2011). Better understanding the root causes of marginalization and inequality opens the possibility of transforming existing political and social systems and reduces the risk of reinforcing current systems of unequal power through responses to climate hazards (Björnberg and Hansson, 2013; Gaard, 2015; Kaijser and Kronsell, 2014). To take advantage of these opportunities for transformation, future research on the social dimensions of climate hazards must shift from identification of simply who is most adversely affected (often expressed in simplified dichotomies of women-versus-men, for example), towards an understanding of why certain individuals and groups are more affected than others (Tschakert et al., 2013). Ultimately, we believe attention to key attributes of intersectionality such as those presented in our framework can promote more consistent critical analysis about how climate hazards interact with existing social inequalities and help create space for collaboratively building more inclusive immediate responses to, and long-term adaptation planning for, climate hazards.

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