Climate feminism for export only? Australia’s domestic and foreign gendered climate governance at the Janus Sieve

Fragmented climate governance undermines both gender equality and climate action. Yet, despite growing international expectations for gender-responsive climate action, many states’ substantive attempts to address the gender-climate nexus in foreign policy is unmatched in domestic policy. Why do states adopt markedly different approaches to the same global issue across foreign and domestic policy? This paper aims to explore gender and climate change policy divergence in a key, under-studied context: Australia. Employing a comparative content analysis of six federal policies spanning both domestic and foreign policy domains, the paper sets forth an original conceptual framework drawing off feminist institutionalism, norm translation theory, and strategic narrative theory to explain how institutional conditions “sift” international norms into divergent policy outcomes. Drawing on metaphor and conceptualised as the “Janus Sieve”, this two-faced approach to the gender-climate nexus offers a transferable framework for tracing how international norms are refracted through institutional filters and transformed into policy outputs. Findings demonstrate that whilst projecting an image of gender-responsive climate policy internationally, underpinned by Australia’s robust gender credentials, Australia’s policy record on the gender-climate nexus at a domestic level is woefully inadequate. These trends may have broader resonance with other contexts globally grappling with such domestic-foreign policy dissonance.